[Suggestion] Naval Warfare in PS2. (Wall of Text)

I know what you're thinking "This is stupid", but hear me out. I put a lot of effort into this, and I'd appreciate an open mind when you read it. I'm going to be writing it in such as style as it seems like it is actually going to happen, as it seems more positive and enthusiastic that way.

I basically want to have a thread about the introduction of naval warfare in PS2, with a PS2-style twist to fit its gameplay. Inspired by Supreme Commander and Battlefield 1942.


This is a huge suggestion that I put some fair time into, but its what I would like to see PS2 evolve from.
Lets start from scratch.

Map:

The concept would obviously need a new continent that is mostly water. Now what I propose Is that the map is about 60% water, with a large archipelago of islands in the middle. Water will surround the entire map and you're characters can swim in the water should they wish. On

Warp Gates with a twist:

The "Warp Gates" on this map are not warpgates, they are massive aircraft carriers. From the aircraft carrier deck you can spawn galaxies and jets. This will make it behave like a real aircraft carrier. The carrier will have plenty of turrets on it as well, especially anti-air. Now in the hull where everyone spawns, you can mess around there or you can go the the "launch bay" which is right at the bottom, and in on sea level.

Here you can spawn two "new" vehicles, the amphibious flash (Jet ski) and the amphibious Sunderer, which could even just be a normal Sunderer, it just can float and move on the water surface. These vehicles head off the the islands where they can capture facilities. and have ground warfare just like normal Planetside. More on new vehicles later.

The Aircraft carrier can move, but not too far away from land. This allows people to access the beaches easily Now I would love to have a real player control it but it would probably have far too much trolling, so I would propose an AI to control it, although you can definitely try it out with a human controller, then switch it to AI if the trolling gets to intense. An AI commander would simply keep the aircraft near the beach at all times (not right next to it, say 600-700m away). The turrets on the Aircraft carrier can be destroyed, but the carrier itself cannot be.

The Islands:

The island would behave exactly like Indar/Esamir/Amerish. You assault and capture facilities. The difference being there is sometimes water between you can your target. This will encourage amphibious beach assaults. Bunkers, trenches and defence systems (turrets for example) will be on all the islands to encourage defence not just constant attack. One of these new defences will be this puppy:

Roel Jovellano, I want your baby in the level as a working unit. This gun, used just as a prop in Esamir/Indar/Amerish will be a full-blown anti ship cannon. These Anti-ship cannons will be stations on coastlines facing the sea to take potshots at passing ships. I will call this gun the "Roel Gun" for now.

Geography of the islands I'd say should be hilly. Make it interesting, especially for aircraft. Maybe even make one central island that is higher than the rest, allowing it to make for a very intense 3-way battle like the Crown in Indar. Make them green and tropical though with decent foliage coverage and nice amounts architecture.

I think what would be awesome if there was a Vanu (as in the aliens) artefact in the centre of the complex, and traces of their civilisation around the islands, which would give a tiny bit of depth to the story behind the maps invasion. The structures on Amerish/Indar/Esamir are all very blocky and New-Conglomerate like, but it'd be cool to see a few curved, Vanu-style structures that all 3 nations a fighting over.

There should be two facilities that have docks allowing you to buy Jetskis, Sunderers and Assault Craft from land. These should be heavily fought over. In additions there should be at least 4 places allowing you to spawn tanks.


Some parts between island can be shallow water, which everything can cross, but its its "deep" water only amphibious craft of ships can cross. Magriders are NOT amphibious for balance sake.
Vehicles:

In the Naval Warfare continent, you have 3 classes of ship, the Aircraft carriers, the Battleships and the destroyers as well as three smaller vehicles, the amphibious Sunderer, jet Skis and Assault Craft. I have stated the aircraft carriers purpose and design above.

