Unit Cannon: Design Vision

I think it would be interesting, perhaps make it so it doesnt consume energy, requires an enormous amount of energy to start, is expensive, is always on, and blows up in a nuke size explosion on both connected teleporters when destroyed(due to wormhole collapse).

Edit: ninj'd by everybody...thats what i get for leaving my browser open so long lol

The unit cannon is meant for invasions and the teleporter should be re-designed into a mechanism for acquiring heavy reinforcements once a foothold is gained. The teleporter should be expensive (so that its not used as the initial invasion mechanic) but it should also be very sturdy (so that once your foot is in the door its hard to kick you out again).

In WW2 the allies didn't send engineers to the beaches of Normandy to build docks, they sent soldiers first to take the beaches. It should be the same way in PA, first you use the unit cannon for the initial invasion (which can only send light 'infantry' units), then once you take the beach, you put up a teleporter and start bringing in the heavy equipment (shellers/vanguards, etc).

And that is *exactly* how its going to work. All this 'tele is OP' stuff... that's *only* when you invade an undefended area. You can't really use a tele when there are heavy defences without sending in stuff first to clear the area (which atm means tedious orbital work to get anchors, assuming they don't get umbrellas first cause then you've had it).

Now with your example- when landing on a *defended* beach then yeah- soldiers first. If there was an area that wasn't contested tho- then sure they'd send the engineers in first. Just like you can easily build a gate where there is no enemy, or in allied territory for support purposes.

At the end of the day, the game *as it is right now* needs the UC as a tool to help do exactly what you've described- invade a defended world. There are very few options for that right now. What I want to avoid is the community forcing through a change that prevents the use of gates for support of allies or movement between uncontested worlds, as that is really all that the changes of *OMG MAKE IT COAST LOADS* type stuff will accomplish. It will make the base game slower and more tedious, whilst having little impact on the scenarios we're interested in.

Well, I for one am excited by this new addition. My two cents:

I think that units fired from the cannon should be encapsulated by their launch vehicle until the moment they hit the ground, none of this firing while descending nonsense. Instead, the vehicle should hit the ground at speed, and the impact should act as an AOE arty hit like from the battleship, and then the unit should emerge from the capsule. Think of the Saiyan dropships from DBZ for reference. I think this would be an excellent compliment to the delivery of forces, as it would naturally have a zone clearing effect, giving the attackers a place to start their attack from when they first arrive. As part of this, the unit cannon should be relatively inaccurate to guarantee a decent spread over the target zone. Also, a new animation for dust kicked up from plunging fire would be nice.

The teleporters shouldn't be used for the beginnings of expansion, that should be the role of the aestreus, the teleporter invalidates the aestreus.

This gave me an idea: The unit cannon can only send combat fabbers, not engineers.

No matter how many units you can send through with the unit cannon alone, it will eventually be more effective to make a teleporter with the combat fabbers so you can send in advanced engineers to make flak, artillery, factories, etc. and secure your beach head.

So the *only* issue I can see with this is that orbital fabbers can build gates.

That aside I don't want to remove gates from the early game. The astreous *isn't suitable* for troop movement in team games. Having allies be able to support you is key in an RTS, and with teams spread across multiple worlds gates are essential imo- and early game for that matter. It makes the whole game a lot more dynamic. Removing orbital fabbers gate construction ability wouldn't invalidate this- though tbh I'd almost be tempted to say get rid of the astreous rather than nerf the gate. It's a pretty pointless unit imo.

That's why we need multi-unit transports :>

Yea, but then you would start to be getting towards spaceships, which the PA devs want to stay away from. This isn't Homeworld, even though adding Homeworld on would be ace.

But even then that *doesn't* solve the alliance issue. I really think the way gates are implemented in PA are *really really good* for team games. Playing with a group of players- you can move units quickly between battlefronts, support weaker players, team up against one opponent. If you remove them (or critically shove them behind a high cost t2 barrier + high use cost) then all this fantastic dynamic play we have now will be killed off. You'll have a 4 v 4 against good players that plays as a set of 1 v 1 games, no twists, no surprises, no last minute escapes. I actually think PA plays better *pretty much without orbital involved* by spawning across a solar system and using gates. That said orbital is nice to have for intel, and nice for expanding to worlds *off the grid* or that you've been pushed off.

