Ship range, and ship size: Too Big, and too far.

Has this been discussed?
It's ridiculous how far the ships can shoot.
They're also far too big.

Are there plans for balance for ships?
I mean, look at their size vs. the amount of space they work in.
Personally I'd recommend a 30% reduction in size, and a reduction in range.
They should not be able to simply destroy my entire base from the water and I have nothing to fire back at them with based on land, other than Nukes and Catapults.

Mmm... Too complicated. Buff Ocean sizes instead.

Ships are supposed to be big, and have long range. Look at the size difference between a battleship and a tank in real life. Look at the range difference. They need to be able to hit large chunks of base that are somewhat inland because they can't go on the land, they are stuck in the water.

A better fix would be to fix Pelters and Holkins so they don't fire in such a silly high arc. Have them fire in a much lower trajectory so they can actually hit mobile units. Also buff the Pelters health significantly, it should be the static equivalent of boat, good health and able to take some punishment while dishing it out. Basically this boils down to making them more like the Punisher / Guardian (and the Holkins like the Big Bertha / Intimidator) from TA.

A battleship has huge guns, so their range should compare to the size of a static artillery gun, and possibly even act like them.

Naval does need a balance though
They are waaaaaaaaaaay too slow if you ask me, but they do have a lot of firepower.

As I have said before, the speed isn't bad, but it's made so much worse that they are made out of cardboard.

Yeah they need a speed and HP buff, not a nerf. Naval is expensive and restricted to large bodies of water, it only makes sense they get some good firepower to compensate.

But currently they are glass cannons. Even with today's technology, battleships don't sink from a two missiles. A few catapults can rip apart all but the largest fleets because ships are so slow.

Keep them slow, increase their cost, give them a huge health buff and arm them like their real life counterparts.

Iowa class armament in WWII... (I'd love to see a unit with a hundred of guns instead of... 4)

9 × 16-inch (406 mm)/50 cal. Mark 7 guns
20 × 5-inch (127 mm)/38 cal. Mark 12 guns
80 × 40 mm/56 cal. Bofors
49 × 20 mm/70 cal. Oerlikon

No more losing battleships to a handful of gunships

Ships are supposed to be situational but strong.
If they were to weaken, nobody would use them.

Ships have always been very powerful and strong but expensive, in PA however, naval is very restricted by land and they are very, very slow. And typicle of PA, every unit doesnt have enough health, including naval (although direct naval vs land, naval has better health, but loose because of expense, and instead rely on range)
they are expensive because they are big and strong, but there are less of them, which i like. It gives each naval ship more impact. while on land, i just wanna see huge amounts of tanks clash =)

I prefer Red Alert 3's approach to water.
It applies particularly well in this case because the randomly generated metal spots are applied equally to water, where in SupCom (and initially in TA) there was absolutely no metal in the water. In RA3, ore in the water is the same as on land, and the emphasis on amphibious and multi-role units unifies the two theaters together.

I understand the ratio to size proportions of Tanks and Ships. Still, ships are OP because of their range.
I'm not doubting their worthiness at all. However, when you have a small to average sized map, their range is far enough to hit my entire base from where their factory is.
That's totally bogus. It basically means I'm dead, and they just sit there in their base.
So either fix the map size or fix the ships.

Ya, probably the one thing that could be nerfed is range, or range accuracty (farther the range, less likely to hit). But if range is nerfed, then need more speed as arty can take down naval easily (as well as orbital because of anchors these days)

I do not really care about their size, i just want to get some real orbital mechanics to them, so they just don't float above something but actually orbits around a planet.

It should be a switch in the lobby which enables real orbital mechanics and fake orbital mechanics, that would make me glad.

I remember once I had a giant fleet of 60+ Orcas and 30 Leviathans.

What do they do? Conga line at the speed of a bunch of old people at a retirement party and get wiped out by artillery while they were busy clipping through each other and figuring out whether 0.005 or 0.0051 kmph was the optimal speed.

What might be interesting, would to have different levels of targeting.

Blind firing with no radar and no line of sight = Low accuracy, low precision shots.
Radar coverage, but no LOS = Accurate but imprecise shots.
Radar coverage + LOS = Accurate and precise shots.



TA had a building called the targeting facility, if you did not have one units did not auto-fire on radar dots. If you built one it cost something like 1300 energy (1.3 T2 power generators) to run and would enable units to auto-fire on radar dots. Obviously we don't want to have to manually target in PA, that is too much micro, but a targeting facility could trade energy for an increase of precision.

Oceans are not a situation. They are a terrain type that defines entire games.

Should we buff land units? They can't move on water and their range is awful to shoot at water turtles.

Ships should be able to defend against Catapults with a sort of Gatling Gun.

Indeed, a counter to Catapult is definitely needed also on ground.

^ ...That's one way to go about things. Ships can be turned into invincible doom fortresses immune to most long ranged weaponry...

or you could go with the game's central theme by making them smaller/cheaper so you don't care if a handful of boats die.