Battleships:

These will be massive multi-gunned ships that are driven around the map by real players. They will have enormous firepower (Two shots from on of its main guns will destroy a Prowler for example) and a lot of anti-air firepower. Each main guns is the equivalent in three Roel Guns if firepower. . Externally the ships may looks something like this:

Supreme Commander Tech 3 UEF battleship:




Internally however, is where the difference lies. Each turret can be controlled by a player, without a player they are useless. This includes anti-air. Nothing on the ship is automatic..The best way to see the battleship would be to see it as a facility in itself. It has 5 main parts:
- The Hull (The entire hull is extremely strong, but enough rounds go into it and it will be destroyed)
- The Turrets (Normal turrets are fairly weak, but the main guns are very tough, but very hard to get back up once destroyed)
- The spawn rooms (Standard spawn room)
- The control room (Full of explodable things for attackers to destroy)
- The generator (Located in the back of the hull, reasonably tough but enough rockets will blow it)
Each of these has its own health bar. If 2 criticals are destroyed (Hull, Generator, Control Room for example) the ship will sink, and it will sink in an awesome spectacular animation as well. Each turret can be destroyed by enough focused fire (or from an enemy Battleships main cannons) and they will not respawn ever unless an engineer repairs them (which should take a reasonably long time to make it worthwhile destroying this guns). At the back of the Battleship is the loading bay which is on sea level, it will also have a small aircraft landing pad to allow the purchase of aircraft.. If you spawn in the Battleship you can spawn a jet ski (Spawns at the back on the water), Sunderer, but no Assault craft (See assault craft later).

Each side has ONE Battleship. Here's the kicker: you can board enemy Battleships. When you board the ship you can fight you're way into the reactor and destroy it. The spawn room for the defender MUST be located a fair distance from the Control room and Generator to avoid easy camp defence. Once the ship is destroyed its got a long spawn time so you're team will want to keep its Battleship if it wants to have the firepower it gives.


Destroyer:

Each team will have two or three destroyers. These a much smaller than the Battleships, but also a lot faster. They still back a punch. They have one Roel Gun at the front that can do a hefty amount of damage and they also have an aircraft pad at the back, allowing aircraft to spawn and repair. They can only spawn Jet-ski's from them.

Destroyers can be spawned on and are player driven.

Assault Craft:

These small ships are about the size of a Sunderer. They offer two engineer-type turrets on the front and can house up to 10 players. The difference is (inspired by Battlefield 2142) you can either exit the boat or if you press SPACE (for example), you will be ejected fairly high into the air and forwards. This allows you to board enemy ships with ease. Assault craft can only be purchase from a facility dock or your Aircraft Carrier. Assault craft are about as fast as Lightnings. Assault craft are boats and cannot go on water.


Sunderer:

Same as always, except it can float and travel across water. It CANNOT deploy in water.

Jet Ski:

Literally a water-borne flash. Same as a flash except on water and it would look like a jet ski.

Effects on Gameplay:

I believe that if this were ever implemented it would have a massively positive effect on PS2 as a whole. It would also add an absolutely HUGE spike in its replayability. The enormous potential for Land, Sea and Air combat on this map would make it EXTREMELY fun to play. From laying broad sides into an enemy battleships, then coming along side it and all the light assault troops flying over to board it whilst the battle for the Coastal artillery takes places, the winner then allowed to start pouring heavy fire onto the sea battle. The "perpetual war" style gameplay of Planetside 2 would benefit enormously from such a continent.

Sea, Land, Air combat all in one continent, yet still retaining the things PS2 is known for (Enormous combined arms battles). Just imagine fighting for a coastal trenchline, successfully getting it, then looking out to sea and seeing two three battleships broadsiding each other whilst destroyers go in between.








What do you guys, the community, players and fans of PS2, think of the concept?

Please fix the current game, and add more infantry combat.

The last thing we need is more vehicles.

It's a cool idea but I think the game needs to grow into it.

This will all come in good time, my friend.

This would add in massive infantry combat potential. If you've played 2142, this is similar to titan mode and it infantry gameplay works very well in that.

