A miserable experience and frankly broken mechanic

Without having watched the replay there are two, maybe two and a half, things people conveniently ignore when they say just kite.

The biggest: if there was a large naval battle there could be literally hundreds of thousands of mass sitting where you need to kite away from. Congrats, enemy gets that mass and you’re now massively down overall.

Next, though closely related: You can’t kite forever. Sometimes you have to defend some area and just can’t back up more. This also means the enemy, unless they’re cybran and can’t abuse this, can keep their base and stave off land invasion with massive hover spam for longer than they should be able to.

The half reason: sad cybran destroyer noises

Again, I didn’t watch the replay. I just dislike the “just kite” argument, I’ve seen really good players, including top setoners, lose games because hover. Admittedly, it’s due to pretty niche scenarios that cause that and part of it is just depression, but still.

The hard part about hover isn’t that it wins mass for mass, pretty sure it doesn’t. The winning part with hover is that you can have massive dps concentrations with it that you can’t get with ships because they’re bigger. Navy also often massively overkills the hover which helps the hover quite a bit.

I didn't mean to imply kiting is the magic answer, but if we're comparing units mass for mass then both should be used well, and for the units with the larger range that means using that larger range to their advantage. 10 T1 arty is going to win from 10 tanks if the tanks don't move, but that doesn't mean T1 arty is OP.

It might very well be that hover is broken, but I'm asking if this is just a gut feeling or if there's some actual data for this.

@indexlibrorum I apologize - that wasn't directed at you, I was preemptively addressing the most common argument. And I also do agree with you on that, if the navy has to be used poorly for hover to be effective then it's not a hover issue.

every hover unit spam is melting even vs frigates, they can supplement your navy rush if you got momentum but substituting navy with hover is an idea everybondy of us had once and it didnt worked out. Hover maa can only substitute cruiser till there is a real torp spam and there is no point in spamming t2 hover units when the enemy got destroyers. i think you can bring a match fast to an end if you create navy momentum and spam out t2 hovers before the enemy got 2 destroyer, i guess...

T1 is always good at swarming t2/t1. And looking at the replay thats exactly what happenend. besides he spend alot more mass into hover then you did in navy, so its no wonder he pushed back. But if you instead of battleships made frigates, you could have pushed all those floaty arties back. Aeon destroyers are just not good at handeling spam, because they have high damage low RoF.

I hear that the legendary t1 frigate can kill dozens of t1 units

this is like comparing percies to labs, high damage and slow rate of fire vs spam = lots of wasted dps,

making frigates would have made all that spam useless.

I watched the replay. It turns out Aeon navy sucks vs hover. This is not new news.

Lets go down the list

Tempest+BS+Torrent suck against Hover for obvious reasons. They have low rate of fire and massively overkill their target. Also hover units have small hitboxes and they can miss.

Exodus: I believe half of the Exodus DPS is under the water in terms of depth charges or torps. And the number 1 feature of hover units is that they are unaffected by Torps.

If you want to counter hover units then you need to invest in units that have high damage on their surface guns and low dps on their torpedos. The Valiant is good here.

The Neptune and seraphim destroyers also trade well vs hover because they always hit their shots regardless of the size of the hitbox.

Aeon navy has always been terrible against hover. The best thing you can do is ask for seraphim tech and make seraphim destroyers. Aeon destroyers are atrocious against hover.

But that requires you to

1. scout that your opponent is making hover.
2. Have enough brainpower to ask for seraphim or uef tech
3. Have a teammate who reads chat
4. scale production.

You have to be at least 1600 rated on setons before you begin scouting for hover spam. It takes a fairly high IQ to understand which naval units are good against hover spam.

Every navy obliterates hover unless the map is to tiny for t2 or t3 navy. Also aeon navy is by far the most powerful in the game because of tempest and omens.Also a crusher has a huge radar bubble and a frigate also has decent radar and omni exists and it is very good.