Ships

I had some ideas about how ships should be handled in this mod.
I propose that we make light_ship impossible to build and only use big_ship, galley and transport.
big_ship should be changed to a merchant ship, with little or no combat abilities, it should be used mainly for maintaining tariffs and also trigger some events related to trade and colonies.
galley should be the main combat vessel.
transport will have the same role as in vanilla.

I think this will be more realistic than using all the ship types, and will make it easier to make ship models as it's mostly naming different galleys we'll have to be concerned about.

Thoughts?

I agree 100%.

We should of course then make big ships cheaper. Also, we should maybe rearrange continents so that gaining tariffs is more common (otherwise no-one will ever build big ships).

hmm, I've been thinking, what would be the historical equivalent of EU3's big ships?

As far as I know, in 650BC all ships stayed close to the coast. That means that the only ship that can model 650BC behavior is the galley. Maybe we should delete the big ship altogether, and only have galleys and transports (the latter because we need at least one type of transport ship otherwise no-one can do naval invasions).

Couldn't we just give big_ship some generic trading ship name?

Wolololo wrote:Couldn't we just give big_ship some generic trading ship name?

Well one of the problems is that I'm worried what the AI will do with them. Also, we wouldn't want navies composed of transports and big ships to sail around on open sea.

edit: also, if they're just for keeping up tariffs, they'll be useless to almost everyone in the game, except if we re-arrange continents (so tariffs happen more often).

That's true about the AI.

About tariffs, I've noticed that Carthage gets tariffs on their Iberian provinces, and Assyria on Cyprus, I'm guessing this is because of low naval range or tech levels? So we may not need to re-arrange continents for that to work.
They could also be used for patrols, but that's not entirely realistic. Altough it could symbolise naval trade routes.

But yeah, I agree, it's probably best to make them impossible to build.

Wolololo wrote:About tariffs, I've noticed that Carthage gets tariffs on their Iberian provinces, and Assyria on Cyprus, I'm guessing this is because of low naval range or tech levels? So we may not need to re-arrange continents for that to work.

No I think it's because Cyprus is overseas & in Europe, while the Assyrian capital is in Asia. Same with Carthage: Iberia is in Europe, Carthage is in Africa. (although Iberia is, technically, connected via land to Africa. Hm.)

Come to think of it, this creates the situation that Cyprus would be a "trariff"-province for Assyria and Egypt, while if, say, Messene conquers it, it will get normal taxes. A bit strange considering the distances. Or e.g. Lydia will also get nice taxes from it (Anatolia is in Europe according to EU3).

I just thought of a problem with entirely disabling big ships: that would mean Cyprus would be quite useless to Assyria or Carthage or Egypt (b/c all the tariffs will go to waste), but quite valuable to Lydia. Which I think is strange. Unless of course we re-arrange continents.

No I think it's because Cyprus is overseas & in Europe, while the Assyrian capital is in Asia. Same with Carthage: Iberia is in Europe, Carthage is in Africa. (although Iberia is, technically, connected via land to Africa. Hm.)

Ah, of course
btw the connection has to be made by provinces you own.

Come to think of it, this creates the situation that Cyprus would be a "trariff"-province for Assyria and Egypt, while if, say, Messene conquers it, it will get normal taxes. A bit strange considering the distances. Or e.g. Lydia will also get nice taxes from it (Anatolia is in Europe according to EU3).

I just thought of a problem with entirely disabling big ships: that would mean Cyprus would be quite useless to Assyria or Carthage or Egypt (b/c all the tariffs will go to waste), but quite valuable to Lydia. Which I think is strange. Unless of course we re-arrange continents.

Hmm.. We could just make the old world one big continent to get rid of this problem.
But if we keep big ships and tariffs we could name big_ship the same as the galleys only with "big" in front. But that would be a bit boring IMO.