I just think a few people here are using the UC as an excuse to basically request a pretty much full rework of the entire game and I don't think that's a fair, realistic or necessary thing to do right now. The game plays well, especially in teams, and needs tweaking rather than full overhaul. Even the economy system works well enough imo.

It must be soooo frustrating for Uber to have to read this after putting in all this great work, and offering us something many have been asking for only to then get "well that's nice and all, but for it to matter your going to have to redo the entire game". /rant.

Well, given that a tele takes less than a second to build you CAN kinda use it on really heavily defended planets wherever you want, as long as you're fast enough...

Yep, which is why it's a broken unit. :c

I can't believe my ears, I just heard a piece of PA's soundtrack on some random tv show. I've had that happen with some other games OST, Skyrim twice. I guess the epicness of PA's music has been recognized.

Random off topic post cos I'm not willing enough to find and bump the soundtrack thread...

If that's how it's planned, the teleporter (why on Earth is this not in Google's dictionary?) ought to cost a bit more metal. Perhaps it should be re-balanced more towards what it was when it was first introduced? Less of a planet-cracker and more of an army mover.

Edit: @tvinita You've made a lot of people happy with this one structure. Awesomely done!

So what are the chances of a weekend of "testing?" (read: squeeing like a little girl as I stare at the Unit Cannon for hours )

Try to figure out why you can pull this off in the first place.

I'll give you a hint: The problem is related to the overall scale this game has tilted to. On a standard sized planet (leave alone the standard sized tiny moons), you need only a comparably small number of bombers or Avengers to reach critical deathball mass in every possible location of the planet. As soon as you can instant-kill Teleporters planet wide, game over.

Yes, in theory there are also nukes and Halleys as tie breakers, but they just don't work in this scenario. A nuke radius is giant if it hits a base, but its tiny if it just used to wipe out a few bombers on a planet wide patrol, the next bomber squad is just mere seconds away.

Against Avengers, you have at least the option of going Ender's style, sacrificing your own Avenger army to decimate the opposite one (before Umbrellas and Anchors ultimately wipe you out), but even with them, you only have a few seconds before the whole planets worth of Avengers converges in your landing location.

The problem is the same in both cases, planets are way to tiny in relation to unit movement speed (at least for units in the upper range), so omnipresence and therefor the fundamental lack of safe landing spots is bound to happen rather soon.

For Avengers there is not much which could be done, except maybe rethinking the Anchor mechanics. (I'm serious... Away from static defenses, towards deployable beachheads with limited lifetime. You know, like dropping an Anchor. Other solutions would be possible too.)

For air, well, I think there are only two options here: Either cut down the movement speed, or tie the action range of air units to ground control. SupCom style fuel system wasn't bad in these terms as it tied air superiority in an area directly to ground control, it also imposed a penalty for redeploying troups since they would need to refuel when moving large distances.

Guys, I don't have much free time to read whole thread
What is the difference between traveling via unit cannon and traveling via astreus+area load? Is it faster? Cheaper? Faster landing and/ir immunity to anti-orbital/AA ?

Whole concept seems exactly like astreus with simplified controls.

People seem to forget the horrible stalemates that were common place before teleporters were moved to t1 and had their price reduced. These changes that people keep defending for teleporters "make it expensive" "make it T2" "make it made of paper" have been tested, they were there in the origin of teleporters, and they failed miserably, that led them to not being used and stalemates to being very common place.

If the unit cannon doesn't have a place yet the solution is not to nerf something that has made games much more dynamic, but to improve the UC.

btw, now up on pte in rough form. Head over and take a look. Please leave feedback on the thread for it:
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/pte-build-75771-pte-now-live.66332/

Haha, but that was before the unit cannon, and before transports were made viable.. Oh wait transports /still/ aren't viable.

@jables Multi-unit transports? Plz <3