Obligatory navy thread

I totally agree with you. Having separate land/water construction units and buildings was an annoying and pointless distinction.

Some might be concerned that if you let land engineers function in the water, that it will be too easy to colonize other islands without building a water force. However, you can already easily do this with planes, so I think the point is moot.

It would still be nice to have boat engineers for immersion, and possibly to make them more maneuverable in the water than land engineers, not not necessary. This solves the problem of bootstrapping when your island is under water siege and you have trouble building a shipyard.

I would even go as far to say that allowing aircraft engineers the ability to build water structures should also be allowed. If you don't allow all engineers to build water structures, the solution is just a couple more steps away: 1. Build shipyard, 2. Build boat engineer.

I'm kinda puzzled by the waterplanets stretch goal;

If I understand it correctly; there isn't any naval available on an earth like planet? only on the naval planets? I find this a bit irratic, because what if you want to play on just one giant earth like planet and the map generator creates a giant planet with isles? There is no access to naval, but there will be air and land?
Or are they going to implement it so that there is naval available on every planet you get with water? This would be what I like to see.

Since they've hit the stretch goal, Naval will probably be able in every body of water, no matter how small.

I think ground engineers should be land only. For construction out at sea, or deep underwater, you should need to build a construction ship. For convenience, these ships might have excellent build range, and be able to build on small islands. Although if you wanted to build on a faraway island quickly, you should either get a flying constructor, or a transport and a land one.

Regarding constructions on water- absolutely should be the same unit as the land version, when that makes sense. Having a land factory constructed far out to sea doesn't really make sense, but an air factory might.

As for sea planes- as mentioned in other posts, I think we need to restrict planes much more than previous games did. Allowing them to land anywhere on land is bad enough, but being able to land anywhere on water as well? I don't know if that's a good idea. Ideally we would force them onto an airfield or aircraft carrier.

I think allowing land construction units/engineers to be amphibious (be it hover, floating, or fording) but construction ships should be faster and more maneuverable on water, not to mention they should be faster builders for their cost.

So 2 questions:

1. What's wrong with "floating tanks"? I think that the sheer amount of effort invested in your average naval ship always = there being 5 total naval designs in general, which is meh.
2. I agree with the no subs thing. Subs could possibly be awesome, but more awesome than lots of surface ships? Hell naw.

Ships are not floating tanks, they are their own thing. Why should we decide to make ships floating tanks any more than planes into flying tanks, or satellites into orbital tanks?

Ships can be made much larger than land vehicles without the issue of ground pressure (which we can ignore if we want to), or obstacle avoidance. There are also a myriad of other issues which make ships different from land vehicles but if they are including water they should make it play differently than land.

If I were making the game I would include there types of naval units (based on locomotion):
1) Fast surface ships which are sidewall hovercraft or take advantage of hydrofoils.
2) Fast supercavitating submarines.
3) Slow, stealthy, deep diving submarines.

Are making all ships surface ships really better than having more varied options?

While I obviously can't speak for everyone, I don't think simply having amphibious tanks is a problem. They make beach invasions a lot more practical. Focusing on them or making them viable naval combat units, however, would be disappointing for a couple reasons. First, we already have a theater with tank combat as a focus. It's called land. Second, having something with the capabilities of a tank fight a cruiser on its turf is just telling your robot minions to pile onto the rape train and bend over for processing. Water is not land. It by its very nature allows much larger things to move over it than land does. Modern navies recognize this and use it to their advantage by filling the seas with metal behemoths covered with guns larger than the tanks you would have facing off against them. I like it that way and think it would be a lot less awesome if they were scaled down to the point where fighting them off with hovertanks becomes a viable option. More variety in ship designs would be welcome, but if something's the size of a tank, it's a scout.

I'm fine if there are a few amphibious land vehicles, it makes sense if your planet has some rivers that are a tad deeper than normal. These should be way less powerful than any navy vessel though, 1 frigate should toast at least 4 of these tanks simply because it should be 4 times their size (which may or may not be the case in the end) if a few tanks can stroll across the water without a transport it isn't gonna break the game, just make sure not all tanks can go across the water, or fight while in the water unless they've been designed for it.

Since the only real counter to taking over the entire ocean is to torp bomb them, I for one would like to see less AA capability on ships. That might sound a bit off-putting but there's nothing worse than having a lone cruiser off your base in SC, since there's little you can do about it but spam torp bombers and whittle it down bit by bit since they only get 1 pass ><

Of course, having aircraft carriers would be a nicer AA solution, being able to send fighters out to combat bombers instead?

