What abilities should the commander have?

I haven't been able to find a poll yet on this. So here is one.

What default or upgrade abilities would you like to see?

You can select as many or as little as you want and reselect if you change your mind.

Orbiting Weapons refers to the possibility of having the commander orbiting the planet in an Orbit Suit to fire into Space or Surface.

EDIT: Taunt option can also act as melee attack.
Might be cool to show off the commander pounding a unit with a heavy fist or so! XD

Out of the box: just the D-GUN.

I love Supreme Commander 2, so I voted for all that fit in the supreme commander 2 category.

However, I believe commanders do not need upgrades. I do expect the D-gun to be available at square one! If that's the case, everything else is unnecessary.

My expectation for PA is that we don't have upgrades for the commanders. Anything, you can do with an upgrade you can do with a unit. Want jump jets? Use a flying transport. Want a mobile shield? Bring a mobile shield. Want more fire power? Bring bots and tanks with guns. Upgrades are a lot of extra work. Other than the economic ones, they never felt useful in FA.

One of the things I wish TA had was transport capacity for the Krogoth. I can't think of anywhere safer to put the big guy.

Also, I really like the ability to eject your head in supreme commander 2. That's just cool. However, there's a reason it's not free in SC2. It makes aggressive behavior far less risky and therefor likely.

It was over the top in supcom 2. A couple of upgrades are fine. I thought it was ok in FA. The issue of the commander becoming obsolete had more to do with T3 troops, rather than any shortcomings of the commander itself.

Out of the box: just a d-gun and pew pew laser.

I'm not in support of any built in method of escape. If you have built an escape launcher (something like in the Kickstarter video) then if you can get to it in time then so be it. It would be a pain in the derrière to fight your way through the defences to get at the commander to have it push a button and flutter away like a silken butterfly on a pantone rainbow.

It would be much better to do the recon to see if the escape launcher was built. Destroy that before/during/after your assault. Then cornering it after vanquishing its puny army and detonating its power core with ruthless glee.

Rebuilt

PS: Oh, yes, the D-gun is a must.

Does anyone feel like analysing D-Gun to see if it has to be added? A lot of the stuff from TA seems to be instantly assumed without justification beyond tradition.

Because big guns on bigs commanders are fun.

I get your point.
I would argue that it is necessary to give the commander a way to fight back against rush tactics.
It is also very cool to have a big gun on the commander.

It will be interesting to see how the D-Gun is implemented in PA.
Will they stick with point and click or activate supercharge mode like SupCom2?
Will there be a larger blast radius?
Will it go through multiple enenmies?
Ballistic or continuous laser?

Perhaps you could choose between a shotgun D-Gun with large blast radius or concentrated high penetration beam of destruction

Perhaps another poll is needed

How about a pew pew laser which is good against those early raids and then units which can defend you against heavier stuff?

D-Guns are cool, so I'd like to see them. But maybe I'm a little bit biaised.
As I see it, it should have a powerful impact to take out a big unit in one shot, but also a small, weaker area of effect to take out concentrated light units. Then, it would be useful in both situations, but its low ROF and high energy consumption would prevent it to be OP.

Rapid-fire gun is needed against light units, be it to defend the base or the Commander itself at the beginning of the game. It should still be beefy enough to be more generalist and also take a few bigger units.

Anti-air should be included IMHO, to give some 'free' AA at the beginning (so you can't be air-rushed as easily, and it removes some of the guess-game at the beginning of "will they go air?" before your scouts arrived).

A jetpack could be interesting. The Commander will already be microed, so the added micro wouldn't be much of a problem here ; but it would add flexibility to the Commander, both in accessing varied places or fleeing an engagement.

Teleportation could be nice, but it should be only with the use of gates, (be it from gates to gates, or from Commander to gates). Teleportation should be for all units with gates, but with a price per mass so high that it's interesting almost only for the Commander. So it leaves things open for some special strategy with others units as well.

An orbital "armour" could be interesting, to make it work in the orbital layer, but that may be unnecessary/OP, so can't tell without tests.

About those "armours", I'd like to see them. As I see them, they would work like specialized transports, but only for the Commander. They would give more capabilities, while letting the Commander itself use its own (same principle than with the ghetto gunships), and would probably take (most of?) the damage. It should be experimented with, as it could be a good alternative to Commander upgrades.

I don't feel like taunts and animations being necessary, but why not if people want them. They could be fun after all. If not in the main version, those could probably be modded anyway.

Deflecting or reflecting incoming fire seems to invite micro, as some units would have to avoid attacking the Commander, other with high HP would have to deplete it... So I don't like it much. If there is some shield in the game, or even Spring-style deflectors, why not on an "armour", but no reflecting.

No escape pod for the Commander, please. The Commander itself should be the escape pod. Particularly if there are "armours".

isnt that "Light Rapid-Fire Gun (Ground)" then?

Well if the light laser/gun was strong enough to rid of the early raids I would still want it to be different from a laser that goes "Pew pew", I would rather see a kind of chain-gun just for the cool factor.
I can agree that it could be unfair for the commander to be able to dispose of any unit with a single shot though...

An alternative to the D-Gun could be an impressive shockwave that repels/flips smaller units in a certain radius when activated, leaving time for the commander to flee.

I think D-Gun or not, the commander should have some defence mechanism.

The key with the D-gun is you should be able to hit "D" click, hit "D" click to do rapid fire shots. That was the single most satisfying thing about the original Commander. Maybe a bit silly nowadays when you could just make it a simpler gun to rapid fire but it was fun.

I quite liked the SupCom 2 commander upgrades. Maybe they went a liiittle over the top but who knows. Whatever is appropriate the game is good with me. When there's going to be planet hopping they may need to be quite sophisticated.

I would like to see cloaking make a return.

You mean cloaking or anti-radar?
Or both?

Might be fun if the commander was to be used also as a hero, sneaking around the planet.
But then that sounds too much like the Commandos in C&C, this is PA the son of TA & SupCom lol

It would be quite frustrating chasing around for an invisible/undetectable commander running away in the end game...

How about u can choose to upgrade out of all these abilities. This would make your commander special in some way. Perhaps it should be an UBER unit in the end but if you lose it you dieeee.

There should be an option for all in the poll!

It cloaked (but not stealth) in TA but for the cost of 1000 energy a second. There would need to be other cloaking non-stealth units for it to matter.

I agree.

All of these, for these reasons, plus a few more:

Disintegrator gun - It is TA and SupCom tradition that the Commander be the most dangerous single unit in the game, with the exception of the top tier experimental units, and for very good reason. You personally are riding around inside that tin can, and it deserves to have a powerful weapon as a result.

Rapid fire light weapon - thorneel has this one covered.

Anti-air - Not a traditional commander capability, but one that I think should be added to make it so that the Commander is not completely helpless against air units.

It's not a poll option, but if the commander has the traditional ability to go scuba-diving, which given the existence of water worlds I expect it will, the commander should also have an anti-naval weapon it can use while submerged. The commander should always be able to dispatch a small attacking force on its own.

Beyond that, it doesn't really need any additional capabilities.

Good point! I'm already thinking that the Light Rapid-Fire Weapon could multitask taking care of the aircraft & navy units.

About the D-Gun perhaps Uber can implement it in a slightly new way. Perhaps if given a larger Area of Effect than in TA, it could be fired at the ground or walls (which appears to have been confirmed) to deform terrain/breach through a defence line if the player is willing to risk his commander.

I also had this crazy idea of the Commander firing the D-Gun below his own feet, sending him flying into orbit/space to flee an attack leaving a big crater/shockwave below