Troop Idea: Ship Transport

Features:

• Pick up and drop off troops at sea
• Allow troops to fire on ship (can add penalties, like worse aim, or longer reload times)
• High speed. Low health (high risk high reward. If used well is game changing, but low health means easily countered e.g. by ravens)
• When destroyed drops troop to bottom of sea (sinking them makes them defenseless, but they can be recovered or kidnapped by other transport ships)

Justification:

• Sea maps (like the Supreme Battlefield) sometimes kill the lobby as players find seas quite boring since only ships, amph, and hover can be played. And even if one side has sea control, it is often difficult to land and attack the enemy's base (sometimes from the shear distance), and thus the rewards for having sea control is relatively low (hence why so often players rush mid in Supreme). Having sea transport allows all troops to be played on sea, and allows for mass landing, making sea battles much more dynamic.
• Commanders are currently (in my opinion) pretty useless at sea. They're defenseless. Adding sea transport will allow them to shoot and quickly move in and out of battles.
• Also a whole system of ferrying already exists, so adding sea transport completes this system, and fixes the fact of how all current in-game transportation dies to anti-air.

This sounds a lot like Surfboard, a unit which used to exist in Zero-K and was removed. Surfboard was probably more tough and more costly than what you are envisioning here.

Surfboard saw almost zero use for a few reasons:

• Since it carries a meaningful expense, shipfac is (deliberately) a bit overtuned, and ground units would barely be able to interact with underwater amph, most ground units on a Surfboard are uncompetitive in combat on sea.
• Despite that, it would have been scary to buff Surfboard due to a few units that would abuse its mobility (think of Moderator, for instance).
• In the "bring a land army to the other side of a body of water, without exposing it to AA fire" role it is wildly outperformed by Djinn. A single Djinn can handle quite large armies fairly quickly, doesn't have to expose itself to surface fire, and doesn't have to expose its payload until it is ready to deliver it.

It might have hung around in ZK despite not being very useful, but the other problem with Surfboard was that a unit being able to fight while in a transport is a unique and special case. Any time a change was made to the mechanics of the game, one always had to ask the question "but what about Surfboard?" to avoid introducing unintended behaviour. Eventually the development cost of maintaining a unit which saw next to no use became too great to justify.

old surfboard could even load (and unload) subs !!1!