Question about orbital transports

Will orbital transports have to land before they unload their troops or will we see orbital drops?

I'm more for orbital drops since the whole point of orbital transports will be to establish a beachhead, plus that negates the possibility of locking down a planet through air superiority as an orbital drop will just negate that to same extent (bomber will still be an issue). Also that would be much cooler.

Teleporters kinda made orbital transports redundant.

Not really. Teleporters need an end point. I cant see that being made when an enemy has units patrolling the planet and actively destroying the end point as it is being build. Orbital transports are going to be there to establish a beachhead so you can build a stargate teleporter. After that I agree that orbital transports will be pretty useless.

Not until you establish a proper breach in the enemy's defences.

Really now, really?
You could not be any wrongerer (yes I invented that word, because any more wrong would not cut it ).

while teleporter facilitate armies moving between planets, they need time to be constructed, and fabbers to construct them. Any decent could of bombers or orbital fighters, can take either out with no issue.

Ortbital drop pods or transport would counter this, allow for the establishment of beacheads on enemy fortress worlds, and would allow fabbers in these drops to make gates for reinforcements.

Teleporters alone do not allow assaults on fortified worlds.

Ok good point. But honestly, if you're taking on a "fortified planet", your best bet is a small moon because it's... You know.... fortified.

Recently I was in a team game and got kicked off-planet (well, I flew there but lets just say I wasn't welcome back), since there weren't any moons, each team had a planet each. Now here comes the problem: Each team has a planet's worth of resources, meaning even if orbital transports were in the game at the time they would have needed to avoid:

The deep space radar that could see them literally millions of kilometres away.
The giant fleet of orbital fighters patrolling the planet
The giant fleet of fighters and bombers patrolling the skies
Advanced radar that was everywhere
The artillery and missile launchers everywhere
Nukes
The giant blob of bots

Even if you had an entire fleet of transports there's just no way to compete against a fully defended planet.

Also I said "kinda" therefore I'm not completely drunk/stupid/damaged. I AM IMPERVIOUS TO YOUR CRITICISMS AHAHAHAHAHA. I'll stop now...

Quite so, although I never said you were deranged, merely misguided . (or not fully informed)

There's always a hole in a defense. Trying to defend against anything takes a lot of times and effort, while not saying it can't be done, it is hard. Also take into account that currently defenses against drops are not being built, as there is no risk of those.

In addition knowing someone is coming doesn't mean you are fully prepared for it, but it certainly helps. I would assume you can see transports in transit, but not what is on them. If drops immediatly land upon reaching orbit it also negates orbital fighter defenses and Umbrella systems.
When the drop lands right on the enemy base I would assume they also do a load of damage before they are taken out, potentially damaging the production capacity of the enemy, and taking out important defenses: ie. anti nuke launchers, umbrellas, tactical missle launchers, etc.
Opening up the planet for further assault, nuke attacks, construction of a teleporters, et alia.

Historically landing operations where always a pest because fighting an entrenced enemy is always a bitch, btu orbital transports would at least allow us to fight, rather than throw rocks at them

Problem 1: They have an entire planet, they can build anything anywhere
Problem 2: Systems with no moons mean nukes are a no-no.

Based on what I had set up in my game, I don't really see a drop doing any significant damage other than a comm snipe.

Well defensive nukes are still in. (Also I'm not at all sure if they won't allow nukes to move through an entire system eventually)

But commsnipes are pretty significant damage. Any fabber and factory that goes down would also be significant. Also bear in mind that unless close range defenses are built, it takes quite a while to shut down an invading drop, doubly so if they land on the right side of the walls. Triply so if they have combat fabbers.

What if you own a planet that is fortified and they own a moon that is fortified and are making Halleys? Orbital transports provide you with a way of taking over that moon .

Well that's different, if there's moons involved you avoid the whole stalemate problem.

Yea I might be a moon or it might be an asteroid with R=200. Also if you think nukes are the answer then you haven't met a guy who built 5 antinukes on a radius 249 moon. That thing was impenetrable. Also don't forget that there are planes to make nukes reach the entire solar system.

Id personally like to see dropships like they are in battletech.

Ie very heavily armoured, with a **** ton of varied weapons arrays, that can carry 80+ units. Perhaps they could even act as a T1 factory once deployed, allowing you to crank out fabbers, doxes, and anti air bots (which im guessing will become worthwhile in the future).

Of course, any assault should have significant preparation and forces allocated to it. Id expect such 'assault transports' to take a decent amount of time, energy, and metal to construct.

