I understand naval still needs a good pass or two on balance, but I want to pitch something from a different angle. the machines of war in PA are all controlled by AI (commanders) without the presence of human operators, so scale of units can be skewed a little due to a cockpit or the need for a crew to operate these weapons are not needed. To put it lightly "naval units are too big" I feel this is the biggest problem with naval. on most planets, there is a enough water to have massive battles with multiple navys, but due to there large size its just not possible. this game has always been about massive battles and naval should be a part of this. Does it really matter that a battleship is smaller as long as its range and damage stay strong, its size shouldnt matter. so in closing, navy needs a good balance pass, but id also like to see all naval units size reduced so massive battles can be on land, air, orbital, and sea. The ability to use navy even in smaller bodys of water just makes sense to me. also; save the subs thoughts?
I had this exact thought. It seems either naval units should be very slow and tank-ier with their current size or be made smaller to be more similar to the other units.
It's easier to kill a battleship than it is to kill a vanguard (which is a tenth of the size). There ain't much right with the current state of naval.
The balance of naval wasnt the issue I was bringing up, its navy units being too big for most bodys of water to be useful. Like a pontoon boat in a swimming pool, with thier current size naval battles are difficult to have with other players, theres just no room.
I was just thinking the other day naval units being much smaller and slightly faster would fix the problem in a lot of ways. Maneuvering is slow for them because they're so big and have to constantly make tiny course corrections for collision. But, making them smaller would also reduce the expectations that ships are big hp sacks.
I believe there was the mention of scale ages ago, everything in this game needs to be half the size. It's silly. Of course if you play on large planets then the scale is actually alright, including naval.
Originally it seems they didn't want to make Naval just be 'tanks on water'.. but the balance between high hp / expensive naval and the whole 'units pop in one hit' style of PA really hasn't mixed well.
I've seen some awesome naval games of SupcomFA, it was very dynamic and different than a land battle in supcom. Really the problem at hand is the difficulty of making naval different from land yet still dynamic and interesting, which I think in time will happen, it's just another thing uber has to knock out in updates.
For me, all units in the game, should be smaller. That way the planets appear larger, the seas too, and to the mountains or hills seem that, and no grains of rice.
If we want to be realistic (yes, computer-game i know...), the ships might need to be this big, ships are fragile, make a single hole and the ship can sink. There needs to be a lot of armor, making the ship heavy, and the guns are really big, but i do not like the size of t2 naval, it´s just ridiculous, they need to be half or two thirds the size.
The factories for naval should also be smaller. Or have collisions disabled. And bots should be slower underwater. It's ridiculous that they are faster than ships.
Styrofoam never sinks, no matter how many holes you put in it Without a crew, why not stuff the hull full of something floaty? At the very least then a hole wouldn't compromise the integrity of the hull. The biggest problem with naval being huge guns and heavy armor is that if naval needs big guns to kill other naval, then naval vs ground units becomes incredibly unbalanced. Ground units can't hit hard enough to take out the naval, so the first one to control the water wins since there is no land counter and no way to get into the water. So if you have naval, you need good map design to make sure you have the strategic option to retreat out of range of said naval if necessary. Hard to do on the current small planets with randomly generated terrain.
I agree, speed is way too slow. But its clear that navy is on the back burner, atleast until the multiple feature fires are put out.
I kinda liked old school early Alpha/Beta navy, when stingrays had the range of the gods, and you could park a flotilla off the coast and wipe an entire continent in Tac missile fire.
