Unit Cannon & Asteroid Belt Discussion?

Aww, that's cute, adorable even! ;p

This is what a REAL SupCom Transport Drop/Battle should look like;



Primarily starting at around 5:20 and going right through to about 7:20, but if you got the time give teh whole video a watch! ;p

Mike

I don't know how or why but I read that as "PA style".

Now you made me want to play Ground Control again. Those dropships are the best.

What we also need is for all of orbital movement to be less awkward in general. Doing a 30 astraeus drop is just plain terrible, not to even mention 300.

I'd just like to add with the addition of Asteroid Belts and say Drop ships, are we going to see defenses such as those displayed in the kickstarter trailer (The missiles being fired at the Asteroid). More ground based defenses against planets and asteroids being flung at us, the same with Defenses that are better than umbrella's?

Or is the smashing of planets the ultimate win strategy

Love to have asteriods and think it would be better then only moon/tiny planet smashing just to add something more to that game mechanic. I always hope that Uber do actually do a little more with how planets look after they've been smashed to oblivion, wanna see half the planet break off into space ect... and more bits of the planet staying in orbit with whatever is left of the planet, depending on the size of impact.

The only one to vote no for unit cannons. Just feels like a re-hashed building idea copied over from Supcom, seems as we have more then enough ways to move units over to other planets already, don't feel like there is a real need for this unless you have anyone just completely tanking and turtling on their own planets but you have nukes, planet smashing and teleporters and orbital units to help combat that sort of gameplay. This is PA, not Supcom, seems so many have complained about Uber just having the idea of experimentals in the game, and constantly pointing out this is its own game, then I feel sort of the game way about the Unit Cannon.

I am the second to vote no for the cannon. Not without some details being gone over like can orbital, then air layer units shoot at incoming units to thin them out? What is it's range? Like a nuke only going between moons?

I'm all for large scale orbital transports that will shot gun air units or transports with units, but first and foremost I want it to be clearly understood that a well defended planet will cause serious pain. However, I want Starship Trooper style invasions.

My dream ship "Carrier" would have;
-The attacking power equivalent of 2 avengers.
-The health equivalent to 4 umbrella hits.
-50 unit capacity. 50 (fighters, t1 bomber, transport with units inside, t1 fabber, scout) or 25 (t2 bomber, gunship, t2 fabber) or any mix.
-Say 10000 metal cost.

Transports would require being switched to to a 4 unit capacity. 4 doxes, 2 ants, 1 t2 tank. etc etc but regardless of load, count as 1 unit inside carrier.

Operation would be as follows.
-Build at orbital factory.
-Air units are rallied to it for loading, it brings them into it's holding space without leaving orbital layer. (Tick marks to indicate how much of capacity is filled)
-Unit flies to center of target deployment area. (say a nukes blast radius for the deployment or smaller if desired)
- Deployment option one shot guns all units at once after a 5 second timer (chance to shoot it down) within the deployment zone directly below the Carrier, in the air layer and can be giving a rally point (for consolidating the landing forces).
- Deployment option two shot guns all units in the same manner but any transport plane will automatically drop it's troops on the nearest suitable ground from where it was jettisoned from the carrier. All air units will automatically patrol the drop area until given new commands.

Q-ships could be cool.

I don't think the unit canon would really work given how planets now actually move. Remember the canon is stationary on the planet to the moment the planet moves even a tiny bit it will be off target. Plus with orbital death ray unit or whatever it's call you don't really need drop pods.

Well id imagine that the drop pods have manoeuvring thrusters on them, so accuracy can be a little grey from the actual gun.

Basically this, i would assume there movement is similar to a nuke when firing it orbitally. Wouldn't matter which way the planet was facing because they would still take the path of orbital movement. If the oribtal cannon only allows movement of Bots for invasions, then the way bots are at the moment, they wouldn't pose that much of a threat. They would still serve as a way to break into the planet to place a Teleporter, and then you can move your main force through.

I like the idea someone mentioned above regarding planets breaking off after they collide, possibly some debris moving back into the local orbit and then they act like asteroids in the sense that if the chunks are large enough you can fly and build on them again. Creating more destruction and more survival. However this could have the opposite affect and cause games to go even longer.

deffinatly gets my vote.

am currently unable to post on my pc, did this from my phone. Not sure why.