From a gameplay and enjoyment standpoint, I think it would be pretty awesome. If the strongest anti transport weapons were only able to be placed in orbital, it would add to the game where orbital units would have to clear out the defences so the assault transports could land without being targetted by the anti transport railguns or what have you. T

They would of course be resistant to umbrella shots unlike other more fragile orbital units, allowing for an attack with the majority being able to make it to the surface unless the planet was HEAVILY covered with them.

Well that doesn't sound overpowered at all.

It wouldn't be if they were a considerable investment in time, metal energy, with sufficient orbital defenses in place that could stop them.

It would make participating in orbital combat vital, and something you could not neglect. If the enemy seized orbital, it would then give them a massive advantage. However, if the push was stopped, if you consider 6 assault transports each with 80 units onboard, thats 480~ units instantly killed, irrecoverably, and the investment in the assault transport which would be necessarily considerable. Even better, if salvage was enabled / worthwhile, and if the assault transport ploughed into the ground, it would be a HUGE recoverable metal pile for the enemy you were assaulting.

Umbrellas shouldn't be able to lock down an orbital zone, and once they are down, obviously with some casualties, assault transports SHOULD need to be significant units thrown at them to dislodge them. As they should not have been allowed to land in the first place.

The assault transport could be fitted with 4 x dual ground lasers, 4 x flak turrets, 4x missile launchers maybe some sort of medium range artillery cannon, something that allows them to weather the storm thats going to be thrown at them and punch back but requires several at a time with support to succeed.

I wouldn't call that particularly overpowered, when you consider what they are up against, especially considering they would not necessarily have an antinuke, and would require orbital antinuke coverage.

If done right, I can just see it being useful unit for the endgame. Combined with a more fleshed out orbital roster, I can see it resulting in interesting, multi stage assaults. Orbital Nukes, AntiNukes, assault platforms built in orbit that can 'drop' manufactured aircraft into the atmosphere etc.

All of these would be fun to play with and make orbital worth the investment, rather than build avengers, acquire superiority in numbers, spam the odd satellite and rush stargates.

Pretty much this:
http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Overlord

i started a similar thread tlaking baout this some time ago:
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/orbital-gameplay.56369/

Teleporters need to bu built, how do you pretend to build a teleporter in a fortified enemy planet? you need an strategy for doing that, is not valid to say: so as it is well defended, there is nothing more i can do about it.so the only option is:

Smash an asteroid or moon into the planet.
Then destroy that planet so theres 1 planet less to build on and to extract reources from.
Destroy the moon/asteroid, so theres 1 moon/asteroid less to build on and to extract reources from, plus the number of moons and asteroids ar elimited, you wont have enough for doing that to all the 38 (or more) left enemy planets.
Lose the resources units etc on that moon/asteroid that was so hard to ahcieve and that take so much time.

Seriously? i think that should be an ultimate option when you don't have another choyce, and that option lets you win, but if not is just a waste of time.

so what would be the other option? well building orbital spacecrafts capable of ''transporting and producing'' units between planets, thus you would be able to stablish a beachead.

you say that planet has a lot of nukes so your army would be decimated? well then why not having antinuke missiles too? maybe in a carrier who nkows. Maybe you could produce and use nukes too.

Spacecraft (for fighting another spacecrafts/orbital units, what would lead to orbital battles similar to space battles)
http://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/12/11043/frigate4.jpg
Dropship/Assault spacecraft (Transport multiple ground units from planet to planet)
http://www.theforce.net/swtc/Pix/dvd/aotc/parade05.jpg
aircraft spacecarrier (Transport and produce aircraft units from planet to planet. might be able to produce aircrafts and produce and use nuclear missiles.) (Maybe antinukes missiles too so you can protect your ground army from them).
http://fc08.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2011/294/2/d/spaceship_from_jap_anime_by_mobiustwo-d4dirfk.png

I love how as a community we consistentely keep calling teleporters stargates .

I have to agree with Zweinstein here, If it takes a fuckton of resources to build one of them transports (on the order of a Halley) it's not unreasonable to expect them to be quite hardy.

Especially considering landing on a hostile planet would be hard as hell to begin with.

Now there are a few alternatives, a fuckton of cheaper, weaker transports that each carry less units, where you expect 1/3 to go down before ever making planetfall. Or something similar in droppod variant.

But I can see these heavy transports working

Invasion methods really, really need work for the final form of the game to take shape. This is why I'm eager to see either drop pods or unit cannons in the game ASAP to facilitate this.

The sooner we'll play with the Unit Cannon, the better.

Apparently there are many things we have to understand about how they will solve the problem of Planet to Planet Invasion at Uber.

Looking forward to that.