OpenRA

zinc wrote: However, it's possible that the original just wasn't balanced that well for naval... I'm not sure that 3 missile subs (for example) are actually more dangerous in the mid game compared to half a dozen destroyers. A few destroyers can actually put a lot of pressure on land targets as well as the anti-air use, regardless of the limited range.

How do you justify cruisers being a tech unit and not the missile subs? -- well I think it would come down to whether the game balance works ok. If if it's balanced, I don't think we need to worry about any theoretical inconsistency with Soviets having a long range weapon at mid tech rather than high tech.

Before you produce missle subs all the destroyers should be eaten by your subs.
Sometimes you can snipe out techbuildings with them or even shoot with em into a group of artys.

This is also wrong imo "Obviously the issue is that Soviets have no equivalent of the destroyer"
The equivalent of the destroyer is the normal sub, they can smash them hard.

But the normal sub isn't anything like a destroyer. It's not actually useful except for countering the enemy naval and a bit of vision. It can't do any damage other than that.

zinc wrote: But the normal sub isn't anything like a destroyer. It's not actually useful except for countering the enemy naval and a bit of vision. It can't do any damage over than that.

This. If soviet player wins navy, he can't turn his naval victory into anything. He can't harass enemy ore fields near water or use navy for supporting land forces fighting near water. Or at least not until tech center is online and that is often too late into the game for missile subs to make any difference whatsoever. Before tech center only naval plays soviet player has access to are transport ship plays. However allied player can control vision over seas with hinds because of soviet's lack of AA.

I want to point out missile sub balance would most likely be balanced accordingly if it was changed to radar tech.

I think missile sub should be hybrid between destroyer and cruiser. Missile range against land targets should be shorter than cruiser but still long enough to harass ore refinery spots near shoreline.

Even if missile subs have the same range, I doubt that they are as effective as cruisers? And they have weaker shielding.

One worry I do have about missile subs from radar wouldn't be naval maps, where I suspect the balance would be fine, but maps which have small ponds on them and someone could get a longe range weapon at the radar stage.

There is always the option of creating a new type of missile sub with shorter range (as well as having the proper one) but that then takes you away from the original game and may be thought to be unacceptable.

Missile sub range has been reduced from 16 cells to 10 cells in blackened's navy rebalance.

zinc wrote: There is always the option of creating a new type of missile sub with shorter range (as well as having the proper one) but that then takes you away from the original game and may be thought to be unacceptable.

For the record, in the orginal RA missile subs had a range of 11 and tracked. So The Current missile sub is actually a break from the source material.

Ok but that's changing the ability of an original unit which has happened quite a bit in openRA.

I still think giving Yak's AA capabilities would be an easy simple solution to giving Soviets Radar level AA support to their navy without changing or deviating much from the original game.

Another idea is to have someone design a flak sub based on these flak u-boats that were used in WW2.


http://uboat.net/types/u-flak.htm