I want to begin by posting a game that I found extremely annoying in order to demonstrate why I think this needs discussing. http://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/280190 I'd recommend watching this at high speed as even then you should get my point. Besides the balance consideration of why everyone was spamming the same unit, I realized that asthetically sea isn't particularly fun. Almost every sea weapon used for underwater combat makes a blubblubblub sound which gets extremely annoying. Furthermore almost every weapon these conflicts is either a torpedo, or a depth charge (which is functionally the same as a torpedo). Regardless of current balance, sea weapons are pretty boring, think if land games were about 5 different plasma cannon units plinking at each other all day. Now that I've explained the problem I think it's time to get to the point, I want everyone to post cool ideas of things to change the aesthetic of sea. This is not a balance thread, ideas here cannot change the role of ships significantly, instead this thread is to change how ships sound/look. Yes, this should be sort of neonstormy, but really I think sea needs something of a face-lift. Please help rid us of the never ending blub sounds and torpedo spam. Example suggestion:Turn the Hunter torpedos into cluster weapons that break into smaller aoe missiles, same dps and role, but more epic projectile spam. Bad suggestion:Duck OP nerf plz Any thoughts? EDIT: link fixed, I missed a 0 in my copy+paste...
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Well, things are a little better now that   RyMarq introduced some burst-fire torpedoes. Those at least feel slightly different from vanilla single-shot torps/DCs. The standardization of slow-moving missiles as "amphimissiles" or whatever you want to call it (the weapons on Ducks and Scalpels) and the amphibious conversion of Gauss has also been good. I think there's room for another underwater-weapon, though. A nice underwater-only energy weapon would break up the monotony a bit - bring back the Sonic gun as underwater-only and replace some of the shipyard torpedoes with it - Serpent and Crusader, for example. Such a weapon would be very limited in the units you could put it on, though, since many units sport torpedo launchers that can fire from land into water and an underwater-only-sonic-weapon would be implictly water-to-water only, so if you wanted to make this primarily a cosmetic change you could only apply it to shipyard units. Speaking of sea aesthetics, I'd also like to see the engine water options that make the surface of the water too opaque removed from ZK's listing of water rendering modes. I tried fidding with some settings after a reinstall and got caught horribly when I found out I couldn't see the amphibs well-enough to play.
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Give an amphib unit Gauss weapons. The recent patch made Gauss amphibious, let's take advatage of that. Maybe short range to avoid game breakage and exemplify that even Gauss has difficulty traveling through water.
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  AutoWarI about that, but the only existing amphib unit that wouldn't have completely new gameplay with a Gauss weapon is the Duck, and then it would fee too similar to the Scrubber/Dagger. So we'd need a new Amphib, and then you're figuring out a whole new unit/role. I'd rather just see a Gauss turret move onto the water - either let the Gauss become sea-buildable, or swap the weapon-types (and names) of the Stinger and Gauss. They could retain most of their stats otherwise. Or a Gauss gunship.
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Weapon idea: 0.1 second duration "concussive depth charge" that pushes large-ish groups of units away Archer-style with minimal to no damage. visual effect: plceholder blackhole animation, expands from 1% to 100% and fades, all within a span of .1 second. sound effect: *goliath main cannon noise* Weapon idea: "Ice-9 depth charge", applies slow effect to units in water in a small radius visual effect: normal plasma bullet explosion scaled up and slowed down and tinted light blue. sound effect: ??? feel free to suggest ??? How do you guys make my profile name link into your posts?
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Alter the torpedoes of one of the units to porpoise out of the water to hit the enemy target! Same flight path as tacnuke, minitiurized.
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Here's some silly ideas: Sonic Pulse Generator (Riot) Amphibious outlaw (no slow damage tho) weapon. It loses damage with distance and has mild impulse. Pulse Disintegration Beam (Artillery): Kind of like a dgun with very weak, constant damage and can hit multiple targets in a line. Can't fire upwards tho (so it would have to surface to hit surface targets). Lasts for several seconds before needing to cool off. Pushes units backward.
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@ArchShaman, AutoWarI don't think we need any silly special damage weapons or bizarre behavior weapons to handle the problem @Norm0616 describes. NTTAWWT of course, I like bizarre weapons. Just some more conventional weapons for the water would improve variety and differentiation. Surface has a rich variety of weapons that *just do damage*. Even without considering black-hole generators and slowbeams and grav-guns and lighting blasters, there's a wide variety on the surface in the form of lasers, plasma, rockets, EMGs, and missiles. Underwater lacks that. Also, to refer to a player with linkyness, use the at-sign @ twitter-style.
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Are you sure of that battle link   norm0616? :)
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  Pxtlunderwater combat lacks variety because the behavior we expect from water is radically different than the behavior we expect in air. A better analogue to water combat is subterranean weapons, althouth there is a lot of problems with that comparison, it's still closer in gameplay.
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@autowar - I'm just saying you're not solving the aesthetic problem Norm0616 described, you're trying to fiddle with the *gameplay*. A high-velocity underwater energy weapon would have similar gameplay to homing torpedoes, so it would be a nice way to introduce a new weapon-type into the underwater game without completely changing it.
