Gameplay: Seafaring

Wind!

You can't have any kind of interesting seafaring without wind.
Even Ultima 3 had seafaring and ship to ship combat that took the wind into account and that was almost thirty years ago.

There needs to be a windrose on the map that displays wind direction and speed.

Different ships have different points of sailing.
Some can sail well before the wind, some can not sail against the wind at all.
Some may even have rowers.

Pirates! modeled that very well.   See the Pirates! manual,     search for   GAZETTEER OF SHIPS

Hey, we could have a Ship Designer!  (wonder where I had seen that before...)

And this being War of MAGIC, the elements will have a say in that, too.  Air / Water / Fire are obvious candidates.

Earth seems a bit out of place but... where do you think tsunamis come from?
Well, tsunamis aren't exactly well suited for surgical strikes so you might make more enemies than you had planned on. =P

Cool ideas.

For simplicity, maybe vessels have two movement rates, one 'with the wind' and the other 'against the wind'. Against the wind would be some factor (1/2) of the with the wind movement score. Galley style vessels (e.g. with oars) that would cost more population to build but would negate the 'against the wind' penalty.

Yes, PIRATES!. I think it would also be very cool to privateers which would be a ship unit that could be used to chase down enemy merchant ships and steal thier cargo. 

Weather effects (hurricane, water spout, whirlpool) may be beyond the game engine's abilities but would be cool also. Maybe they could work as spells. 

I will just use Earth magic to trap your fleet!  Wizards > Pirates > Ninjas!

Pah. Everyone knows ninjas pwn all, because they flip out, chop everyone and vanish in a puff of smoke.

I was watching deadliest warrior, and a ninja failed to beat a Spartan, yet a Pirate beat a Knight.  If a Ninja cant beat a Spartan, how could he beat the same type of warrior with 2,000 years of technological improvement that the Pirate was able to defeat?  Sorry bud, Science has shown us that Pirate > Ninja.

And ninjas are scurvy landlubbers. Arrrr!

But ohh... we have a topic here.

There could be catapults and ballistae on ships. And rams. And boarding crews...

Plus, pirates still exist today.  Ninjas are no longer  

I thought that ninjas were just better at keeping their activities quiet.

Ninjas took to privatteering about 500 years ago.  You have all been fooled, the ninjas are the pirates.  Ahahhahahaha, arrrr.

I agree that more seafaring should be implementet. Personaly I think that trading by sea is a good option. Schips allow bigger cargo transfers and can sail longer and faster than merchants by cart. Following the logic of the schips, merchant schips should produce a bigger bonus to trade. Upkeaping a fleet is costly so maybe the merchant schips should cost some material for upkeep. Or it could be so that merchant schips are costly to maintain so that the schips can only be produced and sent to level 4 cities.

Seafaring needs a lot of love.  At a minimum, we need the ability to research different classes of vessels so we can take the fight to the oceans. 

Pfft, Ninjas are alive and well on most MMO's.