Harbors

from Elemental Forums

Currently you have to build a city on a beach in order to build a harbor (once the tech is researched.) Well this kinda poses a problem especially if resources are close to the beach but no close enough to build the harbor and still use the resource without resorting to city spamming or waiting many turns for your ZOC to encompass the other resources.  I think the way to solve this would be to either,

1) Treat the beach much like a resource and build a harbor on it once the tech is built and it is in your ZOC. This way the city does not have to be on the beach.

2) Once the tech is research have a Harbor kit much like the Pioneer kit to be put on a unit and sent to the beach to build a harbor. You could also use this same concept for Fort building with of coarse the appropriate tech researched for that.

What do you think? I perfer option 2 myself.

elemental
5,725 views 10 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

personally i have never been able to build a harbour myself. mostly this is because there simply don't seem to be many beaches on the maps i'm getting. imo about 1/3 of coast should be beach. there are enough things fighting for my settlements already without having to worry about the 5 beach tiles per map.

personally i prefer option 1. i don't see any advantages in the other one beyond more micro.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

The harbor building option should be a resource that appears near the coast, like gold mines and other stuff appear after being researched. So ya, Option 1.

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Or you could just build towards the resources; remember, after all, resources are linked to the closest tile with an improvement on it, not to that initial spot where you plop a pioneer. So if it's just one or two tiles off, you can easily do that with just level 1 city.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

I get alot of harbours up (:
In my last game I think 8 of my 10 cities had beaches (:

But then again it was one one of my custom  maps :grin:

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

What about option 3;

 

Don't require a 'beach' in order to build a harbor.  A city close enough to water should be able to field naval units and board/disembark from transports.

 

I'm not really sure why these special beach points are necessary.  They don't really add any meaningful strategic value as is since they AI doesn't seem to care about attacking you from sea...

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

That's easy enough to do with a quick mod, just toss this into an xml file in the Mods folder.

 

<ImprovementTypes>
    <ImprovementType InternalName="K_Harbor">
        <SupportedTerrainType>Land</SupportedTerrainType>
        <SupportedTerrainType>City</SupportedTerrainType>
    </ImprovementType>
    <ImprovementType InternalName="E_Harbor">
        <SupportedTerrainType>Land</SupportedTerrainType>
        <SupportedTerrainType>City</SupportedTerrainType>
    </ImprovementType>
</ImprovementTypes>

 

You can build harbors anywhere, in any city, but the ship won't be able to move out to sea unless you use raise land on a cliff, then build on that tile to connect your city to the ocean (best to just build the harbor on that tile). It's not exactly very intuitive, IMO.

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

for some reason we can raise land to make 'beachheads' on new continents, but the landing sites that we create cannot be used to make harbors.  itd be nice if this was changed.

Reply #8 from Elemental Forums Top

But can't we just Raise Land more often to build an entire bridge to the new continent, making harbors absurd and obsolete? =)

Reply #9 from Elemental Forums Top

Yeah, pretty much. with an imbuement strategy I never even bother researching harbor.

Reply #10 from Elemental Forums Top

Well, to rub salt in the 'AI has no concept of naval invasion' wound, there are no military naval units military units or naval battles.  That was enough for me for them to be 'obsolete'.