Underwater/amphibious factory

Well, I've had it in my mind for a long time that there's still one method of mobility Zero-K hasn't exlored, and that is amphibious (underwater-style, the way the commander moves in the sea).

I'd just like to put the idea out here, and hear people's and devs' comments.

Thoughts:

-The factory would bring more variety to the sea unit/factory selection.
-Some or all of the units would have to be bots, or even all-terrain or jump, since the edges of seas are often steep.
-The units would need to be desirable on land-only maps as well, like the hovers are (mostly because of penetrator). So there probably should be at least one great unit in the factory, that'd be tempting on land-only.

Feel free to support, criticize, and comment.

sprang: do you remember CA? it had the exact same thing you're talking about. amphib jumping pyros, cans (old jacks), gimps, etc.

with one faction though, its hard to make units that are meaningfully unique, eg. an amphibious sumo is just a duplicate with the ability to walk underwater. units that are almost identical are redundant. Redundant units are bad. with a whole nother factory for amphibs, its hard not to make an amphib unit that is not just an underwater version of some other unit.

However, I wouldn't mind a special amphibious unit in each factory, to counteract the complete unability to re-take the sea if you've lost it.

Pinguinpanic:

An underwater suicide unit would surely be fun. My gut feeling is that a sonar jammer would be massively OP though.

Your idea about not having AA/only having weak AA is a viable one. It's logical that underwater units don't need to care a lot about air. That'd also give the factory a special weakness, to offset the strength of amphibiousness.

maackey:

I don't remember CA having these amphibious units, at least in 2008 when I played it. But that might well be where I got the idea!

Licho:

Hovers feel a bit bland currently, except for Penetrator. But they fill their job well, as a secondary sea factory.


I don't think the factory would have to contain redundant units, like the underwater sumo. There are plenty of possibilities, and good ideas have been thrown even in this thread.

-An amphibious kamikaze unit.
-An underwater rocket launcher, able to bombard land.
-A jumping underwater unit, maybe armed with a shotgun, so you could jump with them to the water surface and shoot once. With them, you could make surprising land attacks from unconventional angles.
-A weak but fast amphibious scout.

Also, there could be a unit that'd be capable of shooting hovers, for example some unit using underwater gauss. However, in that case, hovers would probably need a unit capable of shooting subs, for balance reasons.

We explored underwater things but they didn't work out. They interact with sea far less than hovercraft and have less diversity in the interaction.

When you make an underwater unit that can shoot at things in the sea there is one important question: Does it beat the basic submarine? I would think it shouldn't because if it beats subs then the unit is a replacement for subs. A unit that picks off ships without sub coverage is still a bit of a duplicate role though so the amphib units must derive some power from being able to walk on land.

There is also little room for multiple combat amphibs due to very tight underwater lineup for other labs. Here is the list of units that can hit amphibs:

• Sub
• Long ranged Sun
• Torp Boat
• Destroyer
• The torpedo launching turret
• Prec bomber

Fighting an amphbious factory with sea looks like it could be a bit boring as Torp boat will have to beat all amphibious units.

Non-combat amphibs (aka things that can just go underwater, not fire there) cannot just consist of a single unit type like they did in TA (eg Triton) due to the ways they could be countered. A unit that could deal with gunships, bombers and swarmers and still have enough HP and speed to be useful in an assault is a unit that is too good at far too many things. So to have useful non-combat amphibs we would need an entire factory of them.

I have an alternate solution to non-combat amphibs, amphibious troop transport. Basically give the Athena the ability to build a costly (2kish) and high health amphibious transport that can hold many units. This would allow people to attack coastlines with any unit combination they want.

Sea in general is already quite complex and there are 4 factories; Sea, Hover, Gunships and Planes. The main sea factory is by far the most complex with the addition of the submarine layer so I think sea is already doing fairly well as far as complexity is concerned.

I don't think most hovercraft are bland. Mace is quite a powerful riot/skirm and the assault hovercraft can be used well to penetrate lines and attack vulnerable stuff. It's raider is a bit poor though.

