Orbital exploit

So @Xankar how did it feel.

Kiwi took over three minutes to scout his opponent, found they'd gone orbital, then waited almost two minutes more to build an orbital radar. At this point his opponent has no meaningful ground force or defences, other than an orbital fabber.

The lesson is that Kiwi is terrible at analysing his mistakes. He ran into a strategy he didn't recognise, failed to respond to it well, lost, then cried foul because of it.

There might be an issue with orbital fabbers, but this sure as hell isn't the game I'd base that on. Come back when you've lost to it thirty times despite trying out numerous defences.

It felt real good. Although that blue guy managed to killed me in the end

At least I still managed to kill 1 guy and make him hate me with these next gen strats

When I realized this was elodea and not a random, I felt less bad.

I would have built an umbrella before an orbital radar versus better players (people that I KNOW are good looking at their name)

I knew it was him when I lost.

I've lost to it twice

It only seems awkward because you don't know how to defend against it properly, and the meta on this hasn't evolved a whole lot to make it seem like part of the 'norm'.

This is basically the same as saying turret creep is 'awkward', simply because you don't know how to respond to it.

To me, PA has always been characterised as having so many different ways of dying that it's mostly impossible to blindly defend against all of them. I would hope that we keep this tradition.

It's still awkward and has room for improvement.

I know how to defend against orbital reclaim, just build umbrellas, although this becomes increasingly difficult on smaller planets like that one.

I mean really, making a simple mistake like building an orbital radar before an umbrella shouldn't cost you the game, right? Another reason why I like Meso.

Graphically the orbital fabber doesn't make sense when reclaiming or building teleporters. The former function only existed because it was a necessity when the latter did and the latter function only existed because the unit cannon didn't yet exist. The orbital fabber has absolutely no reason to have either function anymore. Just remove them and complete the rest of the overdue teleporter rework. @tvinita

Orbital fabbers build more than just teleporters...

Teleporters are a bit cheaper than unit cannons....

Well, you just hit the nail on the head without even realizing it.

Why the heck does something that allow instantaneous transportation from any spot in the solar system to another cost so much less than something that simply lobs a few units to somewhere else in the system, with the units being very vulnerable to being destroyed before landing anywhere?

Does anyone get this?

This is suprisingly effective only if your opponent has no orbital at all. Even 1 piece of orbital, and this becomes a guranteed loss as you simply cannot come back from the cost of an orbital launcher compared to the equal cost in units and such.

If you are really sneaky, and pull it off and your opponent invests in no orbital at all, you can get your own commander in orbit, kill his fabbers with an orbital fabber, then kill his commander. As he tries to build more fabbers, just kill those as well. Considering by time he reacts, he has no fabbers, he literally cannot build any orbital defense. He will never get a single thing that can shoot that layer beyond that, and will lose.

And it is hilarious. I would leave it in the game based on the merit that it is hilarious and only mid-tier. Like losing to Dan in Street Fighter 4. Mid-tier and hilarious.

One unit lets you build t2 vehicle and t2 bot fabricators, the other does not. Thought that was pretty easy to figure out why unit cannon costs exactly 14,400...

That and the ability to reactively put units anywhere you want on a dime..

Yeah, because you totally don't already need T2 fabbers to build it...

Yeah, because it's so hard to make 3 orbital fabbers and create a teleporter a few feet from the enemy base...

I'm not saying that the unit cannon's cost is unjustified, but a teleporter being 36 times cheaper than a unit cannon? I don't even.

Um it is hard? Do you remember again why people were whining for unit cannon? Do you remember what the design goal of the unit cannon was? You know, establishing beach heads as opposed to pure throughput and random units appearing everywhere sniping this and that.

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Also, for people saying orbital fabber is guaranteed win you couldn't be more dead wrong. It's actually 100% guaranteed loss at basically every stage if opponent is the least bit smart. I just hope the devs don't base decisions off some of the information being posted here is all.

For those wondering about a defence for this... You do know that land fabbers and the com can also reclaim orbital units? my mistake was assuming I needed deep space radar and an umbrella (too expensive to build quickly enough). Actually all that is needed is t1 radar then reclaim the bloody thing

I knew it was you Elodea. ****ing knew it.

Shame that im still so terrible at eco management that despite having scouted the Launcher and built a umbrella before significant damage was done, i still die to an avalanche of vehicles

gg well played.

The problem with the orbital fabricator is much deeper and more fundamental that questions of balance. The problem is one of range and 3D geometry. Given the orbital fabricators short range in orbit there is no way it should be able to reach down to the ground. The fact that it can violates our intuitions of 3D geometry, and that is bad really bad. The ability of the orbital fabricator to reach down to the ground needs to be removed, regardless of balance considerations. It is too fundamentally flawed.

Actually only the combat fab and air fabs can reclaim orbital, which is why i tried to build a bot factory.

Ah yeah it was air fabbers I used the other day. I didn't realize you can't with com... fair enough.

This is only with t1 radar. Very cheap to reclaim, can be reclaimed faster than built as long as you already impacted his fabber amount.

Then, just keep him with no more than 1 fabber, kill any fabbers he builds. try to strip him of economy as you do it.

I am actually going on the gold ladder to exploit exactly this. Forums, expect exploit rage posts incoming. I am really just doing it, to record it's success if any.

EDIT: First day, I beat one person with no prior PA experience, with... everything. I build everything I could kill him with, and then didn't use it/powered it off until I built something else, eventually leading to space laser. Then, I lost another match, to another person who also used orbital but used avengers, so it was coincidence that they also used orbital so meh.