Hey man, nice tweaks.

"Mobile AA missile ark and defense rating reduced from 2/2/2/3/3/4/4 to 1/1/1/2/2/3/3"

ok nice. Gives better chances for Cruise missiles and make SAMs more interesting in the early game.

"Annexation cost adjusted from 5000/5000/3000/0/2000/1000/15000 to 4250/3750/2500/1750/1500/1250/10000"

Makes it more expensive, because of 1750 electronics - the most important resource if you ask me, which I have mostly under 2k for almost whole game. Never liked earlier costs of annexation, and considered as a waste in most cases.

"Mobile AA missile ark and defense rating reduced from 2/2/2/3/3/4/4 to 1/1/1/2/2/3/3"

Was my favorite AA due to strong point defense, easy to get and overall quite universal. One of those who makes me thinking "let's try ground build once again" but now it feels like "Aha, lv3 army base to get some point defense. So, lets back to air". Worried that will be out of use.

Can we like not make Fregates rediculously overpowered? An AA range of 150, hitting missiles, aircrafts and helicopters. Thats so overpowered. Compared to ground AA, it is even very beefy!

Here is a comparison between mobile SAMs and Fregates, which have a very similar purpose. Long range AA mainly against other aircrafts, max levels, western doctrine:





-> The only remarkable advantages are less production costs and time and the ability to fly, in later research stages.
Don't forget that SAMs in air are very vulnurable and can't use their Anti Air. Fregates on the other hand can be fast (speed val. 4) and using their AA at the same time.


I took my time and made a map. It shows Europe in the 64 world map, every circle is a possible AA radius of the frigate. In other words, how far the Frigate can reach into land and what it can cover, by itself.




This is to visualize what Fregates can reach and can't reach in Europe. Outlined in red is what they can't reach. You can't really say that fregates don't have a lot to say in ground warfare when they can actually reach far into land and block a lot of airspace. Losing that much airspace control is rarely affordable, especially if you focus a bit on planes.

Some countries would lose their entire airspace, or at least so much that you can't use the airspace for anything useful: Norway, Sweden, Finland, UK, France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey, (Germany), (Poland), Serbia.

To do that, you don't even need 5 Fregates on every possible beach, instead, 5 Fregates in total, well placed around a country and thats pretty much an airspace blockade. An airspace blockade blocks a lot of things: Any helicopter or aircraft movement, which includes striking solo Infantry that rampage behind your lines, also includes any reconnaissance, you will have any information gathering denied. Shooting missiles doesn't work either. Flying in ground units via airtransport is suicide too.

Why is 1 Frigate enough to block huge parts of airspace? It deals a lot of damage, every 10 minutes. Not knowing where exactly the frigate is, makes it harder to evade its AA. Nobody wants to get loads of damage everytime they move air units.

Please note that such things are not possible at all with SAMs. Instead, Fregates can do this perfectly. You want the Air superiority? Build some Frigates. Their huge AA capabilities makes any enemy air movement a suicide attempt. As shown in a picture, you can severely stop their air operations in land.
The next time we fight for Air superiority, it will be a fight for Naval superiority to get the Frigates in place.


How do you counter such thing, stopping those nasty Fregates?
1) Own ships/subs. (To get the air Superiority, you must get Ships! xD)
Sometimes its not that easily possible, you either have 0 or very few homeland coastal cities. Corvettes aren't enough to kill Fregates, except if you spam many Corvettes. So you are forced to invest heavily into Navy, not just a bit into corvettes. Focussing that much on Navy means less focus elsewhere, where resources and research time are much more needed.

2) Aircrafts? Missiles? Helicopters? Suicide.
Using anything that flies to kill AA is always risky. But especially against the 150km AA range. By the time you reach and located the Fregate, the Fregate shot 2-4 times at your aircrafts. And if you don't kill the Fregate on the first run, the Fregate is going to shoot you 2-3 times on your way back to the airport. How are you supposed to sink Fregates with aircrafts anyways? Most Aircrafts deal most damage against ground targets, not ships. All while Ships are pretty tanky with 35HP! Build anti-ship aircrafts? You might as well build ships then

