I recently played a game on the map Tofalas, and was reminded that although Edain ships are a vast improvement over the vanilla game in terms of both lore and variety, they seem awkward in their relationship to the gameplay.
I have three main problems with ships currently:
1) Transport ships are incredibly weak, and still only hold two units (making mass naval landings completely impractical).
2) Long-range bombardment ships are incredibly overpowered and on some maps (like Tofalas) can wipe out entire armies and fortified bases with ease.
3) In general the damage output from ships is ridiculously varied depending on their target. This was implemented for balance reasons so that ships can't easily destroy harbors or specific kinds of units to easily, but it is so extreme as to be immersion breakingly unrealistic (an arrow ship can rip apart another ship in seconds, but takes two or three times as long to kill a single troop of orcs?)
Here is my solution:
Each faction should have one or two types of ships. The ships have no weapons themselves, the only difference between them would be hull strength and/or abilities/upgrades.
All ships are transports, and can be loaded up with as many units as common sense and the game engine will allow (2-5 depending on the size of the ship).
Units loaded onto ships can fire just like they would if garrisoned in a tower (but visible, like on the back of a Mumakil), bonus points if garrisoning non-archer troops could still unlock an arrow attack from the ship.
Siege engines could be similarly mounted onto ships (permanently?) to create siege/bombardment ships.
This solution would make transporting troops by ship more viable, ships more balanced (since they would inherit the balance of whatever units were loaded onto them), and gameplay more realistic.
I have no idea how possible this suggestion is. It would seem one of the major limiting factors is the flexibility of the game's garrison system.
Speaking of the game's garrison system, would it be possible to have segments of the tops castle walls function as garrisonable "towers," so that archers on the walls would be locked into place (so they stop running off after passing units), be better protected, and be realistically spaced (instead of having nearly unassailable defensive bio-balls of 10+ squads of level 5 Rangers)?
Thema: Ships (Gelesen 1553 mal)