After testing the unit cannon, i learned to love and hate it. So i have noticed a few things that could be better. First of all, i cant see how many units can fit into it. I dont know if the 13 slots are full or not, there is no indicator. Another thing i have noticed is, that the Unit Cannon COULD be a Gameending tool against turtles. Sadly...thats not the case. So far from what i have seen its just another version of the Orbital Lander - it just skips the construction of that lander and transports them directly. Not to mention that both can be shot down with the Umbrella So far i had the same issues at invading a highly defended planet wih both of them - If you use enough units, it works. The UC has even one more issue...unit selection. The only T2 unit there is the Slammer - ok, he has Anti Ground and Torpedo weapons, so thats atleast something. No long range units, no shortrange units, no t2 tanks...the unit selection is pretty poor. So i cant use it in a tactical way. I cant shoot out Artillery units to flank the enemy... I can somehow understand that flamethrower tanks are not in there, never liked the Inferno Drops. But what about the rest? why cant i deploy Gil-E in a tactical position? why cant i shoot out Levelers and Shellers? Especially the Bluehawk would be usefull to clear the orbital layer a bit. So yeah...i think the unit cannon should atleast give access to a few more units and some more indicators to make it more user friendly. Otherwise i can just use a few hundred landers again.
UI improvements for a whole lotta things would be nice. And Gil-E's via drop pod would be horrendous, they don't adhere to projectile physics, they really do need to be mechanically fixed in my mind.
It was just an example on how i would use it^^ Currently i rarely use them, just because i cant deploy them fast and easy (and they are no stealth snipers) But what exactly do you mean? Why are they horrendous? Because they shoot in a straight line and not with an arc like other long ranged units? Havnt used them recently, so i dont know^^
their weapon has no collision detection, so if they get in range of your com thats it- you can't hide behind anything for cover. They can also shoot down tactical missiles, which means 3 of the best counters don't work i.e. bluehawks, catapults and hornets). The only viable counters to them really are hords of dox as they can run them down, or artilery.
I've mentioned this before, but I assume that Uber are looking to add in something for build queues -I imagine the same interface will be used to show what is building/built by the unit cannon And yes; The issue from the snipers comes from the fact that they have a long range direct fire weapon, and this usually collides with the planet surface (and ignores it). So a couple of solutions that won't just look really weird are either make the sniper's weapon non-direct fire (arc to go around the surface of the planet, maybe at a constant height above ground - this changes depending on planet radius though!) or make it so that snipers are less effective on smaller planets and that the beam doesn't ignore the planet's surface, but this results in issues with how you effectively communicate this to the player. I'm sure there are better solutions.
Can I add that if a unit cannon is destroyed when firing and then when its husk is being reclaimed the turned barrel suddenly returns to the default position. Thought I should just point it out.
UC needs a roster counter, certainly, and a way to delete unwanted units (such as 2bombots+10slammers, want to delete bombots without launching all the slammers). A second feature that would be REALLY nice is an "auto shoot" function. It would cause the UC to automatically shoot an area once it is full of 12 units, instead of having to manually check on and target the UC every single time. If the UI told me how many units were in the cannon, while the cannon was selected (via hotkey), even while not looking at the cannon, would be nice. I hope that made sense.
tac missiles do actualy work against gile's as the tacmissiledefense has a low rate of fire ... other than that t 1 bombers or fast units with high rate of fire like kestrels do actualy well
