The Vanguard Newsletter - Issue 3

We did not get a concrete answer from Uber as to what would be used as an invasion tool in the meantime. Probably because they don't yet know themselves exactly what it will be.

I understand that - the newsletter was most clear - and am sorry if I came off as being inquisitive. I just wanted to present my rationale for why the unit cannon is as sought-after as it evidently is.

A shame, as I always find your posts thoughtful and interesting.

I fully understand, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with being inquisitive

As you will be able to note from my post history, I was (and still, to a degree, am) quite open in questioning Uber's decision to postpone the unit cannon until post-1.0. However, having actually had it explained in terms of game development, not just in terms of "but I want it and you promised", I do fully understand that several weeks of their most skilled engineers' time is a huge investment at this stage.

A couple of suggestions were made at the meeting as to how Uber could really communicate how 'early' they still are in terms of the game's development to us lay folk who don't have insight into the game dev industry and practise - we'll see if they get the time to have a look at those at some point.

I know the two are technically different, but if Uber balance everything well, I would not imagine much of a practical difference between the two come 1.0 release. It will be good to have another option later in the form of a unit cannon, but I would imagine Uber would re-balance, to give a drawback to the "instant transport" of units to a planet via unit cannon. I see your point though.

That sounds very sincere and I am fine with the whole point staying like that.

I mean, if at Uber they still do not know, obviously there is very little they can tell about. That's well enough.

Thanks for your patience.

Happy to see economy and nukes addressed.
Not happy to see that custom commanders have priority over new units, but I guess it's necessary thing.
Thumbs up for article, really good one, thanks!

People paid a lot of money for them, so it's understandable. But yeah, hopefully they'll be done soon and we get all that workforce onto building awesome units.

Then again custom commanders do not impact balance which in turn gives @scathis more time for number juggling and balancey stuff. Which finally makes everybody a happy, happy panda?

True dat.

Thanks for the newsletter guys, but next time if I could just get the newsletter and not the portal into the dimension of stupid as well.

I don't understand why the unit cannon and transports are proving so hard for uber. I could understand it if they were trying to fudge PA into an existing engine, but they made the PA engine from scratch themselves, right? Surely transports/unit cannon methods would have been considered from the start?

After this @neutrino comment I suppose Uber decide to avoid multi-unit transports since start of development:
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/a-light-bulb-came-on.51138/page-2#post-783402

There is another invasion method: putting Halleys, several Anti-Nukes and a bunch of nuke-launchers on a moon, and sending it in to orbit your target while sending an Anchor/Adv Orbital Radar/Orbital Fabber force to the target zone on the planet.

You can then carpet-nuke the surrounding area, throw down 1+ teleporters before Kestrals from outside the blast radius rush in (20 orbital fabbers build fast), then pump through a ton of Stingers to stop the air attack, while rushing T2 fabbers + T2 combat fabbers out a second teleporter to race out an anti-nuke. Pretty micro-intensive, but it only uses mechanics that are already in the game.

(That said, having an orbital Nuclear Defense Platform is something that would be useful on very many levels, even if you restrict it to the planet it's built on)

Did Uber mention anything at the meeting about using Halleys for changing orbits?

Reading that comment, I don't particularly care for seeing racks of units, but so long as we can make giant dropships/interplanetary freighters with concealed cargo bays, I'm fine. I just don't understand why multi-unit-transports or unit cannons are an inherently hard thing to code from scratch when you're working in your own bespoke engine.

I don't have any coding skills whatsoever, so this probably does not aid my understanding, but still

I think by now it is pretty clear that multi-unit anything (transports, unit-cannon) are hard to do. I would love to have some words by the devs on why this is such a problem so we can understand it better.

Yep. Re-reading now...

Note that we will have ways of transporting units around like teleporters, unit cannon etc. that won't have single unit limitations. This is because we'll use a cargo container type scheme were the units don't have to be shown at all times which is a lot easier to implement.

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/a-light-bulb-came-on.51138/page-2#post-783402

I think that we simply did not get the reason why the Unit Cannon (which has been previously defined as easy to implement), it is now very hard to implement. Or perhaps the Unit Cannon belongs to the multi-units transport mechanic, and Neutrino simply slipped it in.

I'm stop questioning. Doubts will be resolved in a way or another at the end of May, or soon after.

In the end what does it really matter is that the game will have a good Orbital Mechanic and game-play.

Please, please, please answer this :https://forums.uberent.com/threads/the-vanguard-newsletter-issue-3.57993/page-3#post-898120

You can change orbits right now, in-game. I've done it several times. You just get the required # of Halleys, then in the System drop-down menu you select Change Orbit instead of Annihilate. Then you select the planet you want it to orbit around, and it will start moving into position.