Shields in sea?

yes.

quote: Bring back surf board? What was bad with that unit?

I don't remember where I read or heard this, but somewhere I got the information that the surfboard was bad because it made units that were only supposed to be only land units be able to go anywhere for a cheap price and fast. So you could potentially get a super zooming boat with a crab on it that basically means doom to all enemy ships. You can probably see what's wrong with a crab that can go anywhere on the map and is fast on water. Yes it could die from submarines but if you have good cover then it doesn't matter.

Basically it just ruins balance tremendously.

My gripe with shields in sea is that they are submerged. This makes them harder to kill, especially as gunships, where thy have no anti sub unit. Ether not allow submerged shields, or give gunships an anti sub unit. Surfboard is one solution to this, though it may cause other issues. Area cloak has similar issues, though it doesn’t cloak itself.

Surfboard was not a strong unit for its cost. It was mostly removed because a lot of effort was required to keep Surfboard bug-free and the amount that Surfboard actually got used did not come close to justifying that effort.

Shields are amphibious because commanders are amphibious and can equip shields. The same goes for area cloakers. What degrees of freedom do we even have to balance them better?

I just want to point out that aegis floats, aspis sinks, and aegis can be upgraded to aspis.

If aspis cannot navigate water on its own, how would morphing be handled? Should it not be available in water? Should the morphed aspis then start to sink and disable itself as submerged land units do? I suppose floating aspis wouldn't affect morphing in water.

I'm not taking a stance for change here. I'm just asking the question.

Also in that replay, west sea gets outplayed with the right unit composition. South's shields get pierced a few times by lances, but all the encounters are otherwise either lower metal value from north or correct counter from south. Likhos taking out ships without AA definitively turned the tide, so MVP for that.

After that a siren is sunk by something like 5 seawolves + 3 aspis, of which 2 seawolves get sunk via retreating siren splash. The siren would have killed them all right through shield if it wasn't for the likho support, almost killing the siren by itself.

After that what happens is indistinguishable from land battles. Supported artil shreds the front and pushes it back to the edge of map, as pretty much all team games go.

If anything the likho did far more work, pre envoys, than any of the shields did outside of the 4 seawolves vs 4 seawolves + 3 (I think) aspis fight.

Another idea: make aspis/cornea move slower under water - like 3x/4x slower. (in the end some slowdown while cloaked/active might make sense on land as well - this would make them less annoying all the time and more used for "one surprise attack" followed by regrouping)

Another idea that could be put together with some others:

What if the shield would slowly disintegrate from contact with water? or maybe not the whole shield but the part that touches water (this might look weird though). So then they could be useful, but you would have to strike quickly and not just sit around and do nothing.

Perfect game to show how dumb shields in sea is.

http://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/1273920

Don’t know why we didn’t push more… there where periods of times when my shields where full strength, and we waited for a shogun. We had the advantage until we waited it out, then they yelled at me when I gave up the sea to help somewhere else.