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The idea of reusing building capture logic for ships is excellent, but I believe it needs one critical addition: both ships should take hull damage during the boarding process. Otherwise, boarding becomes a no-risk, high-reward action that undermines naval warfare. Why it's important Historically, boarding was a brutal melee that damaged the ships themselves (broken oars, rails, rigging). In gameplay terms: if you can capture an enemy trireme for free just by having 10 hoplites on a transport, why bother building warships? Proposed mechanics (simple and implementable) Ongoing damage: During boarding, both ships lose a small percentage of HP per second. Damage rate depends on: Ratio of garrison military strength (fiercer fighting = more damage). Ship type (warships are tougher, transports are fragile). Technologies (e.g., "Grappling Hooks" could reduce damage for the attacker). Final penalty for captured ship: After a successful boarding, the captured ship suffers an additional HP loss (e.g., 15–20% of its current HP), representing the final deck struggle. Attacker also pays a price: The attacker's ship takes damage over time and loses some of its garrison (e.g., 2–4 units killed). Half of the surviving attacker's garrison (rounded up) transfers to the captured ship; the rest remain on the original ship. This is in addition to the unit transfer already discussed. Defender's garrison is entirely eliminated (killed or captured). Risk of sinking: If a ship's HP reaches zero during boarding, it sinks and the boarding is interrupted (or the surviving ship wins if the fight was almost over). Why this improves the game Balance: Boarding becomes a costly operation, not a free alternative to destruction. Tactical depth: You can soften a ship with ranged attacks, then board to capture it with fewer losses. Realism: Reflects ancient naval tactics (ram, then board). Interesting choices: Do you risk your transport full of elite infantry to capture an enemy flagship? Prevents snowballing: The captured ship starts with very low HP and requires repairs, making it vulnerable to immediate counter-attack. Example numbers for testing Base damage: 2% of max HP per second to each ship. Damage multiplier: (defender_strength + 1) / (attacker_strength + 1), clamped to [0.5, 2.0]. (If defender has twice as many soldiers, damage doubles.) Captured ship extra damage: –15% of its current HP after capture. Minimum boarding time: 5 seconds (prevents instant capture). Attacker garrison losses on success: 2–4 random units + half of the survivors move to the captured ship. Visual feedback Initially, simple effects would suffice: sounds of fighting, smoke/blood particles. Later, ship entanglement visuals (ropes or a boarding ramp) would be great. It would be nice if the ship's texture became more damaged. Regarding the "base garrison" idea from @Thalatta – I see its value for reducing micro, but my proposal works with the existing garrison system. Perhaps both could be combined in the future. I encourage everyone interested to share their thoughts. If there is support, I can help with testing and refining the numbers. Thanks for considering!

Yes, I was thinking, people build enough dropsites anyway to get fast access to resources, there's no point adding rules to solve a problem that doesn't really exist. But I think some simple addition to make new territory a bit more relevant is in order, after all, besides making other CCs more city-like, it has been mentioned in the past that there are not many reasons for expansion, that fields around CCs are unsightly and inaccurate, and even that CCs could be specialised. Maybe just adding a gap around the CC where no resources or structures can be located could tackle some things. I’m not sure how to easily make relevant building houses somewhere else though, and one has to be careful with snowballing.

The game is complicated enough as is. Let's just keep it simple, people. Improve what we can, but let's not add feature bloat. EDIT: For context, if we implement both of these, then that will break a lot of existing stuff, mainly involving the AI. And now you need to fix things that were working fine for decades.

Dirt decal to different wallset:

Civil centre:

Each iteration looks so much better

Theater also fixed:

Done!:

Yes, need to make a spherical+noise gradient to make the same fade out on the radius.

Maybe make it a bit more granular (some stones are fully opaque on the radius and some fully transparent) to mask the pure circular alpha mask?

Gradient to keep the last cobblestone and fade out:

thats what i did, but the shaders are mixed continously, texture is to decide wether is dirt or cobblestone, another to make the dust above the edges to blend seamsly with the cobblestone and the gradient is to give the fade out effect in the dust at the end so it blend with the enviroment. More complex but allows the render to capture the image whitout baking but just a single 15 secs rendering.

Why not just create a black/white texture with texture paint and use it as a mask? Seems way easier to me. If you want to combine more than two textures, use an RGB image as a texture mask.

I've made a vertex paint to be able to decide were it would be dirt (shader b) or cobblestone (shader a) then connected the fac output to the fac input of mix shader. Also a gradient at the corners so the dirt would fade out to blend with the enviroment but keeping the last cobblestone so it wound cut at the end. But for round ones is a bit more tricky to do, need to experiment with spherical gradient.

Well, but the number of units will be arbitrary. I think it's ok for people to decide if they want to chase units, or to do it with last CC standing. I thought about an intermediate possibility: if all CCs are taken, units lose HP, unless they are close to a Hero or garrisoned (maybe just on certain buildings).

Are you sure that it's just the order of the props in the actor file which defines which is above? I had the same problem with my olive mill and changing the actor file didn't solve the issue, it just appeared different each time. I think instead of or additionally to blending out at the edges, you should cut along the gaps between stones. You could avoid the triangle stones at the edge of round decals for example. Also I think you should scale the tiles down, they are too dominant imo. To easily edit it I strongly recommend using masks in the material node shader if you're not doing so already.

Well, a resource cap, with dropsites increasing it, is an interesting and not complicated idea, as long as it’s not too disruptive and only penalises under-building dropsites. Loot can be calculated as some fraction of total resources, divided by the amount of dropsites. Something I was thinking is that CCs are given too much importance as dropsites, and this just comes from other RTS, but it’s historically inaccurate (when compared to the other specialised dropsites), and causes fields to end surrounding it. Of course the idea is to have a dropsite at the beginning, but I wonder if, while one progresses, adding some penalty to them, or some bonus to the other dropsites, wouldn’t restructure things to look better, or maybe something else is better, with those consequences in mind. I have other ideas, but are more radical.

Norm layer wasn't being baked properly due to the mix node. now it is. Added some others buildings:

It's pretty cool. I think maybe that the transition between stone and dirt could be improved with a better edge mask dunno.

Yep: Edit: i see now second normal didn't baked properly. i have to wait till i get my monitor back.

Do you mean to say,

do you generate a normal for it ?

Sounds lovely!

Changed storehouse, since now i can add the dirt above the tiles: Color is just a matter of bake again so as long as the design is okay, i won't mind baking it again with another tone.

@Stan` i can't see properly the colours with this monitor, is this ok?