I'm not really familiar with the navy in this game. Can someone give me a good bunch of tips such as what to get when?
Navy is quite slow, so on a decent sized map you can get a few fabbers out and start expanding *fairly safely*. Note that gunboats are the exception, they're good for raiding and also good at killing early fabbers. Personally I prefer to forgo the gunboats and use bombers to defend against them. In terms of unit composition, it's a 3 way triangle really at T1: Orcas are the best surface unit, but have no torpedo defence so are helpless against subs (and air). Subs are superb against orcas, equal ish with the narwhall and completely helpless against air. The narwhal is your support ship which trades well against subs and bombers, but fails terribly against orcas. You essentially need to adjust your mix based on what your opponent has gone for. The gunboats aren't any good in a fight with other ships, but their worth making to raid expanding fabbers and kill off mexes on the shoreline. Orcas are your best choice for t1 land bombardment (as they can fire quite a ways inland). My usually build is a naval factory + an air factory. Start off the naval factory with 3 fabbers and a narwhall, then repeat queue orcas and subs (which will beat pretty much any other ships) and then use the air factory to prevent bombers harassing too much. First fabber gets a couple of mex then goes on energy, second makes radar then helps with energy, 3rd goes with narwhall to get mex further afield. After that adjust what your doing as needed- once you get your metal going you need to get a good number of factories pumping out ships, and additional air factories. If their are islands on the map, a bot factory or 2 is a good idea so you can raid (although keep the dox away from subs!). Also air lifting fabbers is nice as the land fabbers are safe from fighters once landed. Your com is also very strong in water (especially with a few walls), so in a tight spot com expanding and building a few naval facs as you go is a good way to secure metal. Edit: One more thing with naval... rally points for your factories! Naval is slow, so it's important to get the ships moving to position asap. I personally like to set a rally point to a decent metal field. That way the ships move then and protect my expansion, although be sure to keep an eye on the radar. A stream of ships moving to a distant rally point are vulnerable if your opponent gets in a formation of ships to cut the line (although if you see it well in advance you can group of the ships to counter- just don't forget about them ).
In my experience, naval is all about getting to T2 and building Leviathans. If you can get a couple of those before the opponent has any, with Narwhals to defend against subs and air, you can easily destroy their entire naval presence from a safe distance. If the match is even it's hard to find the opportunity to safely build up to that point though. In that case I often build Torpedo Launchers to efficiently keep the enemy navy away while I build the advanced factory. Also worth noting is that a lot of players will ignore naval and just build air units on the sea. This almost always fails against a player using ships properly, since planes are made of paper. It's smart to have some air units of your own for support though, to guard against hit-and-run attacks. I only play team games though so my tactics probably don't hold up too good in hardcore 1v1 matches.
Yeah torp launchers is a good point. On its own it'll die pretty easily, with a few walls in front though (and yes you can build walls in water lol), almost indestructible against t1 navy
Build a naval factory, set que to Fabber, 5Narwhal repeat. Once the first fabber is up, have it build another factory set to 5Orca Fabber repeat. Once your economy can take it, build an advanced factory and have it spam Leviathans or Krackens. Use Leviathans and Krackens to wipe the enemy base of the map. Build more factories if you want, but I find an equal mix of Orcas and Narwhals in large quantities is good.
