Population and ships

There are two very important things we need to focus on, population and naval warfare. Taking any decision on these two things is hard and so I have to ask what my players think.


Let's talk about population first.
I have an interesting plan for how to handle population which will please those who want more pop while still keeping population to manageable numbers.

Here's my idea: flexible population. What this means is that there is not set pop limit, and instead pop depends on how players play. I already made Docks support 5 pop a while ago, and I thought I should also make Trading Posts support 5 population and have no set limit to pop.
What this means is that, depending on how players play, building Docks and taking over Trading Posts, their population will also increase.

For example: The normal max pop an European civ can reach would be 240, with all 20 Houses and 4 Town Centers. If the player builds 2 Docks, pop will be increased to 250. If he builds 2 Trading Posts, pop would be increased to 260 pop.

And so on. I will of course have a high max pop limit of maybe 300, to make sure scenarios don't make pop too crazy. And some players have also noticed that civs like the Spanish and Germans can get to ridiculous pop limits of 600 or 700 because of some cards. Those would have to be remade as well.

This whole system is similar to how Age of Mythology handles population with Settlements.
So, what do you guys think?


Now moving on to naval warfare.
I tried tackling his before and it didn't turn out too good, but I want to try again. Naval warfare should be a big part of AoE3, just like it is a big part of AoE2, but naval warfare has too many problems in AoE3.

The main problem is the lack of choice. Each ship has a small build limit and that's it. It can be increased via cards but it still limits the player and makes counter play almost impossible.

The best thing to do here would be to have a naval only population system, to have something like 20 naval pop and then be able to spend it like you want, 20 Caravels or 10 Frigates, for example.
But sadly that is not possible so we need to find something else.

There's another big problem with naval warfare in AoE3 which I tried to fix now. There is no counter system between ships, like in AoE2. So I simply made one, as best as I knew.

Here's what I did: we now have 3 ship classes: Light Warships, Heavy Warships and Siege Warships.
Light counters Heavy and Heavy counters Siege.

The ships that are part of this system are:
All Caravel like units - Light Warships
All Galleon and Frigate like units - Heavy Warships
Monitors - Siege Warships

I know this might be a bad set up but as I said, I did it like I thought fit and I need help to make it better.

What I also did to ships is make them cheaper. All ships are now cheaper to make them more appealing to build.

I also thought we could maybe try and remove limits from ships again and instead make them take pop... again. Something like: Fishing Boat 1 pop, Caravel 2 pop, Galleon 3 pop, Frigate 4 pop and Monitor 5 pop. I know it might sound too little but remember we must make ships viable.

I need all the help in the world with this problem, we need to find a way to actually make naval combat fun and worthwhile.


If you actually read all of this, you are awesome.
Thank you.