Obligatory navy thread

There could be a structure to do this, too. A land-based torpedo launcher that lobs long-range torpedoes into the water to keep subs away from the shore.

Torpedo bombers are a pretty effective counter to sub-spam.

General suggestion for water is to allow land units to be built on/under water where relevant, rather than duplicating structures to fill identical roles on land or water.

What structures this extends to would depend on what's actually in PA, but in ZK for example, wind generators, metal extractors, fusions, radar, most defense towers, both air factories, shield generators, and the amphibious units factory can all be built on land or in water.

Torpedo launcher towers can also be built on land near water so that they can hit subs without retaliation (they're outranged by destroyers and a few other ships as counter). Also to mention that in ZK the precision bomber can hit submarines, so a separate torpedo bomber isn't required.

Applying this philosophy of role duality rather than duplication to PA would save build menu clutter and development time/budget.

Way cooler then Torpedobombers would be the Terminator Solution. You know, where a VTOL Aircraft fires a Plasma-based weapon that vaporize the water when it is entering the ocean to hit the sub with the Plasmacharge.

And why shouldnt Robots not use some moe suffisticated technologys to kill Enemys under water? For them its more like "What kind of Weapons works best to Kill enemys in a liquid area". So i wouldnt go only for the classical torpedo oder waterbomb technologys.

Or you do the high-tech waterbomb. Drop some micro-robots into the water as intellegent bombs, that attached to the enemy vessel with magnets and boom! ^^ I really like magnets.

I like the direction ledarsi is kinda going. Where i don't agree that battleships should do everything the smaller ships can do... why have naval "structures" at all? Instead you can build a drydock for smaller vessels, but perhaps have the engineers directly build an aircraft carrier, which IS a mobile aircraft factory. Same with an amphibious assault vessel being a mobile land factory. This way navy is different from land and air because everything is mobile, giant boats that roam around performing land based buildings functions! The only sort of structures that would need to be set in place are oil rigs (metal extractors) and whatever form of powergenerators you'd build on water.

These could be balanced by simply being more expensive and longer build times. Not everyone would want an aircraft carrier unless they had the ocean to do it, and enough metal and energy to get it done. But at the same time if you started on a water world, it'd be a very dynamic experience not always knowing where your opponents fleet was, you'd rely on aircraft carriers for reconaissance, with frigs and subs for quick strikes or distractions and use your destroyers, battleships and cruisers for land assaults or all out battles.

While we're talking about counters to subs, depth charges need to be addressed. In that they shouldn't exist as the primary ship-mounted anti-sub weapon in any setting with cheap guided missiles. Anti-submarine rockets are a thing, and are a much better way of deploying your explosives than putting them in a barrel and rolling them off the side of your ship.

I'm not in favour of allowing any old bomber or artillery hit subs, as some have suggested. If planes have to operate from bases it does allow a much more elegant solution to this that doesn't make certain units a one-size-fits-all counter to everything, which sounds like a way this could go. Planes and missile launchers can be loaded with ASW weapons (torpedoes for bombers, ASROCs for missiles) when they're in their bases for a small cost (say 10% of the build cost of the unit to retool a plane's armament). It means you can counter subs without your own subs, but you can't have one unit that's simultaneously good against surface and submerged targets in the field at once, you need to return it and spend a small amount of time rearming.

Blasting through water with a "plasmacharge"* isn't more sophisticated than torpedo bomber, it's idiotic. Torpedoes in TA were antimatter, and were various magitech things in SC (nanites, some quantum bullshit), and it turns out that it's a lot smarter to put your bomb in an aerodynamic watertight casing and shoot it at a sub than to do what you're suggesting and try and boil off the ocean to get at your target. Water is remarkably good protection from brute force weaponry, due to being liquid and having a high heat capacity.

*whatever one of those is

The "Sonar Bean" saga suggests that making the majority of naval assets mobile is a bad idea. You can justify it in the lore by making various critical systems too dense to viably mount on ships. Fixed assets are an important part of strategy. If everything you own can be repositioned at will, there's a lot less decision making involved in building things. Naval already has significant differences from land (as long as Uber ignore all the people who are trying to make it about "all hovertanks all the time") in that it's about fewer more powerful units, and it has the sub/ship divide.

I absolutely agree that we shouldn't have large vessels that can do everything. However large vessels should have more subsystems than small land units, and be more capable.

For some types of ship that might mean a very limited generalist capability, but for most of them it will be a few different similar systems. A big battleship won't only be equipped with the largest caliber of long range bombardment cannon- it might only have a one battery of those. And then maybe four batteries of smaller cannons. Then factor in some limited ship-to-ship missiles, some machine guns, etc. Giving a battleship a whole bunch of long-range bombardment guns and nothing else is silly.

Secondly, for very expensive units, the degree of capability is significant. A 5 million metal unit equipped with just one teeny little anti-air gun does not become an anti-air unit just because it technically has the ability to attack them. The level of capability is significant.

Due to the expense of capital ships, they deserve at least a limited capability in each area due to their non-fungibility. I should not need to expend the entire cost of a dedicated anti-air unit in order to get any anti-air capability whatsoever.

You are obviously going to want to include serious anti-air cruisers or whatever in a fleet, as they are more effective, and more efficient. However you should be able to send a battleship out by itself, and not have a pair of gunships eventually kill it while it sits helplessly.

