In the begining of the game naval units did not have full capapbilties but they eventually made a "First class citizen". Recently naval has taken a turn for the worse. In the current build naval moves very slowly. I feel like they should move faster to match the pace of the game. Another thing to note are the pathing issues with naval. It seams like they get stuck on everything they pass. From what I have seen this is because, unlike land units, they are not able to squeeze between tightly built structures because of their size. Stay awesome Uber
Watch a recent dev livestream. As they play, you notice they change naval a lot. It gets better and has it's stats adjusted for different roles. I think scathis saw that naval didn't act like naval in my opinion. Not the durastic change I would have done right off, but I wouldn't think that if I didn't notice naval didn't act naval and now (in streams) does act naval. So basically, KNight is right. This game isn't finished. It is beta testing. It is the devs right to break the game with a patch. Kind of comes with the premise of beta. So, next patch it should get better. It is all to make sure that when this actually is a fully supported game, it is correctly built and has no problems. After that, they will release new builds, but will be careful never to put the game in an broken build state hampering gameplay. That is after beta though, for beta you will have things that get highly broken for a build or two. Also, it is amazing how much attention naval got this patch. I had to play a whole naval game, I understand. Anyway, this is the 3rd-4th simple naval thread polling "faster - yes or no", and there were 1 or 2 that actually had detailed poll options about their balance in speed and weapons and what people feel.
I understand that the game is in beta and they are working on it, however I feel that this thread is for influencing the way the game is going. Just adding to the direction of the game.
I don't think it really fair to assume that the FIRST set of balance changes is indicative of anything, Scathis is good, but it's basically impossible to get a complex thing like RTS Game Balance right on the first try. Mike
Well another problem with naval is the cost. Sometimes you can't help but choose a naval starting point and that right away puts you at a disadvantage as ship fabbers are not as efficient as bot fabbers... let alone the speed
Naval has a way to go but it's getting there. I hope roles become more clearly defined, with smaller speedboat ships (frigates) and slower big guns (battleships). I think at the moment, pathing and sight range make naval a bit odd, behaving a bit like land armies with two big blobs of ships running towards one another. I'm sure once formations come about it'll get a lot better.
Naval is definitely heading in the right direction. And, yeah, getting it balanced is a priority. We just played a naval-focused playtest to check out our latest pass in fact.
I can't wait til naval wrecks sink to the bottom. The floating wrecks combined with the tendency for ships to not overkill each otrher means the front line of both sides are always wreckage :S
I like the current speed. I think naval should be slow but powerful. I don't like it at all when ships scoot around like its a rocket sled on ice.
I think if you look at ww2 vehicles of the same classes in the game (say an Iwoa class battleship, an m3 tank and a infantry man) then the speeds are out of whack. The Iwoa Class battleship top speed 60kms/hr the m3 tank around 15km/hr (off road) and infantry man around 4km/hr. Big boats can go fast, but shouldn't be able to turn worth a damn imho. I'd also change the bot's to be more like soldiers, making them slower, easy to kill but way cheaper. Buts that's probably a discussion for a different thread
I suppose they can go a fair speed when they get their momentum up, but I'm not sure this would be easy for the AI to handle, not be very fun to watch your units derp out because they can't turn around. I think a general low speed as it were would work better for a game.
Why can't there be both? There's no reason for the naval theater to disallow a light unit. There's nothing wrong with putting a cannon on a jet ski, nor is there with placing artillery on a mini ice berg. There is the light option for going fast, and the heavy option for placing the big guns.
