Navanax

Navanax is a fast, heavily armored water unit that combines long-duration melting lasers with explosive EMP cannons to assault enemy bases and support allied defenses. It appears as an endgame naval unit that can both shred buildings at close range with four autonomous continuous lasers and influence the battle network with homing EMP projectiles that repair allies, damage and electrify enemies, and temporarily alter block speeds. Navanax occupies a special niche as a mobile support/assault unit: its laser beams provide massive sustained damage to structures, while its EMPs suppress repair and apply strong speed modifiers to powered blocks.

Navanax mounts four continuous laser emitters that deal a combined 324 damage/sec (each beam: 27 damage per tick, 12 ticks/sec) and have long beam durations and reload cycles. These lasers are incendiary, piercing, and automatically home on nearby enemy blocks; they are particularly effective at rapidly removing individual blocks once Navanax reaches close range. Its secondary armament is two EMP cannons that fire explosive homing projectiles. Each EMP shot deals 60 direct damage and 70 area damage, electrifies targets for about eight seconds, homes to the target position, and applies a strong interaction with powered blocks: it deals triple damage to powered blocks (60→180, area 70→210) while dealing much less to units (0.8× unit damage). EMPs also repair allied structures and grant a large speed boost to friendly powered blocks (+200% speed boost ≈ 20s) while slowing enemy powered blocks by roughly 80% for a similar duration. Navanax's EMPs also apply a Repair Suppression effect (25 tile range, 1.5s) that prevents unit repair towers and other repair sources from functioning briefly.

Because its lasers and EMPs function automatically, Navanax can quickly reach and erase exposed defenses; the four beams together can delete blocks within seconds when unobstructed. Plastanium Walls block all of Navanax's projectile damage, including EMP damage, making a layer of plastanium beneath stronger walls a highly effective countermeasure. EMP projectiles still apply the electrified status even when their damage is absorbed by Plastanium Walls, so units sent through or near these walls suffer greatly reduced firing and repair rates; electrified reduces firerate (and thus DPS) by roughly 0.7×. Phase Walls do not reflect the melting lasers but can reflect EMP projectiles; reflected EMPs will electrify the wall and surrounding units and can severely hamper attacking forces.

Practical considerations and tactics:

• Use Navanax to cripple enemy power-dependent defenses and slow enemy powered blocks, enabling allied turrets such as Foreshadow, Segment, and Meltdown to perform more effectively. Its speed-boosting EMPs are best applied to power-consuming endgame turrets rather than conveyors or factories that do not consume power.
• Navanax is vulnerable to focused anti-ship units like Cyclones and Fuses when forced into close range by its laser-centric damage profile; building Omura can be a safer alternative for ranged engagements on many maps.
• Defensively, Navanax excels at clearing swarms of smaller units; its EMP electrify effect dramatically lowers enemy offense and can save a late-stage survival defense.
• Be cautious when using Navanax to accelerate your own infrastructure: boosting reactors or other high-throughput power systems without balancing cooling or mixer capacity can overload your network. Boosted Phase Conveyors and Mass Drivers gain high throughputs, but practical layouts and area coverage for EMPs make large-scale boosts unwieldy.
• Navanax cannot be carried by Oct, limiting its operational range to coastal or archipelago maps unless supported by waterways.
• Build a plastanium buffer under vulnerable powered blocks and Mend Projectors to prevent EMP projectiles from destroying critical infrastructure.

Navanax was added in Build 127 and has undergone tuning: EMP damage and area increased and fire rate adjusted in subsequent builds, laser damage per copy was increased, movement speed was standardized to tiles/sec, and an item capacity tweak and command-limit removal occurred across versions. A description edit emphasized that the lasers melt enemy targets, and the unit gained an explicit Repair Suppression ability in later updates. Navanax is named after the predatory sea slug Navanax inermis and shares very high armor among Serpulo units. It is unique in being the only unit that can apply a speed-up boost to blocks and the only unit that can slow down enemy blocks.