So I've been playing since christmas and yes I maybe built 1 or 2 subs, but I had a break between January 3 and January 20th, and yesterday I remembered that there used to be subs, so I was just wondering why exactly did they get rid of them? Was it to help balance the game or was it that they are just tweaking them right now?
Thank you, that is really good to know, as I remember the subs were really really weak, and couldn't exactly dive...
Yes, naval units are really slow right now. The next update have some pretty cool balance changes coming to naval! No subs though.
Yea, they're not axing it as far as I know, it just needs some work. It'd be neat if naval multi-unit transports/D-Day boats were subs, so that using them to sneak ground assaults in would be valuable. But then, there's been much ado about multi-unit transports as a whole.
They didn't seem to do anything special either. I was wondering what the point of them was the other day.
And that's a problem because...? Water adds 3 potential layers to the game. You have surface ships, underwater, and ocean floor. Hover units share the same space with surface vessels, and any arbitrary land unit can work the ocean floor (such as say, a torpedo bot or amphib tank). The underwater layer is pretty much the only sanctuary for pure naval ships. It's a good thing too because if nature teaches us anything, it's that all the action happens underwater.
It's not a problem. But as the units that are only useful for attacking the underwater layer, I think their niche has been filled for the time being by other units. And it's kind of confusing to have a non submersible submarine. So for the time being, they are not needed. But they will be back!
I like a layered naval system. However, one of the problems I suspect they have from a "game designer" perspective, was probably making them do a "3d flowfield for automatic pathing on the z axis", or diving without micro. Especially with the room they have, or to be more specific, the room they often don't have in most generated bodies of water. I would imagine if I were right, which I might be entirely off, that it would take a lot of work in several areas to get them working, whereas boats work right off the bat. To be honest, that would mean even ocean floor is difficult to make function, as some units might ambiguously not fully submerge and what you thought was invisible/invunerable ends up poking up enough and getting killed, or what you thought could submerge ends up not having enough water depth to submerge in any of the body of water, the whole thing is just too shallow after all. We can question it and ponder it, but things will happen as they happen.
Not everything is about what you want in a game. Sometimes production capacity drives game design. Basically we determined that we can ship a compelling game without subs. The cost of getting them in and working is high enough that it would put other key systems in jeopardy. We will still continue to update the game and add stuff even after we are technically "shipped". So you never know what we may add to the game later.
If it would take completely building most the game over again just to make a working environment for subs, then it really would jepordize work on PiP and Chronocam and more necesary things to include, since the function of the game depends on them while the sub is just a single unit. As long as ships work awesome. I would love for naval to be a first class citizen, doesn't necesarily require subs because then again there are no "subterrainean tanks/bots".
Well not exactly, the main reason was stated to be that currently they think that having 4 layers of combat (water surface, ground, air and orbital) is enough complexity (for balance, programming and gameplay) and they will try to make those work good with each other before they introduce the fifth layer (sea bottom surface/under water).
