Water and Boats?

[Overread]

So I'm noticing one thing - WATER - how the heck do you move armies over water?
Because at present it seems that if you don't have an aquatic army you've got to focus on water magic and summon a waterking and go that way. Which is fine for taking one or two sea settlements and then building up; but it also means that you can't cross the water with your land army.

If the game gives you two land masses its possible to simply build up and up but never cross the seas with your army.

[Mormacil]

Commanders with the Sailing trait, commanders with the Gift of Waterbreathing trait, Pocket Ship item, gateway spells like Faery Trot.

[terve886]

Though truth to be honest, unless you have national ability to move over or in sea, any attempt to gain sailing or water breathing through items and magical summons is pretty much lost cause due to the enormous gem investment that is needed to mobilize entire armies, and more importantly: mages.

If there is no UW nation or UW advantageous nation, expanding into UW is possible to do, but you won't be able to pull out any kind of invasion against proper UW nations because most of the UW combat is rules by water magic, mostly water elementals and geared thugs don't work that well either because the earlier mentioned water elementals are really good at killing thugs while anti elite/thug/SC spell "encase in ice" will be able to stop pretty much any singular threat you send UW for the rest of the game with couple of mages.

[jojeck]

The Pocket ship item is the convenient way to cross water with a small army, 200 Sailing worth of upto size 4 units. Make 3 of them say and then invade the enemy territory on the other side of the water in a province he can't attack next turn with 300 men (worth 600 Sailing) and use Teleport and Cloud Trapeze to send some mages there for supporting the army. Next turn build a lab in the province and raise the PD as high as you like, patrol with your army. You now have a solid beachhead and D-Day was successful.

Then send the 3 pocket ships back through the lab to your own territory and now you can send 300 size 2 troops into your beachhead every turn. If your armies are better than theirs you can easily overwhelm their provinces, take their forts. Pocket ships and water make slow moving troops like MA Ulm infantry that normally only move 1 province per turn much more mobile and threatening.

If you don't have the N3A2 paths on your pretender or national mages then the most obvious way to get them is to research to Conj 8 and summon a Fairy Queen (needs N5 and 40 N gems). This is easily achievable by turn 40 or 50 for most nations if you concentrate on that objective and win local wars.

[Overread]

It just seems odd that the game railroads you into specific mage options to cross water bodies when there's so much depth to the game elsewhere. You'd think building a fort on a coastal province would at least let you build mundane transport ships.

[jojeck]

That would undermine the huge early game advantage a few nations have with commanders that have the sailing ability. Making sailing too easy would make the game much less challenging and hence less interesting for me.

[Overread]

Originally posted by jojeck:

That would undermine the huge early game advantage a few nations have with commanders that have the sailing ability. Making sailing too easy would make the game much less challenging and hence less interesting for me.

From my point of view its not so much about making sailing easy; the game can easily lock transports behind barriers of construction limits and the like. An army with sea capable commanders can still travel at sea early with no additional cost. No need to build up to a castle or build a pier/dock on the coast nor pay for transports. Transports themselves coming in different sizes would also break it up even more.

However it does mean that different armies can be adaptive to the map and means you're not railroaded into having to develop certain schools and colours of magic in order to cross large bodies of water.


Plus it just seems more logical to me that many of the nations would use boats of some craft rather than extreme high end magical spells to traverse the seas.

[terve886]

Originally posted by Overread:

Originally posted by jojeck:

That would undermine the huge early game advantage a few nations have with commanders that have the sailing ability. Making sailing too easy would make the game much less challenging and hence less interesting for me.

From my point of view its not so much about making sailing easy; the game can easily lock transports behind barriers of construction limits and the like. An army with sea capable commanders can still travel at sea early with no additional cost. No need to build up to a castle or build a pier/dock on the coast nor pay for transports. Transports themselves coming in different sizes would also break it up even more.

However it does mean that different armies can be adaptive to the map and means you're not railroaded into having to develop certain schools and colours of magic in order to cross large bodies of water.


Plus it just seems more logical to me that many of the nations would use boats of some craft rather than extreme high end magical spells to traverse the seas.

To be honest there is many "traits" that are limited to just few nations. Many nations doesn't have access to healers, spies, assassins, sneaking, seducers etc. and sailing is just one form of those traits. If sailing is something that everyone should have, should every other trait also expanded to similar availability?

Though generally it is agreed Illwinter could make some improvements to UW/land interaction between land to water and water to land.

[alexsa2015sa]

Originally posted by Overread:

Plus it just seems more logical to me that many of the nations would use boats of some craft rather than extreme high end magical spells to traverse the seas.

There are plenty of things in Dominions that are clearly engine flaws, sometimes ancient ones. Like, there are army-teleport spells - but commanders *cannot use them if they can't cast them*. It's the same with sailing; you can carry troops alright but if your commander can't sail he will not sail, period, unless you get a pocket ship. Sailing also has outrageous ships-from-thin-air and uses outdated Dom2-4 movement mechanics (I believe both should be gone as part of army rework). Also the rest of commanders-are-snowflakes issues but I'm derailing.

If Illwinter hits a stride for another sailing nation, which given one of latest ones was Phaeacia which is like *the* sailing nation (it even has a mechanics which justifies their ship-on-demand which is actually irritating because it highlighted the fact all others do it as well) appears unlikely if not impossible, it may actually get attention soon enough. Next patch though, we know it should be Ind and it's hardly sailing-themed.

Short term, it's probably possible to make a coastal poptype with a sailing commander, and Navigators sort of already exist (even if I've seen them never with rarity 2 site). Nonetheless, the changes at the scope you desire are unlikely to happen until Dominions 6, unless Illwinter makes us all an unexpected christmas gift or suchlike.
(Sidenote: if you *really* want sailing now, there's always modding.)

I'd still love to see Goethic Masters and other land-bound people in a naval campaign as Marignon, mind, but I don't hold my hopes for this year.

[xchrisx88]

dont forget you can hire mercenaries, a few are amphibian or come with a water mage