I agree... every game worth its salt, has to have "fishing" in it right?

Yea I'd say it'll probably come in an expansion. 

Naval warfare would be possibly hard to implement though.  Boarding actions would be simple, just a standard tactical fight on a smaller map.  Maybe some spells/abilities that can only be used during boarding actions (archer/spell support from troops that didn't board the enemy boat).  But ship vs. ship combat would be difficult.  It could be done as a tactical battle as well, but then if any ships board one another you'd have to finish that battle before you continue the overall engagement.  Seems inefficient to me.

it is not like it would be difficult to place a limit on the amount of harbors that can be build.

mostly i just use them out of curiosity so that i can find out the shape of the world and where everyone is; otherwise i never end up making contact with anyone but my neighbours.

It is probably reasonable to assume that the cataclysm, which pretty much destroyed most of the things living on the planet, also killed off the fish and mammals in the waters. Fishable resource nodes would make sense, but food from any harbour wouldn't, in my opinion. For the same reason you can't just start farming anywhere on the map.

Actually i agree there is barely any need for transport. you can easily terraform your way to the next island and attack the enemy lol rather than making a transport to move them over and have to find a beach to load unload them.

I previously didnt really had it in mind but when i realised i found out that is way easier to just terafform mountains to land and sea to land for more space, better caravan routes etc and even build mountains where you want monsters and enemy to keep out

Like morfing your own playstyle, doing what you want and by end of the day only real challange would be an other players since ai would rather go around the mountain i just put there and face my full army rather than terafform their way to my weak points

As for monsters, they just happen to spawn in lands where no influence of a city is apparent and sometimes at areas with fog of war on it. simply if you dont want suprice appearances, then just make all this space into sea, thus no monster suprice attacks from there, problem solved

Perhaps fish in the world of Elemental aren't tasty or edible... possibly due to toxins in the oceans left over from the Cataclysm.

That being said, a nominal bonus for harbors (+1 food, or +5% to food produced by the city) sounds interesting.

Perchance to dream....yes, I agree. i'd love to see that. As it is, I RARELY even research seafaring. If you capture a city that has it, you can build the units---at least for now anyway.

I have had 3 games in row stall due to a lack of food.  In one game, I had 3 cities and could nOT see a single food resource on the visible map.  In another, I was moving along pretty well, but captured like 2 poorly place AI cities and then stalled out due to lack of food.

In my games, the cities build stay at population 0 until I build a hut.  And I have to have a food resource available before a pioneer can build a city.  I don't recall any of that in previous versions.

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Strange---what are your sov's traits at the start? I always use green thumb and then build first city on a farm resource--from there it is not usually an issue.

new version requires food to build settlement...whereas before you didn't need.

A harbour would more logically bring in Gildar through trade. Particularly since it's mentioned that this is one of the main features of Tarth.

Not that realism is important here, but if there was no marine life at all there would hardly be such things as bears and wolves wandering the wastes... circle of life and all.

I think adding fishing as a resource is a good idea... maybe if you build a harbor you can build fishing boats which can then develop special fishing resources in your ZoC.