Not only boats, but naval vessels, sea monsters, flying mounts and flying monsters. Otherwise, we'll just end up with another spreadsheet game for a small number of hardcore guys. FE really needs to have a wow factor as there are couple of fantasy strategy games coming out next year that will have those things.

Ya I don't think we will get boats on release. The devs have briefly talked about them though. They will probably be added in a content patch after the post release craziness dies down. We will probably get stuff like water monsters and resources as well but at this point I doubt even the devs know.

@Gaston_DAoust    what new fantasy strategy games do you mean?

Sorry, double post!

There is also Masters of a Broken World coming out as well.

I will be disappointed if we don't get get even a rudimentary way to travel across oceans in FE. That's kinda a big blank spot in the world. See that ocean or sea, no you can't cross it or do anything with it. People in Elemental melt when they touch water so no fishing or navigation or continents. It would be weird if they waited for the third expansion to add it. Not really what I would hope to see in a few years.... boats.

Boats seem difficult in TBS.  The AI never seems to know what to do with them.  I would love boats, naval battles, sea related magic and fun exploration shit, also lets you have continents and islands, instead of just one landmass.  Doubt the AI can figure out using terraforming magic any easier than boats.  

They did mention they were planning to switch to a Civ style portage sytem instead of dedicated transports, which would make programming the AI a little easier. Also if you actually think about it it's not that naval AI's are harder to program(why would they be?) it's just that most games cope out of adding in a fully functional AI for navies on top of one for land troops. Civ5  didn't do either...

It also depends on what kind of system you use. If you use a system like that of HoMM where there are no dedicated combat ships just transports then it's pretty easy. The HoMM system kinda fits FE because they are both centered around hereos, exploring, and quests. You can also always add dedicated navy combat ships later as adding them wouldn't actually require removing transports or anything.

A CivV style portage system and a HoMM style transport sytem would require very little AI work I would think, but you would still get a lot of content and depth. Although I would love dedicated and designable ships... the amount of work to implement them and their AI would be staggering. Maybe in the third expansion.

I hated how troops could just become boats when they touched a beach. I hated it because it just broke the sense of immersion. And I loved it for how great of a solution it was to annoying gameplay elements like loading transports and such.

I think the system in shogun2 is one of the best, and I would suggest that with some modifications.

My ideal naval set-up is that there are pre-determined troop transport routes across the sea. These can be upgraded to move units faster and so on. But most importantly, these routes all have a "victory point" (or several). Whoever controls that victory point can transport units safely across the water. So you have an easy way to move units without any special requirements, but you still have naval warfare as an important piece of the puzzle. Capturing the route would either kill all units being transported, or send them back to where they came. Whoever is sending units across the route maintains full control of the unit, ie it can still cast spells, and the unit can be ordered to turn around and go back home.

The pros:
-units require no management to transport across water
-focus points for naval warfare from the victory locations (naval warfare can take place anywhere, but it becomes focused at the victory locations as they are the most important)
-focus points for ground warfare, from where the routes land

The cons:
-pre-determined routes are never going to be perfect
-perhaps easy to exploit the AI, capturing and re-capturing the route as you see fit

Yes, the sea victory locations are held by naval units capable of warfare. But there are also de facto chokepoints at the landings, which are not defended by the naval units. Sending an army over a route you control, towards a landing the enemy controls, would trigger a tactical battle at the landing.

A living world where mounted knights and mammoths and tanks can't build makeshift flotillas out of nothing to travel across a raging sea.

Edit: If you want to cross a river, that's fine. You can probably build a very small bridge if necessary, or just wade through it. But you cannot transport armed men across the open sea without real boats. You have no tar. You have no supplies. You have no seamen.

All the naval units would be able to explore, and you could even set up your own naval trade routes. What it avoids is having to load up any transports with land-based units. Other than that, the seas are still open. I just want a system where I can select a land unit and click once to move two or three islands away instead of having to click 40 times and move various transports and so on and so forth.

True, the routes would be difficult to place organically (as I said, they'd never be perfect). Another issue is that there are terraforming spells in E:wom that change the lands. Would the routes change too?

You would think it would be easy on the AI anyway. They can just calculate one direct path just like over land, except when they get to the shore they pop in and out of boat mode. It's pretty much the same thing as land travel from the AI point of view I would guess.

Please no.  Civ 5's boat model was terrible.  It completely removed all strategic planning necessary to move between continents.  Invading another continent should be a serious undertaking requiring planning and preparation.  It absolutely should NOT be "oh hey, I have this idle army.  Let's ship them overseas and conquer someone because that's so easy." 

The boat model in Civ 5 is one of the worst design decisions in the game.