Any word on the naval or orbital stuff?

Just get mole units

If naval combat is portrayed as 'blue-land', then all those ideas done in this 'blue-land' can be done in 'brown-land'.

All it does is create certain sets of units to their respective area of color. Perhaps that is good enough for some.

Doesn't change the result as long units are equally armored on all sides, so no bonus damage from attacking the rear.
The single ship would still keep it's whole firepower till the end, while the ED of the boats steadily decreases.

Difficult to say, depends on how intelligence-denial and stealth works. All I can say for sure is the boats could run better.
If stealth works same as SupCom, affecting radar and not LOS, won't make any difference (same reason as above).

These could be interesting, perhaps launched of mobile (deployable) ground units. Might be intercepted by TMD. But guided missiles are somehow more difficult to balance, so usual TML might be enough.

If all we're gonna do is be unimaginative about Naval, it might as well be Blue land.



Naval has certain allowances that other unit forms simply do not have. Naval can be a true class of it's own if we accept it as such.


There's no reason to have just big slow ships or just fast small ships. And there especially is no reason to just assume it's useless.

there's a reason it's a stretch goal: it can be done right, but it takes time and an investment.


The solution IMO to the "naval on combined planet" is having a combo of big and small units with their distinct roles. Range and firepower are essential for Naval ships, as is staying power.

Naval vs Naval is nice. but i think Naval is nothing useful if it does not have units that connect it to other forms like Air and land.

I know. I've been in favor of a mix of really big floating bases and smaller combat units the whole time.I really think naval can be something cool, but it really needs to be very different from land units to be worth it.

When it comes to basic units, yes. That's actually a very good start. Why? Because hover units, amphibious units, and walking boats are direct links between land and water. Coastlines are direct combat areas between two different sets of units. The cost and scale between land and naval units need to be competitive. Otherwise, their interaction ends up broken.

Then, after the basic units work pretty well together, that's when you add in the advanced boats. This is where stuff like long range artillery and omnirole vessels get to play. Some of them might specialize against land. Some of them might round out your force. Many of their perks will be unique to the sea. But they are by no means the main meat of the navy, because the requirements for basic land and water units remains the same.

Basic units need to be cheap, efficient, and effective. There's no legitimate gameplay reason that a boat can be a better basic unit than a tank.

I wouldn't call hovercraft, amphibious units and walking boats as basic units, they're rather special units because they're changing layers. I doubt anybody would call a plane that can also dive a basic unit. Balancing these units is a tricky thing, since they can use two layers they and therefore need some drawbacks.

While this is partially true, it doesn't concern one important point: You're able to avoid the battle, because usually ships can't go on land or suffer drawbacks for doing so and vice versa.

While this is true, it doesn't have the logical consequence that they need to have the same size and price. This doesn't mean that naval units

be larger than ground units, but the opposite direction is also false (also size itself is a irrelevant parameter concerning strength directly, it makes the unit just easier to hit).
If a cannon-boat nearly beats two tanks, but also costs twice their price it may be fine.

I don't see any reason it mustn't be better than a tank. Because as I mentioned above these units move usually on different layers, which only have small overlaps, and don't need to challenge each. It's not like balancing air units where you can't run and use terrain advantages. Which doesn't mean that there is no balancing between naval and ground units necessary.But the basic units aren't the main concern, because how often will a torpedo-boat/sub/AA-boat/scout-boat have to fight with basic ground units? Not once. The only basic boat that ever may come in contact with land units is some kind of cannon-boat, but is this really a reason it must have equal costs and strength as tanks and not 1.5-times?

Yes after balancing the basic units we balance the rest. But I'd count the dual-layer units like the amphibious tank to this category. And then I'd ask, for what reason should he get this ability. In this case it'd be the ability to cross water without needing a dedicated transport unit. And not because he should fight other boats. So even if he has to deal with the naval units directly they aren't supposed to fight naval units.

While most requirements for basic land and naval units are similar or equal, this shouldn't have any influence on the unit variation in your fleet. You decide what kind of setup you have based on your threats, the situation and your aims. Regardless of what basic land units can, can't. If you have to face them, there are enough possibilities but you won't use basic naval units, since most of them can't attack land or aren't designated to this job.


On the topic about naval variety regarding units I made some notes about possible weapons/functions and naval unit types. New units could be created by combining them.

Weapon/function:
Transport, AA, torpedo, depth charge, cannon (railgun/coilgun/...), artillery, TML, TMD, SML?, SMD, stealth, scout

unit types:
ship (larger, slower), boat (smaller, faster), hovercraft, submarines, platform

So combining these could lead to scout boat, SMD platform or stealth transport hovercraft, I don't know. Perhaps you have some additional ideas, share them.

