A suggestion with ships and such

[Isildor Ravenclaw]

I know ships have only just been added (which I'm just overjoyed about, by the way), but I thought I'd make a few small suggestions.

Firstly with the ship builders, they're currently capable of building model ships at level 1, which is how they get their experience at low levels. My suggestion is to instead have them craft oars at level 1, which can then be used as ingredients for other boats. Even at this stage if they just had the option of crafting oars without them used for anything yet, it could be added in later.

And a minor point: one of the boats they can craft is a Shang Swoop. Is this meant to be Shang Sloop?

I've got a few suggestions for ship types to be added in, but since it's still early days yet I'm going to assume there's still a few things waiting in the wings. The main one I was thinking of was the little papyrus boats used in ancient Egypt. This would probably be similar to the Shang Swoop/Sloop in stats, but would require different ingredients, eg: no sail, oars, different wood, papyrus maybe? Then there's the little canal/river boats you get in Europe. The list could get pretty big quite quickly. Essentially I'm suggesting a bunch of local variants of the ships the game currently has, which would naturally use local ingredients, such as the wood found in that region.

And the final thing I wanted to suggest was for boats to be able to travel along river routes, not just sea routes. There's already quite a few of them around the map, namely in Egypt, India and China, and these are big rivers, not just little streams, so they could take the bigger boats.

I've also been plotting the river and sea routes on a map and from the looks of things there's room for a few other river and sea routes. A Persopolis to Barbarikon sea route is one that comes to mind, possibly also Persopolis to Selucia, Alexandria to Athens/Sparta, maybe a few others. Barbarikon to Pataline seems like a useful river route. Not sure if these trade routes existed in 100AD but if they did it would be nice to see them added.

[Nefertete]

Hey there, I wanted to do river routes, but I want certain 'river ships' to not fair out in the sea to well- so I will have to sit down with john and talk to him about it. The other thing is what about real big ships- should they be able to go down small/shallow rivers?

Thanks for the notice on the sloop


And I have decided to take your suggestion, and divide the ship up in to parts- the hull, bow, deck, etc.. and all. These should total around the same amount of materials needed, just more step by step work.

[Isildor Ravenclaw]

I agree that river ships and sea ships should fair differently under different conditions. Perhaps river ships should get a speed bonus on the river, and sea ships get a speed bonus on the sea, or the opposite, and their speed gets dragged down when they're sailing in the sea for river ships and vice versa.

River ships are typically small, with a shallow hull, so they would carry relatively small amounts but travel swiftly on the river. Out on the open sea a large load would mean they'd sit too low in the water and would have issues with waves in rough weather, so when travelling in the sea they would have a smaller capacity and smaller speed, and take greater damage from storms.

Sea ships are typically large and can really pick up the pace on the open water. They would carry relatively large amounts and travel quickly at sea, but going down river would be another matter entirely. A large load would create issues with beaching in a shallow river, and lower winds inland would decrease their speed.

Some rivers are deep enough to easily take a fully loaded sea ship, and some sea routes are gentle enough for a river ship to cope with without difficulty, so I suspect the best solution would be to set up the ships in a similar way to the animals, and have them with set base speed, capacity, etc, which are then affected by the route it's travelling on.

I don't know yet how you've set up sea travel so I don't know if this is a viable solution, but it's just an idea.

And excellent work on breaking the ships into parts, I think this is a great improvement.