Maps and Provinces

[caravel]

Rather than ruin the game I feel that removing ships will revitalise it. At present ships just don't work (sorry I'm repeating myself) and the AI sees the route from Antioch to Portugal in exactly the same way as it sees invading an adjoining province. The ships in neighbouring seas simply opens up a direct path to the province and the AI goes for it if the province is deemed worthwhile. Also if it happens to be a rebel province then the AI will be very aggressive towards it. This results in factions all scattered all over the map, often losing their homelands.

I mentioned a campaign of mine with the Almohads and Byzantine in the British Isles. Well we have done much to remedy this by breaking the sea up into three zones. This helps to an extent but it still doesn't stop the silly expansions. In the last campaign I played the Byzantine actually dominated the whole south eastern quarter of the map simply because none could compete with them navally. Once they had taken that part of the map, they effectively had the whole of eastern med sea zone to themselves but their, now relatively useless, fleets were still huge.