What if some of the ships are equipped with explosive rounds. These rounds would be capable of blowing large enough chunks out of the land that you could dig a channel allowing your fleet access to a formally land locked location.

That would actually be kinda awesome.

Honestly, I think we're getting a touch "cart before the horse" deal here, balance is easily mutable, but the overall use of a Navy is much harder to change around so maybe we should focus a bit more on that?

So first, here is something I like the sounds of for making Naval good to have beyond shore bombardment/suppression, Seafloor Metal Spots and Geothermal Vents.

Instead of just plopping a structure on top like you would with land based resrouces, you build a RIG, a large, slow 'structure' that moves to the point and deploys to start collecting the respective resource from it. The RIG helps to create focal points for Navbal combat away from shores, and between the resource placement and hte shape/size of the water body could allow for some varied combat/tactics.

Also as much as a I loathe to admit, the use of "High Yield" resources for the resources a RIG taps into might be appropriate as it would help offset the undoubtedly higher cost for a RIG compared to a regular land based extractor and would require less resource spots overall.

So now we have a reason to fight out on "the big blue wet thing" we should look a bit more what we fight with. I'll preface this by saying that I think we really need to use the same system that's already in place for land units, so things like HP, top speed turn rates ect ect. Just by their nature Naval units will feel different, and it makes the easier to learn and allows for easier comparison and what not.

So ships, I envision there being two main size classes, Cutters and Capitol Ships, this distinction will be one purely of SIZE in most or all cases, an Artillery Cutter is just as plausible as an Artillery Capitol Ship, just that the Cutter's weapon(s) would be smaller than the Capitol Ship's weapon(s).

Beyond that we also have Subs, but because of how isolated they are in comparison to the other layers, I'll get to them a bit later.

As far as units go, I don't want to list potential units, because as said above, cart before the horse, so I'll just list off a bunch of things that I can think of off the top of my head as being able of equipped or used by a ship in order to fulfill a specific stated role. Within each of these there are also different aspects that can be variable, like the range of a weapon or its rate of fire ect ect

Weapons
-Direct Fire
-Anti-Air
-Artillery
-Missile
-Beams
-Torpedoes

"Abilities"
-Repair
-Reclaim
-Build(Structures)
-Factory(Units-Land)
-Factory(Units-Air)
-Factory(Units-Naval)
-Factory(Units-Orbital)
-Missile Defense
-Torpedo Defense
-Submerge
-Air Staging
-Carrier
-Stealth and/or Cloak(Area)
-Stealth and/or Cloak(Self)
-Personal Shield
-Sonar/Radar
-Vision
-Speed
-Agility
-Armor(read: more HP)
-Amphibious
-Transport

Again, this is not an exclusive list, just the things I thought of off the top of my head.

So we have lots of tools with which to create ships with lots of variety, but as with anything there are concerns, here are the main ones I have;

-Protecting Shores
-Re-taking lost Shores
-Submarines

So Lets tackle them one by one.

Protecting Shores
Lets face it, Naval units should be big, and the long range weapons they'll carry will handedly out range regular land units. Obviously the best answer is your own Naval units, but that might not always be an option(or maybe you just don't like playing with Naval or whatever) so lets look at some other possible solutions. The problem with this problem is that because of the different layers interacting it's how me make a "counter" that works against the opposing layer units without mucking things up in it's own layer. One way this happens is via unit health, chances are the average Naval unit will have a fair bit of HP, in FA a T2 Naval unit could have 2-4 or more times the HP of a equivalent land unit(the exact number depends on which units are being compared obviously), so a weapon that's effective against Naval units might be overkill against Land units. Another common example I see a lot is "add some slight firing randomness to make it hard to hit smaller units but easier to hit the bigger Naval units" and if all naval units were big, this would be pretty close to ideal, but we do(or rather want) small Naval units as well, so it might be less idea. Also consider that structures are big in thier own right, that would mean these "Anti-Naval" weapons are also good against structures. These aren't necessarily BAD, just that they need to be accounted for in the long run.

Re-taking lost Shores
Somewhat relevant to the above problem we also need ways to re-take our shores from enemy 'camping', in SupCom/FA it was common that once you lost your sea presence, it was VERY hard to re-establish it, even in a new location because you had 'no' way(aside from air) to clear out subs or Long range subs sitting off your shores, building a factory and your own ships takes time. Now if you have the ability to defend your shores, retaking them is obviously easier, but you still gotta deal with subs, an idea I had was for a land based Depth Charge launcher to keep subs from waiting to kill the engineer or factory as it's being built.

