Superweapon Types.

I think "Super Unit" or "Super Weapon" may be a misnomer in many ways. I definitely don't want a single unit that rocks so hard I need nothing else, but I think there are specific holes missing in the gameplay. Among those are late game investments to use our super powerful economies, and effective ways to assault fortified planets.

My solution would be this:

First, most orbital units would be ORBITAL, not interplanetary. Avengers and laser satellites would be among these. Only the Astraeus and maybe a recon satellite would remain interplanetary.

A new class of Interplanetary Spaceships should be added. Most of them would focus on transporting non-interplanetary units.

An Orbital Carrier, for deploying avengers and other satellites.
An Aircraft Carrier, for deploying planes.
An Assault Dropship, for deploying ground units.
An Escort Cruiser, for Anti-Nuke duty and Anti-Orbital defense of our other ships.

They would be an expensive, powerful late game addition, but not one of them could end the game without the support of our existing "non-super" units.

We do have the stargate so you could assault a planet through orbital fighters + fabbers. But many of those carriers would add some of the needed variety and options.

Satalites can travel between planets in real live i dont see a reason for them to be stuck. on one planet .... and no to spaceships
But yes to interplanetary orbital transports and carriers ...
Too much complexity is bad ....

Nope. That's bread&butter artillery. Nothing mega about that.

The best place for mobile artillery weapons is in the naval theater. There aren't too many options to assault land.

Weak, expensive, and alone is a bad combination. It's way too specific of a task for something that is a suicide mission regardless of how good it is.

Anti ordnance has been talked about before. Here's the problem: Artillery excels against things that don't move. Like bases. Things that DO move can eventually break through and kill the artillery.

While in theory this weapon is good for mobile armies, in reality why bother? Use a unit cannon, transports, drop them from orbit, or just walk in. The units on the field simply don't need artillery defense.

This guy is going to sit at home and be a makeshift base defense. So why not make it stationary and get it over with?

Okay, a big bertha style weapon. I can dig it. PA could certainly benefit from planets firing gigantic slugs at each other.

Abilities that move enemy units can be lots of fun. IMO this type of effect is better to use on air. Why? Partially because air is fast, and punishing their speed is hilarious. Partially it's to avoid the awkward issue of putting ground units out of bounds in some silly way.

It's hard to fathom a situation where an orbital transport isn't necessary for PA. Personally I'd prefer "requires expensive loading facility, cheap transports with good capacity, crashes down d-day style". It's the sort of transport that should dominate the mid to late game when a lot of things have to move at once.

It's my own definition of "mega" if you want. I think opinions on that term differ vastly.
And it has more weapons than just that piece of artillery
The design isn't finished, though.

I don't think it's too specific. It should be strong enough to be able to act as a spearhead unit before your enemy has set up too many defenses. There's a time window for that. It just shouldn't dominate ground combat because of it's mobility.
If you're too late you should prefer using other methods. The Megabot should be designed to fill a very specific role.

I for one like to use artillery. And I know that they can force much pressure on enemy armies.
The Megabot would just give you more time to act, and should make your army more cost efficient when facing heavy artillery.

In real life the only "satellites" that travel between planets are those explicitly designed for it, and they aren't even called "satellites" anymore, they called "spacecraft". The processes of launching an interplanetary payload is very different from simply entering orbit. You can't just decide "I'm going to send my spy satellite to the moon today". Satellites lack the thrust capacity for anything more than simple orbit changes. Orbiting does not require anything remotely resembling an engine, and our real life examples don't have any engines. Voyager, Cassini, and all the others are very fancy guided projectiles. They are ultra limited in their interplanetary scope.

Breaking orbit, traveling to another planet, breaking orbit again, and choosing a new destination requires an engine, and is an action no spacecraft built to date was ever capable of doing, so I think it's fair to say modern "interplanetary" travel is a poor comparison to what we are describing as an interplanetary unit.


Of the 4 units I suggested 3 of them are carriers. The last is nothing more than a mobile defense for our assault force, which we desperately need even if we just keep them all as "satellites".

As of the latest patch only units built at the orbital launcher are interplanetary capable, and units built by the fabber are not. I think our current system of "some of these are interplanetary" is much more complicated than having a simple and clear distinction. I'm not talking Starwars or Homeworld. I'm thinking much simpler, torch drive style spacecraft with large solar panels and a long spine down the center where we would attach our transported units. Very 2001 Space Odyssey. They would fit the current art style for space units and would fill a badly needed role.

edit: copy paste error

The unit you have described is a mobile artillery. There are many like it, and this one is not any more special than the others. Big or small, it serves the same goal of smashing things at long range.

Not specific? It's a unit that is built entirely for the purpose of building one thing, something which a bunch of other units can also build. It's not even very good at it- you admitted that it was expensive and weak for its cost.

Are players expected to suicide these things in waves until they manage to finish a gate, in the vain hope that enough reinforcements can take over from there? That seems like a pretty shitty role.

Also, there is no such thing as a weak spearhead unit. It is a role literally in defiance of itself.

Nnnnope. Supcom artillery was made to pierce supcom shields. Supcom shields were incredibly strong, which required super strong artillery to break it. Without shields, a long range weapon does damage regardless of how powerful or fast firing it is. It will always lay pressure without the need to build up a shield crushing critical mass.

