Right now it may be overkill ti create the thread but it´s just for discusing the balance. I have just played a match against posidian, and as usual he sniped me. After half hour of battling the frontlines in a naval map. Where his strategy was spamming torpedo launchers and flak (need rebalance...) a gropu of unit cannons constantly spamming slammers like a blind men. And eventually he luckily threw them near my comm. What killed me was the ability of spammin slammers. It shouldn´t have the abbility of throwing slammers. In water it equals a groups of vanguards. I suggest eliminating slammers from the list of buildable units, and replace it with levellers. Please vote and let mi know you opinion.
Its realy to early to say and it wont be chaned over christmas anyways. Lets see what kind of meta developes from the current balance and then make changes.
The advantage of the Slammers is that they are amphibious with torpedos, which lets you use the to invade pure water planets, nothing else lets you do this.
I think slammers are a necessity to have the unit cannon work correctly - we just need more options. The grenadier and ant are completely worthless units right now in the UC compared to the slammer.
Dox have a value in that they produce much faster and can be used as pod-fodder to distract umbrellas and the like while your main forces rain down. If you're expecting Slammers, consider adding walls, more umbrellas, laser towers, gunship patrols and Anchors near key areas.
Slammers are necessary in order to unit cannon into water planets. The problems with unit cannon however are The building itself is far too cheap at 14000. I wouldn't mind it's imba if there was a metal cost to match. The metal rate of 120 is too high, giving it a very favourable metal to energy ratio that is ~35% better than a t1 factory. Why bother with bot factories? Unit cannon is basically trolol instant teleportation, meaning you can attack, or be attacked at any single point without knowing where that point is in advance. It is impossible to defend against unit cannons, and the metal you expend to try and make it manageable greatly exceeds the metal required to just use one. The equilibrium result is just forced base trading and 'who can punch first' kind of thing. T3 turrets are useless because of their slow yaw rate, and Umbrellas are insufficient at defending against the high rate of drop pods. 12 umbrellas isn't enough to protect a commander (atleast mine). And doing the normal pelican/commander area patrol is risky because random spinners could pop into existence anywhere. Orbital is now obsolete except for getting gas giants. You can expand onto every single planet super easy with low metal and time cost, skipping straight to t2 without needing to give up production time on your first t2 factory.
Throwing anything out of a unit cannon other than Slammers: I would like a slight unit cannon nerf somehow (random spread? Make the pods targetable by AA again?) that isn't a price increase. Aaaaand then make the pods contain either a Slammer, or an Inferno, or 4xDox or 8xDox or.. basically just more than 1 unit per pod for the cheaper units. I voted for "let it be" because it was the closest answer to "needs a change but keep Slammers!" Edit: Booms out of unit cannons are pretty scary too, but random spread would make that much less effective at sniping things.
I still want more units in the cannon. Why can't levellers be built? How about sniper bots or bluehawks?
Everyone, including I voted let it be, because it almost requires it. However, a seperate suggestion I give, is to balance slammers in water. Seriously, they don't need to be t2 naval. They are t2 land, they can suffice to be t1 naval. Give them half the destroyer's damage and twice their rate of fire and 10 less range than destroyer. Possibly buff their damage/rate/health and increase their cost, so they take more eco to spam and naturally spam slower than current. Also, umbrella brah, umbrella. Used to, anti air could spam them. Now, it's even better, the umbrella has an anti-entity that destroys the pods wholesale. Umbrellas defeat the unit cannon outright, for a tier less and even cheaper.
I changed my mind. Before that though, it's not believable that unit cannon pods with jetpacks can't choose to land nearby. That said though, there's no reason why it shouldn't be allowed to deliberately choose pattern/spread under an aoe command. I posted before saying umbrella should only shoot orbital layer. However if we give unit cannons the ability to produce+fire constantly instead of only fire from storage. Then we should give the umbrella a limited second range inside it's original range where it specifically can shoot unit cannon pods. Also let anti air target the pods, I don't understand why they can't. Also increase pod capacity -and a bird just flew into the glass window near me that was a shocker- at least for dox. But I still like the original video where pods unpacked/came apart in orbital layer and then bots could shoot down while landing.
