Obligatory navy thread

I think I can see where you're coming from, but I worry that too much blurring would make water effectively the same as land, but blue and with less variation in terrain. I want naval to bring something of it's own to the game that the other theaters of war don't; otherwise what's the point of raising an extra $200,000 for it?

I've always seen the purpose to Navy is to be able to attack land instalations from long range, and to be a supplement (not a compliment) to a land force. As in, they can turn the tide of the battle, but they are simply too expensive to be used exclusively, among other reasons.

The key thing in this is to make clear roles in Naval, and also have clear anti-roles. For example, you have subs to take out tactical targets, like heavy destroyers and light cruisers, but be wary of destroyers, which will roflypwn you.

The unit triangle described on the first page is accurate in terms of traditional warfare. Here's what I think Naval could have:

Typically, there are five main ships that make up a fleet. One of them should be armed with anti-missile weaponry, I just am not sure which one.

Sub: counters cruisers, frigates. Countered by destroyers, perhaps soft countered by battleships. Extra: deck mounted gun for rare land encounters.

Frigate: Counters cruisers and destroyers due to quickness. Countered by subs, and simply not effective against battleships.

Cruiser: Counter to battleship. countered by frigates, destroyers, and subs. Extra: AA defense for the fleet, to counteract weaknesses.

Destroyer: Anti-sub and cruiser. Countered by frigates and battleships.

Battleship: Counter to destroyer. Soft counter to subs, thanks to health. Cruisers are the hard counter as long as they stay far enough away, and frigates are rarely hit by the guns, but take time to to take out the battleship. Extra: Battleships are excellent for long range bombardment against land forces and installations.

In effect, it's not so much of a triangle as it is a bicycle wheel, in that each ship usually has two other ships it counters, but two ships that counter it as well. Subs being the exception, except that subs are easily beaten with destroyers.
Now, there's lots of other types of ships that can be thought up of in terms of Naval. FA had some good examples:

Nuclear Sub: not much stronger than a regular sub (could probably take out one or two subs), however, used for mobile strategic missile ordinance.

Anti-sub boat: This was a UEF unit. The other two factions had subs for this role, but I think a ship would probably serve better for balancing purposes. Equipped with similar anti-sub equipment as a destroyer, but has no deck guns. Basically a cheap alternative to the destroyer that simply has more counters.

Aircraft Carriers: Mobile air factories, and if fuel and ammo is used, mobile refueling station. Limited weaponry, due to air advantage. Hard countered by subs.

Stealth Ship: cloaks nearby ships from radar, visual is not effected. Takes energy to run. Effectively a counter against scout ships. These were a tech 2 Cybran ship in FA.

Scout ships: Light ships that are countered by everything, but have long range radar and are fairly quick when not in formation.

Shield ships: As the name says. Limited range for the shield. UEF had this for Tech 2 in FA.

There is HUGE potential with Naval. Especially if we take the Cybran technology of giving some of our ships legs .

Naval warfare should be something that you can get involved with more or less seamlessly, I believe, with there being a natural way to expand out into the water as easily as you can expand over the land.

For me, this would entail:

1. The construction units are unified. Your land engineers can function equally effectively in the water, so you don't have to specifically use your Commander to build a naval base. Also, all air units are also sea planes, if that concept exists at all.

2. Naval warfare is comparable in cost to ground warfare. In TA, it was considerably more expensive to build ships than it was to build a ground or air force, particularly in metal.

3. As much as possible, structures that have natural equivalents in the water and on land can be built on either. Metal Extractors, storages, metal makers, air defense towers, and anything like that do not come in distinguishable land/water versions. If you want a metal extractor on an underwater deposit, you just build a metal extractor on top of the deposit.

This was one of my most despised things about SupCom. It alone could make me hate building in PA if it happens. Luckily, it seems that construction units WON'T be unified (from the way people are talking).

For unified construction workers to work it would need one of two things: tiers, to prevent buildings from being built too early (like SupCom, which sucked as t1 con. units where useless once better ones came out because they could do everyone older ones could, plus TA air con units provided access to places far away easier, and TA con. subs allowed secret underwater bases.), or have everything buildable at once, with resources being the only restriction (which would be HORRIBLE to navigate through with hundreds of units, and would drive just about anyone away from the game due to the scary amount of options thrown at you at once).

I should clarify that one: Only the land and surface naval engineers need to be unified. The purpose of this is to allow you to build a naval base anywhere without needing either air engineers or your commander present.

Well, that's something I'd be more willing to accept.

Also, in TA many of the "sea" planes where just normal planes you could build over the water. The main ones that where different where literally built for the sea, ie, torpedo bombers and sonar planes. I don't see how all air units should have torpedo's and sonars, and those are really the only two planes I would call "sea" planes.

I agree with all these points. In general, the initial investment for entering any one theater of war should be minimal. While I certainly would like to see some big expensive ships, I see no reason for navies to be more expensive than armies in general.

Submarines in SC were just too fast. They had the same speed as frigates, even when submerged. Because of this, there was no downside to going all subs at the beginning. If subs were slightly slower than frigates while surfaced, and significantly slower when submerged, there'd be a definite downside to subs over frigates. Subs would be unable to catch frigates and bring them to battle, and attempting to defeat someone's frigates with your subs will probably end with them drawing your subs away, looping round and blowing up your shipyards and/or mexes.

TA probably could have done with water mexes being vulnerable to surface fire. That you needed submarines to raid mexes didn't help the situation.

