I don't have beta access yet. However, I noticed that ports cannot be built on every coastal tiles but beaches (from the trailer in the dev diary). Ancient ports usually were sheltered from winds - bays and river mouths, not beaches. My suggestions are:
- make ports buildable next to river mouths
- create a 'anchorage' feature for coastal tiles. Ports would be buildable there and next to rivers - not beaches
- a mid-game water/earth spell that would create an 'anchorage' on a random coastal tile.
These anchorages would also be assaultable - but with some additional attack penalties compared to beaches.
I cannot confirm this yet of course but I would assume that Lowering the Land on a coastal Tile may very well create a Beach tile so finding or having access to readily usable Ports should not be a major issue.
An Anchorages, albeit a fine idea, requires a secondary method of transport of goods and people to get them to shore. Sounds Micro intensive, vs running er ashore to offload and wait for the Tide.
I can see why they used beaches and made the rest of the continental shelves as cliffs. It's so we have choke points to defend landings from, which makes sense. I do agree though that river mouths should be another site where players should get ocean access.
Once we get our hands on the Map Editor we'll have the ability ourselves to make what-ever kind of tiles we want to have access to the sea, which I'm sure a lot of us Modders already have ideas for (my-self included).
I definitely support this idea though. We need either more beaches on a map (which can't always be guaranteed when you randomly generate a map) or simply a few more places where boats can land and that docks can be built. We just have to keep in mind the strategic thinking behind having limited access to the oceans and landing points. That mechanic definitely needs to be kept in place or it will make larger land masses impossible to defend from sea based invasions.
Another way would be to introduce a new algorithm to the random map generation process that tells it to build "beaches" inside of coves or bays. This way they are strategically (and logically) placed and those spots on a map will have a lot of defensive value as they do now.
Also, thanks for using the proper Category in your post.
Wonder if there could be a 'Make Beach Spell', lol
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