There are a few rules which don't seem particularly realistic or in some cases, balanced, so these are the ones I think would be nice if where changed. 1st Suggestion - Rule S4. At the moment, Submarines are almost useless, scouting for your team is much better done in an aeroplane, which goes 5x as fast and is still hard to spot. An aeroplane can also kill you, which a submarine can't. I propose allowing submarines to carry 1 turret with 1 or 2 guns, this will be realistic AND balanced. 2 guns is not enough to challenge any decently armed warship, and it shouldn't be, early 20th century subs weren't tasked to hunt down warships on the surface, they torpedoed them, and we don't yet have torpedoes, so that is slightly irrelevant, but they did surface and use their Deck Guns to sink merchant shipping, which should be their purpose in naval play, sneak up and attack oil tankers and dive away from warships. Don't want to be sneak attacked by "OP" subs that you can't see? Fit a turret. Cannons are 40 gold each. Proposed Solution - Allow Submarines to carry a maximum of 2 cannons or a 50.cal machine gun. 2nd Suggestion - Rule A5 Airships are basically useless, you can carry 10 cannons, which is a reasonable armament, but you are not even allowed to shoot down on other ships? And you can carry 2 bombs, which again is reasonable. but planes also carry 2 bombs, are smaller, more manoeuvrable, faster, and also carry machine guns. You could say that "Just attack other blimps then", But their is currently no reason to build blimps, because you can't shoot the main contraption type. If blimps where allowed to attack ships, then people would think that "Hey, that's an easier way to sink ships, and i can land on the rig? Woah, I'm gonna make one of them and go and hunt oil tankers" Even if their are no oil tankers, their might be another blimp pilot with the same idea, and their you go, you have actual blimp - blimp and blimp - ship combat. With just the change of a rule! To make this balanced, all the oil tankers need to do is fit some 5o.cals and more turrets, and woah! More combat and exciting gameplay! Proposed Solution - Allow Blimps to shoot ships. 3rd Suggestion - P9. This is simply realism, the 4x4 Minimum size is fair, but why do the wings have to be longer than the body? That makes it impossible for us to make some of the planes we really want, like this: And this.. And this.. My point is, these are all iconic aircraft, and were not even allowed to build them because of the rules. Because it's not "Historically accurate"? Yes it is, look at those! Wingspan shorter than the body length, and you can't say "But that aircraft failed" Sure, the first was a prototype but the last 2 are still in use today. We should be allowed to build them? Proposed solution - Allow aircraft with shorter wingspan than body length. Thank you for reading my slightly wall of text, please tell me what you think of these suggestions!
Your suggestions on rules S.4 and A.5 cannot be reasonably done as both severely threaten the already delicate gameplay balance. Submarines would be VERY ganky if we allowed them to carry weapons. You think it's bad enough having to worry about being bombed while mining ore or tanking oil? Try suddenly being attacked by an enemy you didn't even know was there. (Submarines can already do this in a way, I've seen sailors at the Oil Rig get ambushed by submariners that surfaced next to them, got out of their submarines and cut the sailors down before the latter knew what was going on). Airships bombarding sea ships with cannons is just a common sense bad idea. There's no way in hell the sea ships are going to be able to strike the airships with their cannons, and 50cal MGs wouldn't be effective against airships because most of the time they use large props with a significant amount of health in their construction. Flak obviously has no effect against airships, and even if it did, the airships could just stay out of flak range while attacking. Rule P.9 I think is probably written incorrectly, because as far as I know there never was (or if there was, noone ever followed it) a requirement for an aeroplane's wings to be longer than the fuselage. In fact I have a jet that is based on the MiG-21 (That 1st picture you linked) and nobody has ever had any problem with it.
Thank you for your input, Anime, and you do raise a very valid point, But perhaps their is a compromise? As for Rule S4, Maybe we could allow limited surface weapons on submarines once depth charges and torpedoes are added, and their is an effective counter for submarines? Or maybe we could limit it to just 50. Cals, which as you yourself said, are only useful against very small ships. As for A5, Again maybe this could be revisited when SDG weapons are released and weapons exist which can effectively fire up and down? For rule P9, It rather clearly states in the rules that the wingspan must be longer than the body length, if this is not the case i highly recommend it is removed from the rules, As i have seen many admins (Possibly you?) Ban planes with short wingspans in the past. Thank you for your input! o7.
Well yeah, the post I left is for current NP2, SDG is an entirely different matter. When SDG is mostly finished, there will have to be a discussion on balancing.
The problem with adding cannon or 50 cals to subs is that they will have to be coded to not fire while under water, otherwise subs can just shoot at a ships underbelly. That and planes have a counter in the form of flak/50cals, whereas there are no direct submarine counters right now that aren't in the sdg weapons group. I do agree that the wingspan rule should be worded better so that there is a minimum wingspan per length ratio of the sorts ,but not in such a way so that we see planes like the one in the second picture. A plane like that would be a nightmare to hit for not just ships but other planes. When a plane strafes you or flies away from you the target to hit looks something like this: --+-- , which is a very small target so there has to be compensation somewhere for the sake of gameplay balance. Imagine if it looked like this: -+-, that's an even worse target to hit than it already is. Also, there will need to be some input from other players so that we can see it's a 'we want' instead of an 'I want'.
I see that the way I worded it was as if I said cannons could shoot underwater, I was just talking about the 50 cal's there
