Setting the Netting

"If it happens again I shall worry

That only a strange ship could fly"

 

Sting - The Wild, Wild Sea 

 

 

My recent Europa Universalis 4 campaign surprised me with a bit more novelty than I thought it could muster after half a dozen runs. For one thing, like Scotland and in contrast to the Teutons or Uzbek Khanate, Aragon runs into an old problem of finding a job for Aquaman. Ever since I got into strategy games in the '90s, ever since Civ 2, C&C: Red Alert and Warcraft 2, the idea of having two separate realms of gameplay has run into constant balance issues. A hard distinction between land and sea units leaves ships either utterly useless or utterly crucial. In particular, the need for transports to carry land units raises a whole separate balance issue of vulnerability. Is it fair for an embarked unit with 20 armor to get sunk because its transport only has 2?

 

Though I eschewed the New World colonial race this time around, the Spanish armada nonetheless proved crritical to not only protecting my various island holdings but denying enemies quick deployment. For instance the Ottoman Empire vastly outnumbered me on land, but forcing it to schlep across the North-African coast by foot bought me the time to siege its ally Morocco before reinforcements could reach. It's a bit all-or-nothing. Once I had that naval superiority... I had it. End of story. My fleet only grew with the scores upon scores of vessels I captured, for free, with enemies unable to even deny me safe harbors without conquering me completely, since every coastal province can dock infinity vessels. It's always completely one-sided. One side of every war rules the waves and is the only one who can ship troops. What, no sneaky black sails under cover of darkness? Especially looking at Britain utterly failing to control The Channel across several playthroughs, I kept flashing back to Dunkirk and wondering why I can't commandeer a bunch of merchant vessels for some kind of limited access beyond the old Warcraft spiky turtle dependence.*

 

At least ships providing faster travel for a logistic advantage and not just a numeric one is a solid concept, though it can be taken too far. I don't know what Civilization's doing these days, but its competitor Old World gives every ship a next-turn "anchor" action establishing a traversable radius around it so long as it remains inactive. You can chain these zones to create pontoon bridges over infinite distances.

While my navy was too small for a full-scale invasion, I eked a narrow victory over the Carthaginians there by quickly anchoring my few ships and snagging a couple of low-value city sites in the southeast, impractically far from the mainland and with too little land around them for any other purpose but a couple of extra points. But making the crossing nigh-instantaneous can be stupidly overpowered.

Playing as Greece (bloo) vs. Assyria (yeller) our war quickly degenerated into a perpetual stalemate. The sole overland route connecting west and east consisted of exactly three hexes at the very northern edge of the map (the rest being a mountain range all the way to the sea) making it impossible for either side to mount or reinforce a push. Island-hopping along the center archipelago (two turns to cross half the map) was a nice strategic challenge, and opening up that second front all the way across their empire (as EU4's algorithm tries to do every single war) did indeed lead to eventual victory. Not risking instantaneous unit loss when losing a transport is a nice change (your units either can cross or cannot, and do so in a single turn spending no time at sea) but turning creaky triremes into infinite-range, effortless science fantasy teleporters is a bit much.

 

Age of Wonders does have teleporters, and has done away with naval transports. Much as in Heroes of Might and Magic, units "embark" when you order them into water and fight under some penalties unless they're aquatic/amphibious/flying. For some little while at the start it did feature actual ships as naval units, but eliminated even those as extraneous. Not an ideal situation either, as it removes some player decision-making in deliberately building up sea power.

 

Weird how long the naval transport issue has gone without a clear best option. My own personal favorite would be something like a more purposeful, resource-dependent version of HoMM/AoW "embarking" which stuck in my mind ever since playing Armageddon: allowing the player to buy a motorized transport for each unit as upgrade, of varying quality, activated at will. Of course, "my little pocket ponies" were even mocked in old MMOs, and in some settings like historical grand strategy, seeing your infantry pull a galleon out of its ass may look just a mite queer.

 

Can't wait to see how Bannerlord handles this in its Viking expansion.

 

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* There is a reason for this limited interpretation in mass media dominated for eighty years by Americans' obsession with their moment of glory at D-day, a rare example where the question really was an all-or-nothing, massive disembarkation from purpose-made transports.

 

There's an even simpler marketing-driven explanation for keeping transports as separate units for so long, as every company wanted to drive up its unit count as volume of content.