Well, subs hate you too. Tactical missile subs were the best thing ever, and if you don't want them in the game, your opinion is wrong.

Counter argument: Battleships are more awesome than tanks. Why bother having water at all if it's just going to be floating tanks?

Frigates in SC could move at over four hundred kilometers per hour. If this and this had a race, the frigate would win, and you want them to be faster?

EDIT: Well, if you made ships even faster, I guess you'd have an alternative method of getting into orbit. Build a ramp and have your ships drive up it. Possibly torpedoing some helicopter gunships while you're at it.

I think that the whole "triangle" rocks/paper/scissors approach should be avoided, but rather an should put an emphasis on combined arms (for example you use smaller, cheaper ships as radar/sonar pickets for the bigger, more expensive ships). That being said there should be some specialized roles (ASW and AAW for instance)

Given that losing navy can happen for rubbish reasons (e.g. sub spam) and can lead to you losing the game from offshore bombardment, and inspired by FunkOff's unit roles thread, I think it's pretty clear that there has to be a ground based unit that attacks submarines.

I can envisage a unit very much in the multi-role TA style that is a niche unit whose best attack is some sort of mortar into the water, which then becomes a torpedo into your Speedos. Something like Total Annihilation's Morty perhaps?

There seems to be a consenus that hard counters should be avoided where possible. Unfortunantly there should never really be a cause for a torpedo plane to lose to a sub, hence hard counter. Soft counters are more along the lines of destroyers vs battleships, the battleship mass for mass has an advantage in damage and health, but no inherant bonus against destroyers.

Similarly battleships have tended to have weaker defenses against subs in these games, meaning if you want to not get countered by subs, you need destroyers to defend your ships.

One small point on subs, I'd like to see no surfacing, it's just extra micro.

Either make them wholly unable to engage land-targets, or the able to launch missiles while submerged, but then you would need land-units and/or buildings that can retaliate against a submerged target.

While trying not to be counter productive... isn't the military based on "rock paper scissors lizard spock methodology? They make tanks, let's make tank destroyers. They make airplanes, let's make SAMS, they make ships, let's make torpedoes... I understand trying to avoid absolute counters but I also think trying to hard to avoid them will make alot of mushy units that don't do anything well :/

Tank destroyers were never very good at their intended purpose, and ended up being replaced by tanks. Today gunships (like the Apache) and attack aircraft (like the A-10) are probably the best tank killers but they need spotters and protection from enemy aircraft.

Aircraft are countered with SAMs but there are also interceptors and air superiority fighters.

Ships are not countered by torpedoes in modern warfare but by missiles which is the main armament of most military ships and submarines. Torpedoes were effective in WW2 but so were bombs, and both could be delivered by aircraft.

That being said, I do not think that it will be possible to avoid all specialized roles and that AAW (Anti-Aircraft Warfare) and ASW (anti-submarine warfare) will need to have some specialized units or weapons.

fortunantly this is a sci fi game that throws realism out the window if it can do awesome insted with little relevance to the technologies of today.

I agree. Naval operations need a LOT of expansion before they will be as rich and detailed as previous RTS games have executed their land warfare. There are all kinds of ways a navy could be made distinct and interesting by adding units and functionality. Because ships are so large and mobile, they could conceivably possess any feature you might normally find in base facilities, giving you a legitimate self-sufficient mobile base. Your only problem would be collecting metal with which to build.

Naval units should also be more complex than small land or air units, with lots of subsystems, weapons, and functions present on larger vessels. A battleship might have long range guns, smaller caliber guns for ship to ship fighting, limited missile capability, some anti-air, missile defense, some energy generation, some radar, etc. etc.

Actually interesting aircraft carriers are a big point of interest. These should be necessary in order to get aircraft into position, not just expensive factories. A carrier represents a LOT of power packed into a small space, and losing one should be a huge blow, since it reduces the air power of the fleet.

Amphibious assault carriers would be incredible. An amphibious assault carrier would be a large vessel that builds ground units and small, expendable "lander" boats which transport units to the shore. Could also have the ability to make tiny carryall aircraft that transport units a short distance one-way, and then fly off and die. In TA, the transport ship was a great idea, but having that stupid arm only handle units one at a time, and implemented so poorly, made it completely useless.

Well, I can certainly see that slower subs would be a vast improvement over SC, which all too often degenerates into "sub spam until everything that floats is dead"

Perhaps "Underwater" mass extractors simply being larger structures that extended all the way to the surface would be a better idea than the completely underwater version from TA?

Naval can certainly be balanced and in fairness as long as you give it the respect it deserves (by having a large wing of torp bombers ready), it's reasonably easy to counter due to naval's high cost

Just btw. I guess we hit the Naval Stretchgoal allrdy with the PayPal money counted in. Still think its at least 50K so i guess we hit it. I mean its stretchgoals now. Here they can surely count in the PayPal money. xD

I think we need boats as well. A common problem with navy is that the ships are too expensive and too generalist.

Small units provide another class of things to counter and be countered as they are good against things with low aoe and high reload time. Different kinds of boats such as AA boats and depth-charge-launching boats is a step towards interesting and balanced sea.

Large units should not be able to do everything. If you monospam a large ship there should be something (eg air, subs, speedy boats) that can run in and kill them after a while.

I want subs.

Secondly I also would like to see 2 levels of ocean in the form of "Shallow" & "Deep" water

Essentially I see shallow water as something amphibious walkers can walk along the sea bed whereas deep water they can't.

I also would have submerged bases/units immune to orbital weaponry (But not kews, obviously) as another tactical element.