For Backers Only: Megabot Experiment

Honestly they set the bar pretty low when it comes to the "Major" experimentals. Aeon, nothing new. UEF, a giant top-heavy robot that is very much like the Aeon one. Cybran... and the Cybranasaurus Rex... quite possibly the worst idea ever for SupCom.

:lol:

Never losing the Snark baby!

This.

I do wanna add something to this. I would like the firepower to be crazy but with a high reload timer on it. So that the unit needs to be supported otherwise it will be swarmed and destoyed. The problem i had with soup com was that the experimentals where so powerful u needed your own experimentals to take it head on or a 100 unit army...

Make the big T2 units pure to counter heavy defenses with heavy splash weapons and to fire it the unit needs power to arm the awesome blast weapon. I hate heavy HP and DPS units because tactics become very dull because all players need to survive is this unit. I would prefer it to be an added bonus to your army and only in some area's very effective. I would therefor see a slightly smaller unit but a bit bigger than a commander due its power. Thoughts?

<3 to Pawz.

There are plenty of things that big units can do:
- Planet invasion (asteroids, beachhead breakers)
- Mobile base (asteroids, mobile facs, EZ turrets)
- Orbital support (up and down, weapons and defenses)
- Terraforming (which is a pretty important part of destroying planets)
- Unit transport (space elevator? Teleporter? Mega asteroid?)
- Long range siege (bertha, space laser, missiles)
- nuuuuuuke (As a primary or secondary feature)

That's not even scratching the surface. What you see is a large number of strategic and tactical support roles that have NOTHING to do with direct combat, all of which are completely inappropriate for small units. Leave the pewpew problems to the wheat and chaff.

Excellent... I can see an Uberbot that drops onto a planet as a pod, then transforms into a "Shock Trooper." It would hold the area as engineers build a base. It's too slow to actually do much more. It would then have to job of protecting the base from attack. Even if it did have the fire power of a SupCom Experimental, if it's slow enough, and a restriction on drop zones is used (via anti-space-stuff missles like in the video) using it in any-other role would be impractical.

I actually agree with this a lot. Experimentals in SC2 were done well, because they could easily be taken down, but could fulfill a special roll on the battlefield (especially the big mobile artillery and the big AA-bot come to mind). Would rather see something like that, specialistic and not too daunting, than any of the one man army units in the first SC.

I think the scale of the concept looks just right. I like the idea of having massive experimental units in the game however I agree that they shouldn't be one man armies made of pure win.

But it seems to me that something that large and cumbersome might have a very hard time tracking and hitting small fast targets, like say, those little fast tech 1 units that people tend to not use late in the game. Also EMP weapons that disabled units instead of damaging them were in both TA and SupCom and worked quite well for countering un escorted experimentals.

The real issue with experimentals in the previous games was that they could target and kill pretty much any small unit very efficiently. The Krogoth's arm cannons and eye laser were silly accurate and just plowed through groups while the Fatboy, Czar, Soul Ripper, Monkey Lord, and Galactic Colossus could just AOE everything on the ground to death. The only real counters to them were your own experimentals, EMP weapons, or swarms of aircraft.

I think the idea of specialized use experimentals such as mobile factories, giant guns that shoot things out of orbit, or massive energy shield generators that prevent orbital bombardment (and prevent firing back at things in orbit or launching your own orbital units) are interesting.

I like the idea of a super unit. I think scale wise I would scale it off the commander at about twice his mass.

I would want to see at least two different types of super unit. Support style that provides some benefit to all units in its area of effect and an offensive unit that could lay down a lot of damage or put some kind of Debuff on surrounding enemy units.

The problem with super units is they are often so out of balance they will completely dominate their field of battle. A super unit, like the Large battle ship you have visualized already, should be the core of a task force and should not be effective as a complete standalone unit.

I would want to do everything possible to prevent the game degenerating to a race to build the first super unit. These super units can often become the only viable means for victory. An example would be the Dreadnaught that was in Homeworld 2. Once I had the tech for it there was no point building anything else. Even fighters were rendered obsolete by it in that game.

I like the idea that experimentals could be countered by swarms of t1 units. To do so experimentals would need to have slow turning rate of their cannons and/or very high damage attack with a very slow attack rate so they would waste a lot of their attack damage on low hp units.

This has been debated to hell and beyond but well, speaking of scale I'm surprised it hasn't been brought up so far (or I missed it in thoses 40+ pages).

Over-the-top giants doom robots fit well in some grim grim dark universe somehow

http://1d4chan.org/images/9/94/Titan_Space_Marines.jpg


I'm all for a Krogoth / Monkeylord kind of unit. It wouldn't be the most effective way to win the game, but definetly the most fun and awesome. And that's part of why we're all in there right ?

I dont get this fighting over Experimentals too weak, Experimentals too small.
Why not make it so using Experimentals or pure non experimentals could be relativly equal?
Afaik thats called balancing too.

Allot of people will disagree with me about this but I think if in the future we get a unit such as this in order to offset its power require our commander unit to dock in it.

Make it a risk/reward thing. I wouldn't really want a game devolving into whoever can field the most of this unit being the one who wins.

the problem with commander docking isn't that it balances the unit, its that it means your commander is practically invulnerable now. you dont necessarily have to use the unit offensively, if you use it as base defense you will be well defended and impossible to commander snipe.

Firstly I would like to thank Uber for allowing us to take part in these kind of discussions, this and the live streams are utterly fascinating.

Now my thoughts (appreciate the door may have already shut on this one):

I think the size is about right, but design wise I'm not feeling it, but accept it is an early whitebox. But the following quote I think captures my feelings on such a super unit (bold blue emphasis is my own):

I'll be honest, I'm not sure how to achieve that but I feel it is an interesting point.

Thanks
Sneakers O Toole

I wouldn't say invulnerable. The point I was trying to make is if its an assassination game mode and you are ballsy enough to pull this off you should be prepared to lose the game.

That should be the risk of fielding a powerful unit(providing something like this would be tough rather than a glass cannon or something)

If you play with it from a defensive standpoint then go for it, remove the ability to build or self heal. I would assume a good choice in this game is to keep your commander moving from planet to planet and tying him down to turtle with this unit will just keep him in place while you mass up units to flood it.

Its tough but it wont be invulnerable.

I like the size of it. Could stand to be a little bigger I guess (for the epics), but I also think this is fine, and that bigger might be impractical.

I think it has the right scale, and I'm not comparing it with other units, but with the tree heights. Have you considered a way of preventing aircraft from colliding with the mech, or even flying straight through it? Can flow fields be attached to a given unit, so for example, there is a cost "aura" around a super unit, so aircraft see a cost so they go around the unit?

That would actually look pretty epic, seeing flying units flow around really tall units or mountains that reach into space

That is no moon, that is a mega bot. What is exactly the scale of this thing compared to a small asteroid?

Love it love it, I have always wanted a megabot but I agree with some comments saying that it should be some sort of exo suit for the commander to go into battle as having a lot of these may make the game a bit over powered and boring, having it as a suit the commander can use for battle would be epic, obviously he won't be able to build while using this as it's purely for battle purposes! But if not then a megabot would be the best, it just needs to be fairly matched