Ships can be built, kept and used only in villages with harbor.
Special Servers - Harbor and Deep Water
| Ship type | Purpose |  |  |  |  |  | Speed in deep water |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Trade ship | Sending resources | 2835 | 1235 | 1985 | 750 | 1:15:00 | 20 fields / hour |
 Warship | Sending any army | 18500 | 8355 | 12275 | 7500 | 3:45:00 | 30 fields / hour |
 Decoy warship | Sending up to 60 units | 950 | 350 | 750 | 350 | 0:35:00 | 30 fields / hour |
The time it takes to build a ship depends solely on the ship type and harbor level (the higher the level, the faster the construction). Ancient powers that affect troop training times do not affect ships.
The speed of ships is multiplied on gameworlds with high speed, similar to how this works with units and merchants.
Naval movement
You can send ships to any target on the map, even if it’s not near deep water.
The ships don’t always travel along the shortest path, but rather try to find the path that will be the quickest. They may mix water and land movement.
The part of the voyage that goes over the deep water is done at the ship's speed, while the part over the land is using the regular speed of the army or merchants.
For example, a ship with catapults and a ship with cavalry travel at the same speed over deep water. However, if they need to travel over land, the army with catapults is going to be much slower.
It means that the army with catapults may choose a different route. It may opt to travel around an island or peninsula, to take advantage of the ship's speed as much as possible. On the other hand, a quick cavalry army might decide to travel by water to one side of the peninsula, go through it on land and continue travelling by ship on the other side.
Note how many tiles are travelled by Warship and how huge saving it makes for the army with catapults.
This is a journey from the same place to the same destination. Yet here the length of journey by ships is shorter. And it saves much less time, because the cavalry is fast even without a ship.
Speed bonuses
When travelling over deep water, ships travel at a static speed, which cannot be increased by any bonuses, such as hero items (with one exception – the map still shortens return travel), hero special bonus or ancient powers.
During the part of the journey that takes place over land, the speed is calculated in the traditional way, including all available bonuses. The Tournament Square bonus becomes active after 20 fields have been travelled on land, and it only affects further land travel.
Troops Speed Increase & Tournament Square
Preparing journey
At the start of any journey using ships, an extra distance of half of a tile on land is added to the total travel distance. This increases the travel time and is especially important for very close targets when travelling over deep water, which would otherwise be an extremely quick journey, even for catapults.
This half tile is travelled over land, so it does not use the ship’s speed. This affects both army movement and trading.
Warships 
Trading 
Warships and decoy warships allow sending armies out. They can be used for any kind of movement - raid, attack (including scouting), reinforcement (including forwarding reinforcements) and even sending settlers to settle a new village.
The difference between those two ships is that a warship can take an army of any size, while decoy warship can take a maximum of 60 units and is much cheaper.
Both types of warships travel at a speed of 30 tiles per hour over deep water and at the usual speed of the slowest unit in the army over land.
You can only use ships from the village with the harbor. When forwarding reinforcements it doesn’t matter where they are from, they can use your ship from the village you forward them from.
One movement uses one ship. This means you can’t use 2 decoy warships to send 120 units together. You would need to send 2 waves, up to 60 units each. Or send one proper warship with any amount of units you want.
If the army sent to a raid or attack by ship is destroyed in that battle, the ship is destroyed with it.
When the ship reaches the target and is not required for the travel back, it returns to its home village immediately, without any travel time (note this is not the case with trade ships, which have to travel back as usual).
Ships cannot be stationed in other villages.
Ships cannot be used in farm lists.
Trade ships can massively increase the village’s capability to move resources, in addition to merchants. Trade ships do not count toward the merchants limit and do not need merchants to be used.
The biggest advantage of trade ships is that they transport a lot of resources and you can have a lot of them. They move at a speed of 20 fields per hour (on x1 speed gameworlds) and over land, they travel at the same speed as the merchants of their tribe.
| Tribe | Trade ship base capacity | Speed in deep water | Speed over land |
|---|---|---|---|
 Romans | 2500 | 20 fields / hour | 16 fields / hour |
 Teutons | 3000 | 20 fields / hour | 12 fields / hour |
 Gauls | 2750 | 20 fields / hour | 24 fields / hour |
 Egyptians | 2500 | 20 fields / hour | 16 fields / hour |
 Huns | 3000 | 20 fields / hour | 20 fields / hour |
 Spartans | 2750 | 20 fields / hour | 14 fields / hour |
Trade ship capacity depends on the tribe and is affected by Trade Office and the alliance commerce bonus.
