Allied teleporters should be able to be linked

What the title says

Yeah I support this!

Agreed 100%. This alone basically makes non-shared team battles, or dynamic alliances. useless. Might as well do an FFA with a mutual ceasefire gentlemen's agreement. Not sure if they ended up fixing not being able to see non-shared teammate pings or not, another major cooperation element.

You fools! So long as this remains, people will be goaded into playing shared armies, the superior game-mode!
<_< In all seriousness though I suppose it'd be fine to add.

I'd love this.

PA#3635

Would definitely help even up the balance when randoms don't want to play shared armies against a group who know each other. Currently shared armies have a huge advantage in terms of sending reinforcements between planets in the early game. They would still have the disadvantage that the player sending reinforcements had to control them on the other planet though.

But let's say somebody links one of your teleporters which you currently need? You will end in the problems why some people don't play shared army. I'm not one of them, but this needs to be considered.

That was my first thought as well - but if, say, you can only link to an allies unlinked teleporter, it means you can't hijack a link they already have, and if they then need it for something else, it's their call to connect it to whatever they need.

It would be nice if was tied to the resource-sharing flag, so you could decide how much you trust someone. That won't help with non-shared team armies though, because you are implicitly resource sharing.

@jables, @tvinita I really really think that in Alliance mode (i.e. non shared teams) allied players should be able to link gates.

It really opens up your options, and gives the advantage to the team that actually support each other, rather than playing a set of 1 v 1 games.

1 team mate alone versus two enemy players? Get a gate up and send support, or allow them to escape and keep them in the game. Either way the gate linking ability is essential, as in multi planet battles the time it takes to get orbital, send your orbital fabber to them (and avoid it getting intercepted and killed) and getting up two gates is usually longer than the time it will take for them to be killed off if they are outnumbered- which turns alliance mode into a dice roll depending on who spawns where

As a side thought, if this isn't possible for technical reasons, a good alternative would be to grant the ability to gift specific units (I would imagine this is more a UI issue than anything as there is already an ability to add arbitrary units using cheats so it would appear to be in engine?). That wouldn't be quite as intuitive, but at least your allied player could build a gate and gift it to you giving the same end result...

Not in favour of this idea. Makes it way too easy to expand and invade, and would cause confusion much of the time because players would redirect each others gates. And if people want that kind of team game there's always shared armies.

I think that is probably the best way to do it. The ability to gift units to teammates would also resolve the issue I mentioned above with reinforcements, you could send units through your teleporters then simply gift them to your ally. They can't use them if you don't want them to (hence avoiding the issues of shared armies) but you don't have to play across 4-5 if your ally has been pushed off and is just running around with a commander and nothing else to do.

I don't see why this isn't already a thing besides it's not a priority coding-wise. The fact that you cannot send units to an ally using teleporters is ridiculous. The fact that you can send units through the enemy teleporter is equally ridiculous, yet that's in the game and I love it.

Why is it so bad to have allied games actually playing like allied games? If I want to send units to my ally to help, I should be able to do just that. What I don't see happening is being able to link your teleporter to an enemy teleporter. If someone made a mod for that..? Talk about some wild *** shenanigans..

If its made so that both players have to link to each others respective teleporters, rather than one of them, we'd fix the link-diversion issue

simple ... communication .... there is no safety against dic_ks other than put on ignore ... even with shared armies ...

now dynamic alliances ... that is another story ... ... ...
in that case when suspissious just close the gate cut the connection and destroy the tresspassers being prepared to lose your gate ...

One simple question:

Who pays for the energy upkeep in that scenario?

Currently managing teleporter linkages seems very awkward to me. Why not just define a destination attribute to the teleporter that allows it to be linked in one direction to any allied teleporter? I think that teleporters should be able to accept units from multiple sources at the same time. Having to build one destination teleporter for each source teleporter is a bit silly and very cumbersome to manage in game. A many to one relationship would reduce needless complexity and you would not have to fight over who is going to link to it and when.

For this additional functionality, an increase in teleporter metal cost could be justified.

That's a very good question!

Maybe.. half and half? Both of you need to be positive half as much as you normally do.