The biggest thing is variety. I can't speak for TA, but Supreme Commander really only had ~6-8 naval ship designs/faction across 3 tech levels and experimentals; despite 20+/faction of land stuff and >10 air designs/faction. This is probably as much a factor of running out of time to fully develop sea combat as anything, but I would really like to see some variety here.

And I suppose I have a slightly different view of "floating tank". I'm talking about something this size:


as opposed to this:


or this:


Basically trend towards chibi-sized navy some. Keeps the naval ships being more high importance but

I just think that this random cigar shaped water distorted... thingy is kind of boring, especially since every single game ever with surfaceable subs has absolutely botched any reason to surface those subs. Cool subs? Sure! All subs being torpedo bots with the combat barely visible? Bo-ring...

+1 to subs doing something interesting, such as latching on to the hulls of ships like lampreys and chewing away at them with big grindy teeth. Or firing lasers underwater that cause steam to rise from the path of the laser. Or being high speed kamikaze bombs.

Another way to make sub spam a thing of the past would be to just make submarines really expensive and specialised. You could have a massive submarine with tentacles that rise out of the water and fire heat rays, or a sniping artillery submarine that fires long range torpedos from behind defensive lines... they could be awesome but should be later game options so that the first waves of naval battle are with ships, air, and hovercraft (if we get hovers that is).

Problem with making things more expensive + powerful, is that people will still spam them. You need to make them weaker and more expensive, or make the way to counter them cheaper

And here we arrive at the root of your problem. You liked Supreme Commander 2's ugly "toy boat" ship designs.

...You do realize the entirety of PA's design is going to hew closer to this than SupCom 1's art design right?

And yes, I like toy boats. Naval units don't have to be experimental size. It made building anything past a destroyer in FA impractical in most games.

This doesn't change the fact that you used the SC2 Salem, with its huge stubby gun barrels on cartoonish turrets, its ridiculously tall tumblehome hull, and its bright red paint job and not the far better looking SC1 Salem. The solution to battleships not showing up in most games is not to replace navies with ugly toy boats or floating tanks, it's to make more maps where direct naval confrontation is likely, and make battleships more cost-effective.

EDIT: It also seems that your sig implies that you prefer the SC2 Fatboy to the SC1 Fatboy. Your aesthetic sense is clearly broken.

I haven't played SC2 but I do like those ship designs that were posted. I liked SC1's ship design too. Actually, it's been years since I played it, I should reinstall. too buys playing Soldiers of Anarchy at the moment though.

It's clear you're fairly heavily biased against SC2 (=/) so lemme see if I can find a better example:

(lower right)

Oh wait, that's TA. And those look far more like "ugly toy boats" than SC2 ever will.

*sigh*

Why do people have to be so arbitrary and picky? A lot more stuff has value and is interesting/good than some think. =/

And yes, in terms of aesthetics, the sc2 fatboy trashes the sc1. Flat squashed rectangle with a factory, AA guns, and giant cannons bolted on or a nice solidly designed quad-tank with giant cannon on where they meet?

While I realize many SupCom fans dislike the art direction taken in the second of the series, rcix is hardly alone in appreciating it. While I'm disappointed by many mechanics in SupCom2, count me with those whose aesthetic sense is broken.

Different design paradigms. TA had a lot of technical limitations dictating the design of units. The polycount limit on units was too low to do ships in the style of real-world battleships (modders attempted it with the famous Yamato-class unit, but that was still hampered by the hard-coded three-weapon limit on units and the size of the screen), the units had to be recognisable from the top because there were no strategic icons and the viewpoint was almost top down. And without strategic zoom, the scale length of engagements and groups was fixed (in other words: Battleships couldn't be battleship-sized because they wouldn't fit on the screen and you couldn't zoom out, and ranges were artificially short for the same reason). None of these matter in a game with strategic zoom, full 3D and modern graphics cards.

There's far more media in the world than one person can possibly consume in a hundred lifetimes. Why tolerate the mediocre when you don't even have enough time to experience everything good?

Admittedly, the UEF had the worst aesthetic of SC1, with their "bricky bricks with bricks on them" design philosophy, but SC2 still managed to be even worse. The Fatboy I was dull, but at least it wasn't actively ugly. The Fatboy II had a horrible blue/yellow colour scheme, was far taller than it needed to be (creating a huge amount of empty space which conflicted with the chunky look it was attempting) and had too much of its volume devoted to tracks which were upside-down. Its perfectly circular secondary turrets look out of place on a model with nothing but straight lines everywhere else, and the triple guns are too boxy and too closely packed.