A more 'outlandish' idea is I have is making Dry-docks, a land(shore) based factory that builds a unit and then "launches" it the body of water it was built along. You can even do it where the Dry-dock is cheap(ish), but single use, so you build a bunch of Dry-docks, build a handful of ships and launch them all at once, then you reclaim the Dry-docks. Once you have a presence on the water you can go in to build the more efficient Naval Factory or what have you, maybe you just want to get a few ships out for scouting purposes or whatever.

Submarines - Overall
Submarines(Subs) are tricky, they are a unit type that can only be attacked by a single weapon type(Torpedoes) unless they surface, yet have the ability to attack any unit in the water(but not Hover units). The following ideas have been kinda pinched and tweaked from all th sub related threads here and from the GPG forums over the years, so if things sound familiar they prolly are.

Anyways, I like the concept of Subs being true Glass-Cannons. How? Low HP, front loaded Damage, and Radar/Sonar Stealth'd until it fires, and it has a set period before it enters stealth again, like say a weapon that has a long RoF, so the Sub couldn't enter stealth again until or after the weapon was ready to fire again, so as long as you were being attacked you'd at least know where it was coming from. Speaking of weapons, I'd think that they would(in most cases) highly damaging, but with long reload times, pretty slow too. You can mix it up by changing the number of Torpedoes launched, Larger salvos would be more likely to deal at least some damage even when Anti-Torp 'weapons' are used. Or having Supercavitating Torpedoes that are faster, but do less damage or what not.

Something else that can be done for Subs is a Deck Gun, in most cases it'd be a secondary feature that could only be used when surfaced, most/all weapons types could be applicable for a Deck Gun, Also worth noting is that when surfaces a Sub would NOT be stealth'd in any way.

But the big question is how to stop Subs? If the deal front-loaded damage from stealth they could do irreparable damage before you can even start fighting back, which is technically true if you aren't prepared for it, but that's no different from anything else right? So how do you prepare? Well, first up is preventing them from catching you by surprise, but we don't know much about stealth and detection in PA yet, so it's hard to say anything with certainty, but we could do something where some/all scout units have short range 'active sonar' that would pick up even on stealth'd Subs, or maybe just coming within water vision range? Without more hard facts it's tough to say, but there should be some fashion of spotting them before hand with the right preparation.

Then comes dealing with Torpedoes, pretty much you either tank the damage and hope you have enough HP or you have something with an Anti-Torp system nearby. Anti-Torp systems could act like weapons that only target Torps, so they'd have range, rate of fire, number of projectiles they fire ect ect, it's a highly variable system that gives a lot of tools for balancing them

Alright, so you've spotted them, mitigated or denied the Torpedo salvo, so how do you blow them up? You got a few options, your own Subs or Torpedo armed ships, for example a cutter hull with little more than a torpedo launcher would be great, they'd be relatively cheap so you could get a bunch, making it hard for the front loaded Subs to take them all out and because of how fragile subs are even a few Torpedo Boats could seriously mess them up. You also got weapons like the Hedgehog in which individually the projectiles might not do much damage, but because of the spread they'd be great against groups of Subs and yet still not be as effective against ships due to the lower damage(which is still suitable for dealing with the Glass-Cannon Subs).





And I think I'm done for now, I think I've covered the core bits, soon I'll be going to bed, and you guys get to tear it apart overnight and while I'm at work, so have fun I guess?

TL;DR

Mike

Oh, big yes on creating canals!


As to basic units:

how far down are we going to go with "basic"? (as in: down the tech tree). I do not consider the first boat you build a prime example of good Naval warfare.


From a realistic POV, the easiest unit to build is a Land unit. It's a fairly small unit that does not rely on overly expensive technologies. Walkers are actually more expensive and complex units than tanks (and IMO should be treated as such).

from that same POV, boats are the second most expensive. Archimedes' displacement law ensures that boats need to get big pretty fast to keep floating. Where land units are vehicles, Boats range from small to large buildings.

Air is the most expensive because of 3 reasons:
-It needs to go fast.
-It needs to be light to go fast
-It needs stealth to survive.


Boats and tanks can largely be made from cheap steel. Aircraft are made from high-end alloys, use advanced high power-to-thrust ratio turbines for propulsion, use dozens of computers to fly and the most advanced stealth technologies to stay hidden.

I do not see why we can use some of this for a total package for TA:


Land is the cheapest and has most bang for the buck.
Air is the most expensive and is mobile, fast and powerful but lacks numbers or health
Naval is the bigges, is in the middle when it comes to cost and powerful, but especially at range

Because Orangeknight ninja'd me:

You don't really touch on how to do that, which i think is the one flaw in how you thought this out.

