Trade Question

[caravel]

On the trade subject, I'm a big advocate of land bridge removal to create true islands of sicily and britain, to divide sardinia and corsica and split spain from morocco to try and reflect how forces would have to invade these islands or cross channels historically, and this is how I play the game: modded in this way, but I've often wondered if MTW wouldn't benefit from losing the less than perfect trade and shipping thing altogether and go back to, almost, doing it "the shogun way", this would achieve, among others, these goals:

1) Stop the player taking advantage of the poor AI naval management and easily achieving total naval domination by the high period. The AI just can't "play the naval game", it can just about manage on land. The player can 'jump' armies from scotland to the sinai in one year without those vessels making port or the army getting lost or getting blown off course, and also scotland to northumbria in one year, both seem unrealistic but the land province movement time cannot be altered, the sea travel can, it can be stopped altogether.

2) Prevent the player reaping a huge trade profit and thus a seriously glutted economy while the ai gains little.

3) Force crusades/jihads to take the land route, as they probably would have historically, only using virtual shipping when they could "borrow" it at friendly ports to ferry across a strait or channel (land bridges). Three alternative land bridge routes would be created for crusades. (see below)

4) Stop the "re-emerging faction isolated on island" problem (i.e. the byzantines in crete, the italians in sardinia/corsica or the english in Ireland)

5) Get rid of the bugged naval warfare system and allow the player to concentrate on the land warfare which is what it's all about after all.

To achieve this some changes would have to be made to farming incomes and the tech tree. Only shipyards would need to be removed, as this would effectively stop ships being produced. Trade goods within provinces would need to be increased to boost local trade. The base farm incomes for all provinces would need to be boosted carefully as would the incomes from mines to make them more worthwhile.

I would place the new land bridges between the following provinces:

1) cyprus -> anatolia/lesser armenia/antioch
2) rhodes -> niccea
3) crete -> greece/cyrenacia †
4) greece -> cyrenacia
5) malta -> sicily/cyrenacia †
6) sicily -> tunisia
7) wessex -> normandy
8) ireland -> wales/scotland
9) sweden -> finland
10) corsica -> genoa/tuscany †
11) sardinia -> tunisia †
12) denmark -> norway
13) livonia -> finland

† crusade routes

Or something like that anyway. These would represent, what I feel would be, common shipping lanes between these provinces and islands, without the actual ships being part of the equation. It would allow muslim factions to branch out into the meditteranean islands and pose more of a threat.

This may not appeal to some of course, though it does to me, because I dislike managing ships and find the naval battles to be quite uninteresting. I can beat the AI every time when it comes to naval deployment, so there is virtualy no challenge only annoyance. I also find the cut off provinces (islands) to be a real nuisance in that most of the time I can't be bothered trying to capture them because they provide no incentives. If they were connected by land it would make it easier and worthwhile, as they would become stop off choke points between north africa and europe. The AI can't handle the islands, the way I see it is the more obstacles you put in the AI's path, the more it fouls up, keep it simple and it's fine.