Leaking battleships

Battleships are usually large vessels that can take sustained fire and takes massive effort to destroy. In SupCom you generally had to defeat the rest of the navy before you could take them down.

If torpedoes and other attacks hitting ships below the water level causes ships to start leaking and sinking it could add more ways to deal with large ships rather than just shooting till they blow up.

While smaller boats are more likely to just get blown up by torpedoes larger ships actually starts sinking as torpedoes hit them and blows holes in their hulls. This causes torpedo bombers and submarines to have roles as capitol ship hunters and ambushers where they don't just shot at everything till it dies but allows them to put attrition on the enemy that forces them to act or see their ships slowly sinking to the bottom of the sea.

1 or 2 torpedo hits might not cause substantial leakage and can be contained by onboard pumps and repaired by internal ship nanolathes. 5-10 Torpedoes might mean the ship is on the way of sinking in seconds or even minutes. Unless substantial repairs are done immediately the ship will be lost to the fishes.

As the ship takes in more and more water it slows down and become an easy target for other faster ships.
The water finally consumes the ship slowly beneath the waves as it sinks. The majestic battleship is now at rest on the bottom of the sea.

So one submarine can cripple a battleship completely? Seems a bit unbalanced to me.

How about torpedoes just get a damage buff? Seems to work just as well to me.

For "balance" I'm going to have to insist that my Commander can be upgraded with a caulking gun which then triggers a mini-game full of Active Time Events to rush around the bilge plugging holes. :roll:

This is really just a special case of what is being discussed, and rejected, in the
A "Low Health Threshold". How units respond near-death thread.

Battleships usually have no weapons against submarines so even 1 submarine could destroy a battleship in SupCom given enough time.
However considering how long time it would take you basically had to be able to destroy the battleship very fast before the enemy could react and in that case you could probably win outright with your submarines.

Without leaking ships:
You sneak up on the enemy battleship with submarines. You fire at it and the enemy sends his Destroyers with depthcharges. Now if you don't destroy his battleship it will be fine and go off with a lot of health and you risk losing all your subs to the destroyers if you pursue. If you retreat the enemy knows you got subs nearby and wont let you get close to his battleship again.

With leaking ships:
You fire your torpedoes. The destroyer escorts are nearby. You brake off and disappear. The battleship is now leaking and unless it get repaired it will sink. It hasn't taken substantial damage but in short its' mobility will decrease and you will be able to overrun it with smaller ships unless the enemy ship retreats for repairs.

I don't such an idea should be implemented on all units but I think it is valid for some units.

No damage modifiers. At least, not on the surface. There are still ways for weapons to excel in one theater or be locked out from another. But locking out weapon targets as the first design choice isn't a good start, especially if a weapon has an obvious ability to point and shoot.

Nature has yet to discover any creature that makes sense living only on the water surface, with one kind of orientation, with its flotation dependent on a gigantic hollow chasm. A kill bot encompassing the pinnacle of evolved technology would be wise to listen to roughly five billion years of experience.

The animal kingdon hasent, but nature has.

And you gotta bet that i'll be putting turrets on iceburgs if I can afford it.

That's not so much a boat as it is a moving land mass with engines.

Wait a minute. I see what you did there!

Hell yeah!

I'd want moving landmasses for battleships, what about you bob?

Set sail for awesome!

It's just a rock with engines. It can't be THAT hard to balance, right?

Make it out of Pykrete then!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Habakkuk

After all, if it was crazy enough to be designed in WW2 then the physics defying setting of PA should be awesome!

Well, I meant that stronger torpedoes would be better than leaking battleships, in a sarcastic way. Sarcasm is hard to transfer via the interwebs. I still don't like this idea.
Plus, if I knew someone had subs, I would escort my battleship with destroyers. If battleships leaked, I doubt anyone would build them because they would require 24/7 constructor support.

This kinda reminds me of Homeworld 2, where the biggest ships (Battlecruisers, Carriers, Motherships) had systems you could target, to disable them temporarily. This meant that you could not just fly a Battlecruiser alone at the enemy, because 2 bomber squadrons could easily disable the engines, and if it didn't get any support you could basically kill it with a few units given enough time.

This was an awesome mechanic, because huge fights would often start over disabled capital ships, escalating over time. You send fighters to deal with the bombers, he sends gunships to take out your fighters, then you would need frigates against the gunships, and so on.

I don't expect this for PA, but some kind of vulnerable systems on big units like Battleships, Reactivated Super-bots, mega-projects and what not would not be unwelcome in my book.

Pykrete? Wow, I haven't heard of that one in a while. Actually, that's a great construction material! It floats, it's tough, it's durable, and the best part is it's built entirely out of no metal. While such a material would be horrendous as real armor, it is not a problem for a platform built entirely out of local terrain, some energy, and a bit of science.

And the best part is, well... pic related. Hoist the black sail! We've got a battleship. A huge vessel, vulnerable subsystems, and piracy, all rolled into one.

Tbh....




.....great idea.

Nature also has yet to discover any creature that's even remotely bulletproof, so I hope they don't take too many cues from nature :roll:

That said, floating islands of ice sound awesome.

Physics has yet to discover anything that's even remotely bulletproof. If there is a defense, there is a gun capable of breaking it.

The race between offense and defense technology is certainly a topic that can keep someone busy for a long time. Nature has certainly had its own successes in one way or another. But it ultimately comes down to gameplay. A "realistic" battle would be everyone 1-shotting everyone with tactical missiles. That's no fun.

:lol: I still can't tell in genuine or sarcastic!

It's nice that you post all the examples, but it does illustrate my point that in a choice between following nature and technology it's not so easy as to say "take an example from nature" when everything tech has built so far has proven far more efficient.

I know you're trying to push some kind of "subs only" idea, but this is a very poor argument for it for multiple reasons.

Actually, that's my argument against TML based warfare. Everyone fighting missiles with missiles because missiles, and may the best missiles win.

The "sub centric" idea has a whole different set of reasons behind that. Mostly, it can do the "stealthy, ship centric warfare" without getting completely screwed up every time water touches land. The best balance against land, is to fight it with more land, and keep water out of it as much as possible.

A surface vessel fights in the crappiest arena possible. It is disadvantaged from every angle, fights against units it can't relate to, and contests resources it can't reach. Nothing about that makes sense. Let the sea battles happen where they matter- over resource deposits, geothermal power, and with million ton blimps raining terror from above.