Battleship

Combat role

Naval heavy artillery — Range 3 fires on coastal cities and naval targets without entering melee.

Lore

Naval theorists buried the battleship twice in the twentieth century and once more in the twenty-first. It kept coming back for the same reason: nothing else parks twenty thousand tons of armored magazine off a coast and holds a conversation the shore cannot end.

The Red Age hull is a battleship in role rather than silhouette — a missile-and-railgun arsenal ship behind layered point defense, its armor scheme designed less to shrug off hits than to keep fighting through them. American Federation yards build them in pairs; European Alliance ones, singly and reluctantly, each a budget fight that outlasts the keel-laying.

When one arrives on a coastline, the map changes before it fires. Cities within its reach are no longer rear areas. That, more than the broadside, is the weapon.

When to use

Station a Battleship off a contested coast to bombard cities and enemy fleets at Range 3 with no retaliation. Watch for air strikes and swarms — it dominates the sea but cannot clear its own sky.

Counters