Naval Feedback

Yes, you can build a pelter.

To answer this more deeply, i would ask what you were doing for 3 minutes? Because whatever that was, you have advantage in that over your opponent who rushed naval.

If you're talking about meso, and your opponent rushed naval like this against you, then you will have land island advantage as well as air advantage. Further, your commander will easily take care of all 3 ships if they are narwhals, or your bombers will take care of them if they are destroyers. Now you will steamroll him with your control of the land metal and your air control that prevents him from expanding on the sea.

It wasn't me playing the game. I spectated a newer player to give him some tips and he didn't manage to defend from one single boat. He would have lost the game anyways, because his opponent was way better than him, but it was interesting to see.

Do pelters have longer range than Orcas? I haven't tried it, and in the game I'm speaking about he didn't have the ability to build one because of his small eco and all the fabbers were shot down.

Yes, we are talking 260 vs 180 range. It's an unrelated problem if he decided to rely on air fabricators on a naval map. Alot of new players do this mistake.

I think in general naval would be much better if the orcas and battleships were not primarily direct fire units, but actually fired with the same mechanic as pelters, but upscaled a bit, or at least in addition to a forward mounted direct fire cannon for ship to ship combat. Orca could basically be a mobile pelter with light ship-to-ship gun, and battleship could basically be a dual-mounted holkins or holkins + pelters with light anti-air and no ship to ship. This would make their positioning much more important, allow them to fire over walls or high ridges, and create a nicely devasting effect where well positioned ships could shell the heck out of land targets while also being more realistic. Imagine circling groups of ships around one another trying to line up high arcing shell fusillades, while countering with direct fire units (gunboats and narwhals.) Note that this also actually renders the 'slow ships' mechanic useful, since you need to take their speed and turn rate into account when lining up shell volleys.

Just a few more bits of feedback based on what I've read so far:

1. People are saying the battleship needs a buff? Wow, I think it's an absolute beast. With the range advantage it has over all other naval units you can just park it down somewhere and it will kill dozens of orcas before they even get in range. And if you cluster your T1 up then the massive spread of those shells will punish you.

2. Good ideas on piranha balance, I like the increased vision range idea. I also think switching their attack to torpedoes might work quite well: on large naval maps I find defending dox/slammer raiding groups a big pain since orcas are too slow to catch them. You end up relying entirely on bombers, which isn't always practical (and also very micro intensive compared to your opponent giving slammers a move command), or static defences, which is not cost effective.

3. Stingray sucks hard. Fix it.

4. I do kinda agree with Jonas about shore to ship being too difficult. Perhaps elodea's right and in such a scenario we should have a large enough land/air advantage to win the game, but no one's a perfect player, and it's very hard to make a come back against naval from the land. I'm not talking about an early game scenario like Jones was describing: I was playing a 3v3 the other day where both teams had one spawn on opposite sides of a large lakes. We played the map twice, same teams both times, both pretty fair games. Both times however, the team that went hardest naval won - as soon as a naval force got into range of the main base it was game over. We were fairly even on the ground/air front, with neither team having a large enough advantage to tip the scales, and fighting back against te boats was nigh on impossible (and yes I was spamming up pelters outside their range, but the dps was too low to save the base).

Interesting idea @philoscience ! Whack it on PTE and let's try it (or someone mod it in?)

Generally I would agree that if you lose the land you can get back on it, but if you lose the sea you're probably boned.

Short Answer: Yes!

Naval is *only* useful on water- so where there is water it should be the strongest option. Not going naval should be a gamble you take to gain an advantage on the land / air battle *at the risk of getting rushed by sea*.

Adding in a land to water combat unit (e.g. hovercraft) would mitigate this as it will allow a naval player to move to land and vice versa.

Still if you start on the edge of a lake there needs to be some benefit to going sea (as the player starting naval is inherently weaker on land as you have a factory that can only assist in one area).

@elodea I disagree with you the piranha.... it can be countered easily with a well timed bomber. Piranha + fighters is more of a problem but then your loosing due to lack of air control rather than the piranha.

I personally think it *should* be possible for the piranha to be an effective combat unit. Ideally it would work well against orcas, which work well against narwhals, which work well against piranhas (creating a 3 unit 'triangular' balance). It would certainly mix things up as after the initial raid, currently all you need to make in naval games is Orcas (until t2). I agree the battleship is strong.

I think the battleships are cool and useful. That said, I appreciate long range units more than the average person. Probably because I'm a coward.

What would be really interesting is some kind of means of flooding or otherwise changing the water level of a planet. Probably not going to happen, but in a mod?

A large problem with naval is the lack of space to use it in. You start up a match against the AI and think "Hm. I could build a naval factory, or I could go vehicles and not be confined to this tiny pond." The lack of water planets is mind-boggling.

Yes, a tool to manually edit water on maps would make the proliferation of good water maps (of which there are few) much easier.

Stuff I Want to see Eventually

• Water planet template - cannot make one in the system editor without moding it
  
• Purely naval game play - this would be awesome
  
• Aircraft carrier - to support purely naval game play
  
• Corvette - everybody loves a corvette
• Minelayer and minesweeper - it would be nice
  
• Piranha - what is it purpose? escort? patrol craft? if its attended purpose is as a coastal defence its working fine. Although it should be faster then the other vessels but limited in range.
• Logistics system - this would be similar to the ammunition system for air
  
• Auxiliary ship - to deal with logistics
  
• Ice asteroids
  
• This form @philoscience
• Boats with tank treads @lafncow
• Uniqueness from other types - differentiation from land, etc.
• Area patrol - if not already in
  
• Reduce needless micro
  
• sub sandwich - mm....

