Obligatory navy thread

I have to join the club of enjoying SC2 aesthetics. I like both styles. And I think that hamping on a game just because of aesthetics detracts from the bigger picture.

I'm against hover tanks becoming a possible naval alternative, because that is EXACTLY what happened in SC2 with the Illuminate. Their main tank could hover. As it happens, spammed main tank>navy. This is why I'm pretty happy they're only making one faction. Same navy all around

Ah, but this is an indie game with fairly tight budget limitations and a low artist count; they have explicitly said that they're going with a very stylized visual look that is easy to produce with a low budget but still looks nice.

Further, battleships run into the "experimental" issue; you can have them look pretty cool, but then you only get 5 designs ever because it eats 6 normal units worth of production time.

My original point with those was the relative scale more than the style. I'd like to see a similar scale paradigm as with land, simply because A: you have water and underwater to develop and B: you can add more variety if you don't spend so long on the individual units.

Because if you spend a lot of time trying to figure out whether something is "good" you throw away time you could have spent just enjoying things which are nice quality (if not in the top 5% or similar)?

I honestly disagree.

1. All SC2 units had a texture scheme that featured teamcolor heavily. I don't remember if UEF in SC2 was blue and teamcolor or yellow and teamcolor. It lended to "toy army" a bit, but I liked it.
2. The 4 tanks glued together with a giant main cannon was intended to make it look like an artillery fire support platform, which is exactly what it is. Emphasizing the 5 cannons on wheels bit over "rawr im a giant brick you can throw at the enemy".
3. The tracks were largely to grant it mobility so it could kite (or at least, that's my guess)
4. If you look at other designs (Jackhammer, Disruptor Station), circular motifs on artillery style units weren't uncommon. And UEF was more closer to a general "futuristic" design, not "boxes".
5. Boxy guns was an aesthetic shared by a lot of SC1 and SC2 stuff (cybrans had triangle barrels, Aeon had random energy projector type ones). They just carried that over to UEF for SC2.

You claim you want variety, but you also say you want navies to be more similar to armies. These to positions are not very complimentary. Making naval units bigger increases variety, since there are only so many combat roles, and land units tend to fill all of the single-turret ones. If you've already covered all the bases on land, all your simple floating tank-like ships will be basically copies of existing land units.

I immediately know whether aesthetics are good, which allows me to spend the time I save insulting people with bad taste on the Internet.

While I'm going to ignore the rest of the paragraph, since it's clear that you enjoy having the wrong opinion, this one can be conclusively disproven. Long thin rounded barrels. Fat stubby square barrels. But you also mention cybran, so let's look at them too. Short stubby barrels.. Long thin tapered barrels. If you think these are the same, I'm going to have to declare you legally blind.

As with you, I won't bother with the rest of the post since it's mostly an elaborate way to insult me, but: I'm talking more variety within naval units; I agree there needs to be a differentiation between naval and land but I just find "sub frigate destroyer cruiser battleship" to be a boring and overtread unit set for naval. Throw out what "reality" uses and come up with some cool naval stuff, darnit!

You mean like "attack boat, submarine hunter, guided missile cruiser, aircraft carrier, strategic missile submarine, submersible battleship, counter intelligence boat, shield boat, torpedo boat, battlecruiser, submarine aircraft carrier"? If only there was a game that featured those units...

So there are 2 things here which I need to address.

1. Naval units are almost always built on a power scale at least one tier up from their equivalent land units, resulting in experimental-cost battleships and fleets made out of 6-8 ships and sub spam. Realistic, but boring.

2. Most of those types were lame:
* Submarine hunter = submarine but with not even a bad reason to surface it, ever.
* Torpedo boat = submarine but can't ever go underwater
* Strategic missile submarine = submarine but with nuke capability that next to no one ever used
* Submersible battleship = what is this I don't even (cool in theory but mostly pointless in practice IIRC)
* counter intelligence boat is also lame (yay fast stealth boat.... Too bad air scouts and omni radar was way too easy to get)
* Submarine aircraft carrier was aircraft carrier but vaguely safer really.

Some similar comparisons could be made for land units, but when that is the entirety of your unit variety it kind of sucks. And you can't do more considered testing or come up with better balanced ideas than theseif you're spending a month's worth of dev time (as opposed to a week, the relative amount is more important) on each single unit.

you're not a very good player are you, because all of these units were really really important and have their own unique roles.

then if you play free for alls they become even more important.

Even setting aside my skill level (I mostly played lan games with a friend of FA), there just isn't variety in "this is a sub with no surface gun and moar power" or "this is a sub but it doesn't go underwater".

These are commonly used because they are common words for warships. A submarine is any ship which can travel under water. A frigate can be pretty much anything but is usually smaller than a destroyer, a destroyer or cruiser can also be almost anything. A battleship was just the biggest and best fighting ship when it was around.

All of the ship types you listed have been used as aircraft carriers. Destroyers, submarines, cruisers, and battleships have been used guns as primary weapons at some points, missile at other points.

