Any word on the naval or orbital stuff?

I'd just like to note that naval engagements should really feel like proper naval engagements. For the most part, ships should be fairly slow, ponderous, and expensive to build.

One of the main issues I have with Zero K is that naval maps are way more fast paced than they ought to be. The naval battles in PA don't necessarily need to be as slow as they were in TA, but they shouldn't be quite as fast as some of them seemed to be in FA.

This leads to boring and clunky naval units that take forever to path and longer to die. =/

Kind of what paschmaster already said, there's barely anything on the deck now, no antennas, radar domes, cranes, depth charge dispensers, cables, hatches, lights, nothing, just the 3 turrets.
Texturing of course adds some detail to it, but without fair amount of tessellation I don't think it's gonna be enough and the model looks more cruiser-ish than a huge battleship.
I mean just by looking at pics of Yamato for example, you can tell that son-of-a-ship is huge and made to f*ck your sh*t up..

I'm not sure you understand the basic setting used for PA, these units(Robots really) are created on the spot with a life expectancy measured in hours and equipped by lots of technology, all the stuff you listed isn't there because it's no longer needed, I suggest looking at some of the other units/structures Uber has shared with us to get a better idea of PA's Aesthetic.

Doing that level of detail with what are essentially superfluous doodads just doesn't jive with PA's Aesthetic.

Mike

It seems to me that we need to consider why real world countries use navies.

Sustainability: Navies are long-term. They can go to sea for months at a time. They really are mobile bases, especially when you consider aircraft carriers and land invasion forces. This also means that navies are generally best suited for long-term, slower-paced warfare.

Size: I drove past the US Navy base in Bremerton, WA and I was blown away by how enormous the aircraft carriers there are. I think scale-wise you could put an entire RTT map from most games on the deck. Even most big RTS maps just don't really have the room for the actual scale of large naval vessels.

Speed and Range: Most strategy games are too small to make proper use of navies. The bigger the map, the more useful the navy. TA and FA had some maps that were big enough to make you want a navy. Navies should actually be faster than land units, but in too many games you're better off just selecting your army and telling it to walk to the enemy base. Maybe what we actually need are large water expanses (deep ocean) where you can't build anything. Range for a navy is basically unlimited, whereas in real life everything else needs frequent refueling.

Firepower: Before the beaches were invaded on D-Day, the shores were bombarded by naval artillery. Since naval ships are so big, they are able to carry monstrous guns, or missiles, etc. The great part about this is that they are much more mobile than most large guns. The traditional downside is range (less of an issue today). Cannons can only reach so far inland.

So with these attributes, what are navies useful for in real life? They make a great staging area for invasion or strike forces. They make excellent transports. They serve for protection of supply lines and key positions that could be attacked from the sea. They are useful for attacking enemy beach positions and bases. They provide a long-term presence in strategic ocean locations.

Perhaps there needs to be more separation between a quick strike force (PT boats) and a proper navy with carriers and battleships. But I will say I liked the navies in both TA and FA, even though they were both clunky sometimes.

Fun ideas:
Well if aircraft pads do end up being essential to air gameplay (either lower fuel limit, limited bombs or range or whatever), i'd love to see carriers being utilized as a useful unit for staging an areial attack, making it a juicy target for the defender.

Carrying a large group of land units to an enemy shore, blasting the PDs with ship-based arty and landing said units would be a lovely thing to pull off. Although hopefully handled a bit batter then TA (2 seconds unloading per unit wasn't all that helpful)

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Boring balance idea:
I think that SC1 handled naval gameplay fairly well, battleships were easily overwhelmed by submarines, as they had no (or limited) torpedo defense. Unfortunately this meant that submarines had no real naval counter, the only real way to take out mass subs was torpedo bombers or MOAR SUBS.
Perhaps a solution unit would be something similar to the UEF torpedo boat:
- Small-medium size
- Carries "depth charge" torpedoes that can ONLY hit submerged units, so not target other ships
- Highly effective torpedo defense
- Low-ish HP
- Little to no anti-ship weaponry, so easily killed by frigates, destroyers and battleships

This would create the full rock-paper-scissors circle for naval warfare:
Frigate -> Depth charge boat -> Sub -> Frigate...

Any advances on that idea?

All Lovely!

I've always felt that aircraft carriers were underused and could see more action with the right balance. The "rock paper scissors" kind of circle you talk about makes sense and at it does sound fun. I would love to see other opinions on it to make it more "awesome".

[PS. why isn't there an "Awesome" emote yet?]

SC1 may have handled naval well but I would never know, it was so boring my brother never wanted to play with naval on...

