Naval Balance Survey

@harzer99 Cruisers may have much lower AA DPS relative to mass than T2 MAA, but their range and accuracy is far higher, so it more or less balances out.
Plus, on top of that, cruisers aren't a dedicated AA unit.
All of them have TMD.
UEF has decent long-range missiles, and a fairly weak direct fire weapon.
Cybran has long-range proton cannons nearly as powerful as those on their destroyers.
Aeon... Well, that's actually a dedicated AA unit, and an insanely powerful one.
Seraphim has really powerful long-range missiles.

So ignoring the AA and TMD, UEF and Seraphim cruisers add an additional ability to the fleet, and Cybran cruisers are great in ship-to-ship battles.
So I think it'd be perfectly fine to make cruisers no longer an AA monster and instead have the AA as more of a long-range utility.

@bellatrix Cybran cruisers are expensive and trash vs torps compared to other cruisers. Sure uef and sera have their missiles but uef cruisers are pretty wrecked by torps. Micro’d sera cruisers are a bit better because of flak but still vulnerable. If you don’t have air control and you’re not a faction with hover flak torps are extremely good.

Why aren't the flak and AA systems found on the naval vessels similar to those found in the land units ?

It seems rather fundamental to grasping the use of, and balancing of - the entire class. There's no validity in supporting AA weaponry that's better - either in damage or range - than what you might find either in a mobile unit or a static emplacement. They should be almost identical in capability.

By the way, i'll drop that here : Aeon cruisers should be less expansive, because they fill no additional role than TMD/AA. Or just have more HP, or a stronger cannon ... Anything that make you want to built them ...

@auricocorico They have the highest dps and the best atm. So they get onepassed by torpedos the least mass efficiently B)

@harzer99 UEF cruisers are the best atm because you can build shield boats for them.

Their only strengh is that you need 6 torps instead of 5 to kill them. Big deal ... Meanwhile all other cruisers have powerfull guns/missiles and Sera has flak AA .. doesn't seem like a fair trade.

The higher dps is a scam, they still need two cycles to shoot down 1 torpedo, and the second wave of missile deals massive overkill, so their "highest dps" is only relevant against T3, not against torpedo bombers. Actually the best cruiser regarding AA is the Seraphim one, because the flak will melt the group of planes attacking it, so you'll end up losing more torps against it.

Aeon has hover flak that accomplishes the same thing that you are saying phim cruiser is great for while also having the greatest cruiser for killing single air targets. It also has arguably the best destroyer in combination with a t2 sub.

@auricocorico said in Naval Balance Survey:

By the way, i'll drop that here : Aeon cruisers should be less expansive, because they fill no additional role than TMD/AA. Or just have more HP, or a stronger cannon ... Anything that make you want to built them ...

Aww man... thanks for letting me know.
Time to build much less Aeon cruisers on water maps >.<

Survey is now closed, here are the results.

https://imgur.com/a/pSPibBb

I'm not terribly experienced with Google Forms so Imgur is the best way I've found to share the results. If you know a better way let me know.

Naval Balance Survey Summary

There were 228 responses (with at least 216 responses to each question).

Here is a single image version of the survey results: https://i.imgur.com/yasLezG.png

The overall FAF naval balance was rated at an average of 3.69 out of 5.00 (with a 1 being pretty much unplayable and a 5 being perfect).

The majority of responses indicated that subs should be buffed, frigates should be nerfed/made less powerful, and that torpedo bombers are too strong.

The majority of responses indicated that battleships should not be reworked to have less HP and more DPS, and that surface weapons should continue to be able to groundfire subs.

Here are some stats from the survey (factions were rated based on naval strength, with 5 being the strongest rating and 1 being the weakest):

Here's the raw .csv data if someone wants to extract it and pull out only the 1800+ responses, for example.

Naval Balance.csv

Looks like a majority wants T1 frigates nerfed and T1 subs buffed. So how about it? I recommended awhile ago just switching their costs so sub is cheaper and frigate costs more.

The majority also thinks aeon is the 3rd worst navy faction. How about it? Time to give them a buff

Alright got bored and sorted the data by rating bracket. All I can say is that not even 1800+ is a decent enough rating group for reviewing navy balance:

NOTES:
I use > to represent .1 difference in preference for navy, meaning that >> means that a group prefers a navy .2 more than the next subsequent faction.

