The Problems With Naval

Naval is the most underdeveloped portion of the game right now and suffers from numerous issues that will have the effect of making it inferior to land fully and completely until they are fixed. They are as follows:

1. Lack of ways to attack ground. So, you control a pond, now what? Spam air and hope that your opponent doesn't spam flak and hummingbirds? Wait for your opponent to attack with his com because he's an idiot? Naval needs a way to offend. The key is making amphibious units accessible to a naval player. Hovertanks should be added to the naval factory and a new amphibious factory is needed to allow naval players to mount offenses against the land.
2. Naval is hollow and doesn't make full use of its layers. We need subs and underwater buildings in order for naval to feel fluid.
3. Naval is slow and it takes forever for anything to happen when it's involved, which is neither realistic nor awesome. Increase speed to 20ish and everything is better. One only has to play Statera to see this.
4. Naval is confined. You cannot invade with it and you cannot move it. If you add some sort of naval only teleporter then it will be improved immensely.

Fixing even a couple of these issues improves naval play immensely. If all are fixed then naval may be able to compete with land in terms of fun-ness.

The thing is, right now we're stuck in a self fulfilling prophecy. Naval sucks, so nobody likes playing with Naval. So the planets are configured to normally not have a whole lot of water. So no one plays naval. And since no one plays naval, naval doesn't get any love. It's really a bummer – I LOVED naval play in SupCom.

I really like the hovertank idea.

Naval definitely needs to be faster.

And we also really need a naval teleporter. Just add floats or something to the Teleporter model and allow it to be placed on water. Although... there would need to be a check to make sure that naval teleporters are linkable only to each other, which wouldn't be overly difficult I imagine.

YES! @stuart98 YES YES YES !

what happened to hovercrafts having their own factory?
i rather want them to be independent from vehicles and naval to still be usefull on lavaheavyplanets

hope to not start sounding like a broken reckord

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/...lanetary-annihilation-general-gameplay.63990/

what underwaterunits/structures though? ... i am not sure of deepseabases adding too much to crossplanetary warfare ... that rather sounds like superniche for waterheavy /fullwater planets

Apart from the balance I really dislike the size of naval units. Unless half the planet is water navy always feels like you make giant warships inside of tiny ponds.
The size of everything is too big, but navy is the worst offender by far and the one I have a hard time overlooking.

I live FAF's navy, but would love a mix of all UEF/Aeon/Cybran/Seraphim ships for a standard PA faction.


A nice mix of missile ships, submersible battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, walking boats, destroyers, support frigates and even a few missile subs.

Give them a few additions like transport ships, amphibious assault ships, anti-orbital dreadnoughts and gate swimmer submarines and you'll have a blast.

Underwater mexes, for one example.

..... ssssssss ... i am not realy sure about this ... deepsea metal and energy production buildings and 1 defensive turret and radar maybe ... but i dont see to have fullblown underwater bases be added ... that stuff is already too limited to water that i hardly see that stuff being justifyable with general naval already providing seabattles ...
i mean we are playing planetary and not aquatic annihilation after all ... though considering halleys cattalists and jigs those are system dependant too, no?

Underwater bases shouldn't exist but having a couple of buildings be underwater can make you switch up your unit composition.

hmmmm ... to me that sounds rather like forcing the opponent to go anti submersive but that depends on future unitbalance

You're in the water, if you're smart you'd use subs to make him go anti-submersive anyway.

Yeah we agree it should be dependant on a single anti-anything.

As that really rustles my jimmy's.

on a full on waterplanet sure
but on a well mixed terrain planet you dont neccesarily have to ... you could still control the seas from air or orbital and lock you opponent into deepsea territory while controlling the land ..

More anti-sub stuff would also be cool.

Loved having tactical missiles be able to hit submerged stuff.

i feel ya: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/a-proposal-for-naval.64672/

Aircraft carrier that acts as a mobile factory that produces a unique fighter/bomber and torpedo plane?

EDIT: For balance, the fighter-bomber would have a limited range and compliment, sort of like how attack radii work now, but for the range of the plane. Limit to X-planes supported at one time. This way naval can attack inland, but you can't just spam figher/bombers unlimited and all over the planet.

Sounds like they'd function in a similar way to the carriers in Starcraft.

Naval actually got a few very good units---the stingray for example, just a super nice-unit at overall (can fire against land, naval and air!), but waaaays to less range and armor. In fact, the Stingray is onehitted by a Hornet, ONEHITTED! No guess why nobodys plays with them...
...I try them every few patches and they are still basicly the same!

In general, most naval units don´t have either enough speed, armor , range and pathfinding isn´t nice anyways.
They are awesome if an enemy is distracted enough to let you build a little army in a pond near to his base, they can really crush him in that case. But that´s happening in one of twenty games or so...
...and even then you are just using tier I units and build those factories with air fabbers. Why? Because Tier II Naval needs way to much time to be build in comparision to it´s stats (you don´t wait a minute to get an unit that will be instakilled...) . They can only be used as a pretty nice anti-land defense if you are setting you base up near to a lake!

Oh, and BTW: The Narwahl still got a totally wrong-mounted gun!

P.s.: The new PTE Build is awesome, but it doesn´t addresses any of those problems. But, as naval was a stretched goaland not primary goal I can understand that you are priotising promary goal features!
I even appreciate it, this just should be containing a few tips...

I'm loving the carrier idea. I remember the carrier from Red Alert II. Each carrier had 4 bombers it could use for offensive. They didnt have a lot of armour or firepower each but could attack quite frequently (in formation and only single targets), and the carrier could restock lost bombers. The bombers took maybe 30 seconds to build each.

Something like this could work well with this game. The range of naval to attack land targets was greatly, but not overly so, improved. It also forced players to lay defensive structures and anti-air when near water.

I personally would welcome carrier unts to naval. That and a speed increase would be enough for me to start using naval as a serious option in my wars.

Nice idea.

I like the carrier idea to! I loved using naval on sup com esp once fa came out so many diverse units! Pa biggest problem is lack of interesting units that create fun/interesting strategies...I mean destroyers that can walk on water, an underwater aircraft carrier,a submersible battleship..nothing in pa comes remotely close.