Elemental Forums
As far as I can tell there isn't any naval gameplay. This I feel is bad, not only because it means the game has less gameplay depth but also because it means that the actual maps then self's are less varied.
Are there any plans to add naval gameplay in the future?
The devs discussed it quite a while ago a bit but they never made any real plans or promises. The only real chance of it happening is in a new expansion. I keep hoping for it but ya...
Yep, I really hope they will make a New expansion mostly focused on naval game mechanics and features. Naval units, naval battles, transport by sea, sea exploration with special quests and sea monsters, naval skills for heroes, naval buildings for cities with a coastal port, naval techs, ship designer etc.
The "problem" with the city placement system not creating enough coastal city opportunities can be solved by a new special tile called Natural Harbour. When this tile is within a cities border you can build a port there (the way ressources are improved today) and start producing the earliest ships. Later it could be upgraded to naval yards being able to construct larger and more powerfull ships.
The coastal problem is easily solved. Go to terrain modifiers and change placement likelihood for cliffs to 60 and then go to beaches and change placement likelihood to 40 and now you will have beaches throughout the game. After that add in a food modifier to beaches and you will have more places where you can build by beaches. I made an alternate pier that only uses beaches and upgrades to docks, then harbor, and stops there. I forgot to back it up before I opted into the beta so I get to redo it. After that you just remove harbors from the river version and its done.
Navies and the inclusions of features such as separate continents etc as known from Civilization would be a great boon to the game and I'd be very interested in seeing this in DLC or an expansion pack. I do believe, however, that this is asking for a *lot*, I imagine it would be very challenging to reprogram the engine to be able to feature all such things.
I would love to see airships and flying units in the game as well as traditional water navies.
While on the subject of editing TerrainTypes.xml modifiers...
<GameModifier InternalName="CityTileYield_River_Essence">
Doesn't seem to do anything.
I like your idea to make more beaches. I am also working on navy units, but it's (not) funny. I can set boats to have a cost, and make water units able to enter rivers (I haven't tried taking a boat onto a river yet).
Naval combat is strange. The ship doesn't seem able to attack other ships. A crew on a ship seems able to attack the crew on another ship as though they were on adjacent land tiles. The winner doesn't move into the losers square. Nor does it "conquer" the losing ship. I am still having other funny difficulties.
Wanna know what would be easier? Airships. It would be the same workload, only movement in air instead of water. It could be an air transport unit. Again, I don't know how flying units would react to that because I don't know if the ships could be "killed" by other ships or units. Water monsters wouldn't be TOO hard in theory but again about ships being (not) "funny" about combat.
I would also like to see a Naval Expansion for FE:LH. Making water tiles playable would add all sorts of new dimensions to the game. Hopefully someday....
If you play the scenario, there is some boat usage there. So not like it would be unpossible for them to have Naval stuff in the future.
I know people would like ships and such, but doing the ai for that... I dont see them trying that anytime soon.
A much simpler solution would to be able to cast a spell on a unit (water walking) and have them be able to walk across water. But even then I assume it would still be a major code change for the ai to use it correctly.
my 2¢
I have been transporting my army by boat once . It has 8/8 carrying capacity . You don't need to pay wages for it either .
Though they could load/unload in one place only .
The short answer: Because navies suck.
The long answer: Because navies suck. 
Kidding aside, the implementation of navies would actually detract from existing gameplay. You would need AI to be able to utilize navies. You would need roaming monsters and lairs in the sea. You would need quests and encounter intergration. You would need magical alternatives to sea travel. You would defenses and improvements that altered sea defense/offense. Essentially, too much needed for the implementation for a mechianic that can easily be done without with just as much satisfaction...
Air Elementals can already fly across water.
Strangely, dragons cannot. At least my Storm Dragon could not fly across water. They do move fast on roads; I guess they rather run than fly.
AI can't handle it. I feel it's something that should be in the game and the AI should be made to handle it- but it's more important to get everything working sufficiently correctly that is already implemented (fairly close on this)
lolz
You'd figure a flying dragon would be able to...you know....FLY.
The feature got scrapped after working really badly in E:WOM. The biggest issue is that they had tons of AI pathfinding problems with navies and basically couldn't figure out to teach the AI how to use the feature intelligently. With FE they just removed the feature entirely since, as implemented in E:WOM, it was actually detrimental to gameplay. I think there is some interest from SD to adding the feature back in, but clearly there have been a lot of other higher development priorities. Maybe if they do an expansion to LH this feature might make the cut.
I completely agree with this point. The key thing, what would navies really offer this game?
The game doesn't have positional combat like Civ 5 does, so there is not benefit there.
the game already has a good amount of unit customization, i don't really need entire new unit types. And water isn't such a major component that i need to utilize it.
Navy inclusion to me would be a huge endeavor for very little gain.
Don't buy this. Naval exploration by the AI, along with water monsters, would make the game deeper and more interesting. Imagine escaping to islands to avoid defeat, raising/lowering land and Curgen's Volcano to cut off sea access. in combination with an AI that actually explores the seas and uses boats, that would add a lot to the game, and make flying units an interesting counter to navies.
I do buy, however, that it would require enough resources as to make non-viable at this stage of the game. The AI has to have a significant code addition to understand this, and thus make it worthwhile.
Since we are talking about opening up additional land to exploration, I'd rather like to have a "myrran plane" that let you have warp zones/wormhole type entrances across the map as in MoM before opening up water terrain.
I agree with the other posters that the added benefits of navies would require a huge sink in time and effort and coding.
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