Seafaring: possibility to clear land of opposing players

[Nasenbaer]

It is not yet possible to clear the land owned by opposing players to build a port on that place afterwards

[wl-zocker (wl-zocker)]

In r6880, I was able to build a port next to the spot where my opponent had a occupied military building (a tower). Furthermore, a warehouse of my enemy was standing on the border while my port was being constructed. After its finish, the warehouse burnt down. I attach a replay where you can watch the different steps. It happens on the west side of the black territory. At the beginning of the replay, the tower is still under construction.

[wl-zocker (wl-zocker)]

Note also the lumberjack that vanishes after the blue player decided to colonize.

[Nasenbaer (nasenbaer)]

The more I think about it, the more I am sure that this bug is very close related to the solution of bug #1191297

Keeping in mind, that Widelands is supposed to make military interactions as small as possible, the "clearing enemy territory" part of the game should only take place for the purpose of constructing a port on enemy territory.

Therefore I see two possibilities:

1. The expedition ship itself carries the soldiers with it - problem: the ship is already quite loaded with all the build materials as well as the builder - therefore only a small number of soldiers could be carried, which would make it up to impossible to clear the enemy territory as long as the enemy has at least 4-5 soldiers left ... and seriously once those are defeated, there is not much fun left to conquer the rest of the enemy island.

2. create a "special clearing force mode" for ships so soldiers get loaded and are automatically send to the port build space area. to avoid missuse of this feature, this should be somehow automatized and only be started via an expedition ship that found a matching port space. So like:
-> Once an expedition ship encountered a possible port buildspace (e.g. already used by an enemy port, used for another enemy building, or simply under enemy influence but empty), a special message appears: "Ship found a possible port buildspace under enemy control". The player would now be able to click a special "send special clearing force ship" button which unhides the "load clearing force ship" button in all ports of the fleet. this button pressed in one of the ports opens a new tab where the number of soldiers can be selected (similar to the military site window) and the player can finally (as soon as (s)he is alright with the currently selected soldiers) load the soldiers to a ship which will than set its sail towards the area and send the soldiers out to conquer enemy military buildings.
-> This should of course be expensive, so if the soldiers get defeated, the ship that brought the soldiers to the area is sinked. Further the expedition ship will be in wait mode as soon as the "send special clearing force ship" is pressed, therefore it is unusable until the "clearing force ship" did its work (or not if it was defeated).

[SirVer (sirver)]

1 is out of the question imho. 2 is better but a complicated process. How about armadas?

3) When a player starts an expedition, she chooses how many ships manned with soldiers should be send together with this expedition ship. A ship with soldiers should only contain a max of 8 or so soldiers to not be overpowered. When the armada lands, the soldier ships align behind the expedition ship and the expedition ships becomes a military building with the number of soldiers that were in the armada ships - it can also attach. If it is conquered though, all ships are burned and all wares are lost.

Seems like a very simple and easy to understand solution? It would also degenerate well to the case of no soldiers with an aramada -> the building would burn down immediately and the expedition would be lost if any player has military control over the spot where the port is build.

[_aD (ad-simplypeachy)]

se5a has suggested an additional idea which seems quite good: maybe the ship itself could become a 'fort' when it's 'anchored' at a possible port location. There would be no need for extra ships to follow or armadas. Ships would then always be able to anchor at port spaces and if they are carry soldiers, attack the port and/or other military sites in range.

[SirVer (sirver)]

I replicate what I wrote in the forum:

Having one ship is not enough though, this will be very hard to balance. Imagine the ship contains 20 soldiers -> it will be nearly impossible to defeat it so it is very, very strong. If it only has like 8 soldiers or so it will not be able to conquer a castle though.

In my mind, the correct approach is a military expedition with more than one ship (but no new ship type). Each ship packs 6-10 soldiers (I think 8 is a good starting point for testing this out). Sea warfare is then super expensive (because you need a lot of ships) and can be scouted (i.e. when your enemy sails his ship close to you shipbuilder he will see you are building an armada which gives time to prepare and fortify). The armada will only be able to land at a port and in its immediate vicinity and all ships will become 'military buildings' of their own right.

This will not happen before b19 - and there are lots of bugs in the current seafaring that needs fixing before that.

[Frank Pieper (frank-pieper-1)]

There is indeed a very simple and effective for: Disable TErritory-Feture for Game (and give it another Meaning like Conflichts for Territories exist: iit does matter from which one yoou buy the Map to see what Borders on Map)

[SirVer (sirver)]

Setting to incomplete for bug sweeping.

[GunChleoc (gunchleoc)]

Migrated to https://github.com/widelands/widelands/issues/855