Any word on the naval or orbital stuff?

I dont like RTS with navy at all, especially if mixed with ground....
In my opinion its not that fun and harder to balance.
An idea wich i like is, every vehicle can be on land and sea, but while in water they get other "perks" slower movement but more armor, longer range etc...
or just make water only planets...

It's even worse, because your enemy needs only half of your units to defeat your fleet, if you distribute your ships even against all 3 layers.

higher dps/health per mass for the anti air and anti ground ships could definitely fix this?

If "this" means the situation of the previous post then yes, but it also makes the unit OP.

I heard that coilguns are more efficient, but more difficult to produce, and particularly to mass-produce, which is military labs don't try to develop them yet.
As of personally, I just prefer the coilgun for no particular reason. It's just the idea of coilgun that I like better than railgun...
That said, I'd like to see your source for the efficiency of railguns and coilguns ; though it would still make coilguns better for massive battleships.

That's why I suggested NOTA's naval guns.
High damage, low accuracy, tiny AoE : they are only effective against massive targets like ships.
They would also make decent siege weapons, but higher-AoE, higher-range or higher-precision artillery would generally be better for that, apart from when you want to specifically take the biggest buildings out.

OP or not depends on the Context, in the AA focus, the idea that an AA weapon can handle 2-3 times it's own cost in Air units would be OP if the AA weapons were plentiful, but in the case of a small portion of available units having AA, you need less to effectively protect your entire Naval Force.

Not the easiest thing to balance honestly, but with the right balance it should work out.

Mike

I think alot of the problems with air and naval units is that they behave too much like land units. Move towards the enemy & fire. Since air units never collide it led to stupid swarms, throwing blob against blob and the one with the most units wins. Since sea units are big, slow, and have large health bars compared to the damage they do, and don't collide, it led to fleets just sailing towards each other, parking at point blank range and sticking around for a bit till one side wins.

Adding collision damage may fix the blob issue for aircraft, leading to nice extended dogfights and hilarious failures as dogfights are frequently interrupted by piloting accidents. Also allows for aircraft to crash into high enough mountains if they are distracted by a target, increasing the importance of terrain.

For ships, I'd suggest collision damage and slow acceleration & large turning circles, so the battles might consist more of fleets sailing past each other and firing till out of range, then circling back and doing it again. A bit like bombers vs a base, but with two sides. Also allows for one fleet to pursue another. Adds movement and constant excitement to the battle. Also allows for ships to run aground and to ram each other. Allows for smaller ships to be treated as "boats" and behave like classic TA/Supcom naval vessels.

(my idea, reposted from an old thread, because I'm quite proud of it and I can't really think of any examples of something like this being implemented otherwise)

Comham. All great ideas.

May I also suggest the following for water planets?

Reefs and other dangers, just inches below the surface.

Dynamic and changing weather. Storms etc. Could wreak havoc with ships and aircraft, including weapons accuracy.

Under the sea, real topography, not flat plane nor just 2 planes..

Build structures on the north/south poles. The enemy with some expensive "super weapon" could cause massive failure on the ice sheet the structure stands on. Building falls into a huge crack or hole in the ice.

Anyways. Crazy ideas. But we need some crazy ideas to make sea planets become more than just slow blobs fighting other slow blobs.

Here's my view of naval/air/orbital (I'm going to call them NAO) units. Note, I've expressed these ideas before in the general forum. This is a digest (since Neutrino asked so nicely).

General Concept: The Battlefield
naval/air/orbital (NAO for short) gameplay should be integrated into a single "fluid resident unit" system. I don't care if you keep the "air" and "naval" labels, but it's easier to think about it this way, and opens up some opportunities which mesh nicely with the core PA focus. Namely, battlefields that can be altered and destroyed in cataclysmic ways.

I suggest each NAO unit has a range of "fluid density" where it can operate. Since "Operating fluid density range" is a bit long, let's call this OFDR. Submarines have an OFDR which includes the density of water (since they can operate freely within it). Air units require lower density fluids (water vapor, vaporized mercury, gaseous oxygen, vaporized rock, etc). Orbital units OFDR is very low and narrow as they can function in a total vacuum, and probably a "trace" environment (Mercury's atmosphere, solar wind, etc).

