Can naval really be quite fun?

I tried naval on a planet at maximum size nearly complete covered in water and suprisingly it was quite fun.

Btw the ai isn't good in handling the slow large scale and expensive naval units.

I often heard that the naval units are too big, too slow, too ineffective and therefore unfun.
First in relation to the other units the naval units have scale and moving abillities like actual ships so either the plantes are to small or the units are to big in general.
But i agree that the ships could be faster, especially the leviathan wich has a little lesser ground speed as a ssx-platform (so the ssx is actually a lot faster) but the leviathan costs a fifth of the ssx.
I think around + 10-20% movementspeed a- and deccelration and around + 30-40% tournig rate would be great. But we shouldn't forget that naval units can compensate some because of their higher firepower and range.

Most balance mods give naval very high speeds, up to 30 or so. This is about 3 times that of the ant, BUT the acceleration is to be made terrible. This means going from one small pond to the other is slow, but crossing an ocean is quicker. It's also a bit more realistic

i could imagine having a bit faster naval with hovercrafts to be fun

Heh even I did that in the mod I made!

Naval is fun until someone shoots back at your boats... the glass cannon HP is a real problem. Add to the fact that on large maps, it takes upwards pf two minutes for your boats to arrive and instantly die, and it's just crazy.

Boats canceling out other boats 1:1 is fine, but they really need a lot more health to work against ground units of any kind... to say nothing of bombers instagibbing leviathans.

The possibilities with naval is really endless,

beach landings, air craft carriers, nuke armed subs etc. etc.
tidal generators
more air units
more land units
more base defenses
All to deal with navy.

maybe a new class of commander to use on water only maps.
as in the other thread i started, naval units need to be smaller, there just too big for the space we have.

I was also thinking of there being an ultra-long ranged artillery canon that you can either build in the water or as a separate ship. This would be even more amazing with huge planets (radius 2000+) and would be one of the reasons to build naval in order to control the ground.

Like the Mavor in SC, except for the sea. (i guess it would still be alright to have one that you can build on ground, but then that would put even more emphasis on land)

Nothing that shoots further then a holkins, please.

Naval has to have some kind of feature that makes it better than ground, like it is in real life (even though we're shooting for awesome)

The leviathan and Stingray range is not far enough and building a holkins in the water is sometimes not even far enough.

I guess it's really just a matter of opinion, but the experimental artillery in SC was my favorite unit. If huge maps are allowed/released sometime soon, there's got to be something that shoots further than the holkins. They said something about artillery warfare in the Kickstarter right? (i think so, can't remember)

I agree! Though, I kind of masochistically lament the death of the catapult. I really hated those things, but now it basically has no place in the game whatsoever. RIP catapult.

That being said, we need an aircraft carrier with a maximum compliment of buildable fighter/bombers and torpedo bombers with an extended, but limited range from the center of the carrier.

I have never and will never, ever, accept the idea that you need such long ranged weapon on a large battlefield.

If you can't hit the enemy from where you are, establish a forward base and do it from there.


Do not invalidate the size of a map by introducing things that make distance irrelevant.

A navy however already has one thing that land forces don't, a much larger maximum size. Tanks can only realistically get so big before they simply cannot move, or are too slow to keep up with a battle. Ships however move through water, and so can move very quickly with huge loads. Battleships already carry huge guns, and missile ships have mobile catapult launchers.

Modern day warfare, which this game and supcom's gameplay is based on (If not actually outdated from being based on the cold war) use aircraft to deliver payloads, rendering most kinds of artillery pointless when a fast bomber can deliver more precise and heavier bombs and missiles to the same spot.

So if anything, the only thing left to in introduce id a carrier with attack drones to fly to enemy's from great range and attack for it.


So really, naval units are already distinct from land forces, as every naval ship is a pieces of moving artillery, and naval battles rely on it.

Where as land forces scarcely have two kinds of mortar, a sniper and a rocket launcher that pales in comparison to it's static counterpart.

Amen brothers. Where all the boat lovers at?

I really do enjoy naval vs naval play when the map is covered with water, and i think it's a shame people discount the game mode too quickly. Yea there's broken numbers in the unit jsons, and sometimes the units are just plain buggy (like naval scout weapon), but the essence and dynamic of naval vs naval I find incredibly fun. Very much about macro and positioning.

Stuff that needs fixing
- Naval scout weapon fires over targets instead of at them and is just generally all round buggy.
- Naval scout should have 200-250 vision, not less vision than a frigate/destroyer. I'm ok with the 300 cost. Those things are killer for punishing greedy play. A true dox of the sea.
- Narwhal turret yaw rate needs to be higher, and the animations need to be fixed to properly show the direction the turret is actually pointing in. Should not be locked into fighting other ships once engaged but be able to run away, just like with the changes to t1 tank turret speed.
- Naval roll off time needs to be decreased
- Orca needs to be more than just the boat you build to finish off the commander. The slightly better dps per metal of like 7% on paper is negligible, especially when most of the slow torpedos end up overkilling targets in practice.
- Commander torpedo rof needs nerfhammer
- Slight naval speed increase e.g. frigate from 7 to ~9. Crazy things like low accel with 30 speed cause problems for player responsiveness, make the game super volatile, and create problems for reliably predicting where naval units will be. Might be a fun idea, but should stay out of vanilla imo.

Other stuff
-Would like to see t1 naval weapon ranges increased slightly to from 180 to 200-220. Pelters have 260 range, and naval should be able to bombard land targets more easily.
-Would like to see most of the cost of getting t2 battleships etc. being part of the cost of the actual battleship, and less the cost of the factory. Lower the time needed to powerbuild things with t1 fabbers, and thus the energy cost footprint, and t2 should become more accessible.

Also fix that silly issue the narwhal has where it's ship to ship cannon is backwards, it's ridiculous. XD

What cannon? All I see is a Strategic Icon most of the time... and THAT faces the right way...

here I am : )

I've been a naval lover for almost as long as I've played RTS.

I agree with elodea!
And those fixe wouldn't be that complicated.

But one reason that naval can be unfun is the low amount of water spawning on many random plets. No one want's to have a leviathan emprisoned in a puddle.

So we can either make all units a little smaller ore plantes bigger in general what woud solve lager problems as it causes, because you are often seeing your units as symbols on the surface.

Ireally hope that the subs are comming one day (or sooner) this would give naval more sttrategic depth and movable nuke launchers would be really mean.

What do you think about making nav units lava resitant to get more cahnces to use them.

He who rules the seas, rules the world.
soooo much this!!

No, this game, TA and SupCom are based on fun and gameplay, any realistic concern coming dead last. (Go play Wargame: Red Dragon if you want realism, great game btw.) People seriously need to stop brinding up this dumb argument.

Any period in history is useful only as an inspiration for good mechanics. If making boats behave like sail ships, ironclads or WWI battleships makes sense from gameplay terms and is fun, that's what they should go for. That's what they've mostly been doing anyways, bombers in this game act more like WWII planes, and it has giant arty cannons and heavy tanks which have nothing to do with modern warfare.

Naval is like art. And in the words of a Squidward Tentacles, art is suffering.

the T2 naval against T2 naval can be epicly powerful and fun, to bad few people get to that point