Great work Han Solo78 and BBW! With the harbour crowd scenes may I suggest that you have rows of 2 dimensional galleries, to make the crowd look bigger, with your 3D models in the foreground to 'sell it'? It's an old school cheat that would save on time and resources
This may be a silly question, but in terms of having to go to the trouble of lowering all the docks individually, might it be easier to raise the water level globally by a couple of meters?