A way to populate a planet from orbit? Orbital Unit Dropper Idea

I had an interesting team match the yesterday. Essentially I ended up in the situation where my team mate got disconnected and I had to evacuate my commander by Astraeus to a far off moon. I already had orbital fabbers there but didn't get chance to send any ground fabbers through the teleporter to begin taking it over. This left me in the situation where I could only build orbital units/structures until my commander arrived, which took about 5 minutes (it was a very large solar system). By that time my metal extractors on the starting planet had got destroyed leaving me with my in-transit commander as my only source of metal income. As such I was in the situation where I couldn't build anything economy related until he arrived, as I could see no way of claiming the moon's surface with just the units I had in orbit. There was no gas giant in this solar system.

I realise this is a very specialised case, but it seems to me that we're missing a link in the tech tree that allows you to get down to ground from orbit (titans being the exception). A few solutions I thought of are:

• Have the orbital fabbers able to build T1 factories (but this could introduce a lot of complications)
• Have a new orbital factory that builds a subset of units in pods and drops them down to the surface. This could either happen one at a time, or be stockpiled and dropped on command (like the unit cannon).

Anyone else have any thoughts or ideas on this?
Thanks

P.S I ended up loosing the match due to the current bug of commanders detonating 5-10 minutes after a team mate disconnects if you're playing with shared armies, which happened to be just after my commander reached the moon

When you lose all you base including the metal extractor and you haven't started to the construction on other planet,
I believe you already lost the game.

Allowing the orbital fabricator to build the T1 factory is an interesting idea.
It will be very convenient to expend other planet without too many steps.
But I worry about the game play and balance,
this may make the Astraeus near useless unless transporting the commander.
Because there is no need to use the Astraeus to bring the ground fabricator,
orbital fabricator can build T1 factory directly.
The construction speed of orbital fabricator is 45 metal per sec,
I think it is even faster than the commander's construction speed.
The orbital fabricator will become very overpower.

Solution: T2 orbital launcher. Like t1, but can be built only by orbital, significantly more expensive, slightly more efficient, and can build t1 ground fabbers.

Well I was hoping I could make a comeback as Team 1 and 2 fought it out, but in a 2 team game you're right.

It would be an easy addition to the game, but could have many balance implications as you describe.

An orbital launcher that builds ground units seems rather strange to me. If you're already in orbit the orbital factory gives you access to everything.

I still think the Unit Dropper has merit though. Not only does it resolve the original issue described by giving a way to get units on to the ground from orbit, it also keeps them safe from ground weaponry until they drop. Given its limited use-case I think such a structure would make sense as just a T1 builder, rather than T2 like the Unit Cannon. If it was a factory that could stockpile and drop units to any point on the planet then T2 tech and costing would be justified.

Does anyone like this idea, think it would be worth making in to a mod presuming Uber don't do anything with the idea?

Well, I think the orbital unit cannon is ok for me.
Current unit cannon on the ground can shoot units to almost everywhere.
I can't see the major difference between building the unit cannon on the ground with building it on the orbit, unless the unit cannon is under attack.
And I think it is more reasonable to launch the units from orbit rather than the ground
since it requires less energy in physics.
Of course, building unit cannon on orbit should be more expensive than building it on the ground.

not a fan for factories that can drop units from orbit ...
but i wouldn't mind if it's expensive enough and only can dropunits directly beneath it ... ...
definitively don't want an orbital unitcannon that can send units everywhere ..

I totally understand that, we already have a functional Unit cannon after all. If one was buildable in orbit then players could easily spam them on a Gas Giant and send massive armies to anywhere. Also it would essentially make the ground cannon obsolete which is something that any new unit/structure should avoid doing.
I think cost would be dependant on what it would actually be capable of building. For instance if it could build everything a Unit Cannon can then it should be a comparable price, as it's on-orbit location is offset by its inability to stockpile and select a landing site. On the other hand, if this was made to only produce T1 units then perhaps it could be a similar price to the Orbital Factory.