Eventually Some Polish

• Tsunamis - just a animation not a simulation
• Waves - just a animation not a simulation
• Not passable areas - make them more visible

Again I like to see this stuff eventually. Also pretty much agree with everything.

why a naval carrier? what does it do different than a aircraftfactory ither tah n moving?

what does the corvete ?



no to auxilary units .. this what i disliked about conflict frontier wars the most ...

My general opinion is that naval is in a fairly good place just now. Not much I can add here that hasn't already been said by better players, but I think I'd like to add my voice to the general opinion-shower. Prepare for opinions!

1. A naval teleporter would be an awesome toy. It would move naval from being a second-class citizen of the annihilation republic to a first-class citizen, and encourage the creation of some really cool and crazy maps (pond-hopping included). And it would open up multi-planet naval engagements, which could be the most fun you have ever had ever.

2. Orca-fighter is damn strong. The core problem with orca-narwhal is that, because naval units have a wide default separation distance when you use the move order, including narwhals drastically dilutes the firepower of a blob of orcas. I have watched a fair few high-level ladder naval replays (including a blinder feat. Yaegz vs Elodea a few days ago) and it seems that narwhals are only good for defending expansions from the inevitable bomber raids, while orca-fighter is the stuff you use to push down your opponent's base. Giving the narwhal low-level torpedo mitigation might make it a bit more viable in these situations, but it might also be effective to allow narwhals to pack closer together when in formation, making a narwhal-orca formation more dense (and thus able to deliver its dps in a more concentrated form). But Elodea's suggested changes make a whole bunch of sense too.

3. Piranha changes seem like a good idea, if only to make naval a bit faster on its feet (or keels or whatever... no Cybran destroyers here). Giving them a torpedo attack (and giving narwhals torpedo defence, why not) might line up nicely, and help define their ship-to-ship roles.

4. The Leviathan is brutal. It outranges orcas and can kite them pretty much forever with a bit of support, and crushes almost all land units/structures in its path. I actually really like this unit as it stands, because it makes T2 naval seem worth it. But it has the 'standard' battleship weakness of dying to T1 bombers. Leave it, and balance around it imo.

5. Stingrays used to be good, now they are useless unless your opponent is massively ahead in air (and tbh, air is so good, you've probably already lost if that's the case). Elodea's suggestion of torpedo defence is a good one here, but I think this ship just needs a minor rethink: its ship-to-ship weapon is basically a slow-firing, not very damaging catapult, which in the context of a T2 naval engagement is nothing next to the long-range shotgun blasts dealt out by the Leviathan or the cost-effectiveness of an Orca push. If it's going to have a missile (and it might not even need one), how about a missile that:

i) builds in an onboard silo, like a very cheap nuke or supcom tac missile. And builds fairly slowly.
ii) only fires manually (unless you set it to an area-attack command, or perform some other micro-saving idiocy)
iii) deals damage equivalent to 55-60% of a Leviathan's HP
iv) outranges the Leviathan by a small but significant margin (approx 3-4 secs of Leviathan movement at top speed)
v) homes onto its target

Now drop the Stingray's movement speed down a fraction below that of the Leviathan (can't remember what that is at present) so that Leviathans and Orcas can chase down a Stingray unless it's carefully supervised. This leaves you with a Stingray that can engage ship-to-ship, or bring down specific land targets, but can't operate without a well-planned support fleet. You won't want more than two or three, but if you have them, they'll give you an advantage over an equivalent metal spend on Leviathans (assuming both sides in an engagement already have a few Leviathans shotgunning things down).

It's either that, or make it a support ship, pure and simple. Give it anti-torp, solid AA, and the naval equivalent of a T2 combat fabber repair gun. See how much use you get out of it when the Leviathan shells start falling.

6. I rather like the floating defences as they are, though I agree naval walls seem a bit odd in their current form. Floating pelters, AA and holkins in particular are things that we'd need buildable on water. Walls might be better replaced by units with anti-torpedo capabilities, but, eh, they don't really stop the ground fire from orcas anyway, which is mostly where naval dps comes from these days.

7. Can we have subs now please? Pretty please? A unit that can't be bombed into a small stain from the inevitable T1 bomber spam would be super duper. Thanks!

Good thread, this.

re-add dis

submersible subs never had been added in the first place ...

A aircraft carrier so you can project air power on a purely water planet against your foe. Could also make its own aircraft.

A corvette is smaller than a frigate and emphasizes speed. A corvette can perform multiple functions like coastal patrol, convoy escort, antisubmarine, antiaircraft, etc. Depending on corvettes purpose.

I didn't expect everybody to liked it.

So a warship not a submersible.

you know that you can build airfactories on water?
so again what is the difference?

corvette: ... nothing we don't have already ... as for speed buffing the pirana in that regard would do aswell ...

auxileryships are just needless complexity to this game and no fun ...

I don't play a ton of naval so I can't give too much input. However I do remember trying to kill an AI commander in the water with a swarm of gunboats, and they couldn't shoot far enough down to damage him most of the time. The bullets kept flying over his head. I don't know if this has been fixed since I last toyed with it though.

However I would love to see more t2 naval units. Perhaps a torpedo ship that cannot shoot at land but fires deadly volleys of torpedo's at swarms of ships?

I was responding to your question about if could make aircraft or not. It does not have to make aircraft. Where our aircraft going to land on a purely water planet?

They asked what we like to see I answered. Piranha it's already a coastal patrol craft and people are misusing it. A corvette could fill that role or just buff piranha's speed does not to me.

Does not necessarily add complexity to the game. Please look at the ammunition system. Other games implementation does not have affect on this one. It really depends on a implementation so it is not necessarily add complexity to PA.

Why not? It'll add diversity which helps make the game feel cooler, and naval special. It could be the same thing with a different model for all I care.

We could play the game with only one unit, but it's fairly well understood that that would be silly and very bland.