What about the Naval part of the game, what would we want ?

Re: What about the Naval part of the game, what would we wan

I want to see floating Hoverfactory's and other floating buildings and floating defences ...

And of of course underwaterbuildings.....


And i want a ship that can fire different rockets thruw its turret launchers for firing on other ships or base bombardment

i have this image of of a ship moving its two turrets and aiming toward the enemy fleet and firing its advanced missiles at other ships the missiles leaving white smoketrails wich reflect in the water.....

thats what i really mend




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Ever heard of TA ZERO its a reimagigning of Total Annihilation given you new units and buildings for arm and core and given you a new race to play with the Gaurdians of Kadesh an advanced race....

note : the mod is now ad alpha 3b and only features Tier one units at the moment

Re: What about the Naval part of the game, what would we wan

Having had the time to think about it further I wouldn't be adverse to seeing fire ships depending on whether such a tactic would still be in use in the far future.

Re: What about the Naval part of the game, what would we wan

It's usually better for tactical depth to make unit roles more limited. Anti-ship and base bombardment are two different roles and so you're better off having different ships for those roles. Using Forged Alliance as an example this would be destroyers for killing ships, and battleships for killing bases. Of course both can do the other role too, but less cost-effectively.

Just to put what I said into context, and using Forged Alliance as the closest example we have, it's not uncommon to have a situation where one player makes a handful of cheap subs early in the game and parks them outside the enemy base. This can effectively deny this player the ability to go in the water at all, and so means that he cannot produce any navy. In FA your options of dealing with the subs are limited: either send the commander in to reclaim them, or make torpedo bombers.

Subs don't do a lot of damage so the commander will be able to successfully reclaim five subs or more, but it means that he will suffer significant damage, and you can't use him for anything else while he's doing that. Torpedo bombers will do the job, but they are T2 and require a significant energy investment.

Assuming that the player with subs parked outside does not deal with them immediately, the other player is then free to tech up his navy and send in a cruiser. Cruisers have sufficient AA to take out several torp bombers no problem, and they outrange any land unit. So as soon as the cruiser is in range of the base, the naval player has won.

This is a valid strategy of course, and it's very satisfying when you pull it off, but I think that there should be more options for dealing with the subs and stopping or delaying the naval tech strategy.

This is why a T1 land unit that fires low-damage torpedoes into the water would be good. It would have limited sonar (much less than a fixed sonar station) to help it spot the subs, but it would have no other use whatsoever, no ability to float or go underwater, and its torpedoes would be low damage enough to be ineffective against surface boats, which could of course also outrange it easily. What it would let you do is deny subs from coming too close to your base for long enough for you to get your own naval factory.

Just for clarification, I imagine that the torpedoes would be fired in a high arc to get over obstructions, and upon landing in the water they would accelerate towards the submarines.

Re: What about the Naval part of the game, what would we wan

I'm Seeing a lot of "micro" intensive ideas being thrown about here, great ides some of them, fantastic stuf if we were integrating them into a ship simulation, but what we need to be working towards is, how can we improve naval warfare in an RTS above and beyond the tired old NAVAL RTS formula while still keeping to the extreme Macro style of the gameplay of the design?, sure it'd be great to bring the NEXUS style take control of every aspect of your ship type gameplay to a ship simulation, but it wont play like an RTS we somehow need to breath new life into an aging and set in its ways gaming stereotype.

Is there anything that can re-invigorate a style of naval RTS implementation that has practically been set in stone since the days of TA and the first C&C games?

Re: What about the Naval part of the game, what would we wan

The comment above about making ships more distinct from land got me thinking. I would agree that it would be an improvement (or at least a difference with a good reason behind it) to have ships subject more to slow acceleration and braking, larger turning circles and perhaps even impact damage from ramming each other.

If ramming was implemented it would have to be done very carefully - assuming ships are subject to slow inertial changes then forcing collisions would be very easy. Assuming that ships would automatically slow down enough to stop where you told them to of course, it would still be very easy for your opponent to cross your path and result in collisions between both sides. If this was intentional it could be a good gameplay mechanic, but if it happened unintentionally it might just be a nuisance - not sure though, any opinions?

The other alternative including ramming would be to have this need a special order to perform. Using a key as a modifier (e.g. Alt = attack-move) would not increase micro so this could work, but then you still have the question of how ships with significant momentum could *avoid* ramming each other.

The other naval change that would be nice is scale: Supreme Commander's scale between air, land and navy is completely off. Boats are too small and planes are too big. It doesn't have to be entirely realistic scale (you would end up with small boats being experimental-sized), but larger boats would just be generally better, and it would also fit well with any changes to ship manoeuverability as proposed above.

Re: What about the Naval part of the game, what would we wan

Land torpedo-launching unit? What about, again, an amphibious anti-ship unit?
As I said earlier, those units shouldn't become useless once on land, though. But turning the torpedo into a short-range oversized grenade should do the trick.

About anti-ship weapons, the Spring game NOTA apparently has a good idea : as ships are really bigger than land units, there are anti-naval guns. Those are quite imprecise and have very small AoE, meaning that they won't be efficient against heavy land units (won't touch them often) or swarms (will at best hit one at a time), but ships are big enough so each shot damages it.
It would probably work against large buildings like factories as well, but those guns don't have the same range as artillery.

Re: What about the Naval part of the game, what would we wan

I wonder if perhaps the scale is the key.

Looking it up:

Nimitz class air craft carrier is 332m long by 76m wide.
Ticonderoga class missile cruiser is 173m long x 17m wide

In comparison, the M1 Abrams is roughly 10m long by 2m wide.

The C130 Hercules Transport aircraft is 30m long and 40m wide
The F-16 fighter craft is 15m long and 10m wide.


