The Sea Shadow has simply been brought more in line with other tier 3 ships and should no longer be overpowered. This makes the deployed state more of an ambush mode than a main battle stance. The deploy function remains, but for the sake of both balance and logic, it now needs to divert power to its cloaking system, cutting down on the range of its laser.
Since tier 2 ships are now the default main battleships, the Laser Corvette is finally free of its awkward in-between state of a role, and we have balanced it to have the necessary baseline power instead of it being so heavily reliant on its deployed state. This was to give more value to its signature speed, since bike-like hit'n'run has turned out to have little value on the waters. Nod perhaps got the biggest overhaul with the new design direction, as the old approach caused Nod to be way too dominant.įirstly, the Scarab has had its model changed entirely so that we could give it a fully rotating turret and with it the ability to move and fire at the same time (Q-move). Big fleets of warships destroying each other in the blink of an eye also just felt wrong. We have also lowered the pace of naval combat a bit in general, as it generally seemed too frantic, to the point unit micro was almost inconsequential.
Naval dominance will now pave the way for amphibious landings, keeping naval relevant without losing the water meaning you automatically lose the game. Tier 3 are still long-range bombardment, but with much shorter ranges and generally more damage to other ships, making them more of naval artillery and less emphasized on taking out enemy bases on their own. The repair ships have become more general support vessels and can deploy into sensor arrays. With so few units in the roster of each faction to begin with, we concluded that our previous approach to navies was too chaotic at its core to ever become balanced.Īs such, tier 1 ships are now fast scouts and dedicated anti-air, and tier 2 are main battleships. While faction asymmetry is a big part of keeping things interesting, navies really had no "baseline" system the same way as lands units. Our core philosophy this time around was that we wanted to play things a little safer and balance navies according to a more consistent system, since naval balance has been an issue basically since its introduction. But that's not all! We thought this was a good opportunity to take a look at naval balance in general. We have been teasing them for a good while, and we are finally ready to release them.