Should aircraft be able to travel through teleporters?

Maybe you guys already saw this, in anycase I'll just leave this here.

YAAAAAAAAAAAS

Just, more of that kind of stuff in general. plz.

Orbital Teleporters:

• Built in Orbit by Orbital Fabbers.
• Can move.
  • A mobile Orbital Teleporter would give us a way of invading established enemy planets late-game, something essential without the Unit Cannon (which will only work on asteroids/small moons anyway).
• Allows mass invasion by Air - giving a greater importance to Air Transports in carrying armies.
  • Further to this, T2 Units should be able to survive their transports being destroyed (depending upon how much overkill there was; if several Flak cannons all shoot the same Transport then obviously its contents should die). Any ground units which survived the fall would be in a heavily damaged state.
    
    • This would mean that even if a planet was covered in Flak and Umbrellas, an opponent could not completely prevent all ground units landing and fighting.
• Air travelling through would be vulnerable to AA/Umbrellas.
• This wouldn't force Air to fly extremely low to the ground.

I'm down with it, especially if air units are allowed to transit the gate. That kind of places it in Tier 1.5/Early 2 where it belongs.

It's a real Saturday Morning Cartoon solution, too - I'm pretty sure there's more than one episode of the Swat Kats where they're trying to shut down something like this >:3

Imagine the portal from Avengers Assemble and you've basically got it haha

@eroticburrito

So basically what you're saying is you want a near invulnerable teleporter that essentially makes difference planets just more or less different harder to reach places on the same map.

Don't like this solution.

uwotm8

No, the Teleporter would be vulnerable to Umbrellas, Anchors and Orbital Fighters.

Also doesn't the Ground Teleporter already 'make different planets just more or less different, harder to reach places on the same map'? The difference is you can't just build a load of Catapults on a planet and completely secure it.

As described by EB, it would remain vulnerable to anti-orbital attacks. I imagine it would also be limited by

a) expense, and
b) throughput of units.

Attention would have to be given to balance, certainly, and I'd rather the existing teleporters be balanced correctly first.

EDIT

Ninjaaaaaaaaa

ALSO EDIT

Functionally it would fill the role of the Dropship that I've seen requested in many places - it would just be better than the Dropship by being able to ferry all the units ever by itself. I'm personally in favor of the Dropship over the orbital teleporter, but I'd take either one as a solution to planet cracking sans nukes and asteroids.

The thing about ground teleporters is that they're still vulnerable to both ground and air, this is completely invulnerable to that. Ground teleporters also take time to build so even with orbital fabbers doing it the player on the planet gets some reaction time. Even if units get though he still has opportunities to blast it. This thing just forces "who can do biggest orbital spam" because unless you have "more orbital stuff" then the other guy it's more or less invulnerable. Expense doesn't matter because you're essentially dealing with planet vs planet (ie. everyone has stupid amounts of metal) and throughput is irrelevant since you can just have more of the things.

Honestly EVERYTHING is a numbers game right now - the issue of more vs. more is really a symptom of a different problem, I think. A bigger limitation on metal availability across the board could alleviate the kind of late-game problems we're talking about.

I agree with where you're coming from, and I dislike Orbital being a numbers game - basically just Anchors at the moment. But at least with an Orbital Teleport we'd have a way of invading with Air (Carrying Land) rather than late-game still completely revolving around Orbital and then Orbital having no impact on Ground/Air. This way Orbital supremacy actually impacts on Ground/Air gameplay in a way other than sniping Commanders with Lasers (one of my least favourite game endings).

@doctoraxel

Limiting metal will do nothing. If more vs more translates to 10,000 vs 10,000 or 10 vs 10 it's the same problem. The only affect it has in expansion, more sparse metal makes for more "precise/rehearsed" strategies that's all.

The real issue is that the game's general purpose meta balance when it comes to the different layers interacting with each other is more or less "aesthetics only." It really feels too dumb as balance for a 1.0 release; since I kind of doubt it will significantly change by then.

I would love to say "well this is how [game flow] needs to change before 'tweaking' things is actually a worthwhile option," but honestly just ground and air are so hard the great majority of RTS games don't have anything more then that, and this game has ground, air, sea, planetary orbital, intergalactic orbital and planet smashing to deal with.

Actually redefining the game from the core might be an interesting exercise... *goes to make thread*

Here's a way to balance air units flying through teliporters.

Teliporters use energy with each unit going through them as well as a base energy cost for being open. Sending a bunch of tanks or bots through slowly won't be too much trouble, but air units go so fast, it could quickly chew up your eco.

If aircraft are going to continue to be able to land then there should be a command for them do to so, so that we can micro them better.