Good idea though.

As long as the RPS element isn't concrete, there needs to be some flexibility to it.

Also might be neat to see an escort type unit, something that is primarily design to negate damage, maybe deal a little bit, so AA, TMD, Anti-torp and such.

Mike

One really nice thing about no factions is it will be possible to have a larger spread of units for the navy, which should help a lot in terms of allowing for both a spread of quick, fast combat boats mixed with heavier ships and floating fortresses.

I also favor the idea of being able to build on a floating unit - either for gas or in the water, it would be interesting to be able to construct your own land, and be able to slowly move it, fight over it, etc.

Well obviously I don't mean it as in 100% RPS, and there would need to be variations of these boats.
Like in the advanced tiers there would be destroyers with depth charges and some decent ship-ship DPS, who would therefore be beaten by Battleships, as depth charges can't target boats.
So T2 would be Destroyers -> T2 subs -> Battleships -> Destroyers..

To be honest i'm just looking for ways to make submarines killable by another class of naval unit, I hate one unit being completely dominant >< (See the unavoidable ASF)

But I do like the idea of "support ships", maybe like the cruisers in SC? I loved the Cybran Adaptors in SC2 with their AA, shields and TML, they were just a handy all-round thing to have in a force.

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Also i'm all in favour of small, fast speedboats for scouting, engineering ships for underwater mass/floating buildings, and general early game naval play, it's usually missing in most RTSs, TA and SC included

Another point to make is that submarines were a lot tougher than they should have been.

One thing we brought into ATW was the idea of submarines being able to go into 'silent running' mode, where their stealth was massively increased at the cost of their speed and an inability to fire torpedoes.

A detected sub is a dead sub, so it seems like it would make more sense to make subs more sniper-like, stealthed until they fire a torpedo or move quickly.. And then give destroyers and anti-sub boats the ability to fire depth charges overboard as soon as an enemy sub is known to be in an area - if the sub takes a hit / gets damaged, it becomes easier to detect, until its location is pinpointed and a direct hit from a depth charge takes it out.

Change the paradigm from x number of hits to destroy to x number of charges to find the unit and then 1 to destroy it. Emphasize intel over brute firepower.

Okay, I know this isn't a thread for my art, but because I can only talk about scale with proper numbers here.....

So I worked out the scale to my units, using the Scale Renders to figure it out, first a link to the pic;

Knight's PA Scale Test 01

And now for Numbers! Based on the Scale Render I eyeballed Tanks being about 5 Meters wide(Americans ;p) and based on that and making my Flame Tank about the same size my Battleships comes in at 71 Meters long and 15 Meters wide.

Obviously it's still 3-4 times shorter than actual Battleships were, but frankly that kind of scale isn't terrible practical for PA is you ask me.

HERE is the post in my art thread, it also includes a comparison to SupCom Naval/Land units as well.

Mike

I like the Battleship in blocky PA style. but what about making the back turret as big as the front ones?

What about making heavy ships like this fast long range direct/indirect rapid fire gun ships that fire on the move? Like a Trimaran version for low drag better speed. Its guns could fire one at a time making it like a six barreled scathus from Subcom that moves and fires at the same time.

If the AI has a good fights command it should probably have equal guns on each side for better firepower as it auto kites enemy units.

I really, really, really hope the Uber team looks at the old Carrier Command game (and new incarnations, including Hostile Waters). That was perhaps one of the most interesting ways to deal with ships I've seen so far.

Have (important) ships as huge, floating bases that you can build on top of, and that create smaller, faster units to do most of their fighting. In addition to the aircraft carrier, you could have ships that deploy hovercraft, or smaller ships, or subs.

Bonus cookies if ships are so big that you can deploy land forces on top of them, that can drive around (and off them in case of a naval landing), and that can attack the ship itself (if the enemy drops little tanks all over your ship) by attacking the command structure.

Give the hull an insane amount of HP that no conventional weapon can crack (but dedicated shore guns or the massive artillery batteries on a ship can) and then add in a control tower somewhere on the deck that has much less HP but isn't really damaged by shore guns and the like, but is vulnerable to small vehicles or fighters on top of the deck.

Lose the control tower, and the ship becomes a floating carcass. You can still build on top of it, you can move around on it, you can reclaim various sections of it, but it won't do anything and its ship systems are offline. Until somone builds a new control post, and takes control of the ship.

You'll be generating water terrain on the fly with a few of these carcasses lying around, as players try to land engineers on them for reclaiming or capturing. You could even start the game with some of these things in the waters from wars past, and allow players to take those to get a leg-up in the naval war.

