Sea routes ARE changes to the world because they connect place A to place B. Basically, you could just as well change the map so that A and B touch each other, that's the effect that sea routes have.
And that is why sea routes suck, because they connect A to B, but not A2 to B, even though you could make the same argument for A2 as you made for A. So either it is tons of sea routes all over the place, which makes everything connect to everything and makes coastal cities totally vulnerable towards naval invasions, or you don't.
All you guys arguing historically are forgetting an important detail: There are no actual sea routes in this game. Nowhere. We simulate them by having connections between unconnected regions, but the game doesn't know these are sea routes. It doesn't know that landing your soldiers in an enemy city by sea is not the same as marching in by land. It doesn't know that you could be attacked by an enemy navy at sea. It doesn't know about weather, it doesn't know about ports, it doesn't know about the fact that sea routes should be limited by the number of available ships, it knows bugger all.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Well, a) That's just plain wrong. The game
does know they're sea routes, and that's how it can prevent you from scouting along them. It also knows about weather; we just don't happen to have weather affect sea travel.
And b) None of that matters. It's all still
totally and completely irrelevant to the point at hand.
You know why?
Because unless you're planning to either
remove every single existing sea route from the game, thus isolating a lot of people form each other, or
implement full-fledged sea travel, all this is saying is "Our system for this is imperfect," while totally ignoring the fact that we
actually have a system for this.
If you're never ever going to give us a sea route from the isolated tail-end of SE Beluaterra to the rest of the continent
just because you don't want to, then please, Tom, just say so. Stop hiding behind BS justifications like this that make no sense whatsoever.
Or, better yet, just add one. It's not hard. It doesn't take a lot of work in the DB or on the map image. Hell, I'll do all the DB work if you want.
Trying to argue that the maps don't change that way is stupid, because the BT map has already changed massively.
Trying to argue that sea routes are a terrible hack is stupid, because we have over a dozen already on Dwilight alone.
Trying to argue that we shouldn't make these decisions for political reasons is stupid, because either all the existing sea routes are political, or none of them are. This one is needed because there's no other place in the game that you have such an isolated piece of land, and it's
bad game design to allow it to remain.
Trying to argue that we should wait and see how things develop is stupid, because we
know that there's no realistic way that piece of land can do anything but stagnate over the long term if it's left isolated like this.
It really, really feels like
either you really want to eliminate sea routes in BM entirely and replace them with proper sea travel—which would be fine as a solution to this,
if it were going to happen some time in the next few months—
or there's some kind of deeper reason that you don't want to add this sea route, but you don't want to admit to it, so you keep covering it up with increasingly confusing and illogical justifications.
