In a match that I'm playing in right now, Koprulu: Yamato's board designer, Wallace Wishmaster, asks:

Should a new mod be developed for this board that switches the Battleships to artillery borders?

My response was getting a little long for an in-game post, so I thought I'd make this thread and open this discussion up to more people:

I think that would be a fantastic idea. I don't have a lot of experience with the map, so I'm hesitant to criticize, but it always bothered me that a ground assault never seemed to be feasible in this map. The battleship attack is just so much more efficient than having to break through a neutral 2, then a neutral 20, and then a neutral 2, and THEN break into a tower with a dice-disadvantage. You just need soooooo many more armies to break a base that way than you do if you're attacking from the battleship.

That said, even if you make the battleships artillery, you might want to lower the neutral count in those buffer territories, as it might slow the pace the pace of the game, for the reason I stated above. You have to break the neutral 2 on both sides of the neutral 20, break through the neutral 20, and then break a tower from the outside. A battleship can help you with the tower, but securing the battleship AND having enough units to break through all those neutrals on the ground would be very difficult.

This might need a bit more fleshing out / redesign, but I think at the core it is a great idea.