I generally approve of this idea but I think they will probably want to get all the continents they have in the works out before they did this. The only question I have is would you be able to spawn MBTs etc at the different facilities? Because if you could this would give the Vanu a massive advantage considering they can levitate over water and mount massive tank zergs that the other empires just couldn't do. Would seem kind of lame to make it so you can't have tanks on the continent at all though. I don't know. Like I said though I like the idea of adding naval warfare in just as much as I want them to add space combat in someday (I can wish)

I added in a bit about tanks spawning on land. I'll add in a bit that states that Magriders cannot go across water.

Some people likely won't like that but it's not like it's much use now anyway. I like this idea. I'd love to board/defend a battleship.

im going to go ahead and say that the calls for "no, too many vehicles" - i don't get at all


Anyway, I will...go ahead and support this- but here's the problem. We also have flying airborne aircraft carrier ships coming - you'd have to add those as well


Anyway, yes the devs have to focus on a lot- but hey, if it improves the game, they should start thinking Now about how they will do it

I didnt say give it a higher priority than serious issues like bugs- but , you know, that doesn't mean put it off 5 years either- no one wants that.

While medium-small sized archipelago would work, having faux-seamless world with oceans between continents will do as well.

Considering devs are aiming in that directions, Naval warfare will really happen at some point in the future. And if so, I would like to see the design like this.

now theres a few problems with this idea. i like it dont get me wrong, but we're talking about 3 factions with near instant travel to other continents, and space craft, and when you have a space based navy, you dont need a sea based navy. plus anything in space should be able to blow anything in the sea into a pile of ash. the only reason the continents arent bombed like the ships would is because the facilities are worth fighting over. any ship in the open ocean would be easy prey from an orbital strike.

the other problem we have, is that we need to focus on the current game first. once we have the core game mostly finished, im all for naval and space combat, but it has to be done right.

as to further flesh out your idea, instead of the carriers, make there be several large islands with warpgates and docks as normal. add more ships, ones that can transport tanks etc etc. make supply lines matter. no spawning tanks at certain islands, you need to load them up on a transport craft and have them taken over, or airlifted. also check out carrier command, not for the game, its buggy as ****, but for the concept for the carrier and supply lines.

also to get around the problem of space control making sea control pointless, add a shield ship, and have AI controlled carrier groups or something. those groups could be hacked and act as mobile bases that you wanted, while players would control smaller craft, which would be better as its hard to find gunner for my lib at times if im on alone.

another idea would to just make the whole archipelago shielded, making a navy required to control it.

you also should look at the player base as well. on most servers i can pull a lib with a zephyr or dalton, and have to wait 2-3 minutes to get gunners sometime, and unless they have a mic, you just have to pray their a good shot and know what to target. the same problems would happen for ships, and if you need 5 people to even pull out of port to stand a chance, your going to be waiting for some time, and end up getting owned.

also research naval warfare a bit, look at modern ships. do you see any battleships in modern navies? theres a reason for it. also most naval combat today is carried out through torpedoes and cruise missiles at such long ranges the ships rarely see each other, naval battles also tend to last several hours and even in modern naval battles, ships are rarely sunk, and usually crawl crippled back to port. theres also the massive crews and size of these ships as well.

also since we're on the topic of giant multiplayer craft/vehicles, i suggest checking out the Titans of warhammer 40k (one of the few ways ill accept a return of BFRs)

I get what you're saying, but I believe you are looking at it from too realistic a point of view. You say "Are there any modern Battleships" well of course not, but at the same time, Battles in Planetside have the infantry shooting at each other from about 10m-100m away, in real life infantry are usually engaging from 1km away or more, and in case of insurgents are usually solved by artillery and aircraft rather than small arms.

As for the Space battles you state, nothing is ever said on the state of the orbital war. Is there even an orbital war? The Terran Rebublic came to Auraxis and found traces of Vanu, and then war broke out. There's no statements as to where the factories that build the VC/NC vehicles are, there's no statements as to whats happening on earth. If you look at it too realistically it becomes silly.

From a GAMEPLAY point of view, Space combat wouldn't make a whole lot of sense as it would be extremely difficult to have a game that focuses on massive ground combat in space. The Naval combat idea works really well as it can have massive ground combat with a twist.