This continuum of "fluid density" then opens the doors for interesting game-play interactions. Raising and lowering "sea level" (more correctly, fluid level) and "atmospheric level", as well as introducing or removing fluids (whether through temperature changes, pressure changes, bombardment stripping due to impact, solar radiation stripping due to altered orbit, comet material deposition, vaporization of materiel, large weapon discharge, operation of special buildings, or any other means) will have direct (and obvious) effects on the strategic value of different NAO units.

This interaction with the "fluid battlefield" of the planet is directly in keeping with PA's core theme of "battlefield alteration/destruction". I feel it plays into PA's strengths, and would require a very minimal additional system complexity for the strategic flexibility it offers. Since Gas Giants have a uniform atmospheric density gradient, they could support both air and naval units at various levels. This unifies the Water Planet and Gas Giant combat paradigms, which should make balancing these two planet types easier.

A variety of fluids (other than "air" and "water") and a simple phase-change system should probably be included to make this system interesting. Liquid oxygen, molten rock, vaporized steel (as an atmosphere on the Metal World perhaps?), trace solar winds, and a few in between. I'm sure the Devs can think of awesome fluids for us to play in.

Specific Unit Examples: Mobility and OFDR
Variations in types of armament, abilities etc can be similar to that of land-based units. I'm more interested in narrow-range vs broad-range NAO (Naval/Air/Orbital, remember) units, since this plays directly into the primary utility of fluid resident vehichles, namely freedom of movement.

NAO units have the advantage of mobility over land units. The larger the OFDR (Operational Fluid Density Range) the greater the mobility of the unit.

Compare surface vessels to submarines. Surface vessels have a fairly narrow OFDR (between that of air and water) and thus float (trapped) on the surface. Submarines have a larger range reaching from denser than water (since they can submerge in it) to a bit less dense than water (since they can poke out of the water a bit). Therefore (as everyone knows) submarines are more difficult to obstruct than surface vessels, and have a greater mobility.

This principle can be used to create a broad range of specific NAO vehichles that are more than just weapon platform/ability gimmicks (such as the 16" guns mentioned earlier (no offense Neutrino) and most of the other suggestions in this thread (no offense everyone)). Magma boats, trans ocean-orbit units, and a literally infinite variety of others, limited only by the range and type of fluids included in the game engine.

General Implementation Note: This is not "hard" to implement
Please note that this system DOES NOT require any kind of "fluid simulation" in the traditional sense of CFD, vortex simulation, waves, transient flow, and induced turbulence, none of that. All that is needed is a list of fluids (per planetary body), their densities, upper and lower surfaces, and the pressures at those surfaces. Everything else can be easily interpolated from these few variables. Changing these levels requires no complex simulation. This will not be hard to implement, I promise!

Specific Implementation Notes: Fundamental NAO unit rules

• No NAO unit can operate in a fluid less dense than their OFDR allows. This kind of operation will cause the unit to fall until it contacts either the ground, or a fluid dense enough to support it. Suddenly stripping a planet's atmosphere with a meteor impact could be fatal to air units.
• All NAO units can submerge in fluids within their operating density range. This gives rise to the idea of submarines, airplanes, zepplins, re-entry vehicles, and orbital transports jets.
• Some NAO units can "float" on fluids more dense than their maximum operating density range. This gives rise to the idea of magma-skiffs, surface vessels, sea planes, and high-altitude surveillance balloons.
• Some NAO units can NOT "float" on denser fluids. Satellites, traditional airplanes, and most lighter-than-air vehichles are good examples. Contacting a denser fluid (or the fluid they inhabit becoming more dense than their OFDR allows) should destroy these vehicles, or at least cause them to sink in the fluid (and possibly be recovered later?).

Units with a narrow range of operation have necessarily less mobility, such as a low-gunwale flat bottomed boat which operates on magma. It would sink in water, or any other "normal" fluid.
Units with a broad range of operation have excellent mobility. A sub-sea to orbit transport rocket, for instance, could be used to convey submarines from a gas giant to an ocean world, or used in atmosphere to transport air or land units, or in a total vacuum.

Closing Notes: Thanks for reading
I condensed these ideas to the bare minimum I felt did them justice. Even so, I realize it's TL;DR for most people, so thanks for getting this far. I sincerely believe this unified air/water fluid... thing, is the best solution for PA. I hope it helps, if not to implement, at least to help you think more clearly about air and naval units, their unique strength of mobility, and how to alter the battlefield in meaningful ways.

