Unit Cannon: Design Vision

The current balance is the latter ATM, and some reversal is needed in order to get orbital to a state where you can do the former.

I wonder how moddable this unit cannon will be.

Could I launch building from it? Ships? heh, Orbital units?

Could I increase the clip of units to something like 300 and have the structure practically continuous fire?

Do units built count as transported? Can I mod in the ability to accept new units from outside to be 'transported'?

Very interesting.

Well we know we can mod it to moon to home planet and visa versa.

Which is good, I might make in my mod a T1 dox/fabber cannon for inter moon play, and see if I can't figure out how to use that unit scale changing mod to make them quite small, saving the main guns as burst firing but inaccurate invasion siege cannons.

THIS!!

*sigh ... well that makes about as much since as the astraeus going up to space with the force of a rocket then going back down and back up into space with those little blue thrusters. Why would something as complex as a teleporter and rightfully game changing be lower tech level than the unit cannon...? as far as gameplay wise it should be mid-ranged priced t1 building less expensive than even the orbital launcher that you load units in then fire them to nearby planets. . .

and the teleporter should be about the price of a catapult and be sitting rightfully in t2

Although I'm fine with how the unit cannon is, I think the teleporter really needs to change otherwise the unit cannon might be useless...

Except that because the UC was seemingly dropped from the game early on in the development process it came to be that the Teleporter had it's mechanics and balance geared specifically to account for the lack of the UC and now that the UC is being added back in it seems like the "easy route" is being chosen and the UC is simply being shoe-horned into the current "Design Meta" instead of of using it's introduction to rework other relevant aspects of the game.

As per the UC's proposed implementation it can easily be viewed from the perspective that the Teleporter and the UC are not intended to work together on any level and it becomes nothing more than a boring and straight forward calculation to determine which can be used when. This doesn't seem to be a case of trade-offs or Pros-vs-Cons, no grey area.

I'm hoping things will change over time, but so far I've noticed a trend that once something has been decided upon it's almost set in stone, requiring either a Catastrophe to be looming or to have already happened to spur any attempt to change something. Remember, Orbital fighter's were "just a test" after all.

Mike

How exactly did the teleporter have the Unit Cannon's mechanics? It works completely differently than even the originally conceptualized Unit Cannon. A huge example is you need a beginning and ending gate, that instantly makes it work very very differently.

The Unit Cannon's original role in the orbital gameplay was to be the primary means to move between planets sharing an orbit (or, in most cases, a small moon to a planet). The Teleporter superseded that by becoming the jack of all trades, then completely obliterated the idea of even NEEDING a Unit Cannon by becoming so cheap and tanky that it would be straight ridiculous to do anything else.

Look, The ONLY way to make the Unit Cannon work is to make sure that it presents a unique and significant advantage over the teleporter. I cannot envision a place where I would spend 14k metal to build one unit cannon rather than build a cheap, 2700m factory, then a 1600m fabricator, and build two 400m teleporters to mount an invasion.

I just cannot see it. It's not cost effective. It doesn't make sense when (in a match with good players) orbital never gets past T2. Just spam T1 Dox, Ants, or Booms, throw in some AA, and you are solid. Presto, planetary zerg at 15 minutes in! Match over!

I never said It had the UC's specific mechanics, I was saying that the Teleporter had to be implemented the way it was because the UC wasn't included.

Imagine if the UC had been implemented first and worked in a fashion was assumed based on the PreViz, do you think that had the Teleported been implemented AFTER the UC it would have the exact same mechanics and balance as it does now?

Mike

Even without a UC the teleporter is very very weirdly balanced.

The teleporter needs to be completely changed. Much more expensive and use a good amount of energy per unit, also orbital fabs should stop being able to create it.

Sorry about that, I misread your post.

For the time being we could also make it buildable on water and allow boats to path through it, until we fix boats.

I'd love a naval transporter through orbital. Imagine a big hulking transporter similar to the UEF transports in Supcom picking up these massive ships.

:/ I have a funny thing about keeping the orbital layer looking like 1960's satellites rather then 2260's space dreadnoughts.

I'd love to, but it's gotten to a point where that's just not going to happen. Considering all of orbital just kind of ignores orbital mechanics.

I mean in the aesthetics, not the mechanics.

Im more or less fine with the mechanics.

If/when the devs enable ferry routes, then I'll agree teleporters really need to be nerfed in terms of buildability. As it stands though, the manual effort of ferrying with Astraeus is really quite painful.

EDIT: I should mention, ferrying for the purposes of peaceful expansion. A short-term fix for the above might be to have teleporters made of paper, or give them some AoE on explosion (collapsing wormhole animation? nom nom nom).