I think this might illustrate the weakness of aow3 and planetfall maps for naval battles the best.
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The brown random shapes is the land masses/ islands.
It is labeled continent but in actuality they're really more of a large islands to me
The black rectangle things is abstact standin for ships. And this is generally where they would be positioned if players bothered to even build any at all because the waters can be easily bypassed in 1 turn.
As the result, the boosted cosmite in waters do in fact encourage players to try and build some ships but they can just easily build flyers instead and call it a day. Reason: AOW Ships cannot hurt enemy cities + bombard land units. AOW ships is a joke.
I mean.. haven't you seen how badly designed the vanguard ships is? Everything about them just offends my eyes. xD Looks like it was slapped together in five minutes and nothing else was considered further. Vanguard battleship just screams design failure. One good shot to its bow and it is out of commission.
Anyways, now lets look at land 2 picture.
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Both images is of same size but i made lands smaller to help show how making distances between continents greater will naturally raise the value of having a deep blue navy. Red arrows showing many avenues of possible attacks. And red star in middle means attack can occur in every direction.
Its only then, having a navy becomes important and necessary. In addition they must be able to attack ocean based cities + cities built on the coast and bombard land units. It should be understood that making navy more important will slow down the game greatly because extra time will be needed to establish production harbors in order to crank out alot of ships in acceptable time frame and cost. This in turn will take the greatly needed cosmite from land units and put them into naval units.
And it is one of many reasons why balloning colonizer costs need to be removed. Completely unecessary and doesn't effects the AI anyways.