ships attacking shore

[bvanevery]

In the original game, the only naval unit that can attack from sea to plain land, no base involved, is the Sealurk.

I've realized it's possible to make ships that can attack units on land.  You have to turn on Amphibious Pods for sea units.  It will consume an ability slot.  If you don't want it to increase the cost of the ship, you could set the cost to 0, then set the "Cost increased for land units" flag, same as the game does for Deep Radar.  That way your Marines still have to pay for it.

I've been trying to get the AI to attack coastal cities with Foil Probe Teams.  Currently the AI will go after sea bases with almost hyperactive focus, but not touch coastal land bases at all.  It will only do it if the coastal land base contains a probe unit, in order to destroy the unit.  I'm not even sure it'll try to do a mission after that.

With the capability enabled for ships, I can do it as a human player.  But, I didn't need it anyways, to do it.  It's about trying to convince the AI to do it.  I don't think I'm having any luck with this.

I also tried making a Marine land probe team again.  But like I determined ages ago, the AI just uses such units poorly and not like one would hope.  It ends up just being a more expensive probe unit, its capability wasted.  So, no point making the AI spend more on probe teams.

The AI doesn't seem to know how to design ships with Amphibious Pods, even when that's allowed.  This is not surprising.  I haven't tried making a predefined ship for the AI to use yet.  I don't know whether the AI will try to scour the shores with it.  If the AI can't actually make use of this capability in any way, then it's probably not a good idea to turn it on.  It would just be a cheat for the human player, and I think us humans have enough of those already.

I've tried a few predefined ship designs now, and run a few AI vs. AI games.  I haven't seen the AIs shoot at anything on the shores.