Orbital fabber/launcher

I should also say that my teleporter as a lander idea is totally stolen from the fan art thread.


https://forums.uberent.com/threads/fan-and-community-art-official-thread.45310/page-11#post-885253

And should an orbital factory come into being, we should also totally steal @sirmantron's version of that too.


https://forums.uberent.com/threads/fan-and-community-art-official-thread.45310/page-13#post-897675

Oh boy, the fan art thread is a gold mine. Those 3d modelling and animation skills.

Yes there is a lot of micro for orbital. It is highly frustrating. But if you remove the micro of the orbital layer you will see it naked and it will be disaponting.
Orbital war :
I have more anchor than you, i win the orbital layer, thank you good bye.

Damn that arts good. Would you say the second piece would be the T2 factory?

For the simple reason that air is DIFFERENT - it's units are much faster, the production can be attacked by mobs of fast A2G units, and you can circumvent their defenses to do so.

You cannot do that with orbital. They throw up some umbrellas around their base and there is just no way to get in aside from massed anchors and SXX's.

In addition, you WANT your air factories to be inside your base and hidden away - otherwise they are at risk from destruction. With orbital launchers, which are almost exclusively inside fortified bases, you cannot destroy them easily from the orbital layer, where they produce stuff.

With air, the best way to destroy it on large maps is with air.

That's why I want to see the distinct difference between advanced and otherwise. The station could build pretty much everything except solar panels and the stuff in the launcher itself.

What.....exactly.....do you mean?

You don't make big changes to something once it's done. Uber follow iterative design, that means suggestions need to be made from the beginning onwards, not just at some magical end point where it's too late to significantly shape the design.

Personally, I think I'd still prefer a 'basic orbital' and 'adv. orbital' factory.

Early concept art shows that Uber have at least considered the idea at some point and there are certainly a number of routes this could take.

I think the concept art linked above, however, makes more sense with how things progress in other unit branches, however. Since it goes:

Commander --> Basic factory --> Basic fabber --> Adv. factory --> Adv. fabber --> Adv. buildings

I would imagine that:

• The Commander can build the Basic Orbital Factory
• The Basic Orbital Fabber would build the Adv. Orbital factory, which would be in orbit.

To me it just seems to be a logical extension of the existing unit trees. However I do accept that Orbital is a bit of a special snowflake, so I'm willing to make concessions there.

In any case, we are already well into the planning stages for an orbital mod to start on fairly promptly after server release, so at least some of these ideas should get a chance to be tested.

I absolutely love both of these. Especially the orbital lander-tele.

I agree that launchers and fabbers building the same things would be a good idea.

As an additional unit I agree, but keep fabbers. They perform a different role to orbital launchers even if they build identical things. Orbital launcher has a long roll-off time, fabber is mobile, they should have different fabber types able to assist them, etc.

As for poor handling of different layers, that is better fixed with a beter UI than removing units. All you need is a hotkey to cycle visiblity between one, the other or both, and another hotkey which does the same for interaction.

I agree, it doesn’t work that well so in team games I tend to volunteer to man the main planet rather than deal with the micro and layer-switch, and 1v1 its rare anyway.
off the top of my head I would do the following:
Tier 1 Orbital factory produces:
Avenger
Fabber
Basic radar sat
Orbital laser – but significantly less powerful and a fair bit cheaper
Astreus

Fabber produces:
Gate
Tier 2 Orbital factory
Tier 1 Orbital factory
Orbital turret – fires at orbital layer, cant move/really slow - undecided
Orbital radar – as in a radar that scans space, and is also in space (I would make the orbital radar range limited, so you would need to send radars off into space to track people in large systems – hence this unit has a use.)

Orbital tier 2 factory produces:
Advanced Fabber
Advanced avenger (anchor)
Advanced radar sat
Orbital turret – fires at air layer, cant move/really slow – undecided
Solar satellite

Controversially…
Advanced fabber produces:
Haleys
Unit Cannon
Nuke launcher

This allows 1 unit to interact with air, 1 unit to interact with ground. One unit in each ‘tier’ is a radar. One unit in each tier interacts with another layer.

Id also give orbital a really slow turning circle on account of them being satellites, so making them play differently.
May want to have a secondary land based orbital defence turret too, to flesh it out a bit more.