Quote Originally Posted by KiOwA
That might make it obscenely impratical to transport large amounts of forces, at least until mid-game or so. Having to pay upkeep for all those ships who are not fighting, just giving the landlubbers a piggyback... I agree with the basic idea, but perhaps we could scale down the formula abit.
Naval invasions should be difficult, and it should take some sort of stack of ships to manage an invasion--so making it "obscenely impractical" is part of the thrust of the idea. Hannibal attacked overland for several reasons, one of them being that Carthage no longer had a navy to match Rome. Yes, it will take far longer to build up the forces, and be costly to maintain. One should have to maintain some local naval superiority for an invasion to succeed. This is one thing that will help the strategic AI, since it is a ship builder and is likely to gain naval superiority. If the human wants to mount seaborne attacks, he/she will have to build a real fleet too. Right now I only need 3 or 4 individual ships spread about to do all the naval activities I want, blockades and invasions.

Right now we have many stacks of AI ships doing nothing. Combine this with more decisive naval battles, and reasonable autocalc, and we would have some entertaining naval strategy I think. (I also propose requiring blockades to take a number/level of ships that corresponds to the port level in some way, and have an AI that actually blockades aggressively vs. enemies. These factors are somewhat offsetting, so that gnat sized "nuisance blockades" are not possible.)