How to kick start building a ship?

[besban]

Playing Aztec and just reached Level 2 Naval. Still no build ship button shows up on the Management Interface of any coastal province. At least Cog should be available I think. What could be missed? Thanks.

[KtX2SkD]

Honestly at first I was going to say "do you have a core? and a port within the coastal province?", but then I was wondering "shouldn't it show a greyed-out button instead of not showing anything?", so I went to test it, and sure enough I wasn't able to make ships by a variety of lower-tech countries.

I couldn't figure out a clear reason during my multiple tests, but I've narrowed it down to the "modifier" value under "technology.txt" file. Apparently too low of a value prevents you from making ships. I confirmed that by raising it for the Americans in one test, and lowering it for the Europeans in another. I tried leveling up Kongo's naval technology into the 30's in some other test, hoping it eventually allows any kind of ship, but that didn't work.

So that's it for the (rather vague) cause. Without more knowledge, I suppose the only in-game solution would be westernizing.

- KitCat.

[besban]

Thanks. That is brutal for already disadvantaged low tech countries. Searching through the official manuals, nothing of this restriction is mentioned as far as I found.

[KtX2SkD]

As great as the game is, one of its painful short-comings is how rapidly information about the game used to become outdated, after all the game changed quite *massively* across its updates. I wouldn't say keeping things up-to-date was impossible, but it just didn't happen, and I wouldn't know why as I was quite disconnected from any relevant scenes.

If the tutorials are outdated & broken, I doubt the "official manuals" which is what you said you're checking would be any better. The wiki & any forum-like environments are good places to go, but even with their 90% reliability I wonder if this specific piece of info exists, as the affected nations are not quite popular choices, and we're also concerned with the pre-westernizing situation, and the more late this change occurred the less chance anybody would've noticed.

While it might not be as easy to get or read through, I'm quite confident the patch logs would list this change, after all I recall coming across some interesting facts when I was randomly checking one of the latest ones.