And everyone knows naval in vanilla is hot garbage.

Lol hell no, the AI is fully retarded at naval combat, Frigates & Battleships are rediculously OP, on specific maps I legitimately believe the Ship of the Line to be the most overpowered unit in the entirety of civilization 5 above stealth bombers and camel archers.

Like there are bad/situational naval units, Galleass, destroyers, and nuclear submarines are among my least built units. Galleass are good on paper but I can never find a chance to build them and a lot of situational things have to be true for a Galleass rush to be plausible, I tend to build these exclusively for defense and try and go right from trireme to frigates if I can. Destroyers are actually bad units that come with a bad tech and their only merit is that one is useful for utility as they keep the prize ships promotion, can capture cities, and can fight planes. Nuclear sub sits in a place where often people hit missile cruiser first if they're going for SV/Dom and it's a better unit, and if they're going for CV/diplo the game is over pretty much after it's unlocked.

They take very little to tech to after universities, have ten freaking more combat strength than crossbows, and are the best ranged naval unit until the freaking modern era. They literally can crush everything, ironclads are more efficent than them but ironclads won't let you beat somebody that already has mass frigates. Any capital that can be attacked by a decent number of frigates basically gets completely destroyed. I've won games with frigate rushes securing me 12 wonders, and frigate rushes taking every capital on small continents by early industrial, although that takes serious map RNG luck.