Allow wagners to surface like subs

The idea with this is to allow land production of the cybran faction to influence navy.
I would like to gauge the response of this idea before committing time to make a demo of this.

The problem.

Certain maps give a large advantage in regards to having the capability to influence navy with land production. Even in high level games there have been examples of hover spam being very effective to support navy, usually by the dedicated land player switching production to hover units.

Proposed solution

Allow wagners to surface like subs. This would also give the unit another purpose besides being a raiding unit.

There are many examples of how amphibious land is useful, e.g. #19469855.

Of course salems being amphibious would be an obvious counterpoint to the proposed changes, so I would like to hear other player's thoughts on that also.

Would they be stationary or able to move

what about increasing their torpedo damage? If there was a concern it'd be too powerful their range could be reduced slightly since with their slow speed they'd then function relatively similar to hover tanks in that you can try and attack naval units but the naval units can kite and/or run away.

They have just over twice the health of a sub and slightly less mass cost, but a fraction of the DPS (7.5 vs 37.5). Doubling their dps to 15 would still make them significantly weaker than a sub at naval combat (where the enemy stays in range), but might be enough for them to be usable as a last resort. However I dont know if this would cause any other issues from a naval balance perspective.

15 dps is almost as worthless as 7.5. Give it a 200 damage salvo on a 10 second reload

@zeldafanboy said in Allow wagners to surface like subs:

15 dps is almost as worthless as 7.5. Give it a 200 damage salvo on a 10 second reload

I mean... it fits with "hit and run" tactics that cyb would prob do...

Probably would be strong... get few of them, deal 2k dmg and back off... wait a bit and repeat.

@hinthunter

The Wagner has meh range and much lower speed than naval units so you could only really use it near the shore defensively, which allows Cybran to get back into the water. Navy can easily kite it otherwise

I don't think what you're suggesting is possible. @Balthazar could you enlighten us?

We're very limited on what we can do with motion type stuff like that. Only submarines can surface like that.

To elaborate, the only motion type options are:
Aircraft
Amph-floating
Amph-seabed
Land
Land again (there's two separate land-motion types that are identical except for the name, one's not used).
Hover
Ship
Sub
None (Structure)
To have anything that uses a combination of them would require you to swap out the unit in code, which breaks half the games systems.

Curious what makes the Salem walk on land?

That would be an engine hack, specifically designed for that unit

Doesn't the Salem just use amph-floating?

I see. I thought it would be simply something like changing the layer the unit was on. The unit script for some units has a OnLayerChange function, so I thought that the ui button simply changes the layer or something. How can I find the code that handles ui interactions like submarines submerge button?

While it might seem like a cool idea, it's neither feasible from the code perspective nor balance one. You can't have units that can go under your naval force and suddenly submerge and obliterate your cruisers/destroyers.