Can water be a benefit?

[garry619]

I usually end up with a few coastal cities, or a city on a lake, etc, etc, but I can't find a benefit to having water tiles. Unlike say Civ where you, logically, get food from water tiles I can't see any real use for coastal water or lakes other than they get in the way of movement.

Is there a way to get food from them?

[CaptainSpacetime]

Fish/pearls/crabs if they're there.

Movement I think is the big one, since you can move super far with anchored ships.

But yeah something more to actually "do" with water would be cool.

[Siontific]

Water increaea mobility significantly; expanding long a coastline will make you be able to move all across your empire faster than if you had road, and in some cases you can even ignore roads altogether. Additionally, you can establish connected status through coastline which will send a lot of benefits to every city.

Water is much more tactical in it's purpose in the game; since orders is a very limiting resource, high mobility has sweeping advantages when you can move further with less orders.

[mk11]

The shrine that gives a bonus to nets (Persia has it) gives money for every water tile the city has.

[Outis]

Originally posted by CaptainSpacetime:

Fish/pearls/crabs if they're there.

Movement I think is the big one, since you can move super far with anchored ships.

But yeah something more to actually "do" with water would be cool.

perhaps, New Nation: Phoenicia

[Twelvefield]

Oh man, you probably haven't seen the AI make a beach-head flank against you. Using anchored ships and advanced naval movement, you (or it) can move a lot of troops across a map with few orders. It's like Caesar landing at Dover, except with D-Day numbers of troops.

Water is truly efficient for moving troops in Ōld World. Probably quite a bit more efficient than it was in the real Ancient Era, considering how easily ships could get lost and how seasick the armies got while on the water. I think there should be some automatic attrition for naval units at sea.

Then, as has been mentioned, waterways connect cities without a need for roads and there are synergies with some buildings. There are certain resource types as well, but Ōld World isn't Civ.

[garry619]

So I'm seeing a lot of comments that it is tactical viable, that you can move units over water faster than on land. Thank you for that, but I already knew that bit :) My question was can you use it to feed your cities other than the odd crab or fish you might come across. The answer it seems is no, which really doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

[omnius]

There's a market type building next to harbor buff to take advantage of.

[mk11]

Originally posted by garry619:

So I'm seeing a lot of comments that it is tactical viable, that you can move units over water faster than on land. Thank you for that, but I already knew that bit :) My question was can you use it to feed your cities other than the odd crab or fish you might come across. The answer it seems is no, which really doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

Back to my answer. You can build a shrine which makes money from which you can buy food. So the answer is yes.

[Siontific]

Originally posted by garry619:

So I'm seeing a lot of comments that it is tactical viable, that you can move units over water faster than on land. Thank you for that, but I already knew that bit :) My question was can you use it to feed your cities other than the odd crab or fish you might come across. The answer it seems is no, which really doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

Respectfully, maybe you've never gone fishing in the ocean before. It's actually way more realistically the case that food sources are localized within a region rather than just any ocean tile providing extra food. Also, since food and crab are food resources, one single tile grants the output of several land tiles, as well as providing growth, which farms won't do on their own. It wouldn't really make any sense to be able to put fishing boats on every single coastal tile in the way you can put farms everywhere.

[Twelvefield]

And again, connecting cities with water feeds them. And again: Ōld World isn't Civ.

[harken23]

Originally posted by Outis:

Originally posted by CaptainSpacetime:

Fish/pearls/crabs if they're there.

Movement I think is the big one, since you can move super far with anchored ships.

But yeah something more to actually "do" with water would be cool.

perhaps, New Nation: Phoenicia

I know nothing about modding (and not a ton about Phoenicia), but this sounds an excellent idea! There's a Babylon mod somebody made, and it's great. Wonder how hard it would be to implement a Seafaring-type family, also.

[Metal Gear Banana]

Originally posted by Siontific:

Respectfully, maybe you've never gone fishing in the ocean before. It's actually way more realistically the case that food sources are localized within a region

I've never gone fishing in the ocean but this is true for every video game I've played that has fishing in it!

Anchored ships turning the ocean into a near instantaneous wormhole, however, is a concept I haven't seen outside Old World...

[Siontific]

True, and it's even weirder that ground troops can travel across ocean signficantly faster than the ships themselves can actually move.

[Metal Gear Banana]

Originally posted by Siontific:

True, and it's even weirder that ground troops can travel across ocean signficantly faster than the ships themselves can actually move.

This is one of the most unintuitive things in the game, even for people coming from other 4X games. I wonder why they decided to design it this way, and especially why they made the ground troops move so incredibly fast.

[Siontific]

Personally I like the increased movement and the anchoring mechanism. Oceans are often quite pointless in 4x games, I think the increased mobility for troop movements makes coastal play interesting. The fact that the movement is instantaneous provides more value to control the sea, not less, since the ability to anchor will open up lots of tactical possibilities.