Sea Battles Problems and Suggestions

[Yandros]

Let me just start by saying I love the game, as I have loved the previous entries of AoW. I'm biased ok, but I'm not here to praise or talk about any other problems, it's just that sea battles are terrible. I find myself avoiding the sea if I think I might be seriously attacked there, or autoing battles I normally would fight just to avoid the bother, and this is for three main reasons:

1. Ship models: Having every ship look the same is terribly boring, and quite confusing as well.
   
2. Combat: The combat is pretty much the same as on land, but on ships.. mechanically it's better than removing every unit skill and have them smash each other as generic ships (even if they still look like generic ships), but it doesn't make much sense.
   
3. Map: Not much to say, and I get it, the sea is just water, and an occasional map with no obstacles at all could even be refreshing, but this together with the 2 previous points just adds to the bland feeling of sea battles.

Now, I'm no dev or graphic designer, I have no idea how viable any of this is, but I do have some suggestions, or call them ideas:

1. Simply having ship models adapt to the cultures (high/mystic etc.) would be big. Adding additional models for basic unit types (hero, melee, ranged.. maybe animal?) even better. But just about anything to differentiate the ships at a glance would be good, even if just the sails at least.
   
2. Now this is where it gets meaty. In my opinion, ship combat would benefit massively from having 2 health bars, one for the ship's hull itself, and one for the crew. The ship health bar could be the same for every ship, or be increased according to unit tier and XP maybe, while the crew health bar should be the unit's regular health. If any of the 2 is depleted, the ship is destroyed.
   Now, ships could all have a basic "ram" or "ballista" attack or whatever, that damages other ships, while crews would board or shoot directly on other crews. There could be some correlation here, for example a ram attack could deal high damage to a ship's hull, but also some damage to the crew, and units with demolition attacks could deal damage to the hull while damaging the crew.
   Status effects should ideally apply to the "crew" stats, some, like burning, might make sense that apply to the ship, but in the spirit of balance them just applying to the crew would be ok I think. Similarly, defense modes and healing spells would just target the crew rather than the ship's hull.
   The ship itself could have a chance of recieving random debuffs when taking damage, like broken sails or rudders that reduce movement speed, or a modifier that its crew loses hp every turn due to flooding.
   
3. As I said I don't think there's much to be done with the sea battlegrounds. Having them be filled with rocks or debris wouldn't be good in my opinion, unless it was a very small percentage of the total battles just to have a little variety. Maybe battles fought on a 1x1 piece of water (like underground canals) could have a more narrow map or something.

Well, thats about all I have to say on the matter. I understand most of this would probably be a lot of work considering there are a lot of maps with little to no water at all, but on the other hand, there's a seafaring origin, and the maps that do have water, have quite a lot of it.
Anyway, thx for reading. Feel free to tell me you agree, or that I'm overthinking it way too much. Cheers.

[Teutorix]

Literally a straight downgrade from their last game. AoW planetfall had varied sea maps and your units were on barges where you could see their models. The fact that many maps have no water at all means the devs will likely never put much effort into changing it.