Stargates and aircraft.

Use a system where you have 2 big planets that are not orbiting each other
In a late game situation ... what do you have to break a stalemate in that
For when both players turtled up with towers and units
... the first thing would be to get a foothold on orbital which imo while timeconsuming is posible with good amount of avangersatalites that we can build in our base and send over
... the second thing to get enough units on the planet which is very difficult
As we currently only have stargates that we have to build on the enemy planet and we can send only fabbers but no other groundunits to protect them ...

Orbital lasersatalites suck against moving targets and are countered by umbrellas

I said it before i say it again troop- and aircrafttransports are needed ... if not mandatory

First orbit then air with bombers,gunships and fighters and finaly ground ...
Oh man dat starshiptroopers epicness when this is happening i cant wait
Seriously that and interplanetary railguns ... and playerkickoption+commcontroloption in teamgames i would be the happiest rts player ..

We may be getting a little off topic here.

What roll do aircraft have in an army?

Should that roll be expanded to an interplanetary scale?



Lets forget about weather or not it would be over or under powered. That can be balanced out later, so lets continue under the assumption that if aircraft are allowed though the gate that it will be balanced.

Just like ground units, I doubt that they will allow 1000 aircraft though at the exact same time. Aircraft will probably enter a hover mode and enter the gate a few at a time just like ground units do.

Since air is weak armored they are best for hit and run ... and thats were the problem lies .... build a gate send t2 bombers through that cant take much but hit as hard as a truck ... and snipe ... air has the big advantage they can get everywere faster then every other unit on a planet ... This is why they are the most dangerous ... mountains buildings cliffs? They dont care .. the simple fact that their movement cant be blocked gives them the highest chance to brake through ... your only counter Is aa or an preventive attack on the enemies air factories or the stargate but the later wouldnt help much if your opponend rallied his force up already shortly before he finished the second gate ... they are way too mobile to be allowed through a stargate ... orbital in comparison is expensive and slow aswell as inaccurate against moving units .. Everything else on the surface that is on the ground or water even hovercraft can be blocked in movement

What possible reason could you have for letting aircraft use the teleporters? Air is still ridiculously good even after the Flak implementation, allowing them even more mobility will just tips the scales again.

Besides, it's not hard to send a few fabs through a TP and start pumping out aircraft anyway.

TP > T1 Air Fac > T1 Air Fab > T2 Air Fac. Can get all this done in 30s with around 10 T2 Bot Fabs and then you can just assist to build rapidly.

It's not like destroying energy provides any direct bonus for the attack. Stalling production is obvious, but very few defenses use energy, or use enough for a generator loss to be any problem at all.

"Role" and "whether". (/end grammar fury)

Air units arbitrarily slowing down to enter a teleporter at the same rate as ground units is totally against the "WYSIWYG" policy Uber's touted thus far. However, even slowing down their rate of transfer won't help the fact that, once on the ground, their flight speed allows them be omnipresent. Even broad swaths of AA turrets won't help there, as the flyers will simply destroy everything that's not covered by sufficient AA - and since a teleporter-base planet is often totally secure, enough flyers can be built that there is very little that counts as "sufficient"

However, the question about roles hinges on the teleporter issue; if air units cannot enter a teleporter, their role is to establish/maintain planetary supremacy and total vision in ways that radar and ground scouts cannot. They can then be balanced solely around single-planetary concerns like how they fit in the pacing of the early, single-planet game. If they CAN go through a teleporter, they have to be made weaker to accommodate the fact that they can potentially blacken the skies of any planet, as stated above.

How is that true? You see the planes slow down, and you see them go through the gate. It's still WYSIWYG.

I would love to see the devs to an internal play-test with aircraft able to use gates just to see if it felt right.

Ground units move slow, and move slowly through a teleporter. Air units move fast - to a casual observer, shouldn't they also move fast through a teleporter? You don't want a player assuming they'll be able to fly their air units through in a massive swarm, only to discover that they trickle through instead.

Granted, you may still find players with that same idea throwing their hands up in despair on first discovering air units can't enter teleporters at all.

Having a finite transit rate is still an immediately visible and understandable mechanic. It's WYSIWYG. There's nothing wrong with that.

You can justify it by saying that the gate can only transport so much matter at a time.

I wouldn't say no to say, a naval gate or orbital gate, but Air as it is right now is too fast and powerful to have that kind of flexibility. I like how land units have that advantage, and they should keep it. Naval could use it because of water planets and naval needs every advantage it can get. Orbital would be good since switching planets takes a massive amount of time to complete and desperately needs a way to speed it up at the later stages in the game. They would be for fighting out an area of orbital dominance to clear out the upper area for fabbers and transports to drop a ground gate or troops. It could perhaps be deemed too powerful to construct one for connecting for the first few planet switching though, so it could be made a super late game thing because of high power draw.

Regardless I see where some are coming from. We need more options dealing with Air when invading because of bombers, and the best AA in the game are fighters. But then the game becomes who has the biggest air blob. We'll have more options though as the game becomes more complete.

Like I think transports could stick in air units, which would make each delivery time consuming and finite which would solve the problem of an endless blob of air streaming through a portal. The trade off being that you have the advantage the air brings at the cost of time and being limited in amount compared to a ground teleporter that can stream units in. In the end game if an orbital teleporter comes to pass you'll be able to send the transports through those to get mass amounts of air in there with a bunch of transports to snipe or clear the air. At that point in the game those kind of tactics would be much more fair.

I just had a thought. What if we made the Naval teleporter gate... a square? It might work as a visual cue to prevent people from trying to connect them to land teleporters. Though if orbital gates were circles, and you connected them to land teleporters... well, let's just say there are more effective ways to drop units onto a planet.

In theory, unit cannons should be a way to solve the air dominance problem, as you could load them up with bomb-bots, clearing a space for the ground AA units, which in turn keep the bombers off long enough to get a Teleporter going. Transports may end up doing much the same, with or without the ability to stuff fighters inside.

Better yet you can link a naval teleporter to an orbital one and drop Leviathans onto suckers from the atmosphere!

But yeah I'd like some visually distinct teleporters. Orbital, Naval, and Land could only be linked to their own gates and Naval's would have to be much larger and wider to accommodate larger ships and their pathing. If air does get a teleporter it would have to be limited, time consuming teleport to prevent a stream of air blobs which can cover a planet. In theory unit canons and transports would do the same thing though, which makes air teleports with these limitations moot and solves the same problem of having air units while preventing an overwhelming stream. With an orbital teleporter you can speed things up with air units and multiple transports if you dedicate the resources to it and in the late game that should be no problem.