We need a defence against the Helios + Manhattan drop

There is some truth in the defense argument. I mean, couldn't you just watch the Helios leaving (assuming its not from an orbiting moon), then put your commander else where and position some huge orbital fleet just above where he was? You can get 126 avengers for the cost of a helios+manhattan. Or 47 bluehawks. Or your own manhattan insta-blowing up his orbital fleet (not sure, forgotten how you would activate them) as soon as it arrives.

If you can spare the attention, the nuke wrecking the infrastructure might be worse.

Have you tried to hide your comm from a network of advanced radar sats?

Halleys are for breaking a heavy turtle - the Helios is for breaking the other guy with half decent defenses. Manhattans through the Helios should still be a thing - I think it's pretty cool. The helios needs to have a 3 second cooldown like every other orbital unit at the least. That's it.

So helios doesn't have the 3s cooldown? Now I can see why that would be an issue.

Well, why didnt you try to shoot down all the radars. Where are the umbrellas, or rail guns, or bluehawks, or anchors, or avengers, or omegas? Why would they use a helios manhattan when they could just use sxx spam for cheaper.

Why wouldnt you move your commander as the helios is in transit.

For example, you can't say bomber snipe is OP because they have a network of spyplanes and you didn't do anything to counter air. Especially if you can see all the planes being built without having to even scout them, as is the case with orbital.

Orbital can no longer be ignored and this is a good thing that everyone asked for in vanilla.

That's debasing my argument.

Shooting down radars is completely irrelevant if the enemy sends a stream. It's quite feasible at 1k metal a second. In addition, you will not be able to lock down anything but a small moon in the time it takes for me to build a helios or similar superweapon. Yes, you can attempt to move your comm around - it will just delay the inevitable. You seem to forget that you PAG folks tried that during the last clan wars against Promethean. It was the most hilarious waste of attention I've seen in my life. Your time is better spent fortifying an area for your comm or going on the offensive.

Orbital can no longer be ignored - sure. But not because of a halfway bugged insta-nuke mechanic. The rest of the orbital layer does it just fine. Let's get rid of the stupid, please. Also, useless micro. Pls.

The problem is:

Adv orbital radar has mega health and gives *insta vision* of the whole planet. Thanks to this + chrono cam it is not possible to prevent your opponent getting a fix on your com, and given your commander is slow as **** and can only be moved using the astreous (very dangerous) it means your only option to avoid an incoming snipe once spotted is a gate if you happen to have one next to it.

Solutions are either make it possible to have a safe area that can't be too easily sniped (you can at least defend against SXX unless your opponent is stupidly far ahead), or make it so you can *hide* your commander (e.g. a cloak that uses very high energy meaning your opponent has to target your generators to find you).

That's all I'd like to see, for the specific situation of big games, that once you reach a certain point the game should be about crippling your opponent and fighting them, rather than just sniping a really weak single target.

helios doesn't transition instantaneously. I'd assume it's easy to use an astreus and move it around. Or even a simple land teleporter. And this is without cheese with commander invulnerability transitioning between planets.

@mered4
I like how you cherry picked only certain things from my post while using historical games from half a year ago totally out of context. Also seems kind of convenient to ignore that everyone can see helios that are being built. If you couldn't counter his orbital such that he built a helios, then you would have died to anchor spam over your base and metals already. Either that or a handful of sxx.

It's ~40-50k metal total. What did you spend your 40-50k metal on if opponent spent it on helios and manhattan and radar etc? Surely you can do something about that orbital?

It's not uncounterable. And neither is it an assured game ender like a halley.

*You've also forgotten to consider that manhattan was bugged and did not have the correct at_commander damage modifier it now has with the current patch

If only we could cloak commanders for an energy cost. Or had decoy commanders. Or both.

Unless someone is rushing a Helios (which is really dumb from my experience), there is sufficient defense to ward off an orbital incursion. That's actually the first thing I teach folks to do in orbit: Build a base with decent defenses so you can't be cheesed by twenty avengers. That includes umbrellas and anchors. Having a battleship or two there to stop enemy forces from jumping you is also a must-have.

Now, I know plenty of people who DONT do this and rely on avenger micro or a stupid opponent to keep their helios alive. Those people are the ONLY folks who you can actually stop from building the helios. Good luck. If it's a situation with comparable metal income, there aren't a lot of options - the enemy is either defending the helios well enough that the metal lost will not be worth the metal destroyed, or he's not even trying. Any other situation is build up - in which case the helios was a bad idea.

