Any word on the naval or orbital stuff?

Previous titles suffered from an extreme lack of weapons capable of working inside the water. There were only depth charges, which went down, and torpedoes, which went both ways. The weapon choices have to be expanded first. Then the roles of units above and below the water can be established.

Yuck. No way. A slow, direct fire unit should be statted just like any other slow, direct fire unit, no matter where it resides.

Subs have an immunity to certain high ground weapons, and use separate detection layers to make them more difficult to find. These are very powerful advantages, and indeed create a tangible barrier between naval and land battle. They do not justify making the entire theater out of glass cannons.

If a sub wants to be beefy, it should be beefy. Fragile subs are a result of HUMAN limitations(like needing air), not robotic ones. If a sub wants to be fast, it should be fast. Research is happening today to create agile submersible vehicles. If a sub wants to be a stealthy glass cannon, then it gets treated like a sniper or assassin. And if an off-class unit wants to trade blows with a pureblooded sub, then they're going to lose.

In fact, there is little point to having any naval unit operate above the water line. Floatation is a sucker's game that makes a unit vulnerable to every weapon possible. That's a fine sacrifice for hover units, but it's completely stupid for ships. Why should a ship hollow out its hull, compromising its integrity, just so it can die more quickly? If anything, floating vessels should be the glass cannons. At least that one's justified.

The only ships that can not work without floating are anti air vessels and ships that directly trade against ground units. Even the latter can work fine as a submersible, as long as it needs to float to strike.

Ok first, Submarines being glass cannons doesn't have to mean having less health, but more them being equiped with powerful torpedos.

And secondly your point about robotic submarines not being hollow makes them stronger is kinda silly when you them go on to say that normal ships will be hollow and that makes them weak. The logic there is?

That a solid object is tougher than a hollow object? That doesn't seem to be illogical? The denser an object, the more punishment it can take.

Also, you don't have ships that float because you want to stay above the shoreline so everything can shoot you. You have ships that float because you want to shoot back.

Shooting from under the shoreline is simply ineffective for pretty much any weapon system. So if you're going to come up to shoot anyway, you might as well ditch all the complicated dive/rise systems and just make a floating ship.

Just saying ships are hollow and subs are not does not make it true or even relevant, I can fill things with foam and it makes any tougher argument moot. Subs have to be able to control their buoyancy, meaning tanks, and such, that ships just do not need, that will make them more fragile if you ignore everything else. Subs are also under pressure due to depth, meaning that they are already under stress that a ship is not.

Now given this is future robot tech, I can see the decision to be glass cannon or though tank being more of a choice made on preferred strategy and tactics of the robot. (Although a heavy armored fast sub would be silly) All that to say, after a certain point we should pick what's going to make for a good game, because really we could just pick almost anything and wave our hands to justify it with future-magi-tech.

Was kinda my point.

Sorry if this has already been brought up, but it would be nice to true 3D when it come to water and land, so you could have cliffs overhanging water, and more importantly bridges that ships can travel under. Imagine how different Seton's Clutch would be if ships from one sea could travel to the other side.

There's plenty of good reasons to hollow out your hull - an air supply isn't the only thing that makes a sub complicated.

And posting a video of an empty destroyer (2,500 tons) getting sunk is rather different than a battleship (45,000 tons) or an aircraft carrier (100,000 tons).

Another interesting dynamic for ships is the idea of anti-missile defenses - current tech missiles like the Exocet or Harpoon are designed to fly 1m above the surface of the water, in order to stay undetected for as long as possible, because anti-missile defenses would blow them away otherwise. One really nice way of balancing ships would be to have their active defenses play a strong role - you could have a relatively weak ship with strong defenses that performs very well in small skirmishes but once it gets overwhelmed it folds quickly..

I love this idea

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With regard to glass cannon subs vs durable subs... why not both?

Why not have a dozen sub types? 2 dozen? Is there any particular reason why we should have so many land units, but a very restrictive variety of naval units?

If there is only one thing that I could comment on with regards to naval units, it's to add more of them.

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A bit of a side note, I'd love to hear what Uber has in mind for orbital units. We can discuss the **** out of it, but until we get a better scope of what's going on, I doubt any of it is going to be very helpful.

Even if its not a popular decision, we can just provide reasons why it is not. I definitely won't mind pointing out flaws. They've already got my money and I want this thing to be perfect.

Only problem I see with that is everyone has a different version of perfection.

Here's a list of animals that thrive on the water surface.

Here's a short list of things that thrive IN the water.

Nature has come to a pretty sound conclusion over the past 5 billion years. Pure surface creatures suck. There are no redeeming features to something that lives in the water, but is unable to swim.

