Because that's very inefficient. If your opponent spots you doing that he can easily make the judgement that you're inefficiently using your power reserves, and punish you for it.
No such luck, Uber has commented that they are going forward with a Global Economy, not locked in but I'd say given all the issues that need to be solved with a Local one it's not very likely. Second the thing is that sending a unit off planet costs the same, regardless of what you send. So given the Lander as seen in the Previz, it'll cost th same wether you send the Commander or a Fabber, and between the two the Commander is by far more efficient. Yeah, but you also need to factor in the time and cost to get the 3 Fabbers off planet, no matter what it will always be 3 times the cost of sending the Commander. But he's not. The Commander is a Builder, it is the Seed from which the Army grows. Mike
When was it stated it costs the same to fire any unit off a planet? For all you know you can fit 6 engineers in one unit cannon pod, or the commander costs more energy to fire.
Yeah, I think the Commander was just in the Kickstarter Video's Earth-to-Moon rocket for dramatic effect. I think the biggest issue I can see with sending your Commander to colonize every single planet you want to rock a base on is this: Alert! Commander has made landfall on CelestialBody-M002 Alert! Enemy Interplanetary Missiles detected, nuclear payload, inbound on CelestialBody-M002
Nothing specific, but it is a natural extension given the basic theming and intent of many systems(such as simulated projectiles). The thing is when you run into all those awkward inconsistencies cause things to break down gameplay wise. If the Lander carries one Commander, but 6 units, that's a breakdown. Also consider how such a set up would work against the proposed intent for the Commander and it's a solid bet. So many assumptions...... Mike
When it comes to things like this you can only assume. We are assuming the Commander will be the spearhead of any interplanetary attack, and we don't know that for sure. This entire thread has been a meandering tangent of assumptions.
Except we know of many of the ideals Uber has in terms of the commanders use, both from the Pre-Viz and Dev comments, on the flip side with you point regarding interplanetary missiles, there has been little to no work in regard, by saying an enemy will know that you left and where you went and can send a missile directly to the specific location you are at from the whole planet.....is a LOT of assumptions based on pretty much nothing but your need to have an ideal worst case scenario to prove your point. Mike
But we do know that. That is the basis of the game. That is why when you start a game, you start as a commander making landfall on a planet. Due to the expense of sending matter across interplanetary and interstellar space, the most efficient method to establish a military presence in a new system or on a new planet is to send a single, efficient builder which is able to turn the natural resources at hand into an army when he gets there. That is the purpose of the commander. Also, I think it very unlikely that you will get an alert that an enemy commander just moved to a new planet. That would defeat the entire point in the radar/intel mechanic. The only way you would know that your enemy had relocated would be to have recon satellites orbiting the correct body in the correct place. Also, a commander is far to mobile to aim an interplanetary projectile at. For example, if someone launches a nuke at me in TA/SupCom, the first thing I do is move my Commander into the effective range of an anti-nuke silo.
That's true for attacking/invading a solar system. It may be true per-planet, but that's something we haven't actually had confirmed.
i undertand all of this....i suppose my griping is a bit personal..... only because by the time i know a catapult is in play, i am unable to reach it, mainly because the bastard is already bearing down on me hard at this point, or he himself has become invincible, defense-wise. also, it may be just a string of bad juju involving those things, since the first thing they manage to take out is my flipping air factories.
The mechanics for the catapult may change, it could end up functioning like the tac missile launchers of supcom.
Mike will you stop bullying everyone who doesn't have the same views as you. If you carry on i will report you to the moderators. You are creating a bad atmosphere on the forum which could lead to people holding back valid arguments. And please be kinder to people who wish to go over topics again, remember most people aren't on here 24 hours a day.
Calm down timevans999. Knight hasn't resorted to ad-hominem or personal attacks. He's merely pointed out things that have already been discussed in other threads. Calling someone a bully for simply expressing their opinion in a relatively polite and moderate fashion isn't really the best idea. If you want to find out more about the history on shield discussion on this forum, then theres a vast wealth of interesting reading to be found on the matter. If you go through that and note there's some key area that people have skipped over, I'm sure we would all be glad to hear it.
Wow do these threads snowball fast. I think the word 'Shield' in thread titles should be replaced with 'every flaw of an RTS ever' to make the thread more reflect its content.
Shields aren't half as bad as people are making out, and they are no way impenetrable on any previous games like SC and FA, it was all about good judgement and scouting, if you seen the other player was turtling you could then get some shields up while teching up, always a good option, if the player was coming at you fast in a rush then shields would be very hard to get up because you would need to use the resources on other things to defend against the incoming attacks. If the other player is going to turtle and build catapults or nukes then shields should be allowed, it adds way more dimension to tactics and strategy combined. In my view it would be an ideal game if there were many different ways to win or lose, shields would not win you the fight, but they could defend against certain play styles, and could be countered with scouts. Pretty crappy if the other player starts turtling up with a good defence, builds catapults and the only way to defeat this is to attack with everything you have or do what he is doing. That is very shallow for a deep RTS!
Is this a joke? There is no bullying here, and viewpoints are irrelevant. He is correcting a post that is objectively wrong about the mechanics of supcom. When you get such a basic detail of a game mechanic wrong, it is hard to take what is being suggested seriously. He is creating exactly the kind of atmosphere I want here. It gets very tiring reading half baked ideas and suggestions that have been rehashed a dozen times, especially when they get basic facts wrong. If it were up to me I'd make him a moderator here, he's one of the few that actually tries to keep things focused and on topic. And to those that aren't on here 24/7 (that would include myself) the search function is there, use it, it works.
Thats because the catapult currently sucks. As its badly designed at the current stage of the game (but that's to be expected in an alpha). It has lots of issues. UI: There's no warning that you're under attack from a catapult. Its attacks doesn't show up on the strategic zoom and when you have very large bases it can potentionally destroy quite a bit of stuff until you realize that you're actually under attack. Its quite small so can be hidden inside the enemy base which makes it hard to find. In general, you need some micro (look at the rockets path) to find where you're shot from. Balance: The catapult has a very small footprint, meaning you can stack tons of those or easily spread them out near other defensive buildings. The t2 arty (which still is pretty bugged and refuses to fire else we also would ge threads about it being a need for shields too ) has a huge footprint and thus can't as easily be defended. The cata also has a huge range and (unless the shots get bugged out by obstacles or the planets curvature) will destroy an unit or building in its range with each shots thanks to its high damage and tremendous accuracy. IIRC it also needs no energy or metal to fire, making it an easy fire and forgot building. All of this make the cata a pain to fight against. There are ways to make it more fun to go against, some will come through the beta stage, some are deliberate changes I'd like to see. We will eventual get alarms and indicators for when we're under attack, thats a given. Now what I would change: UI: The tactical missiles get their own stratetic icon to be able to see whats going on in strat zoom. When the catapult shoots inside T1 radar range its location is revealed for a few seconds. (T1 radar has anti-missile radar with prediction algorithm. This makes it different from the superior T2 radar and means T1 radar is useful throughout the game.) This makes it easier to order attacks against the enemy catapult and to snipe it. Balance: Increase the footprint of the cata building slightly to make it harder to hide in ones base. Also add some metal cost to each fired rocket so stacking those will have economic consequences. All of this combined would rein the power of the catapult easily in without the need of shields. It makes it easier to counter/avoid/predict whats going on etc. And imo one can do such things to lots of units that people would like shields against.
Personally I think shields should still be in the game because even once the catapult has been tweaked it would still add extra flavour to tactics and strategy if balanced right.
