Make t3 navy more exciting!?!

@CorvathraNoob Muzzle velocity increases would make it significantly easier to kill submarines. I'm not saying that's a bad thing.

Reducing the importance of dodge micro would be a good thing, because I don't find dodge micro particularly interesting. There could be other types of micro we could be concerned with, such as positioning the battleships if certain angles give more DPS than other angles. So instead of microing your battleships to dodge shots, you would micro your battleships to be facing in the correct direction based on what you know about the enemy fleet.

If battleship guns get faster, you could make them more maneuverable and they still wouldn't be great at dodging. Or you could make them less maneuverable, so that maneuver micro becomes more important and you have to be more thoughtful/strategic about where you send battleships. There might be an advantage to having a fighting force that is mostly destroyers/neptunes because they would be so much faster.

Perhaps battleship guns should have a minimum range. It wouldn't have to be a big minimum range. It would make it easier to use subs against battleships. It would make destroyers and Neptunes more dangerous to the battleships IF you can overrun the enemy. So you would need something like 2 battleships (one can cover the other) or t1/t2 spam to protect the battleships.

I am generally in favor of the OP. 25 percent damage buff and 50 percent hp nerf would work well. (Battleships tend to shoot more often than they are shot at because of their long range, so it shouldn't be necessary to buff damage by as much as hp is nerfed.)

Also, alternative options are available. I've always liked the idea of buffing nuke subs. Faster missiles, more damage, homing, cheaper faster building nukes would all help

Im not sure if i like the idea of nerfing battleships hp. Im my mind, a battleship is supposed to be both heavu hitting and heavily armored, so making it a sort of glass cannon just doesnt sit right with me. However, maybe the solution would be to just increase the dps in a way that battleships kill each other more easily while at the same time being still very durable, specially against smaller ships. The problem with that is that it may make battleships more powerful against other types of ships as well, althoug they are already so powerful and expensive that it might not make a difference.

@arma473 said in Make t3 navy more exciting!?!:

@CorvathraNoob Muzzle velocity increases would make it significantly easier to kill submarines. I'm not saying that's a bad thing.

Ya that's another game mechanic I just hate, and I would say should also get fixed rather than worry about muzzle velocity affecting it. I think you should be able to groundfire Harms, (and maybe atlantis I guess?) but groundfiring subs seems about as broken, counterintuitive, and contrary to a well balanced game design to me as the 1% built t1 radar blocking a tml. It's one of those things that can work very well, but takes some apm and attention to do, but to me just shouldn't even be an option to counter subs. I still have memories of one time losing t3 subs to a horde of groundfiring t1 bombers because I didn't micro them for 5 seconds. Just ridiculous.

@corvathranoob It would be nice if buildings had zero volume until about 25% completion. They would only start to grow after 25%.

While it had no volume, if any unit was standing on it, you couldn't build it. If an enemy unit was standing on it, it would lose health (and of course it wouldn't stop an enemy from walking through it or dropping from a transport onto it). That would make it much harder to block an ACU or a drop (blocking a drop of course is not legal, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't fix it. It's better to take away a cheat than just to punish people for doing it.)

@arma473 said in Make t3 navy more exciting!?!:

It would be nice if buildings had zero volume until about 25% completion. They would only start to grow after 25%.

That would be a terrible idea

Blocking shots with buildings is a nice feature eg. with t1 engies when you are being raided.

@tagada said in Make t3 navy more exciting!?!:

Blocking shots with buildings is a nice feature eg. with t1 engies when you are being raided.

Sad aeon noises

@tagada
I don't have a problem with buildings blocking shots generally, even under construction buildings, just blocking tmls with them. I know this was discussed long ago and is only a very rare team game issue so I don't want to dive too deep off topic on it. But groundfiring t2 subs is quite common. The ONLY time this might make sense is if a sub was surfaced, and is targetable for a few seconds while it dives again. The game is based on sci-fi fiction, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to keep things as consistent with the laws of physics as possible. And if people ever want to boast about the projectile physics simulation aspect of this game, groundfiring subs many meters below the surface makes no sense.

To me, the game plans for specific tactics and strategies, with counters to them. TML-->TMD. SML-->SMD. Subs-->torpedoes. If we want battleships to be able to counter subs, there should be some specific weapon they have that is meant to target them, like depth charges or torpedoes. So instead we end up with less strategy and instead more micro emphasis, which I think slightly detracts from a real time strategy game. This makes it a little closer to SC2 and a little further from what makes me love FA.

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It's not exploit, not to mention that it should stay in game as it's quite good skill expression. The only thing that really suffers from it is atlantis.

It's an unintended side-effect of AOE which can easily be addressed either by altering the elevation value of the subs (which won't work on maps that have ultra-shallow water) or by having AOE range reduced whenever such projectiles impact water (which is a natural behavior).

@randomwheelchair I never said it was an "exploit," I said it was a bad game mechanic. If everything you can do through micro is "good" because it demonstrates "skill expression," then anything that saves any clicks ought to be eliminated. According to your logic we should eliminate infinite build queues, patrol orders, attack moving, hotkeys, shift-queueing orders, etc. But that would be incredibly stupid.

@sprouto said in Make t3 navy more exciting!?!:

It's an unintended side-effect of AOE which can easily be addressed either by altering the elevation value of the subs (which won't work on maps that have ultra-shallow water) or by having AOE range reduced whenever such projectiles impact water (which is a natural behavior).

Something was changed with the CZAR no longer killing ASF.

Is it not possible to give submerged subs the same treatment against all direct fire splash effects?

@valki said in Make t3 navy more exciting!?!:

Is it not possible to give submerged subs the same treatment against all direct fire splash effects?

That actually would be possible and I never even thought of it. Submarines could have an armor type that protects against everything except torpedos.

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The question is whether there is somewhere more fun to put apm in giant navy fights, not extrapolating that being able to groundfire subs = you hate the idea of build queues.

Like by the same slippery slope in reverse you can just accuse the people that want to do this to also want a button that tells your units to automatically dodge enemy projectiles.

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@sinforosa Torpedoes, depth charges, stomp damage, crash damage (falling czar), nuclear blasts, energy beams (monkeylord/GC/ACU) . . . but yes, that sounds like a good idea

@randomwheelchair said in Make t3 navy more exciting!?!:

It's not exploit, not to mention that it should stay in game as it's quite good skill expression. The only thing that really suffers from it is atlantis.

Sure, skill expression, like pressing ground fire in a blob of units is something skill intensive...

It makes sense with T3 mobile arty, it makes sense with some T2 PD to increase range but it doesn't make sense to a battleshit to sink subs by shooting at the water. I only play UEF, I do groundfire subs and I quite believe this being a thing is what makes T3 stage a sluggish BB spam fest. Why would I build subs to counter BBs (intuitive) when they can just ground-fire in the moment my subs are still or sailing in a somewhat straight line?

If I recall it right, it was a limitation from the engine that subs can't change depth dynamically and I am not that up for the armor solution because in shallow waters it would make sense to ground-fire them but to be clear, giving armor to subs so they don't get splash damage seems way more reasonable that the current state.