The unit cannon's going to be a factory?? no!!

Err... You're saying that you can accelerate a golf ball to 7 times the speed of sound?
The escape velocity on the moon is 2400m/s.

After Tiger Woods hits a golf ball, it's travelling at 67 metres per second.

launching tanks doesn't make much sense!Whow

Makes all the fun,1 off the great units off sup2

^ just my opinion not saying it shouldn't be done....... just makes more sense that units with joints would be prime choice since their knees would absorb the impact. Tanks or vehicles seem more suited to air transports. But hey it's a game who cares about logic and reason merely hindrances in making a great game!!!!

But how do you invade a fortified moon? I'm hoping it will be a range limitation, and that the reference to small celestial bodies is because only they will be moved into orbit around other planets, but those planets can fire their own unit cannons right back. Limiting the building by planet size would make no sense from any perspective.

EDIT: Actually, I've operated on the assumption that an exit portal is necessary for the teleporter, which I don't think is the case. If you really will be able to teleport in anywhere that's going to be a balance nightmare.

the mars rover didn't have legs and we 'shot' that to another planet. or if you want to explain it as an orbital delivery method, at the very least it dropped from a great height and survived, so why couldn't super advanced robot tanks do the same via a unit cannon? why does having tank tracks stop you from having thrusters and a parachute?

I'd let it fire into orbit and to other planets, but just be slower travelling interplanetary than the gates, and perhaps show up on space radar. instant teleport but expensive, slow orbital gun but cheapish and slow reload, and flexible orbital transporters which can change direction and landing site - depth adds to gameplay.

I'd say that being a launcher is better, and possibly also a factory - more like the orbital relay in Dawn of War 1 - it can build units, but also units can enter it.

I think it was said in the last livestream at some point that you will actually need an exit portal for the teleporter, but since the whole thing is not in the process of implementation at the moment, it's all subject to change as it gets developed. I assume they'll see what works best.

A teleporter without an exit building would, indeed, be a nightmare. I'd figured that unit cannons would be used to leverage ground army strength in planetary invasions, while sustained battles on a planet would need factory - or, by proxy, teleporter - assistance.

This all depends on the cannon's
- range
- capacity
- turret turn ability
- load rate
- launch rate
- burst fire
- cost
- upkeep

You don't start analyzing units with a conclusion. That's just screwed up. You start with the premise and then alter the unit to match that vision.

There's no reason to believe that the unit cannon's premise is flawed when it comes to base assault. If you can assault a planet, you can assault a base. The devil is in the details. If you don't want base assault, you don't give the cannon what it needs to make a base assault successful. This should be common sense, but I won't hold out any hope.

In that case I doubt unit cannon will be size limited, otherwise fortified moons are invulnerable. I also prefer the idea of an exit point on the teleporter so you have to form a beachhead.

The problem many have has nothing to do with the units 'touch down' as it were but rather just with how the units move off of the original Body to Begin with. The Thing with all the mars Rovers, we never shot them anywhere, they were all loaded on rockets.

I was talking specifically in the context of a Unit cannon working on a planet's surface to a different point on the same planet. As I said, although the raw capability of the Unit cannon is the same in that regard as if you were using it from a moon except that using it on the surface cuts out a large number of extra costs and essentially makes it more cost effective to never go to the moon at all to use the Unit cannon.

Mike

There are certainly other ways to move around the same planet. There's transport craft, teles, or just plain legging it. It can be difficult to justify the cost of a unit cannon when you simply don't need one, which is perfectly fine and expected of a strategic weapon.

