Ahh, good man Wes. Some good ideas there. Before i answer some of your queries i'll just update you a little further with some testing i did last night.

I was attempting to put a bonus for a ship together with a bonus for a specific land unit. I tried this in Venice, where i had a bonus for galleys and Italian Infantry. Unfortunately the AI just went straight for the shipping buildings and didn't try for the Italian Inf.

I also tried this in Mercia with billmen and cogs, but the AI just build a port and a fort and stopped there. Giving the AI bonuses to ships in provinces that don't start with a fort means that the AI will only ever build a fort and port and get stuck. This is because the shipyard requires a Castle4 and, if you were to replace that with a fort, it then builds up fine from scratch. Therefore, unless you are going to allow shipyards to be build with basic forts then i would abandon this strat.

However, for provinces like Wessex and Venice, the AI can cope with the bonus to ships since they have basic infrastructure from the get-go. I am interested to see your ideas on linking Merchants to various ships or buildings and then giving the province the bonus for the ship to get it to build the Merchants This would be great for Venice and Wessex in the native version, since the Italians and English (who can build galleys and cogs respectively) never build merchants there.

So far my way round this has simply been to give them merchants from the start.

Maybe by making Venice go for gungalleys (they are further up the tech than galleys), Wessex for cogs and then make the gungalley/cog require a Merchant3, one could get the AI to tech up on Merchants as it progresses the shipping tech tree? Certainly worth a try

I do believe this is better than removing the bonus completely, which then results in the AI simply building everything and anything in Venice. That can be a terrible waste of money for the AI if it's doing it in too many of its provinces. At least with the specialisation, we are getting the AI to spend its money more wisely and more specifically.

More later