And you really only need one or two kinds of battleships now; just floating empty hulls that players can deploy structures and special ship components on. (Made easy on the UI by making the ship's central control a builder that can place unique blueprints, but only on top of itself)

In addition to that, all the smaller ships can still be in, but they'll be closer to the regular vehicles you build, with a baseship/battleship being a serious investment to really take control of the seas.

I think that, considering the lack of terrain in a water map, it would be cool to use really big ships as a form of terrain, both by moving on top and around them.
And once a ship becomes a floating base with various substructures that you can click and give orders to, it stops mattering that one unit is taking up your entire screen, because that one unit has more interesting controls than most small armies.

This is why I'd like to see some decent AA-capabilities. I don't like the idea that one of the most expensive is helpless against two gunships which likely only cost several percent. Imho it should be able to destroy them.
Of course I know the rock-paper-scissor principle and mostly agree. But where I disagree is that paper unconditionally beats rock every time. There may be situations, where 100 stones beat a paper. Or a very large stone beats 2 papers. Of this paper is still the best choice against rock.
I don't want every unit to have limited defense against every threat, but the largest and most expensive units may have weapons for a wide array of threats.

Come to think of it, even if my naval idea isn't enjoyed by anyone, I think that carcasses of giant superships would make an excellent type of terrain for waterworlds. As well as a very simple way to give "extra resources" to them, by virtue of the entire thing being made of metal and reclaimable, even if you can't reactivate them.

Imagine fighting with dozens of small ships in the middle of a giant floating ship-graveyard, with engineers sucking dry these collosal weapons of ages past and tanks rolling over their hull to engage ships and enemy bases being built inside the cracked hull of an ancient vessel (safe from enemy artillery).. Doesn't that sound awesome?

On that note: Will there be unit carcasses left upon defeat? If yes, will there be ship carcasses? Because the lack of boat carcasses made me sad in SC/FA.

Naval is tricky because ships, unlike land vehicles, are never designed to do only one thing. They're multirole vehicles, so picking the right combination of roles and making it intuitive to the player is messier than making them choose between Smash Everything Tank and Plucky Little Infantry Bot. Fewer ships will also be easier to control and handle pathfinding for.

Naval combat in strategy games doesn't seem to have progressed very far beyond about 1960. Where is the VLS array? The sonar-carrying antisub helicopters (which, frankly, would be a better option than clumsy torpedo bombers)? Amphibious assault ships? There's a lot of unplumbed depth, and some of it would look pretty damn cinematic - gunboats and aircraft rushing forward to cover transport hovercraft landing a company of assault bots on a beach, while the gun line shells it into a cratered mud puddle, yeah - but add in laser subs sweeping bombardment satellites out of the sky, a dedicated C&C ship, and ASW helos prowling around the edges.

I'd like to see small patrol boats and frigates that are genuinely useful - a speedy little hydrofoil with twin .50s and an AA missile launcher+radar would make early naval combat a lot more exciting, as would an early landing hovercraft. Similarly, a frigate with light guns, a depth charge launcher+sonar and/or a small tactical missile launcher would be a good 'anchor' for hydrofoil flotillas.

Actually, let's just do a whole set.

From there you can skip destroyers and go straight to a ship-killer missile cruiser - deadly to anything frigate-sized and up, but vulnerable to subs and gunboats. There's not much you can do with subs beyond attack/SSB, so no need to change those much - attack subs might be better as upper-end Tier 1 to keep sub spam from pushing you completely out of an ocean.

At Tier 2, an unarmed command and control ship (advanced radar, short-range sonar, plus toggleable jamming) follows naturally - then an escort carrier/amphib (repairs landing hovercraft and aircraft, but no building), a ballistic missile sub (possibly with an ASAT laser as well), a big-gun battleship (12 x 16-inch gun config, like the Montanas? All boom, all the time, but inaccurate - and this would be the place for flak-type AA), and finally, a fleet carrier capable of building aircraft.

So the progression goes, from cheapest to most expensive:
T1:
Hydrofoil gunboat
Landing hover
Frigate
Attack sub
Cruiser
T2:
Command
Escort carrier/Amphib
ASAT/Missile sub
Battleship
Fleet carrier

That's ten units, five in each tier, none of which becomes useless - even the amphibious assault ship, which overlaps with the carrier, because it can support shore attacks better. Because there are fewer big guns, your little boats have a fighting chance for longer - by the very late game they're probably limited to probing attacks, but that's it.

Devs, if you like the sound of that, I can follow it up with concept art.

sorenr you make some concepts and I can try turn 'em into models