SSX is imbalanced, multi-planet aggression too hard

But that's only because tournament players are aware of that exploit and how to break it. Always keeping the Commander on the move, just to avoid these instant-snipes, doesn't really feel like a reasonable thing to do. Even less so when you have to start hiding the Com in air transports and alike, making him a burden rather than the useful asset he actually is supposed to be considering his build power. Or by using the other orbital exploit: Commander in permanent orbital transfer, since that one hasn't been fix either yet.

No matter what, that change is going to be inevitable, and when it comes SXX will probably become balanceable as well, mostly since the paper like durability isn't required any more.

On the scale of a large system, it REALLY doesn't cost that much. Enough SSX's to instasnipe a Commander is barely 30 seconds of income. Most games I've played waste vastly more than that because they can't figure out what to build with it all and the server couldn't handle it if they did.

Your whole argument is just right back to "Don't let them get in that position in the first place", which is just wrong because in a large system, it's just not that much metal and you can easily spend the rest on delaying your opponents long enough.

I designed a system the other day with a metal planet (with no metal on it) surrounded by 10 super tiny moons (1 for each player). To cut a long story short, 2 of us left, I have a massive army ready to invade, move some orbital fabbers over, try to build a teleporter... there's no room. Try to reclaim stuff, doesn't work. (I watched the replay, i seem to have reclaimed the t1 mex and not the t2 then left it alone, derp) And I run out of time, opponent builds a teleporter on my moon which has a few empty spaces, my bad, and wipes out all my metal income. Now my orb fabs can't do a thing, and I slowly wait for him to finish me off on my now useless base on the metal planet.

GOD GIVE ME MY UNIT CANNON. Peace.

Personally, i'm interesting in some sort of orbital teleporter, or flying unit teleporter, I feel the difficulty of establishing a foothold is also in large part due to the fact that you are pretty much stuck with waves of ground units, that tend to get splatted by established artillery.

Heck, i'd love to be able to fire my units through an orbital teleporter and have them drop down from the sky onto the enemy planet, now that would be a badass way to use a unit cannon.

Personally I think it would be much improved if you could send air units through the teleporter.

Early game he is an asset.
Mid to late game he is one thing: You greatest weakness. He is your king in a game of interplanetary 3d Chess. Keep your king save, regardless how many pawns you ahve to sacrifice for it!
SXX are basically the horses right now: Very hard to use, but they can get you no mater how thick a wall you have in front of you.

Most units out-build, out-damage and out tank the Commander once you got enough (simply due to their numbers) so he has nothing do to on lategame battlefields.

The biggest problem with interplanetary combat is setting up your beach head.

I don't have this problem

Build teleporter, swarm units. Not too hard.

Heh, I prefer the 300 Astraus vanguard assault myself.

With proper scouting, just 50 vanguards in astraeus is better. You don't need to destroy a base, just a commander. That strategy brings the boom to them, not their planet.

Yes I understand that. But it can be hard to get that teleporter set up if there are Avengers patrolling the planet and Bombers patrolling the ground. I'm talking about when a planet has been fully colonised. Yes you could say don't let them fully colonise a planet, but that still doesn't answer the problem of two teams each owning a planet, and massive armies on each planet without a way for them to engage.

I'm still learning what units cost what and how long they take to build. Are the Astreus cheap and quick to build?

Well teleporter costs 400 metal each, hundreds of avengers to patrol an entire planet costs alot alot more. Not letting them fully colonise is very relevant.

Also, you can send avengers of your own. Stacked up avengers absolutely obliterate area patrolled avengers.

Thirdly, you can assist teleporters with orbital fabbers to make them essentially invulnerable.

Astrei cost 600 metal i think. It's not cheap early game but it's a breeze late game.

And can you do any area command pickup?

Yep.

Even against a few tier 2 missile bombers that might be area patrolling the planet? because that would be sweet if true

Like what would be the ratio of missle bombers shooting the teleporter to fabbers repairing it for it to not expode?

Teleporter has 9750 health at a ratio of 24.4 hp/metal. Orbital fabber repairs at 60 metal/s, or 1462.5 hp/s. A single advanced bomber does 1,000 damage per hit with an ROF of 0.25 resulting in 250 DPS.

Well, these numbers are pointless. Because if you just went by these numbers, a single fabber would be able to out-heal almost 6 advanced bombers.

Doesn't work like this. In reality, 10 advanced bombers CAN single-hit a portal, no matter how many fabbers are assisting. 15-20 are almost guaranteed to do so when manually synchronizing the attack sequence by moving in with "hold fire" command and manually ordering attack once all are in weapon range and facing the target.

Those numbers are certainly not useless. Why are you trying to compare things across the wrong timings?

In reality, if you are at the stage that someone is able to spam out enough t2 bombers to cover an entire planet from orbital invasion so that they have 10 t2 bombers at any given position to instantly snipe a teleporter, why havn't you already invaded at the proper timing of about 10-12 minutes that the game most assuredly allows?

And if you were somehow too slow (understandable if just learning the game), why arn't you now using nukes, halley's or death lasers? Every mechanic in this game has it's own relevant timing.

Even then, there is absolutely nothing stopping you from sending sniper bots through the teleporter first in order to render t2 bombers useless.

I didn't say these numbers were useless, just that it is pointless to calculate like that. You just can't out-heal an synchronized bomb strike of low RoF units, no matter how many fabbers you use.

It only means that you can't make a portal invulnerable just by using fabbers.