I thought I’d start off this blog with a series of posts on the design of my Oceans mod. A quick retrospective on the choices I made and why I made them, in context.

Why did I make Oceans ?

The idea behind Oceans itself started a reaction to the then recently released Portugal DLC. After playing a couple of games with them, and I found myself slightly frustrated.

It wasn’t anything with the civ itself—the piles of gold flowing in were fun enough—but the Oceans themselves. Portugal’s inability to direct international Traders over land meant that your first few cities would almost inevitably be coastal, which highlighted a problem that I’d never really noticed before: coastal gameplay is boring

Consider the following:

• Terrain: There is no terrain variation beyond Coast VS Ocean tiles (and who works Ocean tiles anyways?)

• Features: the only feature of note are Reefs, which have limited interactability: you usually only care about them for the Campus adjacency bonuses.

• Resources: They aren’t much better: they provide a little diversity, but due to the fact that there aren’t that many choices to choose from, you seldom get that same push to want to grab yet another type of luxury resource you do on land.

  Additionally, they’re all improved by the same improvement.

• Improvements: Fishing Boats and Fisheries. That basically all you get for the majority of the game. The former requires little thought, the latter has a tendency to just get spammed

So after settling a few coastal cities, you realise there’s very little diversity to their gameplay.

What exactly was I trying to do with Oceans ?

Simply put, the goal was to spice things up by adding variety (and specifically, I was concerned about the economic side of the equation, so no naval rework). My initial ambitions were small: the plan was only to add a few new coastal resources and make coastal luxury resources change per continent (same as land-based luxuries). I’ll go into detail about the specific considerations behind the resources themselves in my next post.

Kelp started off as a bonus resource but was quickly shifted to a feature at prompting from Pouakai (one of my modding friends). It happened to work well as a coastal equivalent for forests, and gave me an excuse to introduce variation by making them the equivalent of difficult terrain in water. This triggered a couple of suggestion for Mangrove Forests and Atolls. I rejected those primarily because of scope concerns, but also because I wasn’t sure how to make them distinct from Kelp and Reef in terms of gameplay: I had to consider the amount of time I had available, as well as whether I had a proper goal in mind when adding them.

Introducing Kelp also triggered a minor change in the Water Park, which ballooned into a rework of the district. I had also considered a rework of the Harbor, but I’ll talk more about infrastructure later.

That’s it for now. Next: why Lobster is a luxury despite everyone telling me about how it was a low-class food until recently.