Sea is boring

sea also has siren with skeeter and cons... it can win but yeah that takes good micro and luck

edit: oh lobster scallop kills siren.. umm gg

I agree with the sentiment of sea battles not being as fleshed out as the other aspects of the game, some may describe as 'boring'.

When there are competitive games in which amphbots are built on maps that have no water, and shipyards are not built on maps that are comprised entirely of water, I believe a closer look at the balancing is warranted.

The power of the amphbots should be in their versatility. Ships should reign supreme in water, as they can do nothing but be in water.

Perhaps another factory called something like Submarine Factory would also help in the longer term, along with the nerfs/buffs to Amphbot Factory and Shipyard in the short term. Because having units that fight on the ocean floor (And thus are only susceptible to torpedoes or other ocean-floor units) should not be a specialty of the Amphbot Factory, a factory that can also fight on land. The Submarine Factory will also be able to include interesting things like underwater EMPs and such.

The power of the Shipyard units as opposed to the Submarine units will be in their ability to help the battlefield on land once they've conquered the seas, i.e their artillery and battleships, while the Submarine units will exclusively battle for the sea, with maybe one Scylla-lite type unit thrown in there just for versatility's sake.

I only suggest this because balancing the existing units of the Shipyard and Amphbot Factory will not help the criticism of sea battles not being as dynamic as the other areas of the game, but adjusting the Shipyard/Amphbot relationship should be first and foremost.

Its probably due to the speed advantage, which matters a lot more in a 1v1 in a water map than in a team game in a semi-water map.

But I don't think sea being able to beat amphibious bots when a lot of space is involved makes up for it. Sea should be able to win at sea in any situation.

The weakness of ship vs amph sounds like another expression of the no underwater skirmisher issue that has been discussed elsewhere. Underwater riots consequently have an easy time at sea (and Lobster gives them the ability to close with Siren, which being a heavier riot ought to dispose of the lighter riot).

A simple stop gap would be to stop lobster working underwater. Siren would then kite scallop all day long. However back door amph surprise would also become impossible.

Alternatively, maybe Hunter could be reworked into a torpedo skirmisher? It's not a good raider to begin with and other factories (e.g. spider) lack a light raider but do have a scout (as ship does in the Cutter). Imagine it as a floating Ronin - mediocre range for a skirmisher (indeed, probably even less range than Ronin - perhaps 420 or even 400), but cheap and stackable. Maybe 100-110 metal if the torpedo is unguided, 130-140 if it is guided. Give it a similar movement penalty to the ronin after firing. Speed wise it'll need to outrun Scallop but be reasonably easy to intercept with Duck. Increase reload time to 3.5 sec, modest increase in HP to 400 to bring it closer to light skirmisher HP levels.

While this might seem to have an adverse effect on Mistral, ship sometimes doubles up on roles anyway as do certain other factories. Claymore doesn't make Mace obsolete, they just have different targets. Ship itself has two riots in shape of Siren and Corsair, while current Hunter and Seawolf are a light/heavy raider combo (like Glaive/Scythe). Mistral and skirmisher Hunter would be complementary rather than stepping on each other's toes. Mistral can take shots at coastal targets that Hunter can't touch and hopefully defeat Hunter in even valued skirmisher duels.

Giving ship the unique ability to skirmish above and below water would seem to go a long way towards making the fac king on the water, which it should be given the versatility of hover and amph.

Making lobster not work underwater would undermine the main purpose of lobster, which is to enable amphibious invasions where it would normally be too steep.

I do think the current raider submarine is useful, rather than reworking it into a skirmisher, the old sniper submarine could be brought back and retooled as to be that skirmisher. Having an extra submarine would be nice anyways, submarines are cool, so its weird that we only have one plus the tactical missile sub (which is rarely used).

The biggest problem that makes sea boring in my opinion is the limited amount of units that can actually even fight in sea, and even among many of them have rather similar weaponry and weapon behaviour with short ranges and all. Sea is probably the most fleshed out among the 3 sea capable factories with somewhat working interaction between underwater and overwater combat between its units, but same can't be said for hover or amph as hover relies pretty much solely on Claymore for underwater fire power and amph prefers to hide underwater with lines of scallops.

Rather than surface battles. The sea battles are too focused on underwater combat which lacks skirmisher, assault and artillery roles. I think it would be better if sea battles had more surface interaction with underwater only weaponry better specialised to wipe out certain unit types that lack underwater weaponry, but there would be unit specialised in hunting underwater targets with worse performance against surface ones.
One example would be making the Claymore bomb have less range against surface targets by making the bomb sink as it goes, giving more range against UW targets but requiring close distance to surface ones to properly hit them.

I think it is unrealistic to expect ship to defeat amph (as amph is currently designed) in all situations. Specifically as a game becomes more and more congested, being underwater just inherently becomes a better place to be... and there are pretty much no limits to how congested a game ZK players seem to be willing to play. Having watched a handful of less-congested teamgame replays it does not seem like amph dominates the meta in that context. Having room to retreat a little from a lobbed ball of Scallops without losing anything you can't afford to lose helps a lot.

Also remember that as a ship player, (a) switching for Claymore is a valid strategy and (b) if the amph player does not have surface support Urchin spam can pose a problem for them.

That being said, perhaps Scallop should just not exist as it is. It has on-and-off been a problem for years, no matter how it's nerfed or what is added to the game to counter it.

I don't think ships have to beat amphibious bots in every situation, but I'd say the situation in which they should lose is when the amphibious bots can make good use of their ability to go on land as well, which opens up other firing and cover opportunities, not to mention more strategic opportunities.

quote: There's no eco to raid since all eco is built on land, there's no strategic terrain to control since everything is flat water

IMO most of these maps should just not exist or get played on, but people really like their Small Supreme * for some reason despite it consistently playing poorly... not to mention Sapphire Shore Duo or Sail Away.

For instance I would expect Aurelian and Bellicose Islands to play much more reasonably. However, neither of these maps have been played in team games for upwards of two months. I am left with the question of whether the community at large wants to play what I would consider reasonable sea games or whether they actually prefer the kind of games being derided in this thread.

I am fairly sure that if one monospammed that unit (possibly backed by a handful of Hunters) Amph would have literally no possible composition that didn't get steamrolled by it.