Fleets blockading canals

[Bromley]

I've bumped into this a few times now. A unit lands near the Kiel/Denmark/Suez canal-waterway and takes control of it. Fleet units move through but one is left on the canal to keep it open for retreat/resupply.

I have no problem with the taking of canals. I even like that you have to switch it to your side first with a land unit (simulating mine/obstacle/defence removal). Likewise, I have no problem with naval units holding them - stick a bunch of heavily armoured ships in the Suez and it's yours, especially as SC2 fleets are of a size that there must be reasonable marine detachments involved.

Those ships should be attackable by land units though. When ships are off the coast bombarding, you can argue that they're relatively small targets and possibly out of range of land based guns. When they're sitting in a channel thats something between 150m-500m and there's a fortified German army (with attendant artillery) next door, that's a very different matter.

Whether the same fish-in-a-barrel effect that you get with ports would be right, I'm not sure. They are move spread out than those in a port, and more able to bring their guns to bear on ground units. What do you guys think?

[Retributar]

Not only that!, but also because that there is no room to maneuver, these ship's in the Canal, would be easy prey for attacking bomber's!.

So now the question is, how could that circumstance be implemented into the game?.

[Konigs]

Ditto, ships in caanals should be a turkey shoot for land based artillery(which has spotters lookin' at ships, no spotter for the ships.)

[Bromley]

Good points about the spotters and bombers. Actually, you probably wouldn't even need spotters (at least not for the ranges part of the arty plotting).

I think the Land + Sea squares are hardcoded, so no easy editor-type fix for the 1.05 patch. Whether Hubert can change that hardcoding to include (a) the ability to target sea units and ( port-like defence penalities for naval units I don't know.

I suspect that even if (a) can be done, ( will be more difficult. I'm hazy on exactly how combat works, but I believe that tile bonus/penalties are the same for all unit types. Obviously, it'd be better to have no penalties than to have penalties that also applied to land units in canal zones.

[Moonslayer]

Maybe all coastal tiles (not full sea tiles) should make ships vulnerable to land units. Coastal batteries were able to give fairly good shore defences against enemy shipping.

Another alternative is to allow fortified/city tiles the ability to attack adjacent coastal tiles.

But if we do this then we should also decrease the defensive values of such locations against attacking enemy fleets.

Possibly there is some scope for another tech? 'Coastal Defences' which can upgrade cities and fortified tiles giving them increased attack/defence values against fleets.

[Bromley]

I've never liked the engineer unit (doesn't really make sense at this scale), so buying upgrades (including forts) for any tile is something I'd like. They'd still take time to build though (i.e. like engineer fortifications rather than anti-air upgrades).

One problem with coastal defences though is the scale. Instead of making ships vulnerable to land units, I'd prefer increasing landing losses when unoccupied and reducing naval bombardment damage (and pos. some return damage to the ships) when occupied.

That doesn't fix the mobile canal fortresses that my non-existent Kriegsmarine can't shift .