Change price politics for strategic submarines

advena

Submarine price:

- 4.500 mass (-50%)
- 20.000 energy (-25%)
- 10.000 BT (-50%)

Nuclear warhead price:

+ 4.800 mass
+ 400.000 energy
+ 129.600 BT

new warhead is same as Seraphim Battleship in terms of price
probably damage should be changed too but for nuke this is not that impotrant

Why:
More common use of strategic submarines as submarines
Fixing an introduced nuke-assist inconsistency
Fixing Seraphim <-> other factions inconsistency

FemtoZetta

More common use of strategic submarines as submarines

Aeon and UEF nuke subs don't even have torpedoes. This would only do something for Cybran and even with half the price the decision to use them as subs would still be questionable (very low hp, not a lot of damage for the price).

Fixing an introduced nuke-assist inconsistency

It's more difficult to assist a nuke sub than the building, so there's no real reason to nerf assisting the subs.

Nuclear warhead price:

4.800 mass

400.000 energy

129.600 BT

Fixing Seraphim <-> other factions inconsistency

This would just bring nuke sub nukes down to the near useless level of the sera battleship nuke. 2min more and 40% more cost per nuke is just unreasonably much.

keyser

i can see a logic to that, to see nuke sub used as well for their tml capabilities

arma473

If you had to buy an upgrade in order to make nukes, we could reduce the price of nuke subs. And we could get rid of the whole "Sera battleship nukes cost more because we know Sera players have to make battleships anyway so giving them same-price nukes would be OP compared to what other factions have to pay for separate nuke subs so we will also make Sera battleship nukes a little bigger to make up for the increased price."

This upgrade should be un-cancelable, pausable, it should be started automatically when the unit is created, but start paused. And it should be capable of upgrading while the unit is moving. So every time you make a "nuke sub" or a sera battleship, it always starts with the upgrade paused and you can decide whether to unpause it. There's no reason to allow it to be canceled.

If we're going that route, perhaps T3 subs should only be able to fire tactical missiles when they are surfaced. I like the idea of making it matter whether a sub is surfaced or not.

There other ways we could use upgrades to expand the game:

Upgrade to Ythotha to add a regen field. If they buy that upgrade, when the ythotha dies, the "lightning storm" does no damage at all, but continues to provide a regen field for allied units. So this upgrade would make the ythotha "safe" to send with your army. You would get more use out of them if you had the option to send them with troops without worrying that your ythotha will be sniped down and then your entire army gets fried.

Monkeylords should have a very expensive cloaking upgrade. It should be expensive to make the upgrade and after the upgrade finished it would cost a lot of energy to have the cloaking ability active. But this would make monkeylords more relevant even into the very late game.

Upgrade to t2 pgens to add an armored shell. It would primarily cost mass, not power. It would add a lot of HP (and for Cybrans, add regen rate). When an armored pgen dies, it has a smaller death explosion/blast radius. This would be an alternative way to protect against snipes. It goes against the current meta which is that you want to get T3 pgens and then recycle your T2 pgens to get mass back. Instead you would be spending extra mass to make them safer.

Mach

the reason t3 pgens are built over t2 is because they are more mass efficient, all pgens get more mass efficient the better tech level they are, while all mass extractors get less mass efficient the better tech they are

Elusive

I agree that naval nukes do need a revamp, but I dont fully agree with your methodology for achiving this. Reducing sub and nuke costs will more lead to naval nukes being regarded more as disposeable junk to throw at an enemy similar to t2 torps then actually making them offer a unique purpose.
Also, the ability to build cheap nukes would probibly be overpowered as it would allow players to drain enemies SMD stockpile at a reduced cost, and allow players to not really be conerned if a nuke sent into an enemy army/navy would be a net positive mass trade becaise it always would be.

What I would say is a better way to go about things is to move in the opposite direction, make nukesubs a heavy investment but one that can pay of greatly if done with stealth.
Buff nuke subs BT 1080 -> 3000 so they have exactally twice the BP of a normal nuke launcher, to offset difficulty in assisting.
Buff nuke damage from 3000/22000 -> 3250/25000 so that 2 nukes is always enough to kill an unvetted battleship, except for a tempest which would be left on less than 4000 hp. The 250 extra damage on the outer ring is so that it still one hits aeon crusiers to match up with other faction cruisers.
Remove the TML weapon entirely. The idea is stealth, if you want to tml bombard something you dont spend 9k mass on nuke subs when you have crusiers and torrents anyway.
Add strong anti torpedos to all the subs.
Nerf Cybran range for the nuke slighty, it already has radar stealth, it needs a little toning down to prevent getting overbuffed. Plus faction diversity yo.

Im not going to bother going into the details of the sera battleship at this time, that things nuke is such a hot mess I could spent ages talking about it.

Lapkee

Funny thing "faction diversity" in most cases can be finded in post about nerfing cybran some way.