Just because it is a frigate does not mean it can not be an aircraft carrier, and just because it is a destroyer does not mean it has to be smaller than a cruiser.

There is no reason that ships being built on a higher power scale leads to sub spam. The cheaper submarines are the easier it will be to spam them.

Why should any submarine ever need to surface? Unless it is a old fashion battleship, or a aircraft carrier, I see no reason it should.

Actually the first effective submarines started out more as torpedo boats that could go underwater for short periods of time. Today torpedo boats are replaced by missile boats. High speed, high damage, and low cost make these have a unique niche.

So one implementation displeased you, and was not useful enough. It, and its less strategic cousins, are pretty useful due to long range and stealth.

Its slightly cooler than most non-submersible battleships.

Again this is just a specific implementation.

See the battleship comment above.

Well yeah, sub spam is more because subs are pretty much universally made a lot cheaper than any above-surface ships.

That aside, the power scale thing really should be tackled. Do we really want 8 ships as navy being an average engagement? Especially when the rest of the game is (to borrow a term) a "robot meatgrinder simulator"?

I would take 8 large ships over 80 tank sized boats any day of the week.

How do we solve the issue of "well you get 5 different designs for your entire navy then because it takes 2 months to make even 1 unit of that scale"?

Setting aside the unit obsoletion that sup com suffered from, there was an intricate system of soft counters going around.

* Submarine hunter = submarine but with not even a bad reason to surface it, ever.

The submarine hunter did tend to obsolete attack subs, however taking a page out of the TA book sub hunters would specialise in taking out subs at the cost of ability to deal with ships. Less powerfull torpedos more anti torpedo etc. They counter sub spam during battles and for harrassing.

* Torpedo boat = submarine but can't ever go underwater

These went with sub hunters a lot only during battles they were better because they cost less allowing for you to make more of them and get more damage from them for their cost, however you pay for this in that they can be fired upon by surface ships so they weren't as good close to the coast.

* Strategic missile submarine = submarine but with nuke capability that next to no one ever used

Well, in longer games, especialy in 5 player free for all lans, if there was water these were used. They provided long range tac missiles from a position of relative saftey and perhaps stealth because you couldn't be seen while under water.

* Submersible battleship = what is this I don't even (cool in theory but mostly pointless in practice IIRC)

The sheer damage of the tempest combined with its factory ability made it very very powerfull for shore bombardment, and if you went up against ships you can submerge and run away because they were comaparativly fragile for their cost. These have won many games for their owners (even in some competetive online play).

* counter intelligence boat is also lame (yay fast stealth boat.... Too bad air scouts and omni radar was way too easy to get)

Hiding every unit that isn't covered by sight or omni day meant that you opponent often had to retarget during battle increasing the life time of your fleet. Or if they aren't in battle you can hide your fleet, even if the opponent knows its there obscuring their numbers and which ship is which is very very usefull.

* Submarine aircraft carrier was aircraft carrier but vaguely safer really.

The atlantis had three functions, if you take aaway any two of them and it still serves a decent purpose, when surfaced it had great AA, it was the second best air factory and it was a very strong sub. the down side? expensive.

but yes, all those useless boring units you talked about were all very usefull and unique

Well given the art style Uber is going for, I do not think this will be much of an issue. Adding a few turrets to something does not take that much longer than making one turret. To save time they could reuse parts from other units.

Not really. If you need a T2 naval fac before you can start spamming subs, then sub spam won't be decisive in naval battles, as you should be able to stake out a large enough territory using T1 units to have an overwhelming economic advantage, and the early gameplay that really decides who wins in most matches will be using ships/air/hover/amphib, not just who has the biggest blob of T1 subs.

On the subject of submarine spam, I think an important part of the solution would be good anti-submarine warfare aircraft (maybe two, one that is slow and loiters like a helicopter and one that is faster like a bomber) that also have SONAR (or whatever the sensor for underwater detection is) and torpedoes (or whatever anti-submarine weapon is appropriate). If you can spot the subs, it is much easier to kill them.

What you are describing is exactly torpedo bombers. Yes they were good.

In TA they lacked SONAR.

Subspam is an unrelated issue that resulted from submarines being the fastest naval unit in the game and the most cost efficient form of antiship DPS. It has nothing to do with battleships. And fleets of 6-8 ships is perfectly fine, since it makes naval feel different to land, because you care more about individual units.

Actually, if you start tarring things with a broad brush, land units have even less variety. They're basically "tank arty flak scout". All the other units were "bigger tank, bigger arty, bigger flak, even bigger tank, even bigger arty, et cetera". You identified five types of naval unit, but really there are only four types of land unit in SupCom. And any counter argument you make I'm preemptively shooting down by calling any unit which deviates from my classification as "lame", because two can play at that game.

This is a problem that was made up by your own deluded imagination. SC had sixteen types of ship spread across its four factions (more if you count the diversification of destroyers, cruisers and battleships), not the five that you claim. Sure, you think most of them are lame, but we've already established that you have terrible taste, so that's irrelevant to the point.