Always hopeful of an excellent game. It will be fun even if we're stuck with traditional "Air" and "water" units, but with a little extra work, I believe you can do a great deal more.

Navy certainly has a need for better soft counters, and an explicit jack of all trades can help keep a naval force well rounded. This does not mean slapping two of every gun on everything else!

The same argument applies to ground warfare. Oh no, you need tanks and anti air and artillery! That's dividing your land army 3 ways! How will they ever cope?

Oh wait. It works because a combined force brings out the strengths of each individual unit type, while protecting the weaknesses of the others.

How is a naval force any different? Why is it that units on the water suddenly lose the ability to carry their own weight and function as a combined force?

This is going to be very long, sorry in advance. Probably going to rant for too long on too much. I'll mark my points in another colour inside the quotes to keep things clean. Enjoy.

My grand idea. (Using 'tier' below just to clarify what I mean)

Why use the typical tech progression of land and air when building boats?

If we compare to the real world, we rarely ever see boat assaults in light/small ships. They are limited to rivers and lakes, not the seas and oceans. These low tier units could just be shifted to something more generally useful, like all-terrain-assault land units or something. Leave the shipyards open for more important projects.

With those out of the way, we've got the medium tier units. Are they really that important when you can just use air units to get the objective done, and much more quickly. Not in my opinion.

That leaves the high tier units. These should be the 'normal' units to see in the water. No messing around with lower tiers, just give us big guns and big ships. That's a real navy.

Why stop there. Without all those light/medium ships to fend off air attacks and the likes, we need some carriers. Instead of launching air units, they'll be filled with light attack drones and ships. These are generated and launched on the go, so all you've got to care about are those giant floating war machines.

Is that all? Not quite. Since we've made the former top tier ships the norm, we need something new to push the limits of reality.

Introducing the uber-heavyweight class of planetary battleships, command ships. These goliaths dwarf everything on the map several times over. I wasn't kidding about the planetary part. Since these ships are so ridiculous, they need to be useful in a number of ways. First, lets allow them to lift off into orbit. Next, lets allow them to act as launch pads for planetary invasions. To top it all off, these will be part of a whole new realm of battle. Orbital warfare.

Even though people might think they want a 3 dimension space combat sim rts... it may be a dream we have to leave behind. Instead, orbital warfare would consist of some overlay covering the planet / object. Spaceships aren't very well known for their mobility, so why bother with it. Just have giant constructs constructed by a massive construction facility in space, and give them lots of lasers and cannons to shoot each other with. Add in some spacefighters, space to ground weapons, and you're done. Fairly similar to navies, really.

So in all we have:
- Navies consist of large battleships, carriers, and interplanetary command ships
- Smaller ships are replaced with swarms of drones/ships that are produced by the carriers (think of them as the carriers' 'weapons')
- Air units can also be used to fill their roles in the early game
- Command ships can lift off into space and move between planets trasporting units / building dropships / etc
- Orbital warfare is similar to naval, except fewer numbers, higher costs, and bigger units
- Similar levels of battleship, carrier, and megaships, just bigger and with a new space prefix

Thoughts?

EDIT: I'll reply to your post dudecon. Eventually. I like the idea of merging the naval and orbital battlefields with something more reasonable than 'just because we can'.

EDIT: I should also mention that I have no idea how this would be balanced against land units, nor do I think it should with regards to damage / RoF / health / etc. The only thing I can think of is a target size modifier to accuracy. Something big shooting something small should have problems tracking / hitting it, so naval attacks on land units would be inefficient. Just think of how Eve deals with it. Can't hit little things with big guns.

I thought there would be no real space combat so orbital behaving like naval is not happening?

Your naval suggestions are quite interesting. Especially the drone thingy.. The power to unleash swarms of specialized drones near the enemy base would be a big plus if drones are weak against Interceptors..

I like to speak about "fluid based" and not "water based" planets, other fluids like nitrogen should be possible as a planet.

When I think about "fluid based" maps they don't have enough land (or ice) to build a complete sustainable base. The resources can only be found in the water. Maybe a big island with some resources to fight over it.

