Orbital battles are a bit two sided now. You either spamm a bunch of Avengers or you build anchors. Now anchors seem to counter avengers, but in terms of intercepting the enemy, the avenger seems better, which is ok, but in time as more and more anchors are build your mass of avengers can do less and less. So what about a third unit, that can take down anchors, but is weak to avenger swarms. What I was thinking about was a sort of orbital destroyer - it moves faster than the anchor and has a lesser range and speed than the avenger. It carries 2 forward facing only laser cannon and 2 triple barrel gauss turret (kinda like the ones on a battleships, but they are direct fire, not ballistic). Because they are slower and shorter ranged than avengers they would be weaker against them, but their incredible firepower would tear anchors apart. Now having 3 orbit to orbit dedicated units feels a bit too much so why not give the destroyer a secondary function - orbital assault support, by being able to enter the atmosphere and combat air and ground units. But there is a tradeoff for this ability: In addition to being slow, the air layer isn't the "native ecosystem" for these destroyers - namely the air is too fast and too cheap. To explain better: while orbital destroyers in air would be able to shoot down fighters and bombers and a group of them could be used to clear and defend an area while you use astraeuses to land or orbital fabbers to build teleporters they would be quite ineffective at doing so compared to air units and woučd have troubles hitting the fast moving air units (even keeping up with bots would be a trouble).
I agree with this, though I would like to see it expanded even further. I posted concerning this in another threat. I'll quote it here.
Anchor is a rock and Avengers are scissors. Now we need paper. Something sniper-like, maybe? High damage and range, but low RoF and no AoE?
I would have thought that the solar arrays/anchors would be fixed in position. in the sense you create an orbital base above your ground base. Orbital combat does need a few new ships, especially with regards to ground assaults. Maybe an orbital battleship that could also take out ground defences but weak against orbital fighters which would be countered with umbrellas which should have an increased range/higher damage output. In turn, a planetary assault would require a substantial force of fighters and battleships as well as ground troops to make a dent. If i am right in also believing that planets could be moved into orbit of other planets in the future, and the additional tools such as the unit cannon would also be a viable feature to help with the assaults.
Orbital combat needs TRANSPORTS before it needs any kind of combat unit. Without the former the latter is an absolute waste of development dollars.
While I wouldn't mind orbital dry docks, it has been said numerous times before that there shall be no interplanetary fighting, only in orbit, as this takes attention away for ground battles. This is also why I am suggestion only one such unit.
So you want to invade the enemy planet full of avenger and anchors. Tell Me again how are you going to move the umbrella there? Anchors and umbrellas are defensive units. Umbrellas even more so than anchors as they are stationary, planetbound structures. What I'm talking about is an offensive unit.
on a technichal standpoint, astraeus's can move any unit now. granted, they're pretty high dollar, and can still only move one unit at a time. but hey, it's something. though i assume you're just whining because we don't have our unit cannon yet. i, on the other hand, would rather wait until we can shift the orbit of asteroids/moons, so that we don't have unit cannons firing across the entire system. on the other hand, maybe what you want is an inter-orbital transport that move MANY units at once? well once again, we'll have to wait. this is beta, not everything is in yet. and even so, Uber wants to make sure that updates don't break the game. they don't want to shovel bugs down our throats on accident.
