Suggestion for the Uber Cannon

I noticed the Uber Cannon was an activated ability in the Combat demo. In addition to an activation, wouldn't it be frugal to add a toggle to make it fire autonomously? Just right click on the ability to allow the Commander to use it at will.

If it is similar to how the previous games worked this would drain your energy whenever anything got in the range of your commander.

In TA I used to use the D-Gun as my primary defence against the tech 1 rocko bot zergs as it 1 shot anything that it hit. However, again, this move travelled along the ground and required you to aim it to actual hit anything not moving directly at your commander. The D-Gun also damaged buildings severely, unlike the overcharge from supcom. So a random flash (fast arm T1 tank) in your base would equal bye bye base and power for TA or bye bye power for Supcom and the flash would be left relatively unharmed.

My 2 cents

Yea the Ucannon will work similar to the assimilation energy weapons in both TA and SupCom/FA. One hit drains a load of energy and it needs a second or two to recharge and then it fires again if theres enough energy. Automatic activation would bring a lot of energy jumps and potential confusion, I'd rather not have such a thing. It kinda removes the satisfying feeling when you do it manually every now and again on a larger group of enemy units.

What sort of confusion would that be? Bouncing energy bars are very informative. In this case, it would show immediately that your Commander is in danger. That's a very good feedback to have.

Oh so lets jut toggle it en have them focus energy and commander doesn't have his Basic attack good move lol

Well, I noticed in the demo that the Commander ONLY has his Uber Cannon as a weapon, aside from... Reclaim, I guess. He was only active in combat when the players ordered him to fire. I was thinking that Uber deliberately did this, and considering the game's focus on macro instead of micro, I figured this would be a good suggestion to make.

However, the Commander's lack of a secondary weapon could be either because of differences with the Delta Commander, or because Uber just hasn't implemented one for him yet.

Do you know how I know you've never played TA? :lol:

Such a toggle could be in the actual game quite easily, or a mod could add it relatively easily. It would really be up to the player whether they choose to use autocast on it or not as it would suck alot of energy up, but provide a massive damage boost.

The thing I hope is that unlike supcom the Ubercannon will still do good damage to buildings, meaning the commander can still be a wrecking ball inside a base, though that recharge time makes it have a decent delay between kills. In supcom the commander was just kinda crap once large numbers of tier 2s were fielded and he became more of a liability then a help during combat. I'd like to see the commander kept useful for combat without going the way of supcom 2 where the commander became almost unstopable.

Actually I did play TA, and the Commander did at least have a basic attack! He had the little pew pew laser in his construction arm. Yeah, it didn't really do much more than a Light Laser Tower, but it made some difference early game where using your D-Gun was extremely energy taxing. It just feels so... Bad, when your Commander is in combat... Not doing anything, just waiting for his main weapon to recharge so he can do something again.

To be fair, it depends on whether from a game design perspective, the commander is intended to be a powerful combat unit. In TA it was powerful only because the D-Gun was so powerful, which meant that using a commander for combat was very energy intensive. Without the D-Gun the TA commander was mediocre at best, and that only because of the high HP compared to other units (the pew pew laser was utter pants, as you mentioned).

In SupCom, the commander was obviously intended to be quite powerful in combat against low tier units, overcharge was energy expensive but you could also deck the commander out with upgrades that improved damage dealing and HP (including massive chest lasers and AA defenses, depending on faction).

If in PA the commander is intended to be a construction unit rather than combat focused, then leaving the Ubercannon as a manual fire (i.e. last ditch panic weapon) would fit the design ethic. Of course, it sounds like all the hooks are going to be there so that modding in an "always on" toggle for it should be trivial, if Uber decide not to add it to the base game.

It really did much less than a Light Laser Tower.

The weapon was somewhat useful if you were killing fleas or weasels but not much else.

Edit:Actually fleas and weasels are too fast to hit when moving so not even those.

It's bad for the player, of course. However, running out of energy for the Commander's equipment is a perfectly cromulent way to lose. It gives a weakness for the enemy to exploit, and a real importance to eco management.

