My long-lingering unhappiness with the sea routes as we have them at this time has come to the point where I want to replace them with something else.
I'd like to make this a discussion, but with rules. Please follow these rules strictly. If you don't, your suggestions will be mercilessly ignored or moderated away and/or I might decide that it all falls into the "!@#$ this" category and drop the whole thing.
- do not de-rail this discussion. Strictly to the topic only, and I mean strictly.
- no over-complicating things. If something is not absolutely required for this to work, then it should be left for future improvements.
- when I say "no" to something, that is not up for discussion. Don't argue with me, don't try to convince me, you will only piss me off.
That said, here's the concept as it stands at this time:
- Remove all sea routes.
- Instead, seperate the oceans and lakes into sea zones.
- Add "harbor" as a building for cities, strongholds and townslands.
- Armies can embark upon ships in harbors only
- Armies can land in any region that is either friendly or has very few defending troops (harbor not required, but a harbor in a friendly region will make it faster)
- Once at sea, you can travel to other sea zones as well, so you can sail all around the world if you want
- Being at sea will require provisions, just like being in a starving region does (necessary to prevent realms from "parking" armies out at sea)
I have not yet decided whether to treat rivers as sea zones, that would allow sailing up and down a river as well as crossing a river by ship.
Sea zones would be larger than land regions. There can be "open sea" zones that do not border land at all. Here's a screenshot of one(!) of several concept drawings I've made showing what it could be like. This isn't the final word, zones could be larger or smaller:
While at sea, you could do very little with your unit. Some units will have to get special treatment. I'm thinking about cavalry not being able to land in non-harbor regions and siege engines not moveable by ship, things like that.
But, basically, it would be very simple. At a harbor, you would get additional travel options says "embark", once at sea you could travel to neighbouring sea zones or land at bordering land regions. If you try to land at a region you can't (enemy and defended), you would lose hours in the attempt. You could not scout while at sea. But I already said that you can do almost nothing at sea (paying your unit is the only thing that comes to mind right away that you should be able to do).
This whole thing has become possible thanks to the new maps system. As we now have actual polygons, we can determine neighbouring zones and regions in code and don't have to draw all of that by hand. To give you a perspective, the table that holds the travel connections for Dwilight has 498 entries, each and every one of which had to be calculated and entered by hand. For sea zones, we can do things in code because we do not have to take region types and travel speeds into account, all we need to know is what zone touches which other zones and which land regions and what the distances are.