Quote Originally Posted by dutch81 View Post
Another suggestion for consideration is to bring down the expense for the maintenance of navies not because it wasn't expensive but you just end up with stacks of pirates because no one can maintain a proper navy. Especially playing with BI (not officially supported by EB) the computer is actually capable of some raiding and a navy becomes more important, enough so that some landbridges could be removed. Now people complain the stacks they bring are small and I have rarely seen anything bigger then 10 but even a 5-6 unit stack can bring me a world of hurt in Italy as I rarely have a garrison bigger then 1 slinger / or a general in a city. Also pirates should only be able to bloackade damaging the player economically, and take out the odd transport, a proper navy should win out 90% of the time. If the pirate stats were brought down even more the 1 attack maybe 2 defend and their spawn rate was actuaslly increased the economic damage they could do would be increased ... at the same it would motivate the powers to maintain at least a small navy and give them a chance to defeat the pirates at sea.
Historically speaking, navies are expensive to maintain. Pirates blockading ports is a simulation of pirates plundering your trade traffic. Once you secure a bunch of coastal cities in an area, the pirate navies tend to die down. Or you have a significant fleet on patrol.

If facing naval invasion, either you keep decent stacks of units where invasions take place, or build a navy.

Of course, you could always mod the unit costs of navies yourself.