<300:
UEF >>>>> Cybran >>> Seraphim > Aeon

300-800:
Cybran = Aeon > UEF > Seraphim

800-1300:
UEF > Cybran > Aeon >>>> Seraphim

1300-1800:
Cybran >>> UEF > Aeon >>> Seraphim

1800+:
UEF >> Cybran >>> Aeon > Seraphim

Breakdown:
Rating (UEF, Cyb, Aeon, Seraphim, Overall)
<300 (3.7, 3.2, 2.8, 2.9, 3.2)
300-800 (3.6, 3.67, 3.67, 3.53, 3.67)
800-1300 (3.82, 3.74, 3.7, 3.3, 3.4)
1300-1800 (3.76, 4, 3.6, 3.3, 3.76)
1800+ (4.1, 3.9, 3.6, 3.45, 3.9)

My only rationale for this data is that this survey was done by a bunch of dudes that have like near zero experience with navy.

Seraphim has indisputably the 2nd best frigate and either the 1st or 2nd best destroyer alongside the 1st or 2nd best cruiser while also being able to abuse zthuee and their t2 hover. Considering them the worst navy faction is literally impossible to justify.

By the way, I wouldn't read that much into the "small nerf for frigates" part of the survey. I voted that frigates need a "small nerf" but my idea of a "small nerf" is basically like nerfing sera and cyb frig very slightly so that UEF can have the 2nd best frigate to compensate for peepee heavily specialized t2 stage. Maybe make cyb frig 20 mass more expensive and either reduce phim AA or increase UEF AA.

So putting some more thought into it and looking at the data tables, I think a massive part of the problem here is the entirely inconsistent way of measuring by people.

The first issue is "what exactly is the benchmark for navy balance" because Cybran has a much stronger showcase on traditional navy 1v1 maps due to their frigate. However, their showing on maps like sentons is significantly worse. Likewise, UEF has a much harder time in 1v1 navy but it really plays to its strength in late game navy.

I personally therefore used Seraphim as my benchmark navy and gave them a 3 since they tend to be a comfortable pick for any sort of navy engagement and then gave UEF and Cybran higher ratings because they dominate in their niche. I gave Aeon a lower rating because while they are strong on very specific maps ie sentons, they are absolutely throttled in tons of scenarios due to the sheer lack of frigate AA, including other large teamgame 20x20 maps like selkie or beetle dance. If I instead decided to weigh sentons more heavily than I originally did, Aeon would bump into a 4 easily as a faction. However, I did not but maybe other people did.

However, I see data that seems like people only really cared about senton balance or ladder balance or some other balance. I also see people really just operate on some totally random benchmark. Some people only gave a 4 or 5. Some people only gave 1 or 2. I personally have no idea how you can rate things like this and not have an "average rating" benchmark, but I'm sure if I went and talked to some of the dudes that gave nothing but 4s and 5s we would agree on a lot in naval balance, it's just expressed in a different way.

For me, no faction is a 1 because everyone has a strength to play to and no faction is a 5 because there is no faction that is universally best in any (or most) navy circumstances.

What this means is that the scale range of the data is almost 100% useless. What matters is the difference in values subsets have because that at least somewhat controls for the 2nd issue (could still have a person have the exact same opinion as me but give Aeon a 1 and UEF and Cybran a 5). The 1st issue is just impossible to account for here.

I dont see why aeon would be bad on selkie/beetles dance but good on sentons.

I generally see beetles have more frig play due to the large amount of water mex. Selkie is more debatable but I think Aeon really suffers from cruisers being sniped and then losing a ton of navy power since you aren't really going to make more than 2 or so cruisers.

Sentons you see a much larger amount of scale to overcome the issues compared to what tends to happen on other maps. Likewise, early frig spam doesn't win you massive amounts of map control expression over underwater mexes and stuff.

If anything i think the opposite is true. The ratio of frigs to destro's in sentons is way higher than on any other conventional 20km teamgame map. Ofcourse you see more early frig action on beetles considering there are mexes to take and defend but it isn't to such an amount that aeon will suffer a significant drawback. Furthermore because of the chokepoints aeon destro's are even stronger there. Aeon is definitely in my top 2 navy factions for a map like beetles

@femtozetta said in Naval Balance Survey:

You could make the T2 ones useful by making them submerged.

pls no harms are already painful enough