Modern ships fire with missiles, this game treats modern ships like WWII era battleships.
This suggestion will lay out a plan that will fix this and create a new system that would work to give naval battles far greater depth than its current state. Right now, the Naval battles are really lacking.
This suggestion will shift the focus from the ships themselves to the missiles. Naval missiles will work differently from current cruise missiles. Naval missiles will reload when the ship is in a friendly dock. They will cost some resources to make, but they won't be a unit that is built (maybe 100 computers 50 rare mats and 100 components, idk). What will happen is when a ship is in a friendly dock that has a missile factory (new building) reloading missiles, the ship will be out of service for a certain number of hours, but that will go down as the ship gets upgraded.
Missiles and ship weapons.
There will be two types of missiles that are different from cruise missiles* Anti-ship
- These missiles have and attack rating and damage rating
- The missiles will start with an attack rating of 2, each upgrade will increase this rating by 1, and increase damage
* Defensive anti-missiles missiles
- These missiles will have a defense rating that starts at 1
- An attacking missile when detected with an attack of 2 triggers the right of number of defensive missiles needed. If the defensive missile has a rating of 1, then 2 will be fired
-The defensive missiles will start with a rating of 1 and increase by 1 by each upgrade. This will give the attacking missile the advantage which reflects modern naval combat.
* CWIS (close in weapon system)
- not a missile, but a last-ditch defense that will have a rating of 1 but can only fire at once missile every ten minutes. That time will never change to prevent CWIS from becoming OP
- will be upgraded with the upgrade of the ship.
* Cannon
- this will work like a normal attack; this can be used to attack surface ships including troop transports.
- This gun will have far lower damage than current ones with 5 damage max.
- this will not be upgradeable
* Cruise missiles
- They will stay the same as current system, will not take up naval missile magazine space, but cruise missiles will not be able to attack ships.
Upgrade system
* Tech Tree- Once you research the ship, researching missiles will be a separate tech tree that is independent from the main tech tree, but it will have its own 2 slots. Researching missiles will cost less materials/rare materials and take less time. Maybe 250-500(max) rare mats and a static 8 hours research no matter what upgrade in order to keep investment costs low
- Ships. Upgrading your ship (in the normal tech tree) will not upgrade your missiles, that will be separate as mentioned.
- Upgrading ships will upgrade CWIS, hull HP, radar, missile fire range, and missile magazine capacity.
-upgrading missiles, will upgrade their max range, but they still rely on targeting data from its home ship or allied ship. max range at max level 300. If a friendly unit spots an enemy surface vessel, the missile will be able to travel further than the ship detection range
How missiles interact with the ships and planes.
* Ships control the range the naval missiles can target surface vessels, and how many naval missiles the ship can hold. - Destroyers will start out with a magazine of 10 while cruisers will start out with 15
- The players will get to choose themselves how many missiles of each type go on each ship that is selected when reloading at the dock.
- Naval strike fighters at gen 2 will be able to fire 1 anti-ship missile that will draw from the carrier magazine. Carrier will not be able to fire but will hold missiles for the planes. Only 2 generation carriers can do this. 2 gen holds 10 anti-ship missiles while gen 3 holds 15.
- Naval patrol craft will be able to fire a max of 2 anti-ship missiles
- Ships that take damage will have reduced speed, and radar range.
Why build destroyers you might ask? For their anti-sub abilities and lower cost. Frigates will have a few missiles (5), but their main purpose is anti-air. Their guns will be nerfed down to 4. Corvettes will remain the same. This rework actually gives them a purpose now. Why spend valuable missiles on undefended transport ships if you can use your corvette instead? This rework adds a lot of strategy and content. This will make planning naval attacks a lot harder since you will need to reload your missiles. You will also need far more resources to maintain a sea invasion because you will need to constantly arm your vessels. This also allows ships to potentially survive an attack without taking damage.
Please let me know your thoughts and ideas and give a like if you like this. I spent a lot of time (over 1 hour) and effort writing this and making it easy to read, I would appreciate the support.