What to do about amphibious units has been discussed for years. I'll go through the proposals we've tried and how they turned out:

On the problem of amphibious units very broadly, they are countered by just a handful of units while underwater, namely torpedoes and subs. They do not interact with hovercraft at all. This makes the dynamic very clunky, and they become like 'another kind of air' (with much less stuff that shoots them), needing dedicated weapons to fight, especially when you mix them with hovers which cannot be shot by torpedoes at all. It is slightly more interesting on some maps because at least amphs can surface, and potentially shoot their torpedo-armed enemies with impunity, but a lot of maps have very large bodies of uninterrupted water to fight in. Some solutions to this might include letting torpedoes hit hovers, and/or adding more underwater-firing weapons. Now, to implimentations

Amphibious units in each factory- This means that every factory can do something in the water, but that if you are on a mostly water map, you cant really field these units. You wont make a factory just for 1-2 amphib units, when you can make hovercraft, planes, gunships, or ships.

Amphibious units in their own factory. We can either make this factory also good on land, in which case it is all you make on mixed maps, or only good on water, in which case it is totally redundant in 90% of games (like ships are already). On the other hand, since hovers are good on land and water, they are actually often all you make on heavily mixed maps, so a second factory like this would probably just add variety. It does entail inventing a whole new unit set (This isn't so hard- reintroducing units from BA, XTA or CA, not to mention all the new ideas) which is going to take a lot of time to design, balance and get feeling right.

Amphibious units as AT/jump. We tried this for a time, with the Can and AA spider having underwater firing capacity. The problem with the can was that its short range meant in deep water it couldnt hit anything, and its huge hp meant it took ages to kill. The other problem is that for mappers when they design, cliff + water = unpassable. So it makes a lot of areas passable that arent meant to be. A sea is meant to have more and less defensible shores, bot slope is better for amphs.

Amphibious units as Spherebot/mbot. These are incredibly strong, powerful factories. By making them amphibious, we completely change the dynamic of a lot of maps, things like bandits and ak's raiding across the water in SSB or scorpio, or outlaws and warriors rising out of the water right on top of your defenses. It makes fronts much larger and harder to defend. To try and rebalance for their amphibious ability after they have already been balanced for land would undo a lot of work and screw up their major role, land-land combat. I honestly think this implementation had promise but there was a lot of backlash and it got reverted.

Hovers and Amphs in the same factory. This was the implementation we had before we switched to ZK. It solves the issue of 'sub and torpedoes counter the whole factory' and 'how can we make a full factory from amphibious units'. This was before we canabalized the interesting units from arm veh and tank and put them in the hover factory, back when hover was pretty boring with just assault, raider and arty. If we want, since hover currently has the least units and the least special units, we could add a couple of amph units to the factory. This would be the easiest solution, but somewhat unsatisfying, because it doesnt add any new factories to the sea-sea lineup.

The main reason we havent done anything more with amphs is the last implementation (mbot as amph) was bad enough that we scrapped it entirely, and the old implimentation (combined amph+hover) used OTA unit models exclusively. Nothing more has happened on that front because people still dont seem happy with sea (ships + hovers, let alone adding more units) and Zero-K is basically in a balance and gameplay freeze at the moment while we work on other things.

I've tried the current implementation, obviously, though maybe the metagame has evolved. I'll start a new thread about sea and what I think of it.

Does anyone play it 1v1? If not, then the metagame has probably barely formed. Not that it needs to 'work' on SoW but some kind of map, at laest.

Hovers...they're ugly. And they need a spam unit, like flea or glaive.

We can add a water Skuttle without cloak - it would work fine against unprotected warlords and can't be detected by usually low range sonars.

I would call it "Blowfish" :)

Revision: Tank lab should be the existing lab converted to amphibiousness, in addition to a new lab with amphibious bots. It's kind of the odd lab out right now. The amphib lab should be a lightweight lab like the Veh or the two infantry labs, with the idea being that you use the pure-amphib lab to make the beach ready for your tanks. Getting a Goli up onto a beach would be hard but rewarding.

Tanks can't be amphib. Most maps are made with the assumption that amphibs have bot pathing, this works for BA because their amphib tanks actually do have bot pathing. But I like consistent visual cues.

Shields as amph was tried and didn't really work, see previous comment about just a method of transport.

My current thinking with amphib:

I would consider splitting the submarines into a separate sea factory (it's a bit crowded) and putting a few amphib units in this factory as well. Subs could gain something like a lighter sub, maybe kamakaze? Amphibs would probably consist of a unit with torps and a strong transport.

Sea would need quite a bit of work to make that work though. Splitting the subs into another lab would further accentuate the per factory counters in sea and increase the amount of teamwork required to play sea. Basically an even larger learning curve.