Uber Internal Playtest Video 1/13/2014

Can I please has build?

On a more serious note, if it is in the main branch, why don't we have it?

Land mines look like fun, but they seem like they'd work better against tanks... It's a shame we couldn't see how many units they took out as a reference.

Looks like both orbital radars have had pretty massive nerfs applied, but they're also a lot cheaper. Watch the stream around 38 min. Advanced orbital radar only costs 3600 metal, but has a radar range similar to the advanced ground radar and a vision radius similar to a ground unit. And the regular orbital radar seems to have radar coverage only a bit bigger than the basic ground radar.

Also, if orbital fabbers can build teleporters, what happens when the one in orbit is the "out" tele and the "in" tele is on the ground and a bot goes through? do we then have an orbiting bot?

Well that's crap. what's the point?

Totally agree. I wouldn't have realized how amazingly far the combat engineer's fabbing range was if you hadn't done that, meta. And the amount of healing that one lonely combat engineer does too. Wow.

Plus, that was totally his fault for putting those walls up without even a tiny escape valve. His comm would've been backed into his own wall and died, if he hadn't called foul to back you off.

Early game orbital PowWow

Satellites should be much more awesome.

But not as OP as before lol

I haven't seen it yet, but I assumed the idea is that the orbital fabber builds the existing ground-based teleporter, lathing down from its orbital position. Visually I'm not sure how that's gonna work out; might look a bit like nuclear-green/acid rain. Hopefully we'll see.

Edit: Lightbulb moment. There seems to be a need for the combat fabber to lathe from a much farther distance than we've all grown accustomed to so far, as well. Look for an art update for fabbing, methinks. Perhaps an animation that expands a bit less, and maybe less brightness in the green color.

Or maybe the bots drop down like rain?

Sounds like a unit cannon to me...

I think they'll have that covered with the unit cannon, too. Re-use of existing assets where possible seems to be the trend, and I suspect Uber wouldn't want to make another type of teleporter art asset (orbital) if they don't strictly have to. Easier to stick to the existing asset and just have it built from the heavens above. Of course, I'm just guessing (and they're just experimenting - we may never see it).

@28:45 He mentions "orbital fabbers building teleporters" again, but his power situation is dire by then and he mentions not getting to orbital. So I guess we won't see it today. The way the references are made though, lead me to believe it's still the one teleporter type we've already seen, and not a new teleporter type out in orbit.

It's the same ground teleporter, just built from orbit. And it will be more interesting with orbital fabbers able to travel between planets.

Great, thanks for clarifying. Just got to @38:10 where you've recovered your eco, built an orbital fabber and shown us that build menu option, so we would've figured it out. But always best to have it as first-party confirmation. Thanks!

Main Branch: Meaning the branch of Perforce that we integrate to our live environment from. We also have a Live branch, which ONLY gets integrations from main when we feel main is solid enough.

On top of that, we have a bunch of different proto branches that in turn allow each engineer to work at whatever speed they want, without impacting the stability of the overall game.

This setup allows for people to work on whatever they need to, high risk or low risk, and still guarantee that the build never gets too unstable.

Main branch simply means it's getting close to the point where we think we could release it, but not 100% of the time. There are still a ton of variables that figure in to whether we think it's ready for release or not.

And confirmation that orbital fabbers should move between planets is great. I was figuring that change was a logical next step, dovetailing perfectly with some of these other changes, but again appreciate hearing it direct.

awww

If it's way more expensive, why bother building it?

If advanced ground radar is similar to advanced orbital radar, I don't see many situations where you wouldn't just use fighters to scout. Because the defense "oh but the enemy has lots of flak" kind of suggests "oh but the enemy has lots of orbital fighters/umbrellas"

The one saving grace of the advanced orbital radar is that it gave you a way of seeing the commander anywhere on a planet - meaning you're quickly able to find out if the enemy commander is still on your planet. Pretty essential if you want to keep the game "lunch break length", but still crazily interplanetary.

The disadvantages are obvious. But I maintain that the only reason they were OP was because they gave you completely perfect information about what the enemy was building and what units he had where. If there were any electronic warfare units that would alleviate the problem quite significantly.

Totally agree about finding commanders. I've been hoping that the basic Radar Satellite would act about like the sat we see there @38 minutes in, and that the Adv "Radar" Satellite would keep its current radar range, but have a dramatically reduced vision range (possibly scaling with planet radius?) perhaps with some cost offset, but not 10x less.

Edit: posted too fast.
This would make sniping a commander generally still require more active scouting (though you'd have the advantage of knowing what areas to scout at least). While finding a lone commander who's got almost none of his war machines and industry left, but is still wandering the planet, would be easier to clean up (scout/hunt the likely remaining radar blips).

It's not wildly more expensive in the test build though. Assuming that advanved ground radar hasn't changed, it costs 1800 metal, compared to 3600 metal for the advanced orbital radar. The extra cost is worth it for the mobility alone, and orbital radar is still relatively safe from attack (just Avengers and Umbrellas can attack it). If you want planetary radar coverage, you'll still need to build a few of them on anything bigger than a small moon, but full vision from orbit will be almost impossible. Besides, all this stuff is in flux, so who knows what we'll see when the next patch goes live for us.

I like how the balance is getting changed.. artillery... looks like artillery for once. instead of a longer range laser tower.

Orbital Gates sound really interesting. I'd be very curious about any options for getting build power in orbit transferred to the surface though. Could you build something to drop fabbers to the surface from orbit?