Upcoming work update!

I would hope that "art style" and "gameplay implication of wrecks" have not much to do with each other.
Show whatever explosion you want, but give us back wrecks. Their strategical implications are way too interesting to be ignored.

Submarine combat fabbers to repair ships and reclaim sunken wrecks?

A thousand times this.

Statera?

Hey everybody!

SUBS! Okay, submarines. When designing the subs, I was trying to preserve what would make submarines strategically interesting within the current meta of the game while keeping them easy for the player to both understand and manage.

1. Elusiveness
So, whatever way subs behave, you want them to be a pain in the *** for your enemy to deal with. To accomplish this, there is not a submerge/surface state on the subs. Instead, submarines are always considered "submerged" as you can see above. The key here is that though the periscope is poking up out of the waves, submarines cannot actually be targeted by conventional weaponry because just look at how small a target that periscope is--how are you gonna' hit that with a broadside cannon? This forms the crux of what makes submarines a tricky target without making it too confusing or frustrating for the opponent who has to deal with them. While submarines have their own recon layer, it's not set up in any way to be different from surface/air vision. So you can see the submarine, both visually and on radar (no sonar needed), but unless you have torpedoes, you can't shoot back at it.

2. Terror of the Seas
Submarines are the cheapest naval units aside from the piranha. They're relatively agile compared to ships, and they pack a lot of anti-naval firepower into a conveniently cheap package that's hard to hit. A swarm of submarines will be an unprepared navy's worst nightmare, and though narwhals now have torpedo launchers to defend themselves--stolen from the orcas--metal for metal, a force submarines will win out against a force of narwhals every time, leaving your submarines free to pick apart the rest of your opponent's navy while you cackle maniacally.

3. Not the end-all of Naval Control
Submarines cannot be targeted by conventional ballistic weaponry, however, as of right now artillery and bombs can target submarines just as they can target ships. This is to make sure that you can't just maintain complete unchecked naval dominance by spamming submarines and your oppponent has no options to counter short of superweapons, and to further encourage unit diversity. If you want naval dominance, you're going to want a balanced force that can take on all potential threats to naval, rather than just building a unit that can maintain naval superiority while ignoring any other possible threats completely.

With that in mind, let's go into the design of the two new subs.

Tech 1 Submarine -- The Barracuda
The Barracuda is cheaper and more maneuverable than the other ships, and it's packed with torpedoes that fire much more rapidly than the narwhal's. It also has lower Health than other ships. This allows it to function as your basic naval superiority unit, as most ships can't even fire on it and it's the most cost-effective optionf or maintaining control of the seas against ships. However, since it can only use torpedoes it can't do anything against land-based coastal bases like the narwhal and orca, nor can it defend itself against bombers.

Tech 2 Stealth Submarine -- The Kraken
The intent behind the Kraken is for it to serve as a late-game raider of sorts. Basically, we have a lot of long-ranged and slow ships in t2 naval, and the Kraken is sort of the reverse. It has torpedoes equivalent to the Barracuda, but its primary weapon is its hailfire missile array, which is a shorter range bunch of missile launchers that serve very high DPS out to nearby enemies. Also, here's the kicker; the Kraken does not show up on radar. So if your enemy isn't scouting properly, a small crack team of krakens can be chewing through their base before they even know what's hit them.

Subs are likely to change a lot over the next few days as they're coming in hot off the presses, so be sure to play the PTE and provide plenty of feedback so we can make sure subs are at the best state they can possibly be when they hit the live build!

Only if the naval wrecks sink. Naval wrecks were the reason no one liked naval.

The Kraken sounds like a lot of fun

Something I would badly like to see: Server crashes worked on.

They ruin at least one game a day for me, where the server just dies and the entire game freezes with no option to reconnect.

If you can't stamp it out completely at least put in checks so if it cannot ping the server, to exit to the menu gracefully with a message about what happened. Games just freezes are a big issue :?

Does this mean Orcas are losing their torpedos to Narwhals?

I like this a lot, but my only concern is that orcas will now probably have a very limited role. If subs are the main anti-naval unit then orcas move to take on the smaller role of coastal bombardment. Most of the time, the t1 naval game is all about killing ships until you win the sea. At that point you have plenty of time to go t2 or mass bombers (or really whatever you want) to clear off the land. Orcas really don't have the range to do much there anyway. On Pacific, I can see this being 100% subs with fighter support. On Mesa it is probably the same thing because the ability to shoot at the shore is just not that important. It is much better to cost effectively win the sea and then take map control.

I wonder if that requires a unit change or more metal near the coasts.

Tim, have you played much naval in TA or SupCom? Taking some inspiration from those games should result in a more fluid naval game.

Or a range increase on the orca. That would leave subs as a good close-in weapon but orcas can still effectively kill things at a longer range. The turn speed means subs can still get right up to orcas and kill them off.

I loved the building in supcom 2 which automatically reclaimed any wreckages in the area, was a very handy metal income for my turtling strategies ^^

Servercrashes are ongoing work, they receive a report everytime it happens and I bet they have a very high priority to be fixed

And subs sound very promising from the sound of it!!

The t2 sub sounds very much like what I expect the stingray to be, just submerged and with added stealth. I think you should be fixing the stingray first.

It's not nuclear?




It's Stealthy? Yep. I like.

Will the subs be built from a separate factory?
Are you attempting to diversify naval by adding a *bot-like* unit type to its roster?

Will these be on live by Jan 31?

@tvinita Ok, let's be direct: Any plans for a nuclear submarine? We all want one!

/me doesn't want a nuclear sub.

C-can I have a nuclear sub ?

guys lets just move the orca into the orbital layer