new building?

[Combine_001]

Some kind of shore battery that defends against enemy ships, is powerful but can only attack ships within a certain arc and is limited to two or three

It sounds unusual to have silos playing the role of antiship

[xander]

1) Silos don't play an anti-ship role. They can only hit flying units.
2) A shore battery would only server to complicate the game, and unbalance it.

xander

[shinygerbil]

Interesting idea. My first thoughts:

-It would have to be a fairly large arc (radius-wise) for them to be at all useful.
-To balance it out, I'd have quite narrow arcs (say 30 to 45 degrees, or maybe less?) otherwise they are too powerful.
-It also makes sense not to have any more than two, because some territories could pretty much cover all their bases with even just two - think Europe, they could cover the North Sea with one and watch for ships from the Atlantic with the other.

I'm not sure this feature would really gel with the rest of the game, but it's an interesting thought, and it's worth discussing it, and seeing what people think. Not that Introversion are that likely to change core mechanics at this stage, but if/when scope for mods reaches this level, who knows?

[Deamon]

I hate the idea.

In defcon 3 navy and air combat is allowed and the only way I know of destroying installations is with nukes, leaving those anti-ship installations free to destroy any if not all ships attacking from Def 3 - Def 1.

Not to mention the complexity of placing them to get the right arcs to hit certain areas.

[Masaq]

I think they'd be an interesting mod, but yeah, not something that would really fit with the core game as-is.

As for the arcs, the easiest or best way to do it would to have them only placeable on coastlines, and the arc was say, 45' or 50' around a line directly tangent to the coast, so that as you slid the installation along the coast during the unit's placement, you could effect what angle it pointed at based upon the angle of the coast (if that makes sense)