If anyone is interested in developing this, I created a thread over in the modding section of the forum (https://forums.uberent.com/threads/idea-orbital-unit-dropper.70170/). I personally would love to see such a unit become a reality, but don't have much time for game modding currently.

There's no need or point in the unit you describe.

Could you give details about why you came to this conclusion? Of course you're entitled to say this, but what is the current method of overcoming the problem I described in the OP? Or are you meaning that the problem isn't worth being taken seriously?

for a situation were you are purely limited to orbital getting no groundtroops to surface .. lets say 2 planets 1 gasgiant

player one drives 2 of his own planet and just leaves him with the gasgiant ... commander being trapped in orbital being at its most vulnerable

I'm not sure if I understand your scenario 100%, but you're stuck with only orbital units and still have eco from gas giant and you want somewhere safe to drop your commander, by first building a base because the commander is vulnerable in orbit on a transport.

In this case, if you have the eco, time and opportunity to build factories on one of those planets and secure a base then there is no benefit to building from orbit, you might as well have just dumped your commander down as the enemy wasn't taking out your base anyway.

What you posted in the OP is not a problem, if you have been so badly hammered that you cannot build a gate or send an engineer through then having a unit that can build factories from orbit is not going to help you all that much in the long run. In fixing your little problem you would change the way in which planets are populated and reduce the use of gates immensely.

the hypothetical situation is you are totaly stuck to orbital factories only ... there is no other way to get groundtroops but to get your commander down which rather would result in him being busted and any attemp to build a surface titan gets shutdown because it takes an infinity and a half to get it finished ... ...

Let me try one final pitch for the idea then, since the scenario I proposed may be hindering rather than helping the discussion.

In Total Annihilation it was possible for you to send one of the six construction unit classes over to a far off location and build a full base, regaining access to all technology by building the different factory types and their advanced variants. In Planetary Annihilation you can also do this, either by sending a fabber to a new island, unit cannoning them, or teleporting them. Once there all tech can be regained in the same way it can with TA (assuming there's land/sea). However, if you choose to send an orbital fabber to a location it is not possible to get all technology back, without employing a transport method for the other unit classes. I don't see why this should be the case, irrespective of the scenario I put forward. It would be the equivalent of Air cons in TA only building air related tech and you having to send a sea, hover or air transport over with the other construction unit types to get access to the remaining units and structures.

If orbital is meant to be a first class citizen of the game as we've been told, then this lack of a link to any of the other fabber classes seems like a big oversight. I am therefore suggesting the unit dropper as a way to overcome this, giving orbital a link to bot and vehicle fabbers and (by extension) the rest of the tech tree.

Note: I didn't mention Supcom as that doesn't have such separation of engineer classes.

I guess there are a few things that help, the fact that we now have lots of really useful orbital -> ground attack options makes this less of a stuck situation. If you only have a Gas giant left, then at least you have the eco and space to build a bajillion orbital battleships and Helios titans. also, with the eco of a gas giant backing you up, you can probably afford to have swarms of literally dozens of orbital fabbers drop in and insta-build Titans on the surface. Not to mention how many SXX platforms you'd be able to support with a gas giant worth of eco.

Anchors are also as good as ever at helping to give you ground control, and really, if you have the economy and build power to mass produce titans, i'd say you probably wont have too much trouble invading using only orbital tech.

I think helios, orbital fabbers, teleports, and unit cannons fulfill this role perfectly well. If you get forced completely off planet and have only orbital i'm not sure if you should be able to come back from that. Maybe. But then you could build entire armies strictly from space without needing any map control other than a gas giant. Seems very niche and weird to me.

the helios won't help much without any groundarmy though it would be a very expensive mobile anchor at best ...

Why not use orbital > ground weapons to clear an area for your commander?

while this could be a choice it would be very risky because of air bring in a swarm of hornets since those have the most range and the comm might get busted ... how quickly is orbital able to bust anything air

Nevermind doing that, you can build titans... directly on the ground... from orbit... just crush the planet under orbital bombardment and titan spam.