Will Naval ever be useful? ;-;

Now that we have proportional planet smashing, and craters getting filled with water depending on water level and location, I still feel like Naval will be weaksauce.

So, will Naval ever play a useful role?

yes, naval will have a useful role on water planet, which is not yet in the game

I figured water planets would be obvious.

I meant outside of water planets.

What? I can create water planets easily.

Short answer from Uber: No.

The long answer is a dodge to the question at hand.

Like many other requests, they just won't answer this one because they know their answer is distasteful to most of the community.

It's funny, because in older patches naval shredded land, and you actually had to care if your army was scooting around an enemy controlled lake. Not anymore. Now noone cares unless you have T2 naval (longest range of anything except maybe shellers).

They need to rethink all of this. Going into a 1.0 release without being close to feature complete is a big no. The backers will rebel, methinks.

Rebel?

You mean post on a forum, like it makes some kind of difference?

You underestimate the company, and overestimate the community.

I think the issue is is that the planets are too small. Meaningful landmasses and oceans seem to be mutually exclusive. Of course, this may be solved with the advent of larger planets.

Those were great builds. Naval could do some work, until someone nuked them or spammed air.

Issues with size =/= issues with balance.

Planets can already be fairly large.

They did away with the Able commander, didn't they?(And that was only done by a portion of the backers.)

I underestimate nothing, if the company wants to keep feeding itself. We are feeding them in some capacity, igncom, with our wallets

And Uber is intelligent enough to know that.

Well I think Uber have proven that they do listen to us if we are *really* upset.

There is a big difference between the usual posts of *this sucks- change it* from one person and the combined reaction of allot of players all with the same concern.

Uber couldn't in all seriousness make all the changes everyone want's made, just too many people.

The other thing to bear in mind, if you don't like the naval balance in the standard or PTE builds, there are also 2 very well thought through community mods that can address this. Probably the best way to get Uber to significantly change the balance is to support the community mods and *show* them something that is actually better. I personally don't think the balance is that bad- the naval is more fleshed out than before and is fun to play. It isn't very effective against land units (at least at T1) but I'm not sure that's really a problem.

Naval is very useful for securing large lakes- and at the biggest scales it is very much possible to have a planet with a good mix of land and water.

I think naval could be useful, but not in its current implementation. Although to be fair, Uber hasn't done a balance pass for Naval in a while. We'll see what they come up with.

There's three things that need to happen for naval to work.

1. Sinking Wrecks
2. Submarines
3. Torpedo Bombers

Sinking Wrecks are needed because of obvious reasons for anyone who has played with them. Wrecks get in the way and make naval advancements impossible.

Submarines are needed to add extra depth.

Torpedo Bombers are needed so we can actually do something about enemy occupied lakes once an enemy sets up shop in there.

From there, they need some balance. We'll see what's next.

Believe me, the game will sell considerably less if this community and the rest of the internet **** all over it.
Uber doesnt have the budget to affort any kind of big marketing (and i certainly hope they dont waste money on that), so they depend on the opinion of the internet.
They already pissed a lot of people off, and annoyed or irritated more with this weird gamma thing and the early access retail thingy and dont forget the shitstorm about the 90bucks alpha access (although, objectively that last part made perfect sense).
If they dont deliver what was promissed on the release the game will most certainly flop.

That said, I realy hope, that they take a few months until the balance feels right, things like navy actualy work and then release a well rounded, innovative, if a little basic game, so that they can add all those features we crave so much sometime after the release.

Edit: Ok, "flop" is probably a poor choise of words since they already got considerably over 2 millions in funding and a lot of people already bought it, but still. If the game doesnt sell well on release I dont see how they can afford to keep working on it, which after all is one of their stated goals.

I don't think there's massive additional feature implementations needed to make naval work.

Wrecks sinking is definitely the most major essential thing in need of implementation to make it enjoyable.

The rest is just an additional unit or two, and proper balancing. Which they haven't touched for ages. But it shouldn't be a biggie.

What I would love to see is being able to reshape the battlefield, for example slamming an asteroid in to give naval access to new areas for example.

Heh.

Heheh.

Except we can already do SEVERAL things about enemy occupied lakes.

1. Nuke, fairly boring but it gets the job done
   
2. Aerial assault. Gunships and bombers can already deal with naval units pretty well, a torpedo bomber would work against submarines yes but why would someone build submarines in a lake if no one is posing a threat to the control of the lake? Torpedo bombers are more for a war waging across an entire ocean rather than a small lake.
   
3. Orbital bombardment, anchors, SXX etc.

SXX and anchors can't hit submerged units. Nor can bombers or gunships.

And bombers and gunships aren't overly effective, especially when stingrays are on the field.

Why would someone build subs? Nuclear missile subs. I'd also love tactical missile subs.

Oh yeah... I forgot those were going to be a thing.

I think naval would work and feel better if ships had more of a Total Annihilation design.
Shorter, wider, and not that huge, that would also allow ships to form tighter formations so you can bring more firepower in range of your enemy easily.
I can never get the current ships to move the way I want because they are just too big and clunky.