I am a big fan of artillery defence. And i believe that an Anti-naval cannon (which obviously can be used against everything else) is the best way to go as a shore defence building. Essentially a long-ranged, accurate, low-splash weapon. At longer ranges it would obviously be very difficult to hit small targets, which is a good thing. Against land it would work mediocre, as i envision land as having large armies and not much army would be hit.

The second is either a Torpedo cannon or depth charge deployer. Cannon/deployer, because a harmless projectile is shot that only does effect near the water. Near the water, either the torpedo takes effect, dives and destroys a sub or boat, or the depth charge missile/canister deploys depth charges and destroys a sub (should be effective against boats too).

I agree on the cutter/capital ship thing.

Subs:


I agree on the glass cannon idea. I don't really play submarine often. IRL, torpedo boats are effective against them, and i think we should use that role too.

Actually I kinda did, as I said, there isn't really a good want to make a Naval ONLY weapon, because Land and Naval Layers do share a fair few similarities(aside from the difference in average HP amounts) as opposed to say Land/Air and that there are some complications that can arise. I also went on to say in the "retaking shores" section that pretty much anything that applies to protect shores also applies to retaking them and included the idea of a land based depth charge launcher as well.

Like I said, it's not really BAD per see that an Anti-Naval cannon turret or unit would also be extension be good against structures, just that it is something that needs to be taken into account when creating and balancing such a unit.

Mike

ah i see. thanks for clearing that up

This was more the idea of attacking multiple parts of the enemy at once, not all swarming around the single unit.
As I said, it's situational. If you want to slow push then one massive unit is better. If you want to raid you'd want many smaller units.

Seconded. Less concern on exact numbers, more discussion on game mechanic archetypes. Also less discussion on pseudo-realism discussion please, those don't really add anything to gameplay other than few texts difference by calling a cannon either regular cannon, railgun, coilgun or plasma.

Have sonar detect subs and keep torpedo range less than the sonar by easily noticeable margin. Keep sonar to lighter escort type of ships. I'm not too sure on defense against torpedo itself, I think just having detection out-ranging subs' main weapon should perform that function much more elegantly.

I know many people here probably dislike games like Starcraft 2 but that game's dark templar/cloak banshee is pretty much how subs should play out... devastating when undetected, but very cost inefficient when they can detect it.

If subs are water only that will probably pigeon hole them just too much, so like you said they should be able to perform ground attack... but what kind of attack should it be? IMO it should be similar to sub's torpedo, meaning another front-end-heavy strike weapon that sub will shoot and run away once enemy closes in.

About retaking the shore against sub camper... I assume this is when you have local land and air dominance (otherwise such attempt should fail without question). Maybe for sake of simplicity (not to make a game dumb for sake of being dumb, but simple solutions can often be more elegant solution and Uber also have a very real problem of having extremely rough development road ahead of them in terms of sheer number of features), have land/air based missile attack be torpedo capable, meaning it would shoot just the same but if you target subs, it will travel underwater, etc. And of course there should be a way to detect subs from air/ground, whichever one makes the idea less jarring to players. At the same time sub detection shouldn't be spammable because that would completely negate their role as well... so maybe have scout plane perform sonar but have them remain stationary (basically only feasible if nothing is shooting at it) in order to use sonar?

As for gameplay architecture, what about sectionally damageable naval units? At least big ones. Nothing too detailed, but maybe on the scale of "battleship 3's giant turret #2 has been destroyed" and must be separately repaired from the main superstructure.

Protecting shores, why not a land based ASROC-style torpedo launcher? It has to be placed within some distance to the shore, and lobs torpedo's into the water. The biggest issue is with responding to the sub spam issue, being as it's on land, it wouldn't be able to use sonar or such to detect subs(logically at least). It could on occasion toss out a sonar buoy, or the torpedoes have their own active sonar.

I like the concept BUT if we take the idea from Starcraft then subs should also not be a part of your main army. They would work better as an actual raider.

Most games on the market now use subs -> frigates -> battleships -> subs as a rock/paper/scissors composition and that needs to end.

I agree with pluisjen please avoid Rock, Paper, Scissor scenarios Uber.

No. That's flat out wrong. You can not start out with a fundamentally broken balance.

Having naval units bigger than land units are fine. But by "bigger", I mean "Zergling vs. Zealot" bigger. One is meatier and more expensive, but can still be well defended by the lighter, cheaper unit. The units are well matched, and each has their own advantages.

The kind of extra large, super long range boats you're thinking of are a direct comparison between Zerglings and Battlecruisers. Wait, it's not a comparison, because the two units simply don't compare. One kills the other on top of dominating the seas, and the other waits to die. Sure, the land guy can build up some stationary defenses, but you aren't balancing standard boats against standard units anymore. You're balancing standard boats against enhanced defense turrets, and that's a battle where everyone loses.

Edit: *snip*