Of course, in order to do ships even to half or quarter scale, that means you need a BIG map. 4km (supcom size) would be covered by a single modern destroyer.

Re: What about the Naval part of the game, what would we wan

Your 332m aircraft carrier is only 1/3 of a kilometer. Still having 1/12 of a 4km map being all boat does sound a bit big.

But yeah making the naval craft feeling like building sized weapons platforms (along with the different acceleration and turning radius) would be a good way to make them distinct.

Also while we are on the subject of map size I imagine that the PA maps will have to be a lot bigger to get the same "feel" as the smaller SC maps. A sphere with a 4km circumference has less surface area than a square that is 4km across. Also if you are on one end of a 4km flat map and your opponent is at the other end then you have 4km of land between the two of you. But if you want to have 4km of terrain between you and someone on the other side of a sphere then it has to have a circumference of 8km.

Re: What about the Naval part of the game, what would we wan

I think he's talking about the area that a destroyer can target.

Re: What about the Naval part of the game, what would we wan

Not sure where you guys are getting the 4km part from, but let's go with that anyway. Also, I seem to recall hearing somewhere that maps on planets will not actually be spheres, just something that can be placed onto a planet to make it look like a sphere. If we assume that they simplify their map design and keep it so that the map has an edge, we can guess that they'll go with a half sphere. Don't quote me on this though when we actually do get proper info on maps.

In any case, the 1/3km ships would most likely be the end game ship units, such as the carriers, the battleships, etc. Nothing wrong with these things taking up significant portions of a map.

Re: What about the Naval part of the game, what would we wan

4km map size is from a dimly remembered interview with Chris Taylor when he was talking about map sizes relative to a unit, where an average map size is about 4km across.

And yes, I meant that a modern destroyer can easily project force across that distance .

Another point to consider. Modern mobile artillery fires in the general area of a 155mm calibre shell. In comparison, the cannon on a 1940's Iowa class battleship was 406mm. I believe they mounted 4 sets of 3 of these cannons on a battleship.

A good naval implementation should take this kind of thing into account and illustrate just how completely kick-*** navy ships are.

Re: What about the Naval part of the game, what would we wan

Well, the average map in TA was 8 by 8, and in SupCom about 10 by 10, with smaller 1v1 maps being about 5v5 and obviously bigger maps available.

Ranges would obviously work differently considering the highly curved surface of the map (planet) and considering it is a game which can't simulate real life perfectly. Ranges for naval units in SupCom (destroyers about 1.2km and battleships about 2.5km) were about right I think.

Re: What about the Naval part of the game, what would we wan

If i remeber correctly, having some sort of cube map projected on a sphere was the plan at the start, but i belive i saw a post that they changed it to real spheres.

Re: What about the Naval part of the game, what would we wan

Well, that'll certainly make it quite challenging, and hopefully fun to adopt our usual strategies with RTS to a spherical map.

Re: What about the Naval part of the game, what would we wan

Gun range for all units needs to be much lower than real-life, much the same as vision needs to be lower. SupCom's ranges were fine so no need to go reinventing the wheel on that one.

Ships need to strike a balance between being big and being usable. No need at all to have a 300m-long ship, but ships should be substantially bigger than tanks, and appear a sensible size for planes to be interacting with them.

Re: What about the Naval part of the game, what would we wan

Ok please don't shoo off what could be epic!
Of course I think Anno 2070 and From Dust when I think tsunami! But! why did I buy From dust? because looking at videos of gameplay, I was like: "Will you just LOOK at that engine and the amazing things it can do! I just wish Forged alliance had sea that had up and down huge waves and a terrain that sunk in added to the black blotch it leaves when a shell hits or a bomb blows, that would be so cool! and it would be so cool that if you bombed an area near the sea sufficiently for the ground to be dug in below sea-level if the sea flowed in and balanced out the same way from dust does and then then boats could go into that new gulf!" And then I bought From Dust, Bam! and I spend time playing just drooling at it's engine. (I know the graphics are nothing fancy but the idea is most definetly present, this is red faction guerilla told bitch please, the engine is there, all that's left to do is skin it)

Wow. I am with you, Bro.

Personally If not big waves that make the ships have to shoot through huge walls of water and make big splashy splashies and have to do more vertical corectional aim than horizantal, all I want is for the naval faction (out of air, space, land and navy) to be the most heavily invested in.

What I understand by that is that navy MUST have the biggest unit. there, that's starters.
It should also have big contrast in size with the diffrent units (otherwise what good is a unit being "big"?).
and finally a flourishing choice of units. A bigger amount of diffrent units then say, land and air combined (otherwise what good is it having water planets?).

Re: What about the Naval part of the game, what would we wan

Im not saying no to tsunamies, im just saying that they arent "new".

Re: What about the Naval part of the game, what would we wan

To make water only planet little bit more intresting i'm thinking Three layered sea battles should be fine (eg. Sea crawlers level , sub level , ship level)

As mentiond before changing the sea underwate landscape no could make changes in tactics like
shallow water = no subs
underwater cliffs = no crawers
ice burg or floating rock? = no ships

only problem is we need a way for the player to see the battle under the ice burg and more importantly comand units that is not to clunky or awkard but i can just imagin using the ice burg to sneeking under it with my subs and crawlers to do a surpise attack.

Re: What about the Naval part of the game, what would we wan

I would imagine the game showing a virtual representation of your units and weapons behind the terrain, possibly in a really basic retro graphic style.

Re: What about the Naval part of the game, what would we wan

I know not if this has been posted yet, but I'd like to see floating fortresses

like, a base on a water (or gas giant) planet would be pseudo-modular, and capable of movement, like one giant battleship.

Could lead to some interesting tactics, I think.