First, a response to this:
sasin wrote:
bombardment
The missleship should be much better at shore bombardment. This is its only purpose, and it's supposed to be a powerful unit (at least imho, it's more of a signature unit than the summit).
Range point #1
The missle ship's primary (only??) advantage is its range, which is 200 instead of 150. As previously discussed, the units it outranges and is outranged by are the same as the battleship. That said, the greater range still presents some advantages. First, the missle ship can sit at the back of a fleet and still reach the shore. That leaves m 128-200 where you can fill all sorts of cruisers, destroyers, subkillers, or whatever you want. By contrast, to protect a UEF battleship, you need to have it surrounded with its support. if you have cruisers etc. around your ship, they may sail into range of the artillery and get shot. If a bomber run comes, it can go straight for the battleship without having to fly over the field of cruisers first. The cruisers will hit at about the same time as the bombers do, rather than being able to take some down before they reach a missle ship.
I am not the most experienced with this sort of situation with UEF, but I'm still sort of skeptical about this. I'm imagining a situation where one seton's player has lost his naval factory and built a ton of tmd shields t2 arty etc., just rows and rows.
This makes sense, right? Unfortunately, it does not take into consideration what the overall game situation will be like at this point. In a scenario like the one you have described, where players are at the point in a game where the naval combat is largely over and the losing player has invested large amounts of resources into static defenses, the defending player has a bit of an advantage. Why? Because the defending player (having fully constructed his defensive perimeter) will not invest many more resources into defenses and the attacking player (having no further need of sea-to-sea combat units) will stop investing resources into his navy. So both players, once they realize that the naval game has reached a relative stalemate, will redirect their resources.
The defender has an advantage in this situation because their defenses have half as much micro to keep track of - they don't move! It is easier for them to direct their attention into executing whatever alternative plan they have, even easier if they have a few SCUs to rebuild any destroyed defenses with no player input needed at all. The naval player if he decides to try and break their base from the seas, on the other hand... Well, you yourself spent three to four times as long detailing the mirco needed to make that work for the UEF player than you did the Aeon one.
A second consideration is the many ways a player facing a navy bombardment will defend himself. We are acting as if the issue is primarily ships versus shore artillery and shields, but there's far more to it than that. Once the defender gets an appreciable number of shore-to-ship weapons operational, they typically will push out naval counter units. Cybrans (beyond a Scathis, which largely renders you immune to naval bombardment) have the most obvious example: They build a Megalith and walk it forward into the water. The Megalith can engage any battleships it encounters and demolish any unfortunate cruisers it comes across. The attacker will struggle to stop it, because they can't properly engage it with the player's static defenses preventing a full navy from moving in. It doesn't have to beat the attacker, just drive his ships out of range. Other factions can perform the same task similarly with other units, whether GCs, Fatboys, or simply lots of hovertanks.
The Torrent largely ignores this problem, because with the extra fifty range, any units the defender decides to have sally forth from his base will be long out of range of ground defenses by the time they get in range of the Torrent, and easy pickings for the rest of the Aeon fleet.
A third consideration is how T3 units have more concentrated capacity than T2 units. Players will often use nukes to defend themselves against a bombarding navy. While people have scoffed at this as 'not mass efficient' earlier in the thread, in a late game like that, especially for a player who is concentrating on his economy (which he must be doing, since he lost navy - if he wasn't before, better get on it now!
) nukes are not particularly difficult to produce. Combine that with the fact that it's either use a nuke to drive off the navy or lose entirely? Yeah. While you may get better DPS/mass with cruisers, they take up much more space, and are that much more difficult to maneuver precisely. Combine that with the smaller amount of space you will have thanks to their smaller range, and you can easily box yourself in to either losing your ships to nukes or spending so much time microing them to dodge the nukes and still stay in firing range but out of shore defense range that you either lose focus on whatever else (and your opponent builds strats or exps or something in the mean time) or you keep losing cruisers. Again, the Torrent mitigates this problem, because not only do you have more room to maneuver in, but for the same DPS you have fewer ships that you need to maneuver. This also allows you to pack more DPS into the same area. So any time you have only a limited amount of water to put ships into (which is basically all the time) before they turn into a parking lot (and easy nuke fodder) the player using Torrents has an advantage over the player using cruisers. A single Torrent may be "FAT and slow" compared to a single cruiser, but not compared to four cruisers.
In response to what you said here:
Aeon's ships are so specialized. That flexibility sacrifice is HUGE. You have that aeon missle ship for only one freakin' purpose. If the battleship is even giving it a run for its money, that's arguably problematic. UEF has this amazingly diverse flexible group.
It's really not that large a sacrifice. For the UEF, you do have a flexible, powerful group, yes, but only as a group. They have to stay together to be effective, so until you've beaten the enemy navy, you can't really entertain any ideas about bombarding the enemy base. With the Torrent, on the other hand, it has its own torp defenses and high HP, so it requires relatively little escort against raiders. It also has specialized weapons. So an Aeon player can pop out a Torrent and assign it a few cruisers and Asylums, and have it trundle on its merry way toward the enemy base while the Aeon player's main navy is engaging the opponent's navy somewhere else. When your opponent starts seeing Torrents, they will have to scramble to put up TMD, and a LOT of them. The fact that tactical missiles are not used by any other Aeon ships is a good thing, because you can either catch opponents without TMD or watch them waste time building TMD that will do nothing if you decide not to build torrents.
A UEF player's opponent will be building TMD from the get-go (obviously they'll face cruisers, after all) and in order to get enough cruisers to damage a base the UEF has to bring their whole navy - breaking off enough cruisers to punch through the defenses your opponent will have set up means the fleet is insufficiently defended against air, and a big blob of cruisers is too hard to miss for their opponent to let them into bombardment range without a naval engagement, requiring the rest of your navy.
Aeon ships can sometimes be MORE flexible in their attacks, because they can split up their units without the lack of support from one hobbling the other.
sasin wrote: I believe that that cannon really needs to be devastating and strike fear into people in a way that an all-around beast like the UEF battleship cannot (and not merely from reputation).
It is, and does. You will never see people scrambling to build additional defenses against battleships - they'll already have shields. (Which will finish recharging before a UEF battleship fires again!) You'll also never see people scrambling to build TMD against cruisers - obviously you'll need TMD with a UEF or Seraphim navy on the field, duh! But against Torrents, it's "Oh shit, I better put up a bunch of TMD!" all of a sudden, because they're specialized units that an Aeon player might not even use.
I could see the AoE being restored to be equal to other naval tactical missiles if there must be a change, but I don't think it is really necessary or that any other change is even entirely appropriate. The ship is quite good, try it out some more, and not just in Setons, for goodness's sake!
