I know, the unit cannon is only live in PTE, yet. Maybe it is too late to share my thoughts abour it. I have read the complete thread annoucing its arrival ( here ). There was a discussion about its role and its competing unit - the teleporters. I have played a bit with the PTE unit cannon ( 75817-pte ) and I must says: "It is too much SupCom. It is nice to have, but it feels like giving the bots (with raiding operations) another life cycle since bots are overwhelmed by vehicles in a late state of the game." Because I prefer constructive critics, I try to highlight some "small" issues that causes the "big" issues. IMHO There are not many parameters to adjust balance right now. Metal cost and energy costs for production are fix linked. It only depends on the producing/assisting unit, but not on the unit produced. Same goes for the production time. It is fixed by the metal cost and by the producing/assisting unit. The Unit Cannon Just imagine, if the unit cannon would not be a specialized T2 factory, but a unit packing machine. It would not build the small selection of units, but it builds the shells and steering rockets for units send into the unit cannon. The metal cost, the energy cost and the time needed depends on the unit you want to box in. To prevent such "tactics" like a twelve vanguard drop on the head of a commander, there could be a spread radius depending on the transported unit, too. E.g. vanguards' shell thrusters can only correct the flight to a degree that the landing zone radius is as large as a nuke blast radius ... while dox are able to pin point their landing. To extend the limitations the magazine size of a unit cannon could depend on the stored units. You want to shoot a battleship? No problem, but you can only store a single one, because it uses more than 50% of the unit cannons capacity. Additionally I would like to see two (or more) different firing modes for the unit cannon. At the moment there is only a single burst shot: All stored units are fired in a short sequence and than the unit cannon forgets its target zone. A continuous burst mode ( fires all units if store is full, but does not forget its target ). A single fire mode ( you select a single stored unit, the target zone is only saved for this particular unit ) A continuous single fire mode ( the units are fired the moment their shells are produced ) could really benefit the unit cannon. Not to mention the ability to see the stored units The Teleports With all these limitations, you may wonder why to use the unit cannon at all ... In my humble opinion the teleporters are much too powerful. Here are some restrictions I would like to see: Teleporting units costs energy depending on the unit type which enters the teleporter. Moving small/cheap ground units through a teleporter, costs only a small amount of energy. But big/expensive units or aircraft (!) cost very much. A commander walking through a teleporter could cause a massive blackout in a power grid working at its limit. Building a teleporter should be limited to t2 and the commander. Orbital fabbers should not be able to build them. A naval teleporter (!) should be able to be linked to another naval teleporter to transport ships. A teleporter should be a time, energy and metal costly thing. Once it is build, it could be a hard nut to crack. That means its HP are very high. But while it is build should be more fragile than its already build HP. If the teleporter is damaged too much, it could get instable: Some units entering it are lost in the void. Ratio of lost unit increases as the damage does. If a completed teleporter is destroyed, both ends explode in a nuke like blast. You cant turn on / shut down / relink teleporters immediately. There is a power up / power down progress that needs some time. Compared with the unit cannon or other transports, you need a small defending force to protect your beach head portal ... or you have a nuke-like explosion in your base The other Transports ( Astraeus, Pelican and more ) I think, we can agree we could need here some kind of SupCom ferry orders: Marking a pickup zone (or a factory), setting up a travel route and marking a drop zone would boost the use of transports. If there are additional transports with different specifications and therefore different roles, the game play will benefit, too More armored versions > slower movement : Transport from/to a not secure area Bigger capacity > slower movement : Large force deployment Troop transport : heavy armored tank vehicle for t1 bots, e.g. passing the defence line to bring them where it really hurts Transport ships (Carriers, LHA, LHD, LST, LCAC, ...) with different types of unit types allowed for loading. "Transport Building": A building able to store units. Used as a shelter for fragile units (e.g. Nuke is incoming) or hiding your unit composition. At last it would be nice, if all types of units could be picked up by at least one type of orbital transport: Some kind of heavy duty Astraeus like orbital lander should be able to transport even the biggest ground, air or naval unit. _____________________ As you can see, I like to have a unit that fits into a specific role. Not something like a unit to rule them all. As the varity of units increases so does the playable varity of strategies. Please excuse any mistakes in spelling and grammar. English is not my first language. But I try to improve.
The shell production of the unit cannon sounds a lot more interesting than just a factory or just throwing units inside of it. Nice idea!
The only reason we have not seen multi-unit transports is because they are incredibly hard to implement. Sup-Com was able to do that , but they had a +10million$ budget. The devs tried, but ran into all sorts of problems. (Same reason the cannon is a factory, and cannot load external units) Other than that, these ideas look good (Although they have all been posted and discussed in great length).
Actually I haven't gotten around to checking out the unit cannon yet, but the points raised by Tairon are exactly how I pictured everything to work. Especially in lieu of the original KS video. Secondly, creating jetpacks/pods for units can be done relatively cheaply compared to units, and therefore rate of fire of units should be relatively faster compared to constructing each unit separately rather than loading in. Even if you make them easier to kill, I'd much prefer launching an army faster, compared to slower. Thirdly, I'm still not familiar with how the teleporter ingame works, but my original expectations was the cost would increase based on Total distance or planet A distance from sun+ planet B distance from sun + size of unit being transported. Fourthly and alternatively, it'd be much easier to simply have a static cost to maintain the portal, and have the cost conceptually larger than the conceptual cost for teleporting individual units.
Ah, I might have missed something, but I can't seem to figure out how to build the unit cannon? Is there some obscure setting I missed, or a mod? or.. something? In order to build it? And yes I'm using latest PTE, I always verify before i play.
Make sure you've got all your mods turned off (especially anything to do with units) as there have been a number of reports of the UC icon being disabled by them. It's build-able by a t2 engineer and it's icon should be in the 'factory' section of the build bar.
Actually multi-unit games can be created now, Statera has one for example. A transport that holds ten units, however they all stack in the same place. This means all we need I'd a reasonably large transport model that looks as if it can realistically hold 5 - 10 units, as well as fixing area load commands so they'll pick up all units in the area until it's filled rather than just picking up on unit.
Thank you to cdrkf For squishypon3, How hard would it be to add code to prevent collision/nit stacking? I'll be adding this feedback into the PTE build too for unit cannon, as a suggestion to subvert everything landing in the same spot when you have a single spot target rather than using area command. Would it be better to consider a 'single spot' as an area command too? with a minimal distance to prevent collision/stacking?
I see now that the problem I saw never existed. I finally got around to trying the unit cannon. Just need to look at area commands now for spreading out army.
I'm hoping they add in some sort of spread for the UC - I primarily use it for Commander snipes with 40-50 slammers tbh.
This! ^ I Like these Ideas but I would rather have this: The unit cannon is a t1 structure about the cost of the orbital launcher, and the orbital launcher is moved to t2 The shells are a flat cost. As the units are loaded into the cannon the shells are produced. It can only fire land units. The landing area is a 1.5 times the size of a nuke blast The cannon has two firing modes: burst: will fire all loaded at an area continuous: fire when unit is loaded I agree that we need armored transports (produced at the orbital factory). Maybe armored single unit transports like the Astraeus which explode on impact of the planets surface causing an AOE damage to the units in the area. would be enough.
