Assault Carriers: A Unit Cannon Alternative

Now, I've seen the developer's reluctance to create the unit cannon, due to the difficulty in implementing it, and I can understand why it might be difficult: what kind of range do you give it, does it have to be facing the planet it is attacking, and issues surrounding giving it a convincing animation where it fires from one planet to another.

So, I propose the developers shortcut many of those issues, and implement something that would be just as awesome: large, orbital unit carriers. Firstly, one to transport air units from planet to planet to address some balancing issues, and secondly, one to transport (and perhaps even manufacture) masses of land units for that epic drop-pod goodness.

First off, the air unit transport. As it stands, it's far too easy to protect planets using aircraft, and our gameplay options are a little too limited: either build teleporters and rush land units through, or destroy the planet with super weapons. The teleporters are an issue though because, especially on smaller planets, it is far too easy to intercept and destroy teleporters with aircraft before they can even send units through. Aircraft are an amazing planetary defense tool, especially considering they are highly mobile and difficult to shoot down with the SSX. Even if you get a few mobile AA through the teleporters with some workers to help build some static AA, they can easily be overwhelmed by scores of gunships, or sniped by advanced bombers. It's also frustrating if you are playing as an aircraft-centric player and cannot use your aircraft for any purpose other than to defend your planet, once you have taken it over.

Having a large aircraft carrier capable of transporting and launching hosts aircraft (like advanced fighters for instance) would be awesome, and extremely useful for quick assaults, or establishing planetary beachheads.

As for the land unit assault carrier, it would simply area load scores of units, move planets, and then unload them by firing them out in drop pods. The same use as above: great for quick assaults, and establishing beach-heads. You could give it move utility by making them able to quickly produce units like a factory, ready to drop. A player, confined to a gas planet, could essentially launch a full on land (and air) invasion using these carriers. Teleporters would still have their place as quicker, cheaper methods of transport.

As for armaments, you could give them stuff similar to anchors, or simply nothing. The SXX is already the orbital death unit. It would be nice to see more unit variety for orbital units, in the form of larger ships.

Picture it: a large orbital fleet arrives, complete with orbital fighter escorts and large carriers. Swarms of aircraft fall from the thermosphere into the troposphere, whilst other carriers bombard the ground with drop pods from which hosts of ground units deploy. The fighting is intense, but the sub-orbital units are able to protect the construction and deployment of teleporters long enough for reinforcements to march through.
Who wouldn't want to see this:

Art credit goes to AdamBurn @ Deviant Art.

Yes it might be costly to implement, but hopefully at least one of these carriers (probably the aircraft one) will be cheaper than the unit cannon. If that would be too expensive still, I'd be happy to buy it as part of an orbital units DLC or something.

I hope this thread gets noticed. It took some effort to type.
Thanks for reading.
Thoughts?

Or, even better: a land based unit carrier, that can pick up other land units. You would make one land guy pick up another, then have another one pick up that guy, and so forth. Eventually, you could have towers of land units piled on top of each other!

I am not sure why you would like my post, and then satirize it with a post like that?

+1. Can't beat drop pods

ODST... Orbital Drop Shock Troopers Tanks?

We need anything that lets us do massive invasions (or at least take beachhead and keep it). Current lack of real invasion tools and uberlolzors+nukes make endgame quite boring, or rather determined same moment somebody took control of whole planet (esp. metal one). Multiplanet maps get boring endgame, and single planet maps do not give many strategies to win.

This is very true. Mutli-planet games are absolutely horrendous right now, there just no good conventional endgame. I find ending the game by smashing planes and using lazors rather boring. Yeah, its cool, but there's no satisfaction to that ending. Unit Cannon/multi-unit orbital transports would make cross-planet warfare much more fun.

For invasion we need something that can deliver 500 up to 1k units quite fast to another planet. I doubt that unit cannon shooting 20 will do anything for invasions. Armies in PA are massive (I hope they will get even bigger with private servers).

We need some kind of Fatboy Experimental. Yes i am not scared of word experimental, we already have 2 super/uber experimentals: halleys and lolzor.

My idea is similar to op, but with small differences (restrictions). We need that experimental to create and keep beachhead, and only for that. So it does not move once dropped from orbit. Build it on orbit, load units (around 50 to 100 per one), then drop on enemy planet. It would act as some stationary defense (few aa turrets, and very few ground ones, maybe single antinuke with 1 rocket), and unload all units automatically after landing. Cost should be around 1 annihlazor module or halley. So total cost of 5 units should be around cost of operational lolzor or planet with halleys.

THIS THIS THIS

Did you ever think of two unit cannons? Or more?

But yes I agree we are in dire need of better invasion options right now.

Yes I did. There was one in SupCom 1 or 2, and it was kind of useless. That maybe because of experimentals and fact that normal t3 units were kind of obsolete late game.

More than 1 unit cannon introduces 2 problems for invading side. First is enough empty space to build it and collect small army around (look at teleporters and how units love to get stuck), second, when you have multiple cannons loaded is synchronizing time of drop for all of them, so units can create critical mass and hold long enough. Unless single cannon can load and shoot 50 units at once, and be quite precise with aiming its not good tool for invasion. And such cannon will be totally op to snipe commanders, but if we get weaker cannon it will be useless for invasions.

it still think its a good idea and it would be really interesting also that means you can have a proper invasion fleet and space based invasions which would be a really big game changer for sure.

An orbital unit that can drop its payload from on high would likely work fine, and would encourage more orbital combat.

Still, we're looking at what appears to be a feature freeze, and that scares me.

?

Yeah, that had me confused too. I think he means feature freeze with regards to the available units, not PA in general.

Correct. I hope I'm wrong, but the recent peek behind the curtain in regards to ranked matches says nothing about units or balance.

Well, that's where the server mods come in.

but isn't the game main focus on balance and adding more units which would change gameplay and social as well as matchmaking features come last

I've sort of been holding back on replying here, but I like the idea of an ODST-style army. There's a simple problem with your solution.

The Unit cannon IS the source of your ODSTs. Units come in hot, from the sky, and create a point of entry. Your large unit carriers are going to be the bane of your ideas further down the line, not because it's not a good idea mind you, but because the carriers will be so large that people will demand weaponry, and it will snowball into a full-scale orbital armada. Not a direction the game is pointed towards.

I don't have any problems with unit carriers in the orbital layer, but I feel that your examples of their addition would simply replace the Unit Cannon, not complement it. If that's your line of moving forward, I'm against it. If you can figure out a way to complement the Unit Cannon, and not replace it, then you'll have my attention.

This is a great idea. This + ferry-routes and I'll happily forget Unit Cannon ever didn't happened.