As it currently stands, the Commander has a very capable power plant. If we used pre-alpha numbers, a shot that costs 5000 energy would take about 2 seconds to recharge. That's a pretty good fire rate for a gib gun, but it is also a long time to be eating enemy tank shells.

If you've played TA before, the D-gun is clearly incapable of dealing with large numbers of enemy units. No matter how fast or how well you shoot, it doesn't take more than a few dozen units to kill ya. That is pretty good proof for the Comm to have a great weapon without harming balance too much.

As PA is based on TA do you think after a short time into the game the Commander is going to be cowering in his base behind base defences afraid of a unit spam or teched up units, or do you think the Uber-Cannon is enough to make it a unit for use in the field?

I don’t have much experience of TA, but am okay at SC-FA. I am trying to understand is the Commander just a fancy engineer? I am used to an ACU being upgraded which can scale up with the battle and can be used in early and late game both as builder, defensive and offensive unit. As PA is not having commander upgrades I was wondering if it is going to be the case of hiding the commander as soon as the game progresses beyond the early stage? :|

We have no information to that effect... yet. Neutrino has been very silent on the matter of "Commander Scaling".

This isn't a MOBA, and the Comm isn't a hero. The Comm exists as a way to end the game. It is inevitable that the Commander will be overwhelmed by a large enough enemy force, no matter what gadgets or super powers he has. You can't really prevent it from happening, nor is preventing it desirable. Good games should end. The trick is making sure the Comm has good mix of survival tools, something that isn't invincible but doesn't leave it a gigantic bullseye.

Everything has a price, and keeping the Comm alive against losing odds should be the most expensive of all. We see some of these traits with the TA D-gun, a weapon that consumes high power, does friendly fire(inconsistently), and vaporizes enemy wreckage. It's a great weapon, but it has a considerable cost for every time you use it.

Originally the Overcharge did 10k damage to buildings, and everything else. It was changed because OC-rushing became too popular. Turns out that if you blow up all of a player's factories early on, they've kind-of lost the game. And the likely worst-case scenario for an OC-rusher was a draw, because at that point Com-on-Com was MAD due to powerful death nukes. The point of the OC/D-gun is to give the commander an automatically-scaling weapon to fight off armies (and prevent 6-pool-like strategies becoming dominant) that has a significant drawback, not to let him lead the charge and demolish bases by himself, since that's basically the TA equivalent of a 6-pool.

Oh I'm well aware of why the OC gun and the death nuke were scaled down in supcom, I just think they did it poorly and a few mods I've played do it better, where death nuke only really hurts non-commander non structure units such that a suicide rush only ends up blowing up all of a commanders T1 tanks (oh no, the horror) and leaving the commander and base mostly intact. And the OC gun rush left you open to swarms of units flanking you to ruin your base or left you being shot at by longer range defensive buildings. I just like to see the OC gun being destructive to buildings but its high cost keeps you from using it too much, rather then it only really hurting units.

Except in a competitive match, blowing up all the enemy T1 units can make a huge difference (especially when the commander had some 20 seconds of 100 dps vs. the enemy comm, making it helpless against your army that's been waiting outside the blast radius)

Well in a 1v1 match those T1 units will die soon since their commander is dead, and in a 2v2 match your ally needs to attack the other player waiting to attack you while his own units and base are exposed. I found it was usually all about the planning and using lots of base defences which wouldn't explode from the death nuke.

There are no longer range defensive buildings at T1 and getting to T2 to stop an OC rush is flat-out impossible. Well, T1 PD has a range of 3 more than the commander, but that's not enough to stop it from being OC'd, and it's unlikely that a defender will have even one T1 PD up in time. And there are no 'swarms of units' at that stage in the game either. Certainly not enough to do more damage to a base than an ACU Overcharging everything in sight.

But why do you need to be able to damage buildings? The only common use of OC vs buildings is if you want to charge an enemy base unsupported, which isn't a style of gameplay that should be promoted.