OMG Uber Cannon is so OP. Fix now!

After taking the time to read through almost this entire thread, I've come to a few personal conclusions:

- I still am really in favor of the Uber cannon charging solely off a commander's personal energy supply, and having a fixed cooldown time. The ability to augment it's strength via your energy economy allows it to gain a strong offensive advantage that I don't feel is in the spirit of it's purpose. IMO, it's use cases should be for rush/defenses-breached protection, and as a strong support unit to augment a unit rush. Doing this would put a rush comm on equal footing with a defensive comm offensively, or at a disadvantage should the defensive comm have some units already.

- Army game implications are tough. Even with identical Uber cannons, obviously numbers rule. I suppose in such cases, you could swarm units on them, and due to the set time between charges they'd have to choose between focusing on the commander or the units (and potentially dying in the process). Hopefully it'd make rushes a bit more risky.

- Keep the transport cheap, but move it to T2. I don't think there should be arbitrary limits on what it can pick up; there is already a huge inherent risk in how weak they are to AA. Hot-dropping units would still be viable, but you'd really have to put your money where your mouth is and commit to it a bit, instead of easily cranking out a few T1 air factories. Investing in your economy takes time and effort, and this tactic should as well, to a degree. It would also push off the time at which this strategy would be viable, and make it easier to scout (T2 air! prepare for transports!)

- Someone mentioned a T1 gunship earlier, and I think this would be awesome. Maybe something somewhat weak, fast, and does strafing passes like the T2 bombers, but with whatever "bullet" the doxes shoot. Kinda like an AC-10 I suppose.

Id think it could be cool to have the commanders uber cannon straight up drain a whole % of your total stored energy, and then base it's damage off that number.

But that might make the problem even harder to solve.

That's actually one of the ideas I have for the Commander Overhaul; to make them more like MOBA heroes with unique abilities, strengths and weaknesses, rather than the paintjob-bodyswaps we have now.

Dunno which Commander would get that ability though

Air first might not really be so bad. When both players do it, you can get a few good exchanges in before both players have to "tech up" to bots and tanks. The first couple minutes become more about jockeying for position and the fighting starts sooner than ever before. I'm still unsure on how to consistently beat commander drops though.

Another weird thing:
Commander vs Commander.
Assuming both players have enough energy it boils down to who can spam the uber cannon faster.

That's what beat me in our game. I'm really not that bad of a player, but my apm is about half of what a top player gets even on a bad day. If I got just one more shot in we would have had a draw.

Can't you just shift click several Ubercannon commands for optimal rate of fire?

Probably. Still rather weird.

"You must construct additional Pylons." How about if the Uber Cannon would only reload when you have power generators or storage nearby? That way UC would only work when you are near your base and would be quite useless for offense; the attacker could fire UC only once or twice. The attacker could do power generator creep into the defender's base, but that would take more time and be easier to counter.

Then you have to do that for every weapon that recharges, for every unit and every type of shot, otherwise it's incongruous. I'm not saying I disagree, mind you, I'm just saying that there needs to be a little consistency.

The Uber Cannon is already an exception in itself - only the commander has "alt fire". Making it even more exceptional shouldn't be a big deal. It would just have to be visible from the game/UI - for example some visible sparks or streams of energy flowing into the commander from nearby power generators when the UC is loading.

It's using a pre-established system. You can't have a pre-established system apply one way most of the time and then another way when it suits you.

Holy crap the uber cannon is powerful. Just played a bit against the AI but daym its a force to be reckoned with.

The vanguard laughs at your ubercannon sir!

So after accepting that first air is just required now to stay alive vs the doom drop the patch is actually pretty fun.

And the AI knows how to spam it too. Down go my bots.

Not that it needs to be said again, but once we accepted air first these games got very fun. Having air fabbers as an option means bot factories can be put down in every metal field early on, and fighters get sent out to chase down the fabbers. After that the game ends up transitioning pretty smoothly into a mix of land and air.

That is so sad that air first is required. PA is supposed to be about options.

At least we understand this for now.

It does limit options at the start, but forcing you into an air factory opens up options you wouldn't get otherwise. You would normally not go air first, so you wouldn't have air fabbers. It is now really easy to get air fabbers out making land factories all over the map. Air first lets us play a game where we start out with a half dozen bases each.