I voted yes, but what would prevent a player from simply landing 20 infernos on a centre of a base and winning a game?

I guess either Umbrellas or AA would need to be able to shoot down unit pods at some rate to prevent it from becoming too easy.

The unit cannon model itself is odd, because its at an angle, it would be better to have the cannon be on a platform... facing straight up and able to turn the cannon say... 60 degrees in either direction depending on where its firing in correlation to the enemy planet.
Ok Unit Cannons, it seems like they are going to be really hard to correctly micro and use them...because its rather difficult to micro between planets without making misclicks/having to redo the order.
why not make them a bit more passive like teleporters? and have the unit cannon automatically fire any queued units automatically at a *facing nearby planet or moon* and since it randomly starts firing (since it starts firing when the nearby planet properly faces the unit cannon) and the units that enter the feild (through parachutes or drop pods or whatever) randomly and spread out...
think D-Day invasion paratroopers, landing everywhere and trying to establish a beachhead somewhere.


TLDR: Unit cannon auto fires at nearby planets, troops drop D-Day style in a huge area everywhere randomly. More freindly to those who dont want to micro stuff, and balances the fact that Unit Cannon can get units to other planets without any real resistance

I also voted no for unit cannon, its just stupid. Why make a cannon that can shoot units at other planets when it can just shoot the traditional explosive shells instead? both should be unfeasible unless the target planet is in orbit I guess...

Large tough unit transports with a few turrets should be the way to go! I have a huge problem with 300 astreus being used for D-day invasions because they introduce additional LAG!! This game has a HUGE problem with lag as it is we shouldn't even entertain the idea of 300+ astreus because all they would be good for is crashing the game lawls!

No you gotta be able to use Orbital and big transports to land a big army to secure the LZ on the planet to allow a stargate to be built and your flood of reinforcements to swarm through the stargate Goa'uld style and conquer the world!

the Unit cannon is a yes seince pre-alpha -_-

I think that there shouldn´t be a discussion whether to implement this cannon or not; it has been a key attribute of PA since the initial kickstarter video! And I´m glad that "yes" collected way more votes than no!
But I think it´s just reasonable that there are discussions about how they´ll work: Having a fix angle (like the presented version in the video) will cause many problems, as the cannon will only be useable for short/ certain periods...
...and balancing of transportation is a huge topic anyways, Teleporters should proberbly get higher costs (not my favourite), high energy drain while teleporting units (not my fav, too) or simply growing delay between unit in teleporter and out of teleporter with growing distances (my fav, maybe linear delay scaling will do the job, but maybe heavy growing with use of exponential function could be even better)!

Anyways, we need more transporting alternatives than just one-by-one-Astreus-Transport and Teleporting!

Yes, they are. Was one of the most fascinating parts of the graphics of that game, besides the tracks of the vehicles in the dirt!
Oh, and if you want to play it again:
It´s on GOG.com and working very well (should be pretty obvious that I like GOG.com...)
http://www.gog.com/game/ground_control_expansion

It was the first RTS I ever played with a completely free camera and 3D environment. Blew my mind.

Speaking about asteroid belts. Can someone point me to the post/video where it was said that they were confirmed for before release, please. Because I can't remember Uber ever confirming that.

I remember one time we were talking about transport ships, some where saying if you can't see what units are in the transport than its bad because its not WYSIWYG. Do you think this should be a concern at all? Or just have transports where you can hold a ton of units and they land and start coming out and you have no ideal until they hit the planet what they could be?

Personally I'm a little torn. I understand that having a transport that carries more than one unit and supports multiple unit types is a huge technical challenge. But obviously this is better for WYSIWYG.

I think having a transport that can drop 50 units could be interesting even if you can't tell what it has in it.

However, I don't like idea of the transport landing and all the units instantly deploying. There needs to be a roll of time or something for units to get out of the ship. Maybe slightly faster than a factory, but obviously no build time.

I was playing Galactic War a few days ago and found this:

it made me pretty excited for the unit cannon