Ideas for units

I can't seem to find where I saw it, but someone mentioned a planetary scaled cloaking device. I must admit, I like the sound of that. Cloak an entire planet. Maybe that means remove it from the map view entirely, or simply remove all unit displays on the planet.

Oh hey, there's an open moon let's go colonize . . . GAH! there's guns everywhere we're doomed!!!

The potential surprise factor here could be quite epic really.

another goofy idea. Mobile structures.

I'm talking about large factories, and other basic structures on giant tracks that can just up and drive around to relocate to other areas. Would make strategy pretty interesting when your entire base can potentially be mobile, if you are of course willing to pay a bit extra for all of your structures.

Glad to see my posts are being read

Question; how many units do you want? I love Zero-K and such because they have just so many units, instead of the dozen or so per faction you see in nearly all RTS games.

But I have a feeling nearly nobody wants much units? Why not? And what is Uber planning (if any), concerning the amount of units?

more accurately the concensus was that people wanted tons of units in one faction so thats what uber would give them.

if you go back a few pages you'll find lots of threads about factions and races that have those debates in them.

Oh, good, I must have missed that then. I'd love to have (literally ) tons of units.

Thank you!

Damageable units and battle engineer with heavy armor to repair them during the fight! The repair feature was a good strategy add in TA, so combining it to damageable units to increase its importance could be nice.

If the animation engine can do it, some kind of "transformers" units would be cool but i wonder if this could not ruin the gameplay : robots that can transform into airplanes

I'm not sure because TA gameplay is based on specialized units more than multi pupose units! And this game looks like to be mostly based on TA.

As many niches as there are available to be sensibly filled by them.
I always felt TA:CC went a little off the deep-end.

Huh, which CC units weren't fun to build and useful?

I wanted to go and contradict you there but i went through all the units and couldn't

Hmm, maybe. But why not offer people the choice of building hundreds of different units? You can still stick to the same dozen if you so want to - but the choice should be there to do some interesting stuff, even if some units are only useful once in a dozen games.

Well, ok, I suppose balance issues could pop up, and it takes time as well as money to design additional units, but meh. This game shouldn't be a 'rush job' like so many others nowadays. Still, it's a valid point I suppose.

That wasn't really my point.
I just feel there was an excessive amount of overlap in the roles they could fulfill.

Plus I didn't really like the whole hovercraft unit-type.
If naval is an integral element of the game then I'd prefer to maintain a separation between domains with a few exceptions not a whole raft of them.

he he he... a raft of hovercraft...

but due to the difference in power between ships and hover craft i didn't really notice an overlap, hovercraft were for after you established your presence and needed to push forward as far as ocean maps are concerned, although it probably cheaper to use transports. In the swamp type maps their extra cost paid for itself.

Glad you liked that one. It was unintentional but I decided to leave it in after I noticed it.

Now I don't deny hovercrafts had their uses, but I personally prefer a model that contains units with well defined roles, and a need to employ combined arms to get ahead.
Mono-cultured swarms of Jacks-of-all-Trades just don't interest me that much.

but hovercraft do have a role, which is anything that requires you to go from land to sea frequently. be this raiding from the shore or on swampy maps where it would be inconvenient to build naval transports in all the water, sure you could use air transports but then thats another thing you need to worry about.

I'm according you. The interresting thing is to have several choices when you build your units aswell as not knowing what kind of units will attack you while you don't scout your enemy.

I just don't see the need. That separation of domains makes things more interesting.

Making every land unit amphibious, but extremely vulnerable while on water (no torpedo immune hovering), is something I feel would work well as I'm not a huge fan of micro-ing naval transports either.
It gets rid of some of the tedium associated with archipelago style maps, but maintains the importance and supremacy of naval unit on/under water, esp. for escorting you 'land' forces of the water.

I support units having strengths and weaknesses according to terrain.

In ZK for example hovercrafts (one of the 10 factories) can cross water but they're unable to go up any steep gradients, so they're all but useless on maps with hills, and in theory you can block them by terraforming stuff in their way pretty easily..