Naval is awful

And I think the primary reason is speed of the units. By the time my naval army gets there, my base is all tech2 and I'm orbital and have nukes, and those things can probably still beat my naval fleet to the punch. At this point in the beta, building an army just doesn't make sense on even a moderately sized planet because the units all move too slowly.

But naval in particular is the worst. The turn rates are incredibly slow, and the move rates are slow too. If my naval fleet can barely even catch an underwater commander, what's the point? Not to mention how bad the pathfinding is, with ships running into shores instead of actually pathing through the water effectively.

I know the team at Uber is working on features right now, but I really can't understand why they don't play around with unit balance a lot more from beta to beta. Tweaking the numbers doesn't take that much time versus massive feature additions.

Naval is known to need work.

Why don't they tweak things?

Because they'd have to tweak things every time and "just tweaking things" properly takes a lot of thought and experimenting. That's time away from development – every patch. And every tweak will cause the community to blow up with people being pissed no matter what's changed.

The game changes drastically every patch, and the devs can't waste time on tweaking things like this.

Besides, I like naval a lot.

I actually think naval is ok even though most other people don't.

Turn speeds make sense but could be a little quicker.

I think movement speed is ample. Any faster would be too good imo.

Lol? What are you playing, 3000 radius?

Naval are faster than Ants, have more range than Shellers, and unlike Ants will actually catch a running commander.


Pathfinding is bad across the board. Land armies often get stuck on the edge of lakes or anything else that they can not path through.


Turning speed could do with being doubled though

The thing is mostly the not working of units that are there since alpha, like seamines.

Also the normal and the advanced submarine dont really feel right to play with.

I actually watched a commander with nearly no health run away from a naval fight, got all the way to the shore, then the naval DID catch him, and turned him into a team-killing f***tard...

I lol'd.

Anyway, naval is pretty strong as a siege machine. It is like easier-to-use artillery (just move them instead of creep-building slowly forward), with less weakness to units and even air, and only limits are where the water is and against actual enemy artillery (which has more punch and range than ships).

What would be better, is if they increased their speed just a little little bit, and then made them physically turn or move but not both together. That way they would drag a lot less against shore and themselves. Especially the goliath ships.

I'd assume these advanced ships of the future wouldn't be relying on modern means, but some remarkable turning speeds are possible even today using Azipods.

I'd be interested to see some way of differentiating between a ship's turn rate at speed (while moving forward) versus a reduced turning speed while stationary. I think this could add some interesting and unique dynamics to naval warfare.

Bowthrusters/Sternthrusters and Azimuth thrusters are pretty much a necessity for large ships.


The torque that the main propeller provides when thrusting over the rudder is really not very much at all, because that distance is so short. (Oddly enough, I'm pretty sure that the mechanical advantage is measured from the prop to the rudder, not from the rudder to the center of mass - it was a hot, sunny day when I learned this, and I may have been sunbathing half asleep, only listening with half an ear to the guy explaining)

And well, Naval Architecture doesn't change much - there is technology that was present in the titanic which is still used in modern ships, and it was hardly revolutionary back then.

Azimuths are actually extremely rare on large vessels these days. There are very few without bow thrusters though.

I would love some beefier ships that really have to slog it out like WW2 battleships.

Your wish is our command.

Ya. But an azimuth more or less achieves the same thing a stern thruster does.

So some combination of them is necessary

I'm inclined to agree; submarines should be high-damage navy killers, while boats should be more or less floating artillery/wall pieces. Having large HP pools with comparatively weak guns - still servicable for screwing up shore defenses - would allow for longer naval battles that don't feel like big-sized tanks.

i actually think the problem comes from orbital rather than naval. i played a few game on waterworld-like planets, or planets with large enough oceans, and it's cool.

so i think the problem comes from the orbital layer, maybe the orbital laser should just be removed, or more stuff should be able to blow them up (for exemple, catapults could be able to target orbital)

but well, that's a lot of change and tweaks to balance.

Navy has way too much firepower relative to hitpoints right now. (t2 Battleships die in a single missile hit from t2 cruisers lol)
And is also absurdly large.

Hope they reduce the size of the t1 naval atleast, and leave a bigger gap between t1 bluebottles and t2 battleships.

Fixing absurdly OP t2 missilecruiser vs t2 battleship would be nice aswell.

In regards to the thread: The naval needs work, but I think their speed and turning rate are ok.

What I'm more itching about is how will submarine warfare look like both for other submarines and other ships?
Currently we have 2 (non functioning) subs and the T2 one looks like it's better in every way. I would much rather see T1 Sub be hunter-killers and T2 ones be nuclear subs that do less damage and have lower ROF with torpedoes than T1 ones (but are otherwise mobile stealthy tactical nuke silos - note not interplanetary, not even intercontinental). Also I'd like to see at least one ship (preferably the Frigate) get either depth charge or torpedoes so we are not left with whoever build more T1 subs wins the naval battle. Also making the T1 scout ship also be a mobile sonar would work wonders, I think.

Considering a individual thread on this, nobody ninja post it and steal it away from me.

But, since land already has two factories, and do you see where I am going with this...

...then couldn't naval have two factories?

We already have two sized ships right now, scout and fab sized, and bottlenose sized. The units still have to be naval themed, but why not have two factories with diverse balance based on differences in vehicle and bot? That way naval will be easier to take off with starting with bot-efficient naval-fabrication on water only maps starting you in the water, and naval will still build up to cannon-ship combat while actually seeing little sailing swarming dingys flanking alongside ships trying to riddle them with rapidfire.

When they diversify land and bot even more, they can carry that concept over to the separate naval factories, small naval gets infantry roles in personal-sized boats, while large naval gets a variety of guns and armor.

Personally the idea of a submarine factory would be really cool.

I fuckin LOVED Millennium battles!

I wouldn't mind at all if sea battles were dominated by this 1 unit