So as naval currently stand you can peg the crap out of anything near the water with your ships. Which is great, however if the land mass is big enough you can't get to the middle. We need some ways to make amphibious assaults on to these land masses. Ways I can think of to accomplish this are either to A) make bots amphibious (which would give them another thing they can do over vehicles) B) transports. We haven't finished the underwater layer obviously. And I'm still hoping we get underwater buildings. If we do I think the bot factory should be available underwater and on land. Kinda like we have the air factory available on land and on top of the water. Transports I think we need an air transport that can't hold a lot but is ultra mobile. The naval transport should hold a lot but not be as mobile. The one thing I think against having transports in the game is that while they give you more possibilities they also add some micro. At the end of the day I really want the game to stay macro, but I am hoping for lots of depth to the strategy. We have nice layers (underwater, water, land, air, orbital) that I really want to see have good ways to interact between them. I also am the mind set of having every unit in the game be useful all the way through provided the right context and situation. Being able to transport you commander quickly via an air transport seems pretty cool. Being able to assault a land mass with amphibious bots after you have cleared the shore seems amazing. The same thing will eventually apply to the orbital layer. We will need ways to get in between planets and moons with our forces. You always need a way to create a foot hold reinforce it and eventually take over that body. Conversely you need ways to defend and counter those things. Hopefully this will spark some discussion.
I'd rather have specialized amphibious bots/vehicles than making all units of a certain kind amphibious. Would also fit more in the basic vs. advanced tech levels.
I wouldn't mind seeing a vehicle/bot underwater factory that produced one bot and one vehicle that were water/land compatible. Would be sick to see something like Pirates of the Caribbean 1 in the underwater scene
It would be weird not to see amphibious vehicles given the pedigree. Both TA and SupCom had underwater as well as floating/hovering units. In addition there's air and naval transports that we'll probably see some incarnation of. Personally I'd like to see a transport ship that can beach itself like a whale and puke a bunch of land units, Normandy with robots.
Given that the tanks used to be able to go on (or under) water, I'm sure we'll end up with hover tanks or underwater ones which are a bit weaker than normal ones but enjoy that capability. Balance wise it will be one to be careful with. It makes land choke points less relevant - if you build key defences on key choke points and they can just hit you right in the middle of your base with cheap high powered units anyway, that will impact strategy a lot.
You only have one option how the game currently is and that is to use a air fab. I was trying to get / talk about other options since time is a big factor in gameplay.
Or your commander? And what is the problem with air fabbs anyway, once you have 1 land factory you can just build normal fabricators.
I think amphibious units ARE very important to have. If you are assaulting a coastline, while you CAN clear out the coast, but if you try to build a factory on the coast, the enemy could easily build pelters or station sheller/levelers out of the ships' range, but in the coast's land range. You could always attack with nukes or planes, but there should be a way to, you know, get land units onto shore. Transports do seem like a rather simple solution, however, the mechanics must be such that you don't have to micro-manage the individual loading, unloading, blah blah. Basically, it needs to be better than TA. I think Supcom did it fine, but it still might be a little too micro-intensive. For instance, you could have transports automatically unload units when they hit a coastline. Amphibious units are another solution. The t2 amphibious tanks in TA worked very well in my favor -- oftentimes I would dedicate a vehicle factory to constantly produce them because they were strategically important in assaulting a defended coastline where using transports proved more difficult. The problem may lie in balancing the amphibious tanks. To me, building them at an advanced vehicle factory, and having their power be less than levelers but more than ants seems like it could work.
This. Also your commander is your king unit and unless you are on a team and have more than one, its a pretty risky move. Plus air fabs are slow and if they have any thing with range you aren't getting it up fast enough....you can keep the shore clear but you can't build anything unless you have an advanced ground unit that can take out their defenses. As far as nukes go, my hope is that they will lower the cost of the anti-nukes making them easier to produce and basically you will need to build one. If they do have one, then you aren't going to nuke them out. So basically you are dead locked with the nukes unless you can out produce him. So that is where it gets strategically interesting if you have a way to launch an assault from the sea.
