The current orbital balance causes a significant delay in getting into orbit but allows you to very rapidly accelerate across the system and control every planet that your opponent does not in only a couple of minutes with fast and easy to build teleporters that have minimal economic cost. This system has the following problems: On smaller planets orbital often isn't used as the game is over before it can be. Astreii are useless. Orbital fabbers making teleporters are just all around better. Invasions become a struggle to get up teleporters. Get one up, the other guy is screwed. Don't get one up, prepare for a bore know as a stalemate. You're able to go from controlling one planet to controlling five with instant transportation to and fro in the timespan of about 3 minutes once your orbital launcher is up. That's a bit of a problem. Orbital needs to be rebalanced, and dearly. You should be able to go orbital in a 1v1 on a small planet. However you should not be able to easily take control of a planet just by building a teleporter or some such nonsense. PROPOSED CHANGES: Reduced Orbital Launcher cost from 2700 to 1200, or two factories. Make teleporters non-buildable by anything other than T2 fabbers. Decrease astreaus cost to 200 (Or maybe even 100?) Make commanders have a carry weight of two (Or 1000, or anything higher than one; doesn't matter) - Non transportable. Use teleporters. Make teleporters have a cost of 2000 and an energy drain of at least 5000. There's no way instant transportation of units from planet to planet should be that cheap. Introduce unit cannon buildable at T2 for cost of 2200; 200 metal per 5 unit drop pod (or equivalent) firing at one 5 unit drop pod per second. Speed should make it take 25 seconds moon to planet. Expansion must now be done with T1 fabbers in astreii. With astreii so cheap you can drop 10 fabbers (100 metal per second; 30 seconds to build unit cannon and 48 to build T2) for only 1000 metal plus the fabbers, less than two factories in cost plus that of the fabbers. Instant travel now takes a lot of metal and energy, so it's reserved for late game. You can invade with the unit cannon in mid-game but it does require a significant investment and isn't useful for surgical strikes given the reaction time the enemy has. Discuss. I'm probably coming up with ludicrous numbers for something in this post but it's a heck of a lot better than what we have now.
I'm not sure about the unit cannon part, bro. We don't even know how they made it work yet. Let's hold the phone on orbital balance riots until the PTE UC is released, eh?
Planets that are mostly water are EXTREMELY hard to invade. It was completely impossible to build a teleporter on my starting planet after I got kicked off of it, my opponent filled the islands with Umbrellas and antinukes and had bombers on patrol. My poor Slammers never had a chance to get into combat... Mass nukes didn't work either (Well, maybe my final salvo would have done the trick), it took a huge snipe with SSX lasers to bring the guy's comm down. Seems there wasn't enough space for 6+ antinukes AND enough Umbrellas... No planets were available to smash into this stubborn SOB. I let some newer guy use the only movable planet to planet-smash me for the lulz, he even allied me to get targeting info on my comm. Of course, I just walked him through his designated escape teleporter whilst re-establishing my base on the opposite side of the planet.. I think the introduction of naval teleporters, or at least being able to build the existing ones on the bottom of the ocean so amphibious units can go through, would go a long way to helping break this strong water-planet defense conventionally.
Naval teleporters are absolutely needed for sure. But the whole naval model set needs to be revamped. It's too big, too slow, too hard to path. We need more TA style models such as @zx0 is making.
Auugh, I said practically the same thing in a reddit post - teleporters should be T2 and more expensive - and I got downvoted to oblivion. D:
I think part of that was from what you were saying about the unit cannon, not about what you said about teles.
Or if we get a full compliment of submarines, sub teleporters! Possibly allowing amphibious units to use them too?
I fully fleshed out naval arsenal with a few hovercraft units is needed asap! I want to be able to build an epic base on the water without any disadvantages
I agree with more amphibious units as well. Additionally, I think that the Astraeus should be repurposed to hold many many more units and the teleporter made drastically less available. Stargating around is fun, but not really balanced.
Speaking of planetary invasions, is there any chance we can get a mobile anti-nuke? Nothing ruins my invasion worse than some clever jerk just nuking it.
Once it is balanced maybe. At the moment if someone has fully colonised a planet (with planet wide air patrols) then the unit cannon units get destroyed before they hit the ground. I'm talking about 5v5 games where full colonisation by both teams on their respective planets can make planet invasions near impossible.
Well, assuming they have the damn metal income for it, which by experience is hugely expensive, not to mention energy costs... but Noone has a habit of building 12 anti nukes in the same spot. Speaking purely from an idealist perspective: Attacking is always cheaper.
How about: teleporters instantly deconstruct and then, after a short delay, construct units in a different place. To use them, you must have mass storage equal to the mass value of the units currently 'in between' teleporters.
I read it, and I got it wrong, so I read it again, still got it wrong. Read it a third time and understood it. Basically I don't want delays. Having said that, I do like the idea that you should have metal in storage, but I think it might be hard to impliment easily without breaking anything. Also I think of it more as a novelty like, I'm not actually sold on needing to spend 2x metal+ energy for the same unit to be sent through a teleporter. I am sold on the teleporter requiring lots of energy, and then having that energy cost increase relative to distance.
Distance cost is a good idea: it would encourage people to wait until the planets are aligned. If you made the cost-ramp high enough, it could become almost like a whole new mechanic: the invasion cycle.
I'd have to disagree there. Although I guess I should throw in a caveat or two. I can understand that no-one specifically said "The unit cannon should be/originally was designed as a stalemate breaking weapon" However said, if a unit cannon is an invasion tool, used to help bypass/circumvent orbital/air layer defense. Then by extension and effect, how is it not a stalemate breaking weapon? For aidenofvt I agree with you in principle, however I think that'd be tedious to employ. It's more likely distance will be (if at all) determined relative to sun. But ideally, the cost would be in realtime based on relative physical distance between telestargateportals