Elodea, have you actually played a large orbital game since the patch?
More than one?
I've been in at least twenty. Can confirm: People didn't send one manhattan with the helios. Often, they sent five or six. In the build up stage (500->1k eco), I'd see those attempted one-manhattan snipes. They often failed, but they were quite scary when someone like Soviet or Roflness or custard(when he gets back) could micro it right. It was almost unstoppable - unfortunately.

Now, unlike what you may have experienced from 1v1s, orbital play isn't necessarily about who did what with which metal. It's more about where those forces are and when they target the enemy. Do you harass the enemy on the gas giant as a distraction from your primary invasion or do you just fortify a halley moon and go for the win? Should you try to wipe his orbital fleet or just nuke the crap out of his orbital production before invading? What about that guy who has ten SXX running around on his planet? Is he more of a threat than that other guy with a halley asteroid?

This isn't to say eco management isn't important - it's paramount - but so long as you aren't floating metal and didn't overbuild energy by more than ~10%, you're fine. More eco is, of course, the goal, but orbital isn't about spam more units HNNNGHH. It's about where you put them. Once I get 3-4 railguns and 20 or so avengers, I can wreck any gas giant base without any support. I don't need 50 - just 4. 50 would be nice, but those would be better used defending my planet or attacking his orbital navy.

For this reason, the Helios is ridiculously OP with Manhattan insta drops. You can place an unblockable nuke anywhere in the system in twenty seconds, or a minute if it has to circle the sun. Asteroids are particularly good at limiting the Helios' usefulness, but asteroids are usually secured first anyway. Yes, you can take precautions by moving your comm or adding more orbital defense - but at the end of the day, you can still micro the manhattan through the helios less than three seconds after it hits orbit.

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Now, as to what CDRKF said about the adv radar sat - it's desperately needed late game. Otherwise it would be the equivalent of a really boring blindfolded snowball fight across a small river. Or you just throw an asteroid. However you want haha.

Point is, the Adv radar sat really, REALLY helps narrow down where the comm is - especially if the enemy is actively patrolling them through stargates. The hermes is also half decent - but it's a bit more difficult to get intel with those due to their squishy nature.

My point is the target late game should be *infrastructure* rather than the com (i.e. energy fields and so on). Or at least there should be a way to play the game that allows that.

Com snipe in a big game is so anti-climactic

I think BA (Spring engine) got this right, by making t2 power very volatile (making crippling someone when you circumvent their defenses easier).

But the game mode is assassination. Assassinations don't end in climatic wars, Supremacy does.

Or god forbid, Annihilation of all enemy forces.

Yeah I think a 'supremacy' game mode might be a nice option.

This so much. I've never liked Assassination much as a game mode. Zero-K uses Supremacy as the default mode and the game is much better for it imo. The coms are important (they're strong units, and give resources) but you don't win the game with a comm snipe. You win by getting more eco and destroying their base.

PS. I liked someone else's suggestion. Create some sort of mech suit titan the comm can get in, that makes it super tanky, like 10x tankier.

Can someone tell me why this mode doesn't already exist....

The devs don't think it's important or it would have been implemented before release.
I think it's massively important, it's pretty much the entire reason I don't play multiplayer, because it always devolves into a STUPID BLOODY SNIPE.
I hate snipes, I want massive battles.

It's also the reason the AI is too easy, because you can't make it smart enough to properly protect it's commander, and you're never going to.
SUPREMACY ! DAMNIT.

You have to play on good maps with decent players to get some satisfying fights. The addition of a supremacy option would just add to the amount of stupid in pub games.

I disagree, a 'supremacy' option (or something *like it* maybe not as far as kill all fabbers) could be a nice addition.

Personally I would settle for 'kill all factories & com' as an acceptable compromise, as PA encourages you to build quite a few factories and they're reasonably strong and static (so you can't run and hide them somewhere).

Given how small fabbers are and the size of the maps, a more traditional supremacy mode of kill all fabbers would probably be more annoying than anything. I just want something that requires my opponent to target my base, rather than one rather weak and difficult to defend unit.

You could always have a transport cooldown timer after the Manhattan is dropped off. Basically, the nuke part of it doesn't engage for 15 seconds after it is transported. This would give you time to kill it before it goes off.

Why not keep your commander next to a teleporter at all times during the lategame? Then teleport it if any sort of snipe is occurring.

a few catapults will take them out real quick, you know - or you could keep a dozen bluehawks or so in your base

Spoiler

Unrelated, I really want to see a commander cloaking thing like there was in TA