3) Artillery.
Thats the only good option. Chasing Fregates away with your artillery. Don't forget that artillery deals few damage to those tanky ships, it may take a while, even if he doesn't back off a little. There are better things than chasing ships with artillery too^^ (A bit frustating to reach the Ship, shoot it once, and then the ships back off, hiding in the deap see, far away from your artillery, and come back a bit later^^)


mobile SAMs?
They have clear weaknesses, loads of Strike Fighters or helicopters work well. Much better than against Fregates. Fregates don't have clear weaknesses, perhaps the submarine. But who plays submarines anyways
(Fregates can shoot at enemy ships too, only the Cruiser and Destroyer are superior to the Fregate)


How to spot Fregates:
You can only use ships or special radar units like upgraded AWACs/mobile Radar. Using regular aircrafts doesn't work at all. Earlier, when your reconnaissance aircraft gets hit by AA, you know that there must be Fregates very close by. Now with the upgraded range, the Fregate could be everywhere! Sacrificing a bit more Aircraft HP to find out the exact position doesn't work well either, with every 10 minutes the Fregate dealing a lot of damage to your reconnaissance aircraft, while finding ships in a radius of 150km while only having a radar range of 75 is hard. Especially if the enemy is moving.



Why was the old fregate not so overpowered, despite having an AA range of 150 too?
Because its effective range was still only 100. You need extra troops to gain more sight, without extra sight, Frigates can't use their extra 50km range. This is already quite a bit of an extra that a player has to spend to fully use the Fregates AA range. At least more than he does now.

It also takes away a bit of the game. To fully use the AA range, you need to give it more sight with the help of other units. It also makes units more interesting and 'diverse'.


So, please, Dorado, roll back the Fregates update. To gain Air superiority, I don't want to build Destroyers/Submarines.

I bow before your autism sir. *tips BUK*
I believe they saw that the frigate was being disused. Destroyers and Cruisers can easily send them down. So, they gave them OP AA statistics. I might suggest replacing the corvette with frigate class as the low man on the pole. Fast attack missile craft under 1kt should have a place but, aren't really comparable to a battalion of 500+ land combatants or a squadron of aircraft. Corvette is too puny for this simulation's formations.

A very convincing point. I love your graphical representation. I do use frigate as anti-air bubble projectors.

However, i don't think that all of the update is to throw. Just that the frigate needs to be the "multipurpose ship for those who can't make destroyer+cruisers to rekt everything on sea".

"1) Own ships/subs. (To get the air Superiority, you must get Ships! xD)"

This is perfectly normal in a post WWII setting. Even if CoN isn't realist, its approach of "naval superiority to ensure air superiority to project force on ground" is acceptable. However, of course, i think a good 33% nerf of range + airplanes + helicopters wouldn't be a bad thing at all.

I mean, thanks to frigate, WHO will ever consider to do ASW helicopters ?

@Mc_Johnsen

Nice post.

++++++
I would give - Attack Submarine 10/15/20 to naval surface ships - to solve the problem.
So, very delicate, short range and stealth cruiser, strictly offensive. We could forgot about blocking air space by frigates so freely. Subs should spread terror at the seas. And maybe someone could build ASW Heli at last. Now subs have 12 dmg maxed, anyone uses them?

Edit:
To sum up. Frigate doesn't need to be nefred, problem is with subs. If subs will be stronger, making stacks that consists of lots of Frigates will be very risky, and could lead to loose domination at the sea (is air domination worth it? I don't think so)

i never use subs unless to launch nukes i use destroyers get a stack of 5 and away you go while know this is a game in real life if artillery hit a frigate it would go to the bottom of the sea by the second or third shot

Raising attack values modifies the odds of damages being applied in close combat. Globally, you don't want to make the game skyrocket into too high value, it basically breakes the game.

@Opulon

Also see a problem, and also don't like that way. Rather I like to make units unique then simply boost them. But... just consider hp values of all ships. Subs are simply marginal + coastal waters penalty + 3 units specialized in subs and two of them are air units. This proposition simply fits relatively to naval battle in game reality, I guess.

I don't mean that you are wrong with your proposal. Just that boosting them this way will produce undesirable/desired efect. Like for example, destroyers getting crushed by submarines in close combat, in this occurence (even with low ship defense value), because of how the damage applied are related to the damage values vs damage class.

Also, boosting an unit always is detrimental to another. In this case, cruisers and corvettes can be erased as units, one because an fundamental lack of HP for its role of coastal anti-sub defense, the other because an fundamental lack of anti-ship power.

When we pull something, it's never one only string.

If Submarines are to be boosted, i would probably begin by something less harsh, like : reduction of electronics cost from 1250 to 1000, reduction of HP malus in coast areas from 50% to 25%, and range from 50 to 55

@Opulon

'When we pull something, it's never one only string.'

