Exactly!! Just because something kills you once don't immediately call for overhaul of said unit, watch the replay review your tactics, overhaul them first. I will say that the laser should obviously consume energy to fire, as should most def turrets
Just to be clear, I am not posting these ideas because I get killed by the orbital laser sat all the time. I am posting them because it is ridiculously easy for me to kill other people with it. So easy that I feel bad for using it in fact. There is almost no warning from the time when it starts attacking to when your commander dies, and there is no reason to use it to kill anything other than the commander, because it is so effective at it. I believe this is the same reason nukes were changed to not 1 shot a commander (and building 2 nukes to accomplish this costs way more than this satellite does). If you get orbital up before your opponent, you've won. All you have to do is build this and target the enemy commander. It is extremely rare that your opponent will build an umbrella defense before building an orbital factory, and even if they do, the chance of it hitting your satellite is 50-50 at best.
Ok, ok, ok, I I see what you're getting at. As we both stated though the main problem is the umbrella being ineffective atm. Perhaps damage could be nerfed slightly, but I must say there are a lot of new players that are still learning game mechanics which is why you could be running an onslaught with your laser. I still feel that the laser has been implemented perfectly
for some reason my laser sats never fire unless I have vision on them, not even radar. It's kinda annoying
last night we had an op get up a laser before we had any orbital at all in a 4v3. We had already destroyed one of their bases and coms. We lost a com and many structures but we countered with a large land attack killing 2 more of their coms and destroying their remaining bases on the planet. In a 1v1, I am sure that it is a death sentence to have an opponent get orbital and get a bead on your com, but in a larger game a single laser isn't going to do it by itself, at least it didn't in last night's game. A power requirement makes sense, I don't know if it doesn't have a power requirement already, but if it had a power requirement to recharge, then you could counter with a land attack in a 1v1 to stop your com from being killed.
Advanced Radar Sat being a requirement to snipe an com with no other sight on him is a pretty big drawback for k-sats as well. It isn't particularly cheap, the advanced radar sat.
Seconding continuous beam, or at least a 1 second solid beam, right now the shooting animation just doesn't visually convey the amount of damage its causing. Also seconding a high energy cost to its use!
Is the umbrella still not effective after the changes earlier in the week? In my tests with it, it was pretty good at taking down the primary thing it currently defends against - the orbital laser. Are there still problems? (Yes, I'm intentionally ignoring the core question of the thread, because orbital in general is going to see a lot of iteration still)
I actually just played a game against some clanmates where we used some orbital. One team had blockaded my base with orbital fighters, preventing me from launching any fighters of my own to counter. I made an umbrella and it was worthless at killing the fighters to stop the blockade. However, I was afraid they'd soon have an orbital laser after me so I hid my commander by the umbrella. I never saw it, but they said the umbrella ended up shooting down the laser they sent after my comm(as well as some radar they sent to distract it), so I suppose it did its job in that regard. Also, a bug I noticed, the orbital fighters blockading my orbital factory ended up killing the factory when the first unit launched, because their downward fire hit the factory while the rocket rose up.
Yah - the Umbrella is not going to be particularly effective against moving OFs. That's pretty much by design. It's intent is to shoot down slower, but more dangerous, units like the orbital laser. Like I said though. Still a lot of iteration, tuning, etc. And it also needs a real tuning pass.
For starters I would like to see a shiny beam being shot by the orbital laser. So that you clearly know when you're being fired upon by the laser. For the rest... I'll be waiting for the iteration.
Ima just revive this thread here... I would like to see it essentially have the same DPS, have a continuous beam, a small AOE field for damage, but force it to remain stationary while firing. I guess a short cooldown between shots (say 2 seconds) would be good too. This would make it more effective as an orbital bombardment platform for removing structures and defenses, especially walls of turrets. If you made it fire into the middle of an army of tanks, it could potentially cut a line of death right through the middle... That would be cool to see! EDIT: The laser would also reveal itself when firing, I think.
Also, it seems to me like this should be in the "general discussion" forum, not beta issues and bugs.
Whut. This forum was previously named Beta Discussion I think, which would explain why many threads here probably seem out of place now.
