Dev Blog: Superweapons

As Electric Six would put it, “Let’s start a war, start a nuclear war!”.

Long time no posting, how are all me hearties? Today I want to discuss Superweapons in Ardent Seas, and how they’ll work.

Specifically, the Coalition Navy and TDN superweapons, which are carried by the Project 41 and Ardent-class Ballistic Missile Submarines, respectively. These Nuclear Ballistic Missile Submarines, or Boomers to adopt US Navy slang, are built at Capital Shipyards. All players are made aware of their completion in a very “KIROV REPORTING”-esque manner. As soon as a Boomer is built, its weapons start counting down to fire.

Both the CN and TDN aren’t afraid of using nuclear ordnance, and that’s reflected in their superweapons. They can both fire the traditional old nuke, deleting everything in the target area upon detonation, but that’s boring, so we’re adding some variety to it. Boomers can separately launch different variants of nukes. The final variants aren’t fully decided yet, but right now we’re thinking of:

• A Nuclear Shape Charge for the Coalition Navy, which will destroy a single target, and do moderate blast damage around the target. The nuke detonates outside of the CIWS range of enemy ships, and emits a powerful lance of plasma that fries the intended target.
• Tactical Nuclear Mine-grid for the TDN, fired via a ballistic missile, this variant deploys a nuclear minefield into an area, denying any major movements within the area until they’re cleared out.

And now to get to the actual units.

Left: Project 41 class SSBN; Right: Ardent class SSBN

While Boomers are vulnerable, they’re by no means defenseless. Like other submarines, they are armed with Torpedos and Missiles, and of course countermeasures. While they don’t stand a chance in a one-on-one fight against attack submarines or dedicated anti-submarine warships, they can scare off targets less prepared to deal with them.

The Project 41 is armed with medium range anti-ship missiles, well capable of denting anything smaller than a cruiser, as well as short range rocket torpedos.

The Tenorran response to the P41, the Ardent, in turn is armed with the same torpedos as its fast attack submarine, but in fewer numbers, and a torpedo tube launched variant of the Lance used on Tenorran destroyers.

So, how do you stop your base, or flagship, or fleet, from getting nuked from not-quite-orbit?

Boomers are subject to the same submarine mechanics as every other submarine in the game. While submerged, Boomers are restricted to deep water, and are invisible to the enemy as long as they don’t fire. Anti-submarine ships can detect them in a wider area, as can attack submarines actively pinging. Active sonar pings do however reveal the unit emitting them. So it’s easy for the submarines hunting a boomer, to be come the ones being hunted.

Additionally, Boomers are revealed as soon as they start preparing to fire, which will take some time, in that time, they’re vulnerable as every anti-submarine weapon in the vicinity can then fire at them.

And that’s it for today. This is a shorter blog post, I didn’t want to write a huge wall-of-text as my first blog post returning from my development break.

Rho, out.