Water sucks

Literally its bullshit nothing makes sense in water now. Before water games were most epic and fun, but with introduction of amphib factory it was ruined and now it is beyond anything literally. Ships is worst factory now you never need ships avoid them. + you cant see anything in the water coz you cant afford that horribly priced sonar and amphibs are just horribly op there.

I have to agree with [pikts]wolas here. Sea gameplay has shifted too much towards underwater combat, which is slower and much more boring than surface combat. It is mostly about torpedo weapons and monospam.
The lack of los underwater because of hard to obtain sonar only makes it worse.
On top of that there is much less interaction with other factiories such as planes or gunships, because most of them can't see or hit underwater.

Ships are indeed the worst factory, they cant deal with amphspam easily and apart from being limited to water, they are generally micro-heavy and annoying to use.

Boatfac has serpent too, which outranges everything.

But admittedly, sea has become underwater combat now, which is slow, porcy and boring with lots of terraforming turrets for the urchins to stand on.

Then again, before amphs it was boring too :)

Also I do not understand why sonar is so expensive? It is static and has the same level of cost as a Vulture, which can move and has radar!

It's just an underwater radar .... give it back the old crappy range and cost.

My thoughts:
- amphibs and hovers currently default-dominate any maps with nonzero shore length, there's just no reason to pick anything else, while staying toe to toe with any single-domain factory
- #sonarlives
- underwater is boring

This is because ZK doesn't have any legitimately mixed maps. Either you have to be able to traverse water, or you don't need to. There are nearly no mixed maps, and the game is not optimized to be played when mixed maps are abundant. Consequently, hovers and amphs rarely get to play where their advantage of being cross-boundary would actually give them anything. Most of the time, they play either full dry, or full wet. If they played weaker than fulldry or fullwet factories in such uniform domains, they would not be played, and having them played is thought better.

Things i would do if there was a larger army of me with a lot of energy and free time:
- Remove sonar as a mechanic. Wooo propaganda.
- Make cross-boundary ability be mandatory for efficient amph/hover play
- Remove all the maps and make new better ones specifically to allow mixed terrain to occur more often, in a consistent and well-defined visual language.

Things that could happen despite such army not being available:
- Scallop becomes riot/riot, not skirmisher/riot
- Sonar stops existing as a mechanic.

Things that could happen at about same implementation cost, but much harder to obtain politically:

- Underwater combat de-exists. Submarine units surface to fire.

Does ZK actually NEED a shipfac? I feel like ships have never worked in TA games, ever, with their inability go on land and finish games. They spawn boredom and stalemates. I'd totally be in favour of just removing them, or else giving them legs so they can climb on land. Only one of these two changes will truly fix sea.

quote: This is because ZK doesn't have any legitimately mixed maps.

http://zero-k.info/Maps/DetailName?name=DownRiver_v1

I thought there were plenty of decent mixed maps?

I've played memorable games on:

Isis Delta
Scorpio BattleGround
Finn's Revenge
Aquatic Divide
Onyx Couldron
Tangerine
Folsom Dam
Flooded Valley
Lowland Crossing
Cull
Indonesia
Tangled Isthmus
Drab
Sands of War
Sail Away

Opinions may differ on these, but that's a lot to choose from.

quote: Downriver is not "legitimately mixed" map in the sense that i would mean. It's a lanes map with different lane terrains, that's all.

not sure that is true - players usually go hovers or amphs in mid, which swings in and out of the bottom fight. The reason avg game length on that map is so low (~20 minutes) is because is if one team wins the whole sea, they quickly use the income and ability to control mid/ roll up bottom to turn it into a win whatever the turtles up top are doing. its probably one of the only maps where most players will use land units, yet the actions of the sea player often decide the outcome.

Ships has to be really OP coz they are so limited and they are now worst they cant walk or hover on land it just doesnt make sense.

Ships need a landboard.

Anarchid

On scallop as riot/riot, why not scallop as skirm/skirm? Add a new riot to amph lab, re-role Buoy as true assault.

Honestly, my preferred option for water would be to make it insanely porcy so there's no punishment for ignoring it - you can seal it off with Urchins, with all urchin-breaking units being late-game things. Then a land player can seal off water with urchins and forget it exists until mid/late-game when he should be multi-lab anyways. Of course, you'd want maps to keep naval areas small and low-metal to avoid bogging the game down in a porcy slug-fest. Which would make ships dull unless they had good ways to interact with land (which, imho, is exactly what they need).

The corollary of this is that skirms and light assaults would be a bit usless in the face of uberporc, so the actual triangle wold end up being Scouts, Riots (which could be skirmy, it doesn't matter they'll still die to defenses), and Porcbreakers.