T1 Astraeus/Radar and T2 Orbital Combat?

Hi
The changes to Orbital have been great so far - it's much quicker travelling and expanding across worlds.
The reasons for this are down to two things becoming a lot cheaper:

• The Astraeus
• Orbital Fabbers

At the moment, Fabbers render the Astraeus a bit redundant - why send a single unit when you can build a Teleporter from Orbit with 10 Orbital Fabbers?
The only thing the Astraeus is used for at the moment is as an emergency evac for your Commander.

Here's my suggestion:

• Make the Astraeus a cheap as chips T1 standalone Rocket + Scaffold you build (Edit: T1 Orbital Factory?), load your units onto and blast on up into space early game.
  • Have it carry multiple Engineers, or one Commander.
• Stop Orbital Fabricators building Ground Teleporters all the way from space. It makes no sense - we don't have Ground engineers assembling things in Orbit, and takes functionality away from the Astraeus as a transport. Orbital Fabbers assembling Orbital Teleporters for Air on the other hand...
  • The Astraeus would have a widened role transporting Land Units to establish footholds/Ground Teleports.
  • This way we can have Planetary Expansion early game, without affecting the balance of the rest of Orbital.
    
  • Also, Orbital at the Orbital Factory can be balanced as the mid-late game T1.5/T2 investment it was before it was forced to become cheap to allow for early Planetary Expansion.
    • We need something to sink our resources into late-game, and Lasers zapping things on the ground from space/spaceships qualify for that privilege in my opinion.
  • There may be room for a larger version of the Astraeus (T2 Orbital Transport) at the Orbital Factory , though it would depend on if we get Orbital Teleporters as these would be an easier means of transporting large numbers late game via Air Transports.

Agree? Disagree? Come at me, you beautiful bros.

Edit:
Alternatively, we could have a T1 Orbital Factory capable of building the Astraeus and basic Orbital Radar, and T2 Orbital for the more advanced units. Currently the Orbital Fabber is taking on the role of a T2 Factory anyway because all of Orbital has been forced to become T1. But primarily:

1. Orbital Fabbers shouldn't build Teleporters, otherwise the Astraeus is only a Commander-Evac.
2. Only the Astraeus needs to be T1 to allow cheap and easy planet-hopping, with Orbital Fighters etc. T2. That way, we don't get people spamming Orbital Fighters early on and preventing those early expansions which are essential for smashy time.

T2 air is finally at a balance adding in air teleporters would push them back into being over powered

Also the reason you use Astraus now is so that you can get your com off planet much sooner than teleporters and for a lot less energy cost

Sounds interesting, but it would be a bit strange to implement the whole Astraeus being build sans-launcher. Perhaps keeping orbital launchers at T1, but then adding an orbital factory or something like that? Essentially adding the whole T1/T2 for orbital.

T2 air is not really balanced at the moment, unless they fixed gunships in the latest mini-patch. Gunships along with pergerines are ridiculously powerful, and pretty much the main strategy on any planet larger than 500 in size...

Air still has a way to go, there are still many... productive discussions about it on the forums.

I did say that the Astraeus is only being used for Coms at the moment. I agree we do need cheap a Astraeus for this role, abd allowing it to step away from the other advanced applications of Orbital late-game would only facilitate that.
So really, where is your succulent, juicy beef my good fellow?

That's basically just building a standalone T1 factory for the Astraeus and maybe basic Orbital Radar. Justifiable? I'd prefer to have a scaffold which just collapsed after the Astraeus launched...

Fair enough, but the way it was before has made me desensitized to what would actually be balance for them. As it is now it is not gg if you get don't get T2 air first, and you cannot win by rushing T2 air and absolutely nothing else.

Yeah... Air has basically been nullified at the moment by Flak/Peregrines, whose AOE annihilates swarms. I've discussed Air stacking with relation to AOE with Scathis - he knows what's up. Not gonna remove Air stacking but he'll find a way to balance stacked Air with relation to AOE.
Besides which, we need some way to mount invasions besides attempting to build Ground Teleports on an enemy planet covered in Holkins and nukes. Orbital Fighter invasions don't actually affect bases.

The way i've seen it work is a little wierd. Gunships with pergerines just annihilate flak towers, partially because the pergerines act as a sort of shield for the gunships, and partially because a good number of gunships just do enough damage to take out multiple flak towers before anything dies. I've had a game where 7 closely grouped flak cannons were taken out by 35 gunships and 11 pergerines. Enough of them survived (75% of them or so) to kill my comm within 10 seconds. IMO, gunships need a pretty big health nerf, as do pergerines.

You'd be able to build fabbers, avengers and radar from it too, just as you can now, but fabbers wouldn't be able to build teleporters, or at least not in the same way as they do now. Then just balance it from there.

The irony is that they already had a nerf. The thing is, that can be countered in a macro game by simply BUILDING MORE! This isn't a problem in Ground or Naval, as you can only fit so many units in a certain amount of space. But with Air, the amount of units you can cram to fire at the ground is unlimited. It's got better as formations have spread Air out, but stacking will continue to present these issues. The only real solution is to make Flak OP enough to take out whole swarms of Air with AOE, and Air which attacks ground to have really low HP so they can be killed in this way. The trouble is that then you have loads of really fragile Bombers and Gunships, and therefore Air-Air Combat is simply a bloodbath.

But Orbital was never meant to be cheap. It just became cheap because we need cheap Astraeuses. That's why we've ended up with Orbital Fabbers needing to take on a T2 Factory role in building advanced units in Orbit - because the Astraeus has dragged all of Orbital into T1.

well last I checked, gunships actually had a HP buff, 100-250 if I recall correctly... Might be wrong though.

doesn't neccecarily have to be cheap, just have the astreus as a cheap option on there.

Their damage went down a little lol.

But then we're stuck with an Orbital Factory early game which sucks up resources early on as we just want to get offworld, and is sat useless in our base till late-game.

true enough. Perhaps make it so that only the astraeus, avenger and radar sat can leave the planet? then have only and advanced orbital fabber be able to go between planets. that would allow for a bit of early orbital stuff, but leave all things we would deem as "T2-worthy" until later on.

The orbital fabber building the teleporter from orbit could be justified if the fabber model was in.

Then it might make sense.

Perhaps. Still seems a bit silly though, I would rather have a drop teleporter, or have the fabbers be able to go into the air layer.

And get shot down by a patrolling fighter? Suddenly air teleports make sense. Which noone wants.

So we need something. OH WAIT.

UNIT CANNON BRAH

Well of course the unit cannon. Everyone wants the unit cannon, and i'm no exception. But weren't we getting some form of orbital anti-air? That would help the survivability of the orbital fabbers, while in the air layer. Not saying those are the only options, just throwing suggestions out there. Perhaps a T2 orbital fabber would be able to construct structures on the surface layer, who knows?