This isn't modern or real. This is a Sci-fi war and the scale of it is akin to World War 2, ergo large Battleships would suit this game very well from a stylistic and gameplay point of view.

It's not really WW2, it's some kind of amalgamation of the most awesome stuff that ever came out of mass crime called war. So battleships should be also far away from WW2, more like the era of ironclad ships and earlier or else it's gonna be boring. The closer you move to the present day in games, the more "skill-less" it becomes, lock-on ridden, no recoil, muzzle compensators and suppressors, tacticool and auto-aim stuff and so on and so forth...

To the point it becomes funny, sci-fi hightech tank with no cannon compensators and AA turret MG on top, WW2 style.

people at SOE have stated time after time that naval warfare will happen, and you can travel between continents this way too. Would like some archipelago style maps too that really take advantage of the ships.

Thought that's in the far future, they need to make the base game better.

Why would they want to use sea power when they have those massive flying battleship things that smed listed. Sea warfare kinda seem redundant with that.
FF

battleships aren't that retro. Things like Railguns , etc- change the cruise missile game

but sadly this isn't a game of Sub Command/Fleet Command- we're not going to be marking contacts and slinging TASM 's and harpoons and shipwrecks at each other at mach .5 or mach 2 from 60 miles away.



Anyway, I will say I think we CAN

have both flying airborne aircraft carriers AND sea based watercraft


Because they just confirmed heavy tanks are eventually coming (LOL, command and conquer XD )
- it seems they'll make it so you can get serious firepower whenther land, air, or sea


But seriously, no reason why we cant have it all-

Well, except space ships- because PS2....and space combat? Unless they want to try to recreate the tech in Star Wars Battlefront 3 where you can go up from ground to air to sky to orbit space- and i dont think they'd be that ambitious, sadly(or have the resources to attempt that)

- space combat as it stands would be harder to implement than the others. Doesnt mean it can't be done- but airships...aren't space combat. space combat is a different thing altogether.

Oh, it's doable- but while we're chewing on that, i think naval and air -can be fully fleshed out

And the archipelago idea- i think it's a good idea


lol, warhawk comes to mind- even though that's not really a good comparison /well, tanks fighting on islands- but PS2 would be on the next level

Good idea, I like me some water fun!

What about starships? Like they could create a map that is set above the planet and seed things like shipyards, fortresses and something like a biolab throughout the map. Then each faction has their own station that would act like a warp gate. Then people in an outfit could use some kind of resource to buy ships, except they have to buy a part of a ship. So if they wanted to buy a battleship, they would have to buy engineering, medbay (respawn) tactical stations, bridge, docking bay, auxiliary engineering etc. Then instead of one person piloting the ship, the outfit could provide a squad to engineering, a squad to tactical, bridge crew and any other position that needed filling. Then if the ship took battle damage engineering would have to go around and repair sections of the ship. However there would be certain dangers to this like hull breaches killing the engineers as they attempted a repair, or delayed rounds from the other ship. Along with this they would have to keep main power up, the shields up and maintain the engine.

Also on the question of infantry combat, it would kinda be like fighting in the facilities on the ground. The only real difference would be that ships could provide a bombardment on a hard section in the hull and cause a hull breach or the gravity in the station to fluctuate. And while you could just bomb the station into submission, if you needed it for some reason you would still have to go in and repair and capture it section by section.

I see no argument as to why we can't have both? An airbourne carrier vircling at 20,000 feet with an enormous ariel battle underway whilst seabourne navies fight it out on the surface?

I see that as complementary not contradictory.

I've been thinking about Starships and its my beliefe that they would not fit Planetside. Even from a literal perspective, Planetside means that its on the surface. Whilst I am no Planetside lore writer nor designer, I think that surface combat suits Planetside a lot more than space combat. Planetside is also quite fruity and attractive in its art style and space is dark and grim, not matter how many blue and yellow cruisers are flying around. Tropical islands and large colourful Battleships would suit the games theme and style more... in my opinion.