In order to make navel warfare a bit better, less straight forward, I suggest introducing patches of fluid (underwater vents and such) which damages units over time. It should do enough damage that it isn't trivial but not too much to make it an option to move your fleet through to surprise the enemy.

There are two points that are IMO underlit here:

-the actual role of a carrier

-Beach invasions.

In the previous games, Naval was WAY too much of the "this is naval. this is land. this is air" doctrine. Naval was a class of it's own that took down other naval and did shore bombardment.

I would like to see an artillery-warship. Not just typical "unit with big guns", but rather artillery guns. Capable of bombarding deep into the land from the shore. Obvious weaknesses against other naval units (bad accuracy).

I would like to see a carrier. Now there's talk of "it produces swarms" but what would they do? Carriers should be the backbone of a shore-based invasion: Lauching fighters/drones to attack the shore and deep inland, preferably further than the above arty ship. This means that a fleet with a carrier has a massive range. True. Naval -especially in the PA context- allow for enough room to be essentially moving bases. The biggest warships in Supcom had the room for a fusion generator and a mass converter to make all the bullets they ever need.

Expanding on that: Mobile floating factory. (Shore invader): A land-unit producing ship. Preferably equipped with a unit cannon to shoot units onto the shore. This mobile factory allows for a land-based invasion onto the shores. While the Arty ships and Carriers keep the enemy inland, and while the cruisers and subs keep the enemy air and subs away, the Shore invaders dump units on the shore to fight.


IMPORTANT NOTICE:

-i am not sure on Drones or planes for Carriers. Given the role of air, i am inclined towards drones to tie them (if needed artificially) to the Carrier to prevent dirt-cheap mass air fleets.

-The Shore invader has to be a factory. Air transports will simply outcompete any naval-based transport, even when the naval transport is more massive. IRL we use sea transport for costs, air transport for speed. PA has not shipping costs so Air is always better.

Railguns vs Coilguns:

shouldn't have used the word efficiency since it's a very empty term out of context.


A railgun is a rail with a bullet inbetween and a massive voltage applied. While causing significant wear, this allows for simple construction and great firepower per meter of barrel.

A coilgun is a coil that gets energised. The bullet is attracted to the coil. the coil is depowered when the bullet is nearby. Induction however ensures that the field does not immediately drop, and the bullet is partially slowed down.

A railgun is great at small sizes because it's fairly cheap and easy.
A Coilgun is weaker, but better scalable.

Coilguns simply need more technology to function

Actually, it doesn't. This army composition would be beaten by someone going dedicated bombers, because only 1 in 3 units can shoot them. Unless of course, aircraft are relegated to a support role only.

Apologies for how harsh this may seem, but:



You're proposing we take what was bad about original SC naval fights (clunky controls) and turn it up to 11? I'm sorry, but that's a horrible idea.

Dedication always works better than multi-roling. However, dedication allows for VERY easy exploitable weaknesses. Someone going versatile will have no problems with someone going dedicated X.

This is of course assuming identical strenghts.

This is unlikely to be the case: anti-air has the sole job of protecting other units, and would require multiple air units (or much stronger ones) to be defeated. otherwise, the AA serves no purpose other than to drain your resources or clog up your army (as you might as well take a bunch of fighters with you).



Dedication is good in certain cases. Multi-role is good in certain cases. Obvious blind spots is just bad engineering (like, investing in a big floating ship and not even putting 1 AA gun on it).


The great thing about naval is that weight is not a problem *unlike land and ESPECIALLY air*. There is no reason why every Naval vessel would not carry AA especially as it's the #1 threat. Ofc one still needs dedicated AA ships. A ship with 1 AA turret won't be horribly raped by a single bomber, but won't fend off airfleets either.

Basically yes, but with extras. SC naval fights were bad because they were uninterestingly clunky. Take that clunkiness, add some gameplay systems that embrace that clunkiness and you get an interesting, different theatre of war.

I'm just thinking of ways to fix why SC/ta naval warfare was just like land warfare but more expensive. Nobody wants naval to be 'blue land', most people seem to want huge big-gun vessels; my suggestion tries to address both of those things.

The problem is no one wants to play clunky. Well, no one but the kind of people who build cockpits to play Mechwarrior in, but I doubt we have many of those players.