You can do this by surfacing a naturally denser, more thickly armored and armed sub. It's not a big deal if the engines can hold its guns above water.

Ships are light. They HAVE to be light. And yes, they do have access to more conventional guns, which is great for fighting conventional land units. But if you're packing a vessel full of insane firepower and armor, it's not gonna float. It's going to need every ounce of buoyant force it can get, and you don't find that by hanging out in the breeze.

Which is basically a ship, except it can dive and be completely ineffective because its weapon systems stop working, which is a useless ability pretty much.

Why would it float? You could use some of the engine power that the subs have to keep it at the water surface level all the time. That way it can be heavy, carry conventional weapons, and be at surface level.

I think your diagram is good here. It gives a good starting frame for people to think how sea-land-air-orbital would interact, and reading lot of posts here many can indeed make use of such frame.

Then again it wouldn't hurt to gain more direct exposure to have its own thread...

Edit: back on topic, I hope many of you guys realize that this game had lot of traditional RTS game contents cut out of design frame to make the cut... so going overboard with variety (I think I read someone suggesting 24+ types of submarines) will only result in disappointment.

We should think in minimalist approach, as in what are the least amount of factors necessary for fun naval-land-air-orbital interaction?

So how are subs supposed to be superior? They still need to displace their tonnage, or they will sink to the bottom.

We're getting off topic, I have a different question. How would replacing all naval units with subs be better for gameplay? And making subs better than ships is almost the same thing (except for niche roles that subs can't do).

My big concern with the underwater layer is it's shear limited interaction with everything else, to the point of controlling this one layer can deny your opponent two layers, even if the one is "weaker". How would this play with the rest of the game? Is there a counter?

To do all that stuff subs can't do. Every kind of direct-fire weapon (cannon, rail-gun, laser) and their purpose (AA, artillery, CIWS), radar and LoS, carry aircrafts, depth-charges/hedgehogs.
And forget about the idea of subs being more durable than ships. They have the same tonnage as a comparable ship, otherwise they can't surface. And a decent part of this goes to the tanks.

There are very few vessels that justify surface warfare, when
A) all the water resources are under the sea.
B) bombardment subs are nothing new.

Anything that fights on the surface does so with the explicit intent of shooting at land, with land based weapons.

Then give it a weapon that DOES work both underwater and above. It's the super future, with every technology in the universe. They can figure something out.

What you have is a land unit with a density limit. The same armor and firepower is always going to be available on a smaller land unit.

While a platform may be able to ultimately wield and move larger guns, this comes at a huge sacrifice of overall armor thickness and large size. It's nothing that can't also be mounted on a more compact and stationary land structure, with much less hassle.

What you have is a heavy armored sub, which spends extra effort to float.

The natural state of the water unit is still underwater, using the medium that exists to its fullest.

1) How can boats be superior? Air has virtually no buoyant force. Every ounce of ship above the water line has to be gained by increasing size and removing armor.
2) the submersible floats by directly pushing the water, a feature common to every single thing that has ever touched water in all of existence.

If a sub can float with good armor then so can boats.

I don't really know whay we are even have this kind of discussion becuse anything one unit can do into he water, so can the other.

A sub that can sit on the surface might as well be a submercible ship.


They are really one and the same.

There are no resources in the air level either, so we need no aircrafts?

They existed in SupCom, too. But their pure existence doesn't make them superior to all other units.

Give them a weapon that can shoot everything. No wait, this isn't a good idea. It's also a bad idea to justify something by just saying "it's future, they can". This argument nearly supports every idea, so why not having a weapon that shoots through hills/mountains? It's future, they can.
And if this "future" has some similar physics to what we have, well, there isn't too much besides torpedoes.

Sorry I don't think I get your argumentation right. I thought we are speaking of vessels/ships compared to submarines. What's the relation to land units? And what kind of density is limited?

I think this is something you want to see, but not a fact?

Right, it's a trade: bigger = more expensive versus mobility. Sounds fair. The thinner armor isn't a logical/physical consequence, but rather something you want to have.

And usual ships can't do that. Seems legit ... not.

A ship can use it's total tonnage to carry armor and weapons, while subs need a part of their tonnage to be useless water. Otherwise they'll need very long to reach the surface.

A submarine floats because of Archimedes law not because of hydrodynamical drag.

A fleet of Subs might be the logical extension for some future time, but honestly, I don't see how that's better than a more "traditional" Surface/Sub based force from a gameplay and from a Player's perspective.

Also, while I'[m here, I don't think the Submerged/Seafloor layer needs to be fleshed out in the same way Land or Air or Naval is, it should certainly be used.

Mike

I concur.

Well being underwater does give you certain immunitys to detection from space, so what would we want to hide in the sea that we couldn't just protect on land or in the air?