Unit Cannon Discussion

Lifting a large naval vessel from the surface should be very difficult. In fact, it would probably make more sense to just assemble a ship in orbit and drop it.

Fortunately most naval vessels are the same scale as land units, almost as though it was understood that they'd be facing the same problems as ground dwellers.

No problem here.

I don't see a leveller and a bluebottle being anywhere close to the same size.

I can't disagree with this more. So far, this game has been great at differentiating the two resources in that metal is spent to make things and energy is spent to use things. The result is that all of the metal spent is poured directly into actual units that can be interacted with and destroyed. I know spending metal on the pods is more realistic, but I it seriously breaks the separation between the two resources.

Metal is the more valuable resource. Energy is produced essentially "for free" after you pay for the generator. Metal, however, requires territory control not just metal spent on producing it.

As a result, anything that should compete with production should cost metal. If you only have to pay energy to operate a system, you're only shifting some of the resource cost of that unit or structure off into more metal spent on energy generators. But if it costs metal, then using it actually means less metal for other purposes. And using it more means you could have spent that metal on even more production instead.

I don't see the unit cannon as competing with production though. The unit is already built, so the metal has been spent on it. The unit cannon is a lot more similar to the teleporter, which I imagine will just use energy to operate.

Size is deceptive. Anything that floats is less dense than water, which in the world of metallic robots, is pretty damn light.

Unit cannons pay metal with every shot by DEFAULT. It fires units, and every single unit in the game requires metal to build. No exceptions.

Density has nothing to do with it, weight does.

And a destroyer is heavier then a tank.

Yet it costs less than every single T2 unit?

If the problem is the boat being too big, build a smaller boat(or build a bigger gun). That was hard.

The only significantly smaller boat is the scout, and good luck invading with them.

Face it bob you are coming up with ridiculous reasons as to why unit cannoning ships would work when simply moving tanks between worlds is hard enough.

T2 tanks cost more because they are balanced around that cost, they use more advanced technology that requires more resources to build.


You cannot simply ignore the problems with space travel by saying building a smaller unit, because that smaller unit will not fulfil what the original is capable of, and if it is, then it invalidates the point of the original to the point that we should be building that smaller unit.

Its a load of bollocks and you know it.

No. First, tell me how a smaller attack boat ceases to be an attack boat.

The ONLY reason boats are bigger is because "muh scale".

It is currently the same for interplanetary nukes.
I sincerely hope this will be taken into account. I had 3 moons in orbit of one planet, the 3rd being the most far away, and could shoot nukes down the the earth planet, but not the other 2 moons. The nukes were virtualy flying through the other 2 moons (so to speak), but those couldn't even be targeted.

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Boats are bigger because they need to be to support their weapons, not because it looks cooler to do so.

Would have us using hovercraft to count out on the need for any other unit then?

Make the T2 vehicle fabber amphibious and offer a couple amphibious vehicle (basic and advanced variants maybe, maybe 2 for each) options to be launched through the cannon. No ship launching. Problem solved.

Well i guess you can always planet smash an enemy controlled water planet.

This train of logic isn't going to end up circular, is it? Because whether a boat can be launched is simply a matter of stating "yeah, it is" or "no, it isn't".

You have not listed any gameplay reason to refuse boats. Map types can have just as much water play as they can have land play. Boats need to be moved around just as much as tanks need it. There's no reason to put an exception here.

Or are they going to be special because humans are special and can only operate on land?

There are much smarter ways of doing a unit cannon assault on a water world that don't involve shooting capital ships.

For a gameplay reason, is the same reason why its more then likely we won't be shooting Levellers themselves through a cannon. They are far too powerful to have such mobility.

Instead of allowing such a individually powerful unit like a destroyer the ability to unit cannon you should instead be using a multitude of smaller units like the ground Dox to fire.

Because shooting a destroyer out of a cannon is stupid, no gameplay reasons for it, its stupid and totally brakes many of the conventions of sense in the game, like no space ships, or using commanders.

You put an exception on things that have been ruled out by including the ability to do this, things like experimental then have little reason to sot exist.


So using gameplay as a reason to do this is bad argument, because it doesn't fit with the game and I absolutely refuse to change my mind on that, IT IS A BAD IDEA.

Destroyers aren't capital ships! They're tech 1 cannon fodder, which is functionally identical to every other cannon fodder that exists in the game. Its going to have the exact same problems as any other cannon fodder unit when it comes to assaulting and defending planets.

If for some reason a unit fails to be cannon fodder, then it's so big and expensive it's pushing into experimental territory.

Perhaps if you were referring to the T2 leviathan battleship, I suppose the "too big" argument kind of makes sense. It's an 8K long range superheavy assault ship that is obviously not standard cannon fodder. The same problems would be true for a monkeylord or krogoth(or a Fatboy, which is clearly the inspiration for the battleship). That's just the price of going big. REALLY big, not "sort of kind of maybe medium'ish" big.

You can not be serious. If a leveller is too innately strong, that is a problem with the leveler. That is a problem with counters. That is a problem with defenses. That is NOT a problem with the unit cannon.

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Leveres should also be able to utilise the unit cannon, but I do agree that they are strong now.

I hope levelers get a nerf some time down the line or that everything else T2 increases in power, they are truly the strongest conventional T2 unit around, way stronger cost to power ratio than Slammers or Leviathans or any T2 aircraft, with missile cruisers coming soon after. But we'll have to wait for the balance patches for that.