Googlefrog's idea of including boats mitigates this argument significantly, because you can purchase cheap little anti-air boats, obviating the need to spend a fortune on an anti-air ship. Boats would behave similarly to cheaper land anti-air units, allowing you more freedom with your composition. I also like the boats idea because it lets us do interesting things with allowing boats to be constructed by big ships. Whereas a ship is going to need a stationary dock to be constructed.

One thing I wonder about is if it would be a good idea to have small "missile boats" which carry 2 or 4 enormous missiles which they fire in a salvo and then retreat to be reloaded by a engineer ship/sub or factory.

This would allow a small ship navy to counter big ships (via missile spam) but would not have the ability to sustain the barrage meaning that they would not be good for long drawn out fighter, against a fleet with good missile defense, or for shore bombardment.

I really don't get the hate on subs and the desire for a land based unit to attack them while submerged.

Sure a sub spam could mean there early domination of the water and the ability to have a land bombardment fleet be largely unmolested but then thats when you bring in the airforce. If they have got to the point where they have spammed anti air ships too then you've simply neglected attention on fighting for the oceans as well as land and air.

I just simply refuse to allow naval combat to be pushed into the realms of other rts games where a navy is only built to cross water. Navy's should be an artillery commanders wet dream, and dammit subs are awesome. Especially when you get in the rare position to surface them and use there comparatively tiny guns for a surprise shore attack.

Yeah well... but it should look awesome, not realistic. In Terminator it worked perfectly to kill the Sub. ^^ Thats Sci-Fi, not a realistic convention!

Yes. Navy should be scary. You should damn well **** your pants if you see a fleet of battleships and all taking aim at your base. Or, no, you won't see them. You'll just notice your base is gone.

Which plays into the fourth aspect of 'land / air / water / intelligence' too.

Here is my opinion:

Blur the line between all the different elements (Air, Land, Naval, Orbit) as much a possible by allowing the same unit to partake in battle in multiple elements. Have Hover and amphibious units that can traverse both types land and sea, have something similar to the Viking in Starcraft 2 that transforms to air or land unit. No element should be superior to another, just offer more options to you in how you can escalate the game.

Having complete Navy/Air/Land/Orbital control should not mean "I win, lolz" it should give you an advantage on the other ones and hopefully ending with you taking the whole planet.

Having a big badass battleship offshore shelling your base from far away is great, as long as the player who is getting shelled got a way to deal with it even if his opponent have complete naval superiority.

I agree that navy should be extremely powerful. But it is important that the fight not be over quickly. Fights that end quickly are boring. Battleships project a lot of power a long distance, but they should never raze your base in moments- it should be a struggle by both sides, for a protracted period of time.

And regarding submarines, I love submarines for their stealth capabilities. I dislike implementations of submarines as serious combat units. Submarines' stealth should be powerful, and expensive to match. But sneaky units should not be the go-to fleet combatant for large engagements- they should be too inefficient in terms of raw direct combat power compared to surface ships which emphasize direct power instead of stealth.

Submarines should be difficult to find, and extremely dangerous for torpedo ambushes and missile capability. But if you track them down, destroying them should be simple.

I would also enjoy having submersible versions of big ships as well. I liked the idea of the Atlantis, but because carriers were largely unnecessary in SupCom, the unit was weak. Submersible battleships, cruisers, etc. would be excellent as well.

Slow moving glowing energy blobs aren't more aren't more awesome than other weapons, they're tired and lack physicality. The last thing this game needs is more weapons that shoot glowing energy blobs.

Why shouldn't a player with complete naval superiority be able to wipe you out? if you weren't paying attention / weren't prepared to defend yourself and he has a navy that large he should decimate you. Rather than having the reaction balanced, have the ability to defend yourself be balanced. If someone has superiority in any aspect they will be able to eliminate you, but if you can keep said superiority in check then we have a fun/difficult game.

While there should be some units that can partake in multiple theaters (like space planes and hovercraft), I feel that blue water naval units would be too large to be very useful on land, and the smaller hovercraft (limited in size to maintain maneuverability) would be at a big disadvantage in a fight due to inferior armor and armament, and I think this would be a good thing. The purpose of hovercraft would be to have units that can get in close to shore, onto shore, and take a beach so that you could more safely unload units from a transport ship/boat/submarine/hovercraft.

If you loose navy but control air you should have some options. Such as take out the opponents navy with your air force. There may be some orbital options as well. And if you have some long range land artillery that is another option to counter naval. That being said navy, assuming equivalent investment, should have a good chance of winning.

If your opponents can shell your base with impunity (which means you have no long range land based artillery, no orbital weapons that can take on a ship, and too weak an air force to destroy them) then you probably should loose. There are plenty of way to attempt to counter naval units, but no counter should be a sure thing.

We did it! 1.1Mill reached!


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As long as battleships have enough range to fire om building and units a bit away from the shore!

How about being able to produce the ships on land and let them walk (very slowly)? Like in Subcom (cybran destoyer). u can move your fleet to where its needed most and retreat to land if its needed. (If you have separate patches of water.) Or use it as mobile artillery platform!

Perhaps all the available land units should have an amphibious clone. This would come with an added cost. Perhaps double the normal land unit. But he could go over land as well.

What u guys think?

Praying for delicious missile bombardment ships, alongside multi-turret battleships.