Teleporters

I have no idea, where did I suggest that?

-_- just... what's your suggestion?

Because you only need it "On" when your actually sending units through it and because you can easily stream huge armies through it the obvious optimal strategy is to have your army/force/whatever right beside the Teleporter, turn it on, stream the units through and turn it off as soon as the units are through.

Mike

I think this is the most concise way of explaining my problem with the teleporter. If the game can know exactly when you want to use it anyways (because you send units to it when you want to teleport them), why have the on/off switch be manual? Heck, even streetlights in many cities have methods of detecting traffic automatically.

It's not simply fixed cost or unit cost, there's many other suggestions in this thread such as cooldown and warmup times, inability to switch it off, etc.

I don't know which one is the best one, but I do know that fixed cost combined with free, immediate and manual on/off functionality is nothing but a reward and encouragement for micro.

Off Topic. It always surprises me to see how some people can't see solutions but instead create problems. Off course I'm not speaking about you, Knight. I quoted you 'cos your answer was exemplary.

that requires tedious extra clicks... it's not that I'm for micro, I honestly don't grasp how what you just described requires less micro than the current?

why not suggesting that it turn on and off on it's own for example?

HE'S DESCRIBING HOW YOU WOULD USE IT RIGHT NOW!!

So, what if we say that you can turn it off, and save energy. Also 'cos the other end in response, obviously turns off as well. But doing so the link between the two gates is lost, and you will eventually need to re-establish the link.

Or, you can keep it on as long as you wish and it will keep draining energy.

Beside, right now it is possible to re-link a gate with a different pair at any time. Just right click on the source and then on the new end, and a new link is establish.

It seems teleporting doesn't cost anything at all? I like it, you can actually use these things because they don't have some absurdly high energy consumption. They seem very fun.

Have to test them more though

The entire point I was making guys is that the current setup encourages micro, and that the efficiency bonus gained from performing that micro is fairly significant. I don't like this fact and it's one of several reasons why I've been very vocal about using a 'Per-Unit' costs system instead.

Mike

bare with me i didn´t have chance to test the new build yet ... but i just don´t get how a fixed running cost for teleportals encourages micro ... say you have a fac, an finished gateway and set up the entrancegate as rallypoint
for the fac so that every finished build unit from it automatically goes through the portal to come out of the exitgate (assuming it works) .... what is micro about that? ... i also dont see much of a difference honestly weither you use fix gatecost or per unit cost ... at worst per unit cost limits how many you can send through a portal at a time .. at best you might be saving some energy here and there for when no unit goes through it ... fix gatecost obviously requiers spare energy to constantly run it ... does that change how i order units to go through it? ... i realy can´t see that ...
sooo what am i missing ? the above anwers didn´t realy give me a AHAA! moment of understanding but rather confused me ...
or are you guys speaking about microing the gate?

I'm going to need some help on this one, because it looks like the teleporter costs less than the fabricators used to build it. Did I hit my head on a rock or fall into the twilight zone or something?

Yes, that is exactly what they are talking about.

*shrugs* well in that case it would be no much different then stopping a couple of factorys / with fabbers from building stuff while running on negative energy as this is basemicro aswell or pretty much everything else beeing built by a fabricatorunit ...
keeping the fix gatecost though makes it more transparent on what you are consuming energywise ... throwing in
an army of various sized bots or tanks in a per unitcost method may make the energy count jump too much and therefor more difficult to read and depending on balance may limit the ammount of sent units or it may not matter at all ... i don´t know i would almost go as far and say this seems to be rather needless codingeffort for rather little gain compared to the complexity of the rest of the game but that´s just my gutfeeling

Uh, no, it would be massively different. Factories cost energy ONLY WHILE DOING SOMETHING!

Build a gate, set aside a few generators. What's the big deal? It's not like Uber did something so awful as making 80%+ of the gate's cost in the form of energy.

OW WAIT A MINUTE!

putting a per unitcost to the gate forces the gate to open and close multiple times while that may take away micro on your part it could take more time for your units to get to where you want them to be depending on how you imagine it to work ...

the current model is simple you run it you know how much it consumes, so just provide the energy requiered and send your flood through ... if you want a antimicrosolution make the gate so that it consumes that energy only when it knows there are units to go through and autoclose when there are non ... at the risk of energyconsumption jumps ...
maybe that was what you guys even meant but then per unitcost sounds very misleading as in everyunit costs that much energy to be send through by itself which by the ammount you may want to send through could be difficult to read ...
im generaly for those 2 modes where i can put the gate to run enlessly or run it only when units are going to come ... but still cost the same to run it while active

Where did I suggest a per unit cost?