Ehh, Depth Charges, in terms of practicality, kinda suck to be honest. More Bark than Bite kinda of thing IMO. Additional Hedgehog reading. Mike
If they are going to improve navel and do water planets then they need to add an incentive to travel to these worlds. i would recommend hydro plants / mass generation which can only be built in DEEP water. These plants produce higher than t2.
Deuterium reactors. Build on specific ULTRA DEEP water points only available on water planets (or just in larger oceans with a specific distance from a coast required for it to even spawn). They would be a T2 water building that produces more power than a T2 reactor, but for a similar cost. Make it so fighting over the deuterium points are worth it.
Hopefully when Beta Start we will have Naval look at for Balance because atm is quite useless IMO, It seem it has been forgotten that why I was looking forward to Water Planet so they can focus a bit more on it. Plus add all the additional units would be nice too
I know where you coming from but Naval need TLC as well... It still has no Strategy Icon for most of the unit the Sea Wall Barrier placement bug is still there, It just seem like it is forgotten. I know Orbital is in a bit of a rush atm but once Multi Planet Battle is up I liked to see some Water Planets so Naval can get some Attention!
Naval in general still has a lot of unit oversights to make it a first class citizen. Nick recently gave us some new code that allows us to more easily create land/water units (ones that may have different art, but functionally are identical).. As of this morning, using the new features provided, I've managed to hook up: - Metal and Energy now use the same JSON, which allows for a lot more flexibility in building economy, such as your commander being able to build economic buildings at sea (the first thing that was needed to make pure water planets playable) - Air defense and anti-nukes at sea (no custom art yet, but this provides some static defenses for naval bases) Next up will be a pass through some of the other necessary units for full gameplay, such as radar, nukes, orbital launcher and air factory. With those, a naval base should have everything it needs to compete with land based as a viable play layer. Obviously, no bot or vehicle factories in the water, as the poor guys would in a bad situation as soon as they rolled off.
For the most part that seems unavoidable... having full water planets makes full base capability a must. The same thing is probably going to happen to orbital because of gas giants. I really think planet balance should be a resource or tactical tradeoff rather than making the gameplay on all of them identical.
Leave the Gas Giants and orbital out there, it isn't fixed that Gas Giants are not getting their very own layer and unit set for that purpose. Naval and ground are replace for each other though, and so need the buildings to be. They still differ enough by the different movement dynamics, the space requirements of units and the added submarine layer. Even if the buildings are the same, it can still end up as a totally different game, just because the moving units have totally different roles and unique mechanics.
To me, that's akin to taking the easy way out. I would rather that being on water planet doesn't mean building the same base but with Naval Factories instead. One also needs to consider exactly what will count as a water planet, is it a planet that is 100% water, doe sit have land masses big enough to build a base on? Will the 'land' just be pointy rock outcrops that you can't build on but are still large enough that they act as 'terrain' for naval units? We just don't have a lot of info yet. Mike
This is as focal a point as orbital gameplay in my opinion. It is important to get a navy that works like ground and air, and orbitals that work like navy and ground and air, and I guess as far as navy and orbitals go you are depending on planet type limited in space and utility, but they should in fact be important to obtain a self sufficiency where you can use water like air like orbital like land, and navy can kill you just as hard and be killed just as swiftly with the right approach and units of your own. It is possible to build "naval" functioning structures. It can work if every unit builds the same pgens and mex and list of factories. It can work if naval had it's own option to submerge pgens and mexes perhaps. As long as either way, it's segregation from the usual ground part of the map gives it treasures and firepower and self-sufficient structural expansion, along with a clausterphobic disadvantage of not being able to always properly reach what can reach it or get to land goodies or dig a deep wound past a shoreline (like air currently excels at, digging a deep straight cut into a target with the downside of its cost) As far as specific balance goes, having cheaper units could definitely encourage naval, having units with good range compared to land units yet poor range considering the shoreline is "it" for their reachable influence, and I personally wouldn't mind underwater mexes and pgens to give it a slight advantage against air while also making a specific air unit with sonar scan and bomber like anti-sea weapons, so air has a chance but it would have to specialize in anti-sea and devote that many less airships to other roles. As a final thought, I would like to say I am pleased that naval is already real close to being an equal citizen as the rest of the trees, and that for water maps I liked the idea of having "terrain to path around" like land maps have. I would be entirely in favor of rocky or swirly-thin-shore cutting up or chunking up the map, giving the good old welcome choke points and 3d navigation through obstacles in every direction. IDK, even small islands would promote a naval balance between ships and subs, because building stuff underwater partially protects it against some ships while building them on land partially protects them against some subs (with land turrets sinking subs as they surface being the deterent and ships needing sonars for underwater structures).
A water planet is an earth planet with the water level set high. A "pure" water planet would have no land at all. Some will have a bit of land. I'm not really sure what you mean by not having info since you guys have the planetary generator. Crank the water height up, voila, water planet. There's nothing more to it than that. The goal is to make it so that you can play an entire game on a water planet to completion which implies you need water bases as a first class citizen.
Little changes are what is needed here to make it feel unique I think. Some suggestions: Remove floating laser defence, stick to torpedo launchers for direct attack at sea. Have "T1" torp launchers long range, non-tracking, "T2" launchers tracking but shorter range. Move some structure roles into mobile unit roles - anti nuke ships, for example. Storage structures should be built underwater These touches just mix up the layer a bit and prevent it feeling wholly like a copy of land.
