How do you get to an island

You can raise land with a spell.

It wouldn't be an island anymore though...

I do hope that they have all kinds of ships, harbours and maritime stuff in the expansions anyway.

We have merchant ships?  As far as I know, all we have is transport ships, you just need to get the boat close to land as possible and then have the units move on to them.  Now, you cant load the boats while they are in the city like in a Civ game, that shit confused me at first.

Raise land till you get to island, then lower land once you get there. You can probably setup invincible homebase there and work on spell of mastery in perfect safety as I doubt AI knows how to do sea invasions.

Teleport still exists, it's in the Mobility spellbook, which you need to take at Sovereign creation.

You can also use boats, which require researching Navy as Empire, or something with a similarly self-explanatory name as Kingdom.

And, as people have said, you can alter the shape of the land around you, once you get sufficiently advanced terraforming spells. It'll cost you a lot of mana, though.

Horrible advice, never research boats, it makes all your other techs more expensive and boats flatout suck.

Do boats even work yet?  The one time I tried building them, the boat appeared to be sort of floating in the city but was unable to move out to sea or anything.  It just sat there and bobbed up and down in the middle of town.  Shortly thereafter some sort of bug hit where turns wouldn't progress.  Not sure if the two things were related or what.

You need shipyard and the city has to be next to water. When you spawn ships you should click water for destination, otherwise the game will glitch.

And yes transport works. You can put armies and sail across the water.

Thanks guys!

Of course, the game is updating as I type this in, so we'll have to see if I can even load the game now...

I'm torn about this.  One, it's absolutely true, there is no real reason to research this, BUT then again, it's not like researching it will somehow make the game unplayable or in any way hinder your easily obtained victory.

Might be better if there was a fish resource to expliot with the harbor improvement.

This.

At one point there were goodie huts out in the water. Those went away. I assume there's more planned for the seas later.

I'd like to add my plea for greater use of the Element Water. Rivers for travel and trade; corsairs for piracy and adventure - these are the features of my most pleasurable fantasy reading.

First off, I have to say I agree with this and its a good post, but on the other hand it kind of reminds me of the kind of fantasy novel Fabio would be on the cover of.

Lord Xia - I'm not familiar with your own tastes, as demonstrated in your post (-; However, I'm thinking of Riverworld, Thomas Covenant, LotR, the Iron Masters in Amtrak Wars, David Eddings' Belgariad, Raymond Feist's Riftwar saga.

Now, have we readjusted your imaginings?

I researched the harbor in the civics tree but i can't build any shipyard, before any possible question:

1) i have 4 cities near the sea

2) there is only sand coastline ( i made a map without cliffs )

3) is not possible to be here and speak about a tech tree bug (bug....a Dune worm!) at 1.11

You most likely lack a level 3 cities with a beach, or is it level 4?