How would water maps play without fishing ships ?
This is something I've been wondering for a few weeks, in an attempt to "redesign" water maps through a mod.
What do you think would generally change if the fishing ships weren't available before castle age, like additional TCs ?
On land maps, you can't build new TCs until castle age, which means your eco growth is limited, not by resources or by the map, but just by the TC production rate.
But on water maps, docks can produce fishing ships without depending on your TC. That means the first one to build a dock already gets an eco advantage, and each second makes a difference. That also means you have to go for water as fast as possible, otherwise your opponent will literally outboom you from the start. This is, imo, what makes land and water maps so different.
Would grushing still be the standard strategy ? Would build orders be similar to land ? Would the gameplay be less/more interesting in your opinion ?
Posted Dec 5, 2016, 9:30 PM UTC
Just a slightly slower grush, since you need to keep 6 vills on food for villager production. Map control is too important not to grush for all the water maps. Maps like baltic will be played different and focus mainly on land.
I don't think this is true, though it will depend on the map (size of islands, distance of ressources to water). Faster castle times will be more important and landings will be much much more important. Water control means nothing when you have it with feudal galleys which can't stop the landing.
If you spot them going for it, you are fine. Just going for FC requires a map with no resources on shore, and still a big investment into docks early one, since they will be prevented otherwise by the galleys.
The main difference is just in combined land/water maps which will just be fully land.
I have a few questions, if you don't mind :
Maybe just create a map and try to get it into a T90 series? He is always open to new maps/styles.
I think I would expect a lot of FC builds with landings and maybe fire ships. The only thing you could achieve with feudal galleys is getting water control, but you would need a lot of galleys to achieve it (it takes ages to take down docks with them) putting yourself too much behind ecowise. So water control starts probably to matter only in castle age when you have war galleys who can raid eco effectively and can snipe transport ships.
So to summarize it: I would not go for feudal galleys, just do fc builds with a transport around advancing to castle. Then knights/crossbows/castle drops... Maybe tower rushes in feudal age, but I think you would have to be really quick with it not to fall too much behind ecowise.
Well if you have walled land (that can be easily done) you get food much faster than opponent and probably win game if you are same skilled