why all the hate? and desperation for a unit cannon?

SupCom (1 and 2) had very few "fun" weapons in my opinion... at least not on the 2nd playthrough with any faction. It had weapons that were trying to be fun but in the end it either made them overpowered or laughably niche.

I guess for me the epic scale of supreme commander and the progressively larger units leading to experimentals was, at the time, something new and interesting. I think the design of iconic units like the monkeylord was "fun" in a lot of ways (albeit logically impractical) - I dont remember monkeylords being particular imbalanced in that sense, but a giant spider bot with a deathray is pretty memorable. Capturing the imagination of the consumer with interesting visuals is significant in drawing that initial desire to try the game I'd say.

Certainly I remember that first ever trailer for Supreme Commander - it showed off some really nice unit design and strategic depth while at the same time demonstrating an epic battle - the visuals on display there have always for me set the standard in what grand strategy games should aspire to. It really is a beautiful trailer ( for anyone who hasnt seen it)

I think PA is currently lacking those same memorable units and moments, the current unit design is somewhat generic and bland with little variation on the weapon types/unit design. Hopefully this will change during another art refresh before release.

the animation and particle effects for planetary impact are about as close as they have come to creating that same effect for me.

my fav trailer for RTS games

The Unit Cannon was the real reason why i threw money at PA, because it was the most exciting thing in the trailer, topping even the planet smashing...idk why, everyone is just *drawn* to the Unit Cannon

for me, it represents the 1st of many promised features that will not be present at the launch of the game. I will fight tooth and nail for each and every promised feature, starting with this 1. I've always been willing to give them time. If they don't think they need more, they need to be ready to deliver...

I find unit cannons silly and don't understand why everyone is so hyped about it. Same goes for teleporters. I'd much rather have drop ships. Imo way more awesome...

But you have to concede that others may have a different opinion about the Unit Cannon, and other related aspect of the actual status of the game.

What worries me it's someone else dictating Uber a date for release.

I would very much prefer Uber to be able to take all the time they need to complete the fundamental features of the game before calling for a version 1.0.

The Unit Cannon may not be a necessity but a better Interplanetary Mechanic it is. So far the game isn't exactly astonishing if players start on different planets (which will soon be possible). And when savvy players end up on different planets afterward, the game can very well call for a draw.

I believe that that's far from optimal and a game which focus is on battles across planets has to offer more options in this sense.

It was mjshorty who basically said "everybody likes it.". That's why I said "no I don't.".

I'm going to do some irrelevant nitpicking and point out that grand strategy games are totally different from RTSes other than that they're both subgenres of the strategy genre.

The crossbow was in the original Assassin's Creed Trailer and in it's intro movie. It was removed from very late development near release. It eventually came back in later games too.

The unit cannon is pretty badass. I'd push the devs daily to work on this, but they make a good point, most of us want server files and a working optimized version of the current game first. Therefore, once they give us a game we can stable and confortably play and even play offline, I will then bug them to please do the unit cannon very next thing lol.

I seen one thread over not having the unit cannon, and I seen one thread supporting a more open minded acceptance of this game's development. I do praise both people for speaking their opinions, but I just think it sucks this is such a big "thing".

This is not the case:

Ouch, i got called out on "everybody likes it." guess ill have to change it to "Everyone that likes big cannons + 'the human cannon' " =O

How dare you to shed some light into all these conspiracy theories going on for days, entertained by the same people.

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/asteroid-field-idea-discussion-thread.57835/

Y'all are invited to talk about asteroids for a while if you want!

My problem with the game is that it becomes kind of stale as soon as you reach orbital and manages to put your commander on a different planet someplace, then you suddenly don't really care about your original base and there is no reason to build units and fight (what is in my opinion the fun part of the game) instead you just need to hide/turtle and race to halleys.

The only thing that would fix that would be if there was a simple way to get lots of units on to another planet, the teleports are a start but they are very time consuming to set up and doesn't work at all if you have a rudimentary defense set up.

The unit cannon as I imagine it would fix so much of the game play in the later stages of the game, so it's sad to see that it's not going in at release.

My concern is still the same as it was back when we were talking about it in the Backer's Lounge, it's not just that it was "promised", I won't lie and am disappointed to a point to see it's priority so low despite everything, yet it just comes down more so to logistics of designing/balancing a game such as PA.

We've all had ideas about exactly how a unit cannon would work, and while we don't all have the same ideas, we all more or less had the right idea because we had the Visualization to go by. For me the main drive behind the Unit Cannon always seemed to me to be provide a means to deliver troops where you don't have factories. In a game that would be very factory centric it's easy to look ahead and foresee that invading other planets is hard when they have factories on it already and you don't. Alongside the other proposed Inter-planetary options it served a pretty clear role, it handled medium size transport needs with an emphasis on Invasion, with the Teleporter handling large size transport needs but being very "interruptible" because it requires a physical presence on both sides of the link. Even the Astraeus had a niche to fill in working on the VERY small size needs and being very economical for colonization.

The problem is that system becomes useless as soon as you remove the Unit Cannon, the System worked because they all complimented each other, kind of like a Venn Diagram that all overlap in the middle, and when you pull out a part of it the system can't stand on it's own anymore.

The biggest issue I take with the whole situation is not the removal of the the Unit cannon from that system(as temporary as it may be) but rather what was done afterwards to compensate for it, primarily Interplanetary Nucks, forcing the teleporter to handle all transportation needs and the effects even go beyond the Interplanetary Mechanics and have actually affected Orbital's role/usage within PA.

Those are things we should be concerned about, even more-so because the problem as many layers. Yes the ones I laid out above are currently the most pressing but we need to look forward to when the Unit Cannon does make it into the game and what that means for the game itself. Is the Uber going to revert the changes they needed to make in order for the Unit Cannon-less System to function? Or is the Unit Cannon going to be changed in order to try and create some niche to fill in the current system that is already a bit of a Frankenstein's Monster?

On one hand yes, The Unit Cannon does seem to require a lot of work to get functional, but maybe it's a bit too short sighted to simply post-pone it for that if you consider that regardless of when it happens, it'll still be more or less the same volume of work but by pushing it back they've had to not only had to invest some manpower into make interplanetary work "as-is" but they're also going to need to invest more manpower later to "undo" the 'extra' work they made for themselves.

In the end we only get "access" to a very, very small portion of the design process that Uber is currently living and breathing right now so it's hard to say anything with any certainty so we should be cautious about making statements that require insight/knowledge that we don't have access to and/or can only infer about.

Mike

That's very close to what I say myself. Thanks for highlighting this aspect of the current game.

Personally, I think some people just want to cheese newbs with the fabled "Vanguard Drop"!

That's not exactly shading light. There is a deadline publicly visible to everyone on the Nordic Games site, regarding the publication of Planetary Annihilation.

http://www.nordicgames.at/index.php/product/planetary_annihilation

As you can see, that date is the 23th of May 2014. This, if you concede me, is quite a fact, specially in the "shading light" that Uber is accelerating into the releasing phase, preparing version 1.0 as they said, and keeping outside many key features of the game.

Since Uber refuses to even acknowledge that there are questions about the topic, far from addressing those concerning of ours, we will see in a couple of months if the doubts of many are unfounded, or not.

Hopefully not.

Perhaps Uber have the intention of releasing on that date, REGARDLESS of Nordic Games. How is that a conspiracy? It doesn't mean Nordic is pushing them to release, it is merely Uber giving them a date to have on their site, which is presumably what Uber themselves have set as an internal deadline.