Iterate on the Gate (Teleporter)

The gate is way to OP by the time it takes to send units through.

I personally believe the time of sending units through should be augmented relative to the distance being bridged.

Not only that but orbital travel speed should be shortened as well to help bridge the gap between the two and make them a question of choice again.

It is easy to win a race to take your commander to another planet using gates+orbital engie combo versus Astraeus.

I believe the Astraeus is currently entirely invalidated. Not only is it an unsafe means of transport, but it bears no advantage over the gate.

I know that it builds faster and moves faster but clearly that is not enough to compensate the huge margin the gate will buy you back.

I haven't ever needed to use the Astraeus since orbital engineers could build gates on the ground and that hasn't changed since.

I believe another possible solution is removing that ability from the orbital engineer, though I can see an immediate downside : that of removing choice, and making using the Astraeus an obligation. Not terrible in and of itself, but destroying choices is never the best solution as it is what brings me to take issue with the way things are currently.

Another solution still (and I'm not saying any of these are mutually exclusive) is to move the gate to t2 (for orbital tech move it to orbital factory - the gate is constructed by the orbital factory, comes out, moves to above landing destination and lands like this )

(whether it could only move within the orbital layer of a single planet or move to other planets is another point of interest).

Of course this isn't the end of the story.

Invading a planet with the gate is massively overpowered.

so much so that it seems that to counteract this the anchors role was switched into a massively effective Gate-invasion stopper. (hard counter)

that's poor depth.

sure you can gate in engies and build umbrellas faster than anchors.

but a gated land invasion shouldn’t be orbital's war. at least it shouldn't be it's immediate business. sure units of different types should interact in the game.

but as of now the scale is too heavily tipped in the favour of orbital to ground interactions. And we see very little ground to ground interactions and very little orbital to orbital interactions as well.

I'm not kidding. the orbital game is summed up by who can get the most avengers. As anchors are worthless versus a good number of avengers.

it's the air deathball all over again. (it doesn't help that we can't tell apart air and orbital in the way it behaves either)
Too many things in the game branch of from how the gate works, how easy to access it is, how cheap and easily it pays for itself a thousand times over, ect...

EDIT : also it's worth mentioning that maybe the gate currently has too much capacity
and also the per-unit energy cost idea. Sorry, these didn't make it into the poll :/ you can always vote what's closest to what you want and comment below what it is you truly voted for.

So I leave you with a thread to debate in and a poll (sorry if you wanted a varient i did not include or something completely different i am poll-options capped, please comment on your idea if you have a different one).

I find myself frequently using Astraeuses in early games over gates. Once built, an Astraeus is energy-neutral, whereas a gate will require a certain amount to operate. Especially during the first 5-10 minutes of a game, where you're busy getting your economy going, it can be hard to keep a teleporter up.

Apart from that I agree that gates need work, but only in the context of reworking the entire mess that lategame & orbital is right now. In its current state, the teleporter is a high risk / high reward strategy with moderate ressource requirements - and the only non-orbital alternative to mass nuking.

With reworked orbital (no more deathballs) and other options of weakening or taking out heavily fortified planets (asteroids), teleporters in their current form would be totally OP, as you'd have massive T2 armies on your doorstep in a matter of seconds. "Slower" gate transfers combined with improved regular orbital transfer speeds would probably even the playing field. I wouldn't move gates to T2, though, as that'd leave Astraeuses as the only T1 option of interplanetary movement. There should always be multiple ways to achieve a goal.

I will like to mention that flooding units through a single gateway is quite extreme, and would want to vote for an option to lessen the amount going through at once, maybe 2-3 at a time instead of 5-6

How about teleporters that consume energy for every unit they teleport? Maybe even proportional (to some degree) to unit cost? Maybe only applied to interplanetary teleports?
Idea is as following: you don't need much economy to build teleporter and transfer few fabbers/commander to other planet, but if you wan't to mass invade somebody, prepare your power generators.

I like that idea! It would promote players building large amounts of energy storage to save up enough to transport units all at once.

lessen the ammount of units getting through teleporters
teleporters shouldn't be buildable by orbital fabbers

Hey that rhymes!

i couldn't add that cuz I was out of room but i wanted to as well.

also something to consider. not sure everyone would like.

I think you need a bit more experience on the field.

sure at first Astraeus seems like an ok deal but trust, me there will come a time where you will realise how easy it is to build power and what you were missing out on all along. for more pro-level play, Astraeus isn't used vs Gates.

guys, I need more votes.

this kind of stuff has been on the forum for ages and now people are saying "don't change"? I don't buy it.

That animation of a orbital dropped tp also makes me ponder the merits of having them be astraeus dropped.

No oribtal fab involvement, you build the gate somewhere else, pack it up and drop it via astraeus

Regardless, I do think energy consumption relative to unit mass being sent through would be appropriate.

I believe the Gate should be built in space factories and then dropped down to surfaces (for interplanetary), and that it only send one unit at a time. Also making space-fabricated teleporters more expensive due to thrusters+drop-pod, keeping it cheap if you decide to send an astraeus with fabber to build teleporter, or when you just want teleporters on the starting planet.

Also like idea of astraeus carrying more units, and it should be quicker to send between planets/moons.

EDIT: Removed random dot in middle of a sentence.

This is essentially an open-ended question; a poll isn't useful in this context because it locks people into only choosing from a limited selected of options that are pre-determined in the OP. The question is valid, and should be discussed. But don't worry about the poll, because it doesn't tell you anything.

For example:

• Some options aren't mutually exclusive, yet you can only pick one (or all).
• Some options aren't covered (this will always be true in open-ended questions without a discrete solution set).
• Variations on options aren't covered (eg., how much is "shorter", "faster" or "relative"? People will have different views)
• Ignores the "why" - why do people think their choice is good? What is their justification? Popularity alone doesn't mean a choice is best.

