Hi, just had a 45 min game, where my team had 2 planets and enemy team had 2 planets. Each in orbit of one planet, so at least we could nuke each other. But that was about it. Nuking forever. And blind most of the time, without the omni-satellite it is nearly impossible to get intel. And landing isnt possbile after some minutes anymore, as t2 bombers will patrol everywhere and bomb anything landing. Transporting air should be possible somehow, it is absolutely necessary Also another way of scouting would be good. maybe a scout satellite without radar, but higher vision radius? Maybe we can discuss some other ideas, that could improve planetary invasion.
So I think you have hit on a couple of problems. Scouting a planet you have no influence on isn't easy, and depending on distance to the other planet can take a long time. (The best you can do right now is send an adv radar with a lot of orbital fighters to protect it with some fabbers to try and build a teleporter.....You can bring death lazers to take out ground defenses and units to clear a landing....) There is no way to fight between orbital layer and air layer, meaning if you can lock down air on a planet you can keep it fairly easily. If you are playing on a single planet the radars seem to make sense, but as soon as you go to more than one they don't work. You can't send a scout plane to a enemy planet. Maybe we need Probes?
My experience with an invasion went as follows: Sent 50 orbital fights, and 10 orbital fabbers, when they landed in orbit around the planet they were annihilated, all 60 of them within 1 second from ground based defenses
Jup its not realy working right now. Just wait for halleys beeing able to shift orbits and the unit cannon. That should make stuff easier.
all i could think is make fighter sats and laser sats and a radar sat, find all the umbrellas, kill them with laser. find orbitial platforms, kill them with laser. reek havoc, dont forget to send reinforcements. once an area has been cleared, build your teleporter and finish the job. idk about the bombers tho, if they have bombers, that could affect some things. EDIT: if they ever add the unit cannon, or let the estraus carry aircraft and/or more units, that would help a lot.
I managed to crack a locked down world by brute- forcing my way in. Spammed orbital fighters and orbital fabbers, kept building teleporters everywhere, once i got one down, spewed my swarm of units through, and has a sizable amount of AA trucks mixed in to deal with the bombers somewhat. It's still quite frustrating finding gaps in their defence to get a teleporter down, but it's still a hell of a lot easier than trying to sneak an astraeus down.
In another post from someone, a suggestion was to have a kinda airfortress comming down from the sky having already some basic (air & land) defence on them. If you could combine this with a teleporter then you crashland (splash damage when it does!! obviously ) on a planet having units pouring in from another planet via the teleportation. I would think, whilst in orbit this unit is in a shell and thus immensively protected from enemy fire. However once down on the ground, and deployed the protection would wear of and thus be more vulnarable. It would be the most important duty to have a first wave of units pouring into the gate, defending this place unitll a beachhead is achieved. -Grtz!-
Actually nukes aren't that awesome of a counter to teleporters, unless the launcher happens to be near where the teleporter was dropped. You can spam bots through and run them out of range of the explosion (preferably in 3 different directions) pretty quickly. The main problems I see with invasions right now: * It can take WAAAY too long to fly between planets. * Umbrella coverage can make it impossible to survive in the orbital layer for long enough to accomplish anything * Teleporters sometimes don't drop for mysterious reasons (the orbital fabs are using metal and energy and sprewing green but there's no teleporter even started....maybe they're trying to reclaim something on the surface that's in the way? They never finish.) Basically if I can get a teleporter down and have it live at least, oh, 3 seconds, I can eventually crack the planet. But it's entirely possible to kill teleporters instantly, all over the planet. The smaller the planet, the easier this is.
I believe the devs commented during a livestream that the movement between planets was going to be sped up in placed to help with game flow. I believe that might be something like going much much faster during the around sun part.
Opps miss communication here. I was referring to the flying fortress not the teleporters. I have fixed that now
I do still think there's room for an "experimental" here. Picture, if you will... the Invasion Teleporter. * Costs as much as 10 nukes * You launch it like a nuke * When it reaches the target, it destroys anything that it happens to land on. * It is now a teleporter with a large amount of hit points (100,000? More?) This makes it impractical as an assassination device unless you know where the commander is and he stands still for the entire time it takes to launch the thing and have it reach the target (I would also give it a smaller footprint...smashing stuff on landing is not the point so much as to make sure it always has a place to land). You wouldn't use it in places where nukes were usable because nukes + regular teleporters would be more cost efficient. It would purely be for breaking fortress planets. Once landed, the owner of the planet has to really pound on it to get rid of it. The aim is to make sure the game can't stalemate while providing a solution that's a bit more interesting than "interplanetary nukes".
Having some sort of Deployable Building Pod seems like an idea. Build these extra-expensive versions of, say, an Antinuke, Flak Guns, and some T2 Factories out of an Orbital Fabber, and then launch the lot of them to insta-deploy as a base that survives the current favored killers of current beachheads: Bombers and Nukes. Honestly though, the really bizarre thing about the whole "I need a unit to form a beachhead on a hostile enemy planet" conundrum, is that you're essentially describing a Commander! But of course the commander cannot be risked, so... what do we do? I know Supreme Commander had Support ACUs as expendable commanders: They were expensive as sin, could fight like crazy, and could build an advanced base from scratch. Honestly it makes me wonder why the "Standard" Commander is so gimped in comparison...
