The Problems With Naval

I am on board with these comments, me hearties! I agree that naval could use a lot of love right now. Naval is actually quite fun to play, but there could be a lot more awesome injected into it, as the OP suggests.

While I don't actually want to see FAF navy implemented (because T3 Seraphim sub spam was not my favourite part of that game), I agree that adding a hovertank, subs, and even maybe a torp bomber would be ace.

I dunno about the carrier idea, but a mobile factory making fighters, T1 bombers, and T2 torp bombers would actually be pretty badass. There's no fuel in PA, though, so I don't know how good it would be apart from the whole 'mobile factory' thing. Maybe it could also act as a combat fabber for naval, sending healing drones to nearby naval units? With the high HP of naval units that could actually be hella handy.

And yes, a naval teleporter. Of course a naval teleporter!

Edit: Also, having naval being interesting would allow people to build BIG planets (R>1000) of mostly water to use as the centrepiece of a system oriented around naval combat.

I don't play much T3, whats up with the seraphim subs?

One *big* issue I've found with naval when playing water only maps (we really need to get naval working in that scenario well as a first step) is that it is *so* weak against air.

To put this in context, the leviathan can be killed in a single pass by 2(!!) t1 bombers. The leviathan is the biggest combat unit in the game, it *should* be tough and hard to kill like a millennium was in TA. 2 x t1 bombers to kill the most powerful ship is a bit silly. I also think AA ships should be much stronger against air. As things currently stand, when on an all water planet, I use naval factories for fabbers and scout boats (as they're fast / cheap- quite like them) then focus on hard air. There's just not sufficient fire-power or critically *health* in any of the ships to make it worth the investment over bombers.

I actually like the look / size of the ships personally, so the issues with them are only related to balance tweaks. Also naval should *demolish* land forces within it's range imo. Placing a base next to a lake and ignoring naval should be a risky move and would promote people trying to sneak a naval base next to an opponent. It could really mix things up.

Yeah it's sad the game went retail while naval is so broken even tho water planets and naval itself was a reached stretch goal..it seems that naval in beta was going in the right direction bc it was very powerful.