Then there's the general issue with polls:

• Not a discrete set of answers
• Insufficient sample size
• Self-selection

tl;dr: a vast majority of the polls on this forum are badly designed and/or shouldn't be polls at all.

the problem with polls is that they are fairly limited and you can do only that much with them

A big problem with this idea is relativity. That is, all interplanetary gates in game are moving relative to each other, so the distance between any two gates is not static, unless both gates are on the same planet, which isn't very useful.

Let me put it this way, if you send units between gates that are moving away from each other, the arrival time between each unit traveling thru the gate will get spaced out. This scenario is not too problematic, but the opposite is. When gates move closer together, the time between unit arrivals will decrease or become compressed, causing traffic jams on the other end that can do screwy things to pathfinding performance. This could also cause units to be "dropped" or telefragged if they arrive at near the same time. Do you have any idea how to handle or resolve these issues?

I don't really see why the gate is OP, when you move your commander from 1 planet to the other because you know you lost the battle on the main planet, you are always behind, and if they find you and place a portal and move units through and you lose because of that then it's just well played. Is this the situation you're trying to explain? Because in most other situations if equal in battle the gate has just as much advantages for you as it has for the enemy.

My suggestion: Teleporters should need energy again, and not just like radar, but much more. And if energy shuts down and comes up again, the teleporter should have a recharge time until it works again (like Uber Cannon or artillery). This will make it less reliable and harder to use, and the energy usage maybe will make moving units by Astraeus again more usefull.

Astraeus could get some kind of weapons against ground and air units. This would allow to use them as a bridgehead together with the units they have loaded. Sometimes when a planet is under complete control of a player you cannot invade with teleporters or astraeus. If the transport unit had some weapons against air units for example and "flares" so it isnt shot down immediately by ground anti air it can land the units safely.
Of course it also has to be much easier to transport an army of 100 units. So it needs to be much cheaper. 40-50 Astraeus should have the cost of 2 teleporters actually. And can be detected much easier.
Cos they are nearly single use and much harder to control.

Or give Astraeus stealth in orbit. They are so small, they are not detected while in orbit, except when loaded with Commanders (they are big). This would allow for stealth invasions.

"Pro-level play" ... I don't think we have that (yet) in PA. I'm also pretty sure that I have a decent grasp of the game's mechanics and sufficient experience across the RTS genre to hold my own. Obviously I won't be moving my commander across the system in a sole Astraeus past the ~10-minute mark. But earlier than that, for example when trying to get off planet asap, an Astraeus will always be faster - and cheaper - than a set of teleporters.

There are many people who find the current system of invading planets overly difficult, and that the game gets slow and dull when it goes interplanetary. All the proposed changes to the gate will only server to further inhibit the possibility of invading a planet and force the game away from ground conflict at all.

I voted "no" because I enjoy fighting with large groups of ground forces, and an easy to obtain and run transport mechanism is essential to allow that. It's pretty easy to prevent gate drops unless your opponent is ahead of you. Forcing it to be "one unit at a time" or "energy use per unit" will either invalidate gates totally, or massively increase the time it takes to set up an invasion due to the invading player having to build up energy reserves and production first.

The Teleporter is a way around not implementing the Unit Cannon and Orbital Transports capable of carrying more than one unit. Simple as.

For what you're getting (instant transportation of an entire army), I think the Teleporter should be T2 and demand at least 10,000 Energy to operate.

The Teleporter should be an end-game logistical tool as it requires a beachhead to be established in advance. Instead we are using it as an invasion tool to establish said beachhead. That's putting the cart before the horse.
A Teleporter cannot be used to create a beachhead, and short of combat becoming ever-more focused on Orbital invasions, defences and bombardment, there will be no solid way to mount an invasion.

Once the focus is on Orbital, and not the Ground, the Unit Cannon will seem obsolete. We might be given the tools to bombard the planet from Orbit to clear a way for a Teleporter, but we'll use them to snipe Commanders.

Orbital Combat has improved a lot. But it's no replacement for being able to mount a Ground-Air-Naval invasion, and the Teleporter is not allowing us to do that because it's a defenceless T1 building being constructed on the surface of a hostile planet.

Planets are too easily claimed with Teleporters mid-late game.
Better to increase the cost, increase their HP, give them a constant power drain, make them T2, and give them a few defences.
This would give the Astraeus back its role as an early-game transport, and pave the way for the eventual introduction of the Unit Cannon as (and multi-unit transports) the key means of invading a planet.
It would also give T2 Air Transports a role.

The Teleporter is bad news for all other means of transportation as it either inadequately replaces the ones we need, or makes obsolete the ones which require any tactical awareness (e.g. Air Transports) beyond covering an entire planet with roaming units.

I kind of agree, but be careful what you wish for! The current system with gates does allow quick and seamless movement between planets allowing the game to focus more on land units. Everything you've suggested would *increase reliance on orbital and reduce the feasibility of ground forces* as what your suggestions is:

1: Transferring easy movement of units up to T2 and putting it behind a 'pay wall'
2: 'Replacing' that with the basic t1 orbital single units transport which is really not intended for that role.
3: Justifying that decision based on 2 non existing options which will probably end up as T2 anyway.

I agree the gate doesn't work for setting up a beach head- however the idea is gates go down before any 1 players has total control (which does happen quite often) allowing for a nice ground fight for control of the contested planet. When things get high tech we have anchors to help defend the area for a 'beach head'- so to invade you need to be able to control an area of the orbital layer first (which is pretty reasonable imo).

I agree to some extent with the premise *once things like the unit cannon or multi unit transports are in the game*. Until that point any of these changes would simple make things worse.