list of cool ideas for units and abilities

Units:
-Bots that can switch between ground- and flying-mode
-Amphibious units/Bots that walk on the seaground
-units that need some stationary time to stabilise their weapon
-energy consuming weapons
-cloaking ability for certain units on certain terrain (forests for example)
-different movement speeds for different units on different terrains
-heat resitant units (maybe a super unit that can move through lava)
-deathcam
-defensive unit that has to stay next to buildings
-unit that has to stay on a certain terrain
-building/unit that generats free units
-unit that selfdistructs when it attacks
-unit that can only destroy buildings
-mind controle

big scale stuff:
-hidden bases on seaground
-hidden buildings (underground)
-tunnels that connect places on a planet
-Portals that connects planets(costs a lot of energie)
-super weapon that can only be built on the Northpole (influencing the magnetic field to attack)
-moon works as a first layer of defense against orbit attacks: A shield generator for the whole planet can be placed on it. As an attacker one can decide to attack the planet directly or destroy the base on the moon before.




(I know that some of those ideas are already existing in the forum and in other games, just thought that its good to have them in a compact form)

In general I think its good to make different units as different as possible
(different workers should have different abilities)

tunnels !

I'd love to see tunnels going straight through the core of the planet. (I know this is impossible, but this is a game and a bagillion years into the future).

that could add depth like the Aperture portal map in FA. I would suck at that map it made me feel like someone opened my skull and started destroying my brain with a mixer ....and I loved it!!! :twisted:

I'm fine with units being able to do different stuff as long as they do it intelligently without needing babysitting. Dumb units which require constant micromanagement to make sure they use their abilities the the number one thing I hate in RTS games.

On a more positive note I like some of these ideas. Some of them, e.g. the portal (read teleporter) between planets is planned. I expect more unique units will be added later, the alpha so far only has the more "vanilla" units.

All those features are cool, maybe tunnels are a bit exaggerated. If the the tunnel would accidentally get connected to the water reserve or lave then whole tunnel would need to get flooded. It would be also hard to control units in the tunnel. What if there would be battle going on in the tunnel?

A part from that mentioned features I'd love to see an surface to orbitgun intercepting units launched by interplanetary unit launcher.

The idea was, that the tunnel would be more like a "Nydus Tunnel". Otherwise it would be too complicated.

Just say "NO" to shields. The best defense is a good offense.

But the best offense is an intelligent offense.
Destroying the energy supply of super power-hungry shields weakening them is intelligent.
Intelligent defense would require preemptive strike against units who could destroy the energy/resources pipelines (=some sort of stargate linking planets's resources).

Shields are not necessarily turtle antigame devices if they have exploitable weakness

How do you starve an opponent of energy for his shields by picking off Energy Generators... when they're all under shields?

By setting the energy drain rate for shields to be greater than the energy production rate of the maximum number of power-generators that could be fitted under them.

Not that i'm suggesting shields should be in and implemented like this, mind you, just pointing out the obvious answer.

At which point wouldn't the drain on your economy (at the rate you're proposing) be a detriment to your production to the point of basically committing economic suicide by building one?

Again, still playing devils advocate here, but it very much depends on the size and strength of the shield.

A small shield that could only defend 3-4 closely packed buildings might still have some utility, even if it cost 3-4 big power plants to power it. Adv Factories, launchers, defense heavy firebases in key choke points, and the commander are possibly important enough targets that it still may be worth paying for 4*T2 Pgens + 1 shield to give them a degree of extra protection. This then creates the powergens as a weakness, and ties the cost of shield protection more to the cost of energy, than the cost of the shield itself.

This also becomes interesting when you consider uber's hinted at plans for orbital He3 mines/fusion reactors around gas giants. Although they could provide absurd quantities of power, possibly enough to power multiple shields by themselves, they can't be defended by shields because they are in space. Thus, no matter which way you look at it, a player always exchanges relative strength in one location, for the creation of a relative weakness somewhere else. Thus the SC/FAF situation of a shielded base always being strictly better than an unshielded one is avoided.

Of course, this is just one idea, assuming SC/FAF type bubble shields. It's also not really what i'd like to see. Neutrino has already hinted on reddit that they are looking at some more interesting ideas, such as directional shields. I'd rather see what ideas they have, then try to resurrect SC/FAF type shields.

No argument here.

Exactly.
This way shields are really a choice made in the defense strategy.
Protecting only the generators powering the shield would be useless.
Protecting some advanced defensive structure would let some pgens exposed.
This way you can't have a 100% secured turtle defense perimeter.

All a defender can do is to store massive ammounts of energy (in high explosive silos...) for making the shields work a few minutes on batteries before they are depleted.

It's still completely stupid because the game suddenly revolves around breaking the shields to win.

fixed.

And how do you do that when there's a cloud of shield perpetually floating over it?

If that's truly what you think, I should let you know that TA, SupCom and PA are designed around the idea of killing the Commander to Win. If you think that's stupid, PA really might not be for you.

Mike

If it was correctly balanced and you scouted well then I would surmise that you would of seen he was going to turtle and made your move correctly, while he spent his resources on the shields then you could have an army strong enough to take him out before he gets settled in.

How you do that when there's a giant army of tanks and kbots defending it?

It's not Street Fighter, it's normal to have something between enemy commanders.
tanks, bots, static defenses, asteroids, death stars, all have the sole and only purpose to kill the enemy commander, shields are only a small block element of the offensive/defensive chain.