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 Autowar / @pxtl The issue could very well be that there's not enough unit variety underwater. We have a total of four units that can participate underwater while being underwater they are: Snake - Slow Torpedoes Serpent - Generic high damage sniper torpedoes Ducks - Generic Blurb blurb blurb torpedoes Scallops - Weird Ball torpedoes Problem: Now the amph factory can't attack say ships while defending against other amphs with those surface amphs (such as: Grizzley, Buoy, Archer (rarely used?), etc) so it becomes a matter of spam duck / spam scallop (which can fight both) where as ships have a total of 4 units that can interact with underwater amphs (These are: Hunter (Very common), Snake, Serpent, Crusader), we see the ship game devolve into spam some of these units. Why? Because they take care of both surface and undersea targets. Guess what? All of these have torpedoes/depth charges. This is why people don't like sea -- it quickly devolves into spam Urchin or X unit all with -- you guessed it -- torpedoes. It makes for a very monotonous sounding and quite boring game. There's no varied unit tactics, there's no interesting features about sea, no weapon variety, no sound variety, just spam x or y unit or spam urchins and listen to the sound s of blaaagghh blurg a blurg a blurg. Yes, there's balance issues, yes there's that ANNOYING sound of torpedoes, but these are due to the lack of units that can interact with underwater units, thus further illuminating this issue that norm has brought up. Solution: Why don't we add more units later on with different weapons? Such as a submarine lab with more subs, an amph lab with more anti-sub/amph units or some new land factory that can also swim on water and dive to set up ambushes / attack amphs? Point is, we need new stuff to bring down the monotonous nature of sea, which would mean that more people would play sea which would mean better sea balance. Edit: elaborated on problem. Edit 2: By the way Pxtl land weapons have all sorts of different characteristics that make them varied and interesting. Not only that listen to the soundscape of a land game.
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Pxtl - I'm saying that the lack of variety is because beam/plasma weapons dont work underwater. This limits aesthetic options to the A/V effects of weapons that do work underwater, or work by weaponizing water, or work via fluff that lets them ignore water entirely.
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Well an aesthetic change doesn't have to be just changing a weapon. Take for instance the sniper sub, it makes the same blubblub sound as the duck, it has a torpedo that looks almost (if not) the same, and you have no idea what makes it different from a normal torpedo. If the Goliath shot the same looking projectile as the Hammer with the same sound would it really feel as good? Small things like a new sound for the sniper sub that gives you chills or making the torpedo start slow and accelerate (same overall travel time) could drastically alter how the sniper sub feels without really changing the balance. Although I think sea is missing interesting units, this is more about making the current ones look or feel better.
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super neonstorm cool weapon design that doesn't change gameplay: Water conducts electricity. ignoring that water conducts electricity well only when salt is around, we can use this to say we can have cool, electricity-based underwater weapons. Here's an example: Serpent sniper sub does boring old blublublub, but what if it instead shot a jolt of blue electricity(a blue that's not water;it has cool looks; done in a way you can see it from the surface, you get it. color doesn't matter) leaving a cool effect that allows you to trace the weapon towards the end of LOS. It can have a cool thunderbolty sound too. instead of snipersub, it could be a thing that replaces torpedo boat. this is even better, instant hit! and none of that anoying silly torpedo AOE or not nonsense. TL;DR: bolt of lightning in water.   
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A little vanilla, but I have a coupele basic ideas to spce things up: Diffrent types of torpedoes! One of the reasons sea combat is so lame to watch is because all the torpedo units have the exact same projectile, and that projetile is lame and colourless. If each of these units had a more unique weapon it would go a long way in increasing the fun factor in sea battles (even if the seagame itself is still dull). I would give the snipor sub, snake and the hunter new projetile and visual effects and change the crusader underwater weapon (it sucks anyway). Snake: (no idea) Hunter: Fatboy. A larger, sumpier looking thing with a visable rear propeller and medium acceleration Snipersub: Lance. A long sleek missle with a vibrant exaust tail and extreme acceleration (So people have time to cry before it accelerates and explodes shit. thanks Jseah for the idea! ). (Note, its techincly possible to just scale the current torpedo model, add colors to the exaust trail [like what happend with the scalpel, looks way cooler now] and touch the acceleration stats to make these torpedos. I would imagine its way easier to do that then to make brand new effects.) Crusader: Dgun emp depthcharge with decent AOE and enough power to stun a bunch of ducks. I think it might create a nice dynamic where a player decides between skirmishing or running in and attempting to EMP the defenders Amphs.
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Supercav torps are cool, and Snake torp could/should really be one of those, with a purple blow to betray its slow-damage mechanic. This also would allow gosh a new sound! Imagine sea that doesn't all sound the same!
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I had wwritten to RyMarq to tell him to give colours to bubble trails of torpedoes to better see who shoots what. He agreed it could be a good idea but said was too lazy to implement it.
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