An anti ordnance weapon can be specifically tailored against PA's long ranged weaponry. Shields could not.

yes our satalites may have been poor but some of them were still able to pass to other planets and take pictures of them without steering torwards their orbit
This is a game with futuristic robots and technology in their world the satalites ARE designed to be able to travel between planets so they might have jets to move around ....
Feel free to call em spacecraft .... i just dont want spaceships nor spacefighters in this game

Yeah but it has even longer range than the other mobile artillery units. But you pay a very heavy price for that, with a big risk attached (because you focus it into one unit). And like I said, it has more than one weapon, which makes it mega to me (apart from the fact that I'd use a Megabot sized model for it).

I said it's not too specific. It should be used when the enemy has bombers and/or orbital fighters on that planet already, a role that the orbital fabber can't take. But if the enemy has, for example, lot's of artillery on that planet, or nukes or whatever, then it should be smarter to use other methods, like the unit cannon, smashes or a form of orbital transport for small armies.

It's a role that no other unit takes, gives you more choices in general.

Let me clarify: It shouldn't be weak, but neither should it be so strong that you would use it to fight enemy armies head-on. There's a very fine line between OP and UP here.

Yeah but we don't have shields in this game, nor are we talking about SupCom.
Did you try the new Holkins vs big armies? I usually have five of those at every edge of the outer-layers of my base. They can do very serious damage to armies. Maybe that's going to change. But I don't think a change is necessary tbh.

Uh. It's still a mobile artillery. It only makes things awkward because you have 2 mobile artys in the game.

Are you talking about the weapon that has a firepower per cost which rivals the basic assault tank? AND has 6 times the range?

I have no explanation for someone who celebrates removing shields from the game by increasing artillery damage. I guess the assumption is that you suicide a few scouts before attacking in force.

What would be awkward about two types of mobile artillery? One would be cheap and useful against laser towers and other stationary defenses, the other one would be very expensive and good against clumped up bases and big blobs of slow moving units. Those are two entirely different roles.

I'd celebrate it by implementing a unit that gives some protection against artillery. Like I have mentioned.
And I'm not completely against shields. But the only place where I'd see shields acceptable is vs the interplanetary railgun cannons that were mentioned earlier.

Btw: I'd consider giving it some nuke protection, too. It's something that armies really lack atm.

Which have been celebrated in TA and Supcom and ZK and Supcom2 with the mobile missile launcher and the mobile artillery. It's not a mega unit. Deal with it.

Nah. Don't fight stupid with stupid. If a single unit turns out to be hilariously broken, the solution is to deal with that unit alone.

A new unit is useful when there are a lot of things causing problems, not just one. If one clever mechanic can turn it all around, it's a beautiful thing.

It could be dealt differently here, there's nothing that forces the devs to do everything as in their other games. I think we were already past that point with the interplanetary concept introduced.

Sry, but I don't think it's stupid nor do I think that it's broken. I like the Holkins the way it is now. It really made this game more fun to play with how they changed artillery and walls.

Guys.
Hey guys.
A weapon.
Guys.
Guys, a weapon.
A WEAPON.
That causes SUPERNOVAS.

Why worry about gameplay when awesome is the alternative??? Supernova bombs should be cheap so we can see them detonate more often!

What would Mister Torgue do?

Ok, so going down the list of ideas here:

1. Using halleys, that's not a weapon.

2.The suggestion was to use an asteroid, if i remember correctly, so once again, halleys.

3.It's been suggested, I think it's cool. Not halleys.

4. Sooo, smash an asteroid into a planet? With halleys?

5. mini death star? It seems to me like the orbital laser platform, or at least an advanced version of this should do it.

You like halleys don't you?

Ok, jokes aside, here is my suggestion.

Metal planets should have re-activateable tech, that is randomized every time you play. One time you might have a deathlaser, one time you might get an asteroid generator (it would spawn asteroids in orbit around the metal planet, at a high resource cost, and you could build halleys on there.), Perhaps a massive unit cannon that fires at a much higher rate, with more units per pod, and have much longer range. Also, maybe a Ultra teleporter, that when activated allows you to connect to any constructed teleporter anywhere, that might be cool.

Use the Unkempt Harold.

I bet you'd get a hell of a lot of bullets raining down if you fired it between planets.

It'd be beautiful.

Maybe I've missed it, but it seems every time these superweapon discussions come up, there's a fear and an assumption that they will be "game ending", and thus induce players to race directly for those weapons or technologies.

I'd only like to put forth a point that I haven't seen very much, and that's that while these objections may be sensible given the way the game has played thus far, they may not be as relevant as optimizations for both framerate and UI are implemented, systems grow larger, and matches get bigger in scope.

In a system with 10 major planets and a number of asteroids, you can see how what would be a game-ending "superweapon" in PA's current state (i.e. games with few or even just one planet) would simply be another tool in the arsenal of a much larger playing field. Restricting their use so as not to be the only viable late-game option would be a balance issue.

Given that the core conceit of the game is... I'll say it... planetary annihilation... I can only feel that more variety in your planetary-annihilating awesomeness would be a good thing, if implemented sensibly.