duckzilla wrote:Regarding french water play, I usually build a dock in age II if time and resources permit. Since your eco will only take up 80 pop, you basically have a further 20 pop space to use for fishing boats. Having a dock already build allows you to intervene in an opponent's water boom or do some small-scale water boom on your own whenever you have spare wood.
Importantly, I would not suggest to send shipments to improve fishing boats (you will not build that many anyway) and also be reluctant to include naval cards into the deck (maybe the one giving +25% hp/dmg). Using the fishing boats to gather coin also results in less apms needed to administer your economy.
cuirs are quite pop-heavy, and French economy is already pretty good, I don't think fishing boats are overly necessary once you've maxed out the vills; instead, you could build popless canoes