Too hard for an indie studio to program the AI.

Yep, I really hope they will make a New expansion mostly focused on naval game mechanics and features. Naval units, naval battles, transport by sea, sea exploration with special quests and sea monsters, naval skills for heroes, naval buildings for cities with a coastal port, naval techs, ship designer etc.

The "problem" with the city placement system not creating enough coastal city opportunities can be solved by a new special tile called Natural Harbour. When this tile is within a cities border you can build a port there (the way ressources are improved today) and start producing the earliest ships. Later it could be upgraded to naval yards being able to construct larger and more powerfull ships.

Navies and the inclusions of features such as separate continents etc as known from Civilization would be a great boon to the game and I'd be very interested in seeing this in DLC or an expansion pack. I do believe, however, that this is asking for a *lot*, I imagine it would be very challenging to reprogram the engine to be able to feature all such things.

While on the subject of editing TerrainTypes.xml modifiers...

<GameModifier InternalName="CityTileYield_River_Essence">

Doesn't seem to do anything.

I like your idea to make more beaches. I am also working on navy units, but it's (not) funny.  I can set boats to have a cost, and make water units able to enter rivers (I haven't tried taking a boat onto a river yet).

Naval combat is strange. The ship doesn't seem able to attack other ships. A crew on a ship seems able to attack the crew on another ship as though they were on adjacent land tiles. The winner doesn't move into the losers square. Nor does it "conquer" the losing ship. I am still having other funny difficulties.

Wanna know what would be easier? Airships. It would be the same workload, only movement in air instead of water. It could be an air transport unit. Again, I don't know how flying units would react to that because I don't know if the ships could be "killed" by other ships or units. Water monsters wouldn't be TOO hard in theory but again about ships being (not) "funny" about combat.

I would also like to see a Naval Expansion for FE:LH. Making water tiles playable would add all sorts of new dimensions to the game. Hopefully someday....

Zeppelins?  yes...

I know people would like ships and such, but doing the ai for that...  I dont see them trying that anytime soon.

A much simpler solution would to be able to cast a spell on a unit (water walking) and have them be able to walk across water.  But even then I assume it would still be a major code change for the ai to use it correctly.

my 2¢

The short answer: Because navies suck.

The long answer: Because navies suck.  

Kidding aside, the implementation of navies would actually detract from existing gameplay. You would need AI to be able to utilize navies. You would need roaming monsters and lairs in the sea. You would need quests and encounter intergration. You would need magical alternatives to sea travel. You would defenses and improvements that altered sea defense/offense. Essentially, too much needed for the implementation for a mechianic that can easily be done without with just as much satisfaction...

AI can't handle it.  I feel it's something that should be in the game and the AI should be made to handle it- but it's more important to get everything working sufficiently correctly that is already implemented (fairly close on this)

The feature got scrapped after working really badly in E:WOM. The biggest issue is that they had tons of AI pathfinding problems with navies and basically couldn't figure out to teach the AI how to use the feature intelligently. With FE they just removed the feature entirely since, as implemented in E:WOM, it was actually detrimental to gameplay. I think there is some interest from SD to adding the feature back in, but clearly there have been a lot of other higher development priorities. Maybe if they do an expansion to LH this feature might make the cut.

Don't buy this. Naval exploration by the AI, along with water monsters, would make the game deeper and more interesting. Imagine escaping to islands to avoid defeat, raising/lowering land and Curgen's Volcano to cut off sea access. in combination with an AI that actually explores the seas and uses boats, that would add a lot to the game, and make flying units an interesting counter to navies.

I do buy, however, that it would require enough resources as to make non-viable at this stage of the game. The AI has to have a significant code addition to understand this, and thus make it worthwhile.