Teleporters

Yes, you send tanks through them.

nevermind, already asked

THIS NOW. No reason the "O'Neill" can't be a unit!

I second this motion.

Indeed.

YES!

And, I claim making the mod to rename the teleporter to it's proper name!

*ahem*

Indeed

i might as well chip in here.

what i see are cleartly two camps.

Camp A is those who favor a constant running cost. this in itself seems sensible, since you need to keep a radar always online, so why not a portal to another world?

Camp B is those who favor a cost-per-unit. also a valid point. an always on structure is a permanent drain on one's resources, and why leave something on that's not being actively used?

but while all of you see an argument, i see an oportunity.....

for two separate buildings. a T1 teleporter, and a T2 teleporter.

the T1 teleporter would function as perscribed by camp B. it would be cheap, but only be able to teleport 1 unit at a time (think TF2's teleporter, in this sense).

the T2 teleporter would be our good ol' Stargate. big, expensive to build, and expensive to run, but HOLY HELL you don't want to be on the receiving end when it turns on. because when it does, the tides will spill forth.

and to make it more super-weapon-y ( and this is just a thought), why not have it go through stages?

Stage 1 - Spool

this is right after its done building, it needs time to build up charge. once charged, it stays in this state until a connection is established.

Stage 2 - Rip

a surge of energy expense after the spool, and BOOM. she's online. and EVERYBODY on that planet knows it.

Stage 3 - Ready to Go

the self explanatory part where the horde spills forth to conquer the natives.

Death of the gate - OH, ****!!

the gate goes critical. the attacked side goes nuclear, wiping out everything around it. the "home" side experiences a smaller explosion, takes damage, and shuts down. and it cannot be re-assigned to a new exit gate until it is re-spooled.

I really feel that the teleporter is going to wind up in T2 while the unit-cannon will sit nicely in T1.

There are reasons to use both.

Not to mention that Stargates also require you build Factory's and troops on the safe side, as compared to a proximity base where you don't need to build 2 gates and keep them running and defend a central unit that players will be gunning for (As compared to a complex of several factory's that puts the ammo system of aircraft at a disadvantage.)

Skilled players will keep air raiding partys handy to kill off quickly built gates near them with scouting to reveal the attempts (Not that they wouldn't also detect a actual base, but comparatively this is in a situation after you have built the factroys and a sending gate, PLUS any power needed to maintain it. Building another base sounds quicker and cheaper.)

Having a flat energy cost over time makes no sense for the teleporter. The issue is that the teleporter then becomes far more efficient if you just micro it, turning it on and off when you plan on sending units through (a process which takes almost no time at all if they're all ready to go).

Radar has a cost over time for a very good reason; it's a passive tool which is used to warn you of incoming threats. Turn it off, and you open yourself up to risk, since you can't know when you will need it ahead of time (or if you're using it to target enemies with artillery, it needs to stay on continuously to do so). So long as it's running, it's doing its job.

The teleporter is an active one. Turning it off does not leave you susceptible to anything, as it can simply be turned back on when needed. This means that leaving it on unused is nothing but a useless energy drain, and so it should always be left off until it's needed, and the player has to turn it on and off again manually whenever they want to send units through.

Now, if the current idea for balance is "it should be relatively expensive to send only a few units through compared to a giant blob", then it makes sense not to do cost per unit. Cost per unit would eliminate the need to micro it, sure, but if we're trying to avoid that (personally I think cost per unit is a better way to go), then it makes more sense to have it turn on automatically when a unit comes to the gate, and turn off automatically after 1 second of a unit going through. If the balance of its energy consumption is lower, assuming the player will leave it on, then the energy consumption can be completely disregarded since no one would ever do that. If it's much higher, assuming the player will turn it off and on again, then using it becomes finicky and cumbersome, especially if the player starts lagging or are trying to work on eco / combat / anything else.

tl;dr: Letting something consume energy while doing absolutely nothing shouldn't even be an option. It just means more micro.

You are assuming, of course, that a gate will be a beachhead for a long term engagement, when in fact, they will be used to quickly stop planetary colonies from being established. Can you imagine a stargate being a successful invasion tactic in late-game full planet eco? What I am saying is that once the beachhead is established it will be over quickly. It will take mere minutes to wipe the planet or to lose the gate.

As for microing the gate, you can micro bombers and levelers, why not gates to some extent? What you describe doesn't seem all that Gamebreaking since both sides could do it.

I still see it being the midgame interplanetary weapon of choice, while nukes will dominate the late game, unless orbital units become more important to the rest of gameplay than they already are.

The only way a flat cost is going to work is if it is very very expensive, an effect on your economy which is akin to launching all of your nukes (5+) which are all assisted by fabbers. Yeah, -300k for 15 seconds.

You could instead just have a large upfront cost to turning it on, and then have a constant cost.

That way players will have to plan when to turn it for for the immense cost of energy to do so, leaving the constant drain to give incentive to turn it off if you need so.

Could be a good tie in to the orbital gas giant stuff as a need to have massive amounts of power generation or storage.

For me I think gates should be t2. unit cannons should be t1 and gates should have a large upfront cost to turning it on, and then have a constant lower cost. As far as the confusion on how gates currently work just watch the play tests on ubers youtube channel or on both meta's and uber's twitch.

I'm not assuming anything at all in terms of balance, I'm just saying that allowing the gate to consume energy while not in use is a bad mechanic that leads to annoying micro no matter the balance. Micro on units can make them more effective based on tactical decisions; there's no tactics when it comes to turning the gate on and off, it's just finicky. How the gate is used strategically isn't important at all for my point (but if you want to know what state I was referencing, it was the state of the teleporter in the recent dev streams).

Edit: As for an up-front cost for turning the gate on + timed rate: yes, that could add some strategic depth and make the decision to leave it turned off less trivial. Not sure if I agree it's a good idea for balance, but if it did have an activation cost my point would be less applicable.

What if the gate turned off after a certain idle time? So the connection would be severed after, say, 30 seconds of idle? or maybe less?

That would help remove the micro. Binding this to a hotkey would also GREATLY encourage such gameplay.

These issues also point to the need for a stargate UI, so we can more easily coordinate attacks, and defenses, etc

copyright issues with using that name

Its cooler and they arent watching.

Yet

Stargate can't be trade mark, it's been used in science fiction for years.

And even then if Stargate is tm, then how about Star Gate, or Star-Gate?