Teleporters

Some of you have been asking about teleporters. We've decided to go with a system that is similar to how stargates work. Each gate is tied to one other gate and they are bidirectional. When the gate is turned on it consumes a fixed amount of energy. At this point they are mostly functional but we haven't played a full game with them yet.

Looks AWESOME!

It might be cool, just as a visual effect rather than having any gameplay value, to have it so that rather than being a true teleporter, the gate just shoots the unit into orbit where it transfers rapidly to the other planet and is captured by the receiving gate, kind of like a mass relay from the Mass Effect series. It would still have the same end result, it would just look different from just a standard teleporter, and I don't think anyone has ever done something like that.

EDIT: the unit would be flung at such a speed that it would be pretty much instantaneous transport. But maybe you can have them show up on orbital/deepspace radar, as somewhat of an alert that you do have a teleporter up. You should still not be able to shoot them down or anything, they're going way to fast.

HOLY CRAP I LOVE YOU!

That sounds hard to program.

Anyway, good news.

How do you pick the start/end points? Just build an entrance/exit or something?

Anyway, that looks pretty cool.

Looks really good!!!!!! When are you guys going to stream a game with them in play!!!???

Cue Stargate theme.

the better question is when they will put it in for us.

looks cool btw.

Please have some sort of segmented visual indicator as the stargate teleporter charges up to become active. It would be a dream come true if I could scream "FIRST CHEVRON LOCKED" in my gameplays.

This is outrageous.

I want to be able to hijack an enemy gate and deliver units to their main base.
Tier 2 special forces infantry?

I.e. capturing a galactic gate.

Ok one question that I have...what happens if you have 3 of them up at once? bad things? it dosn't know what to do? the third is null until a fourth? ...hmm guess that was more than one question.

Can't wait to use it anyhow.

You can move the way point from A<->B and make it A<->C or B<->C. Or build gate D and have two connections.

Sounds and looks absolutely brilliant. Christmas came early.. great work guys!

Genius!!! Super excited now

Well, I can't wait for this. It will make it easier to conquer solar systems, but will need to drain a ton of energy to be balanced.
Can I send a nuke through it?

I know that a continuous time period of operation is how it works in Stargate. But for gameplay reasons, can we pay in discrete increments to send each unit rather than for a continuous period of operation during which you can send as many units as you like? It can still visually look the same way.

The issue I am anticipating is the potential significance of micromanaging your stargate to manually toggle it on and off. And of the need to minimize the amount of time it spends open in order to save energy. Manually shepherding your units through to minimize the amount of time the portal needs to stay open does not sound fun to me.

Instead, why not make players pay a certain cost to send each unit through depending on its mass? Then it doesn't matter how long the portal is "open" or not because the cost will be the same.

The visual appearance can be left the same by having the portal stay open for a time period after a unit goes through, during which another unit can go through to refresh the delay.

Does it take more energy depending on the distance or it's constant value like for orbital radar? How to you set the coresponding gates to work one with another (setting A and B) - this is some context menu after choosing the building or?

I think it looks AMAZING, but this is just a screen shot, please tell me that those 4 things sticking out of each of the four sides of the gate rotate around it! On a gameplay point of view, I like Culverin's idea of being able to send your units through the enemy gate, they would still control it and tell it where to put your units, but it would still be cool, like how in HomeWorld 2 you could capture the enemy Hyperspace gates and use them.