The cannon provides benefits and downsides that other transport options don't:
- no metal payment per unit cargo(easy to change). Transport aircraft get pretty expensive pretty quickly.
- A vastly increased ability to pierce base defenses, partly due to unit speed and partly due to not having a squishy transport that gets killed by anything with a gun. (more difficult to change)
- One way transit, which is a bummer if you have regrets (inherent to the unit cannon, can not be changed)
- Moving across worlds, which frankly is way overpriced and should not be such an obstacle for a game that demands planet assault. (easy to change)

It's entirely possible for it to render other options obsolete. In that case, just ditch the lame units and let us use more cannons.

kinda makes me think of two moons/asteroids orbiting each other fully armed and then it goes like oldscool pirateship vs ship battle were while both ships shoot and navigate around each other their crews try to board/invate the enemy asteroid ... err ship ... errr yeah ...

it´s simply the case of building up and sacrifising a buttload of units ... either that or you start your typical arms race but it still would come to the same result ... either moon/asteroid vs earthtype or moon/asteroid vs moon/asteroid (or metalpanet)

on the topic of teleporters : they stated that you need at least 2 for entry and exit ... one doesn´t do anything ... they stated it would be a network so you would need definitively more then 1

in which case i actualy hoped the rocket for the game would be what transports a unit to another planet and not the capsule itself ... i thought the capsule to be just the cargospace for the transported unit like we saw in the kickstarter ... and while that might have made another orbital launcher neccesary on the other planet to get off again i would think that might have made navigating between planets easier ... ... ... you wouln´d have even need teleporters aside from a speed and time advantage ...

which as i said earlier depends on how the system is set up (hope i don´t sound like a broken record)

starting on different planets may make the unit cannon on the planets with athmosphere entirerily useless but make them on moons a neccesecity if you want to invade the enemy planet ..
this is what makes the game intresting imo you have to adapt not only with the terain of the various planets but the setup of the system aswell, were your enemies are and how you approach them

right

Why not a standard unit cannon that can only work on smaller planets/moons and an advance unit cannon for the bigger planets. They can effectively do exactly the same thing but with the advance unit cannon being more expensive to build and operate.
This way the game play balance can be tweaked individually for both objects ensuring you get the right balance.

they said similar things about the lander, and look how that has been implemented.

I just hope the cannon fires unit in pairs as it does in the kickstarter video, not only for eyecandy purposes but also for gameplay to make it more efficient by landing i.e 4 and 4 units instead of just 1 that could be instantly killed by static defences.

Also hope these units will be targettable by air defence towers like the paratroopers in RA2 was in order to balance it against static defences. Though people will probably scream about that.

So far.

The more I read about these arbitrary gravity well limitations, the more I think that having very specific planet sizes is going to be necessary in your game to have a fun match.

We already have a size limitation on asteroids, despite the fact that any size will destroy any size planet's entire population. (maybe up to change)

Is there going to be a planet size that smashes units that land on it's surface (Terrestrial the size of Jupiter)?

Is there going to be a planet size that smashes itself into a Nuetron Star?

Is there going to be a planet size that smashes itself into a Black Hole?

These affects could all occur in the system editor itself. I am not criticizing. I am curious.

This is most appealing to me. I think many small asteroid size objects should be in every random system generated map. The more gravity well limitations are added, the more the random map generator will need to accommodate for.

I do agree that there might need to be some kind of 'standards' for things like planet sizes, particular when dealing with things like moons and asteroids(seeing as technically right now we only have moons of varying sizes) but the thing is that Uber has to balance the ideals of designing planet types/biomes to function within certain size ranges vs Planets/biomes working at ANY range and it is a very difficult thing to try and balance both aspects.

Mike

In my opinion, the unit cannon's ability to shoot to other planets shouldn't be limited by the size of the planet it is on but it should be limited by it's relative size when compared with the planet the cannon should shoot on. So it can shoot from a smaller planet to a larger one, no matter the size of the smaller one as long as the smaller planet could orbit around the bigger one. This hasn't been said in any livestream or by any Devs so please don't take this as a fact, I just made it up and I think that it seems quite logical and possible.

I also didn't think of using unit cannon on a single planet before I read it here. I think that it might be quite good gameplay wise if balanced properly. It could open unexpected possibilities for breaking heavy fortifications but it would have disadvantages such as being a single unit the enemy can focus on and snipe to stop the attack and being much more expensive than air transports.

i think i found a pic that best describes the unit cannon..

TADA..

What if the range of the unit cannon was related to the inverse of the planet radius? This means that on huge planets it could only be used to travel from base to base, but on tiny planets/moons it could be used to fire to other bodies.