Kraken Cruise-Missile Submarine

The Kraken shells the shore from under the water: two cruise missiles every six seconds at 13 tiles, a Tempest's reach, at land targets only, from a boat that only sonar can find. Nobody sees it fire. It is also blind, seeing six tiles, and defenceless, with no torpedo and no way to aim at a ship.

How to use

It shoots at what your side can see, so bring the eyes: a drone over the target, a buggy on the coast, the reach of a Radar Station. Without them, force fire puts its missiles on a point you remember, fog or no fog. The fog forgets enemy buildings, though, so scout first and write the spot down. Its missiles can be shot down: a Missile Interrupter over the target blanks a lone Kraken the way it blanks a Tempest, so hit what stands outside the towers' rings, or bring a second boat. An Aegis can hear it before it sees the escort; avoid the sonar screen.

The warhead

Once a Radar Station and a Nuclear Reactor stand, and Nuclear Program is researched when the tech tree is on, a Kraken can fabricate one Nuclear Warhead of its own: select it and queue the warhead as you would at a Nuclear Silo, at the same 2,500 metal over the same 180 seconds. It holds one. The work is done at the yard and on the surface: only while the boat lies within four tiles of one of your naval yards and is up (T), in plain sight. Sail it away or take it down and the fabrication stops where it is, costing nothing, until it is back and up again; the card says which. Once the warhead is aboard, it goes wherever the boat does. When it is ready, Launch nuke on the command card, then click the point. The boat fires from wherever it is lying, unseen, and the warhead flies a straight line from there. That is the reason to arm one: a silo's launch comes from a place the enemy can find and ring with anti-air, a Kraken's from a stretch of open water nobody was watching. Losing the radar or the reactor stops the fabrication and the launch until it is back, and the warhead is still an aircraft on the way, so carry it past the coast the enemy has not fortified.

On the surface

T brings it up and T again takes it down. Up, it is 30% faster and sees nine tiles rather than six, still short of its missiles' reach, and it is a ship like any other, seen without sonar and shot by anything that fires on ships, and its missiles no longer throw a splash as they leave. Arming at the yard is the one time it has to be up, and a yard lies in shallow water, where no submarine can dive anyway: off every shore, in the rivers and at its own yard it runs on the surface whatever you told it. Out in the deep the water is its armour, so launch from there.

Anecdotes

Four Ohio-class ballistic-missile submarines were rebuilt in the 2000s to carry cruise missiles instead, up to 154 Tomahawks each. In March 2011 the USS Florida fired some ninety of them at targets in Libya, the first time one of the boats had been used in anger, from a stretch of sea nobody had thought to watch.