The best thing in balancing : )

Explain me one thing please, coz I'm not sure (I'm not sure anything here by the way : ).

I found 5xsubmarine stack on patrol. So I move 5xDestroyer there, and order to attack those submarines. Are destroyers attack as first, some submarines sink and then subs do counterattack? Or both groups are attacking each other same time?

I think there is some order, who attack first will win this at deep sea, probably. So this change almost suggests - use some air detection against subs. So we could have complicated dilemma what to build. After all we could loose expensive subs, without doing any damage. I don't know. Even with this radical change i feel subs aren't unstoppable and quite risky.

Don't know, why Frigates should have been underused before the update.

For me 3 Destroyers & 2 Frigates would have been the basic fleet composition.

Don't know why somebody would play Destroyers & Cruisers only. CM would shred them into pieces, without Frigates to protect them, or do I miss something?


@ Efreet: Your fleet will attack first, subs will counter attack a bit later, if they are still able to do so like still see you or still being in range.

"I found 5xsubmarine stack on patrol. So I move 5xDestroyer there, and order to attack those submarines. Are destroyers attack as first, some submarines sink and then subs do counterattack? Or both groups are attacking each other same time?"

If they cross each other without human intervention, it depends on parameters i don't know, and isn't reliable from one context to another.

If there is human intervention, the first to force a server actualisation, either through movement or attack, get the first damage projection

"For me 3 Destroyers & 2 Frigates would have been the basic fleet composition.

Don't know why somebody would play Destroyers & Cruisers only. CM would shred them into pieces, without Frigates to protect them, or do I miss something?"

Destroyers and Cruisers were summoned only because Destroyer is the anti-sub, and Cruiser the highest anti-ship raw value. Nothing to do directly with the frigate/parallel discussion

'it depends on parameters i don't know'

I give up.

In case of emergency the US plans to deploy their Naval Aegis ships in ports around the nation - eg. Washington, to increase the local Air Defense. What is the problem with this?

You got to research the ships, build them and then get a very solid (albeit floating) anti air platform. Besides the fact, that they really do need good range when at sea.

The downside obviously is that they cannot be added to stacks of ground units and their cost is comparatively high, taking the required buildings and researches into account (prerequisite corvette included).

So let's wait and see how this balancing change plays out, if it becomes the automatic go to we will nerf it. After all: this is the meta of an MMO right?

//G

Its more about game balancing than realism, you or another staff member said it somewhere in this forum^^


Their cost is even that high, researching fregates to max level costs:
14 050 supplies; 17 325 rare materials; 29 800 $$; 260 hours

In comparison, mobile SAMs to max level:
11 250 supplies; 13 100 rare materials; 18 750 $$; 205 hours

Difference is rather small, especially for such a much stronger unit you get.
Building requirement costs favor Fregates, see chart above, on top of that, 2 levels of harbor boost the economy by 10%^^

They may cost a lot in components, but you can easily adjust your army. You got fregates? Good, no need for Airsups now. You can instead build artilleries, which costs no components so you have many components for your fregates.


Why do the AA need that big of an range at sea? They did have the same range before, the player just needed to give the frigates more sight Possible by flying an AWAC lv1 above the fregate!


Why would you want to place AA in your stacks of ground units? Mobile SAMs and TDS don't belong into the main battle stack, instead they stay close behind denying the airspace to the enemy. Same goes with Fregates. Who needs Anti air close to the ground units if you can just deny the entire airspace to the enemy? TDS? Anti Air? SAMs? No need, just get some Fregates into position and the enemy will not be very keen to contest the airspace with your fregates.

I also forgot to mention that the radar range is very strong now. It gives you a lot of information, too much in my opinion. Thats what AWACs and other reconnsaissance aircrafts are for.

Also a huge advantage of the AA-range: SAMs AA range is so small, you can easily pass it between the ticks, but this is much harder with frigates.

It is now also pretty much impossible to scout Frigates with low level AWACs, before you still had the advantage, that you could be in range but still be undetected, because out of sight.

So what is your point? Then just build frigates and see how that works out. If it somehow unbalances the game we can come back to it. We do not feel that the frigate is either unrealistic nor a problem presently.

You should though consider adding SAMs to stacks - remember they get another defense upon being directly attacked, meaning they can potentially do double damage (one ranged, the other on direct defense).