There should be two Unit cannon Tiers

2 tiers?

tier 1 supcom 2 style planetary unitcannon
tier 2 on size <300 planetoid interplanetary unitcannon

however i still think a t2 unitcannon that does both of the abovementionet would be best ...

your example picture above however ..... sssss ..... nope !

why? because teleportals for big planets ... big planets + lategame not always = fully covered in units and defenses ... stargates + far away massfactory of death = metalflood of death ... and i like it *grindrools* ... but i don`t mind stealrain of cataclism *droolgrins*

/my opinion

The major difference between drop pods and cannons is with delivery. A cannon comes strapped to an asteroid. It's kind of useless without a space rock, but it has huge advantages. You can build things on the rock, teleport to the rock(instant reinforcements), and smash it if you get frustrated. A drop pod is an independent orbital unit. Fill them up, fly them over, drop them down. No space rocks required, but if it doesn't work you have little recourse.

Ideally a drop pod style of transport is initially expensive and cheap to scale. An orbital elevator works great with this system. The elevator provides the initial expense- it's difficult to build and you don't need one to invade yourself. The scaling is cheap- drop pods do the actual delivery.

Attacking with drop pods is simple. You fly on over, run through the enemy's defense network, and crash down as quickly as possible. There is no time wasted over the enemy's gravity well, and no need to fight for it. Skip go, collect $200, proceed directly to invasion. EZPZ.

If you need more cannons, just like build more cannons?

Invasions should not be expensive. They HAVE to be cheap, because if you bankrupt yourself trying to attack then penetrating an enemy world is impossible. It's dumb and the game stalls.

I believe there should be 2 unit cannons...

...but t1 only in-planet, and t2 between planet and moon.

...btw, it is rumored that coming soon is the ability for halleys to adjust asteroid orbit around other planets instead of just into them collision style.

If you can take an empty asteroid from anywhere in the system, move it in orbit around a planet, you can use it to full scale invade the planet you chose to orbit.

Then, there is a complicated game around the planet being able to nuke the surface of the moon, and the moon being able to nuke the planet, and the unit cannon being able to full scale invade, and in the end one of the two planets get purged of their inhabitants.

Unfortunately i don't have any concept pictures i was just throwing the idea out there because when people talk about the unit cannon in other threads they always talk about the cannon being on a moon or asteroid but my thinking is that it won't work on maps that don't have moons or asteroid's which are very possible given the nature of PA, some times the teleporter isn't always the best solution to invade an enemy's planet especially now with the addition of area patrol commands the enemy can just construct large numbers of t1 or t2 bombers and just set the area patrol to the whole planet so that when you try to construct the teleporter you just get a stream of bombers destroying it before it can be completed.

I don't like to leave ideas up to uber when we are perfectly capable of using our imagination on what would be a fun way to make large unit cannons work and Drop pods. Maybe even work together to perform the same function. and be cool that the community likes. There are numerous reasons why to think ideas through fully.

I'm not sure what is making you draw this conclusion. Can you elaborate? I would expect large unit cannons to be: slow to build or shoot slower then regular moon unit cannons.

I'm not sure what you mean. Incentive.... to not smash moons? again, i don't follow? how does the large unit cannon prevent people from not smashing moons.

What is the increased cost of drop pods compared to... the unit cannon? I guess that makes since, but i think the bigger unit cannon would have a much higher energy drain to function.

I agree whole heartedly. I think it would be cool to see the elevator elevate a cube of units and load it into the planet unit cannon and with an energy discharge, propel the cube to the other planet. I think that would be shooting for awesome. I'm thinking if the unit cannon could attach air planes to be in the drop pods... or that just might be to weird.

Editted for Grammer/clarification.

It's rather simple.

Large unit cannons would be slower to build than regular unit cannons. However, with late game multi planet economies, increased metal cost means jack squat. So it would nearly completely invalidate the basic unit cannon. Why build one that is limited when I could just build the bigger better one?

And since we can just easily build the large unit cannon that means there's no point to keep the moon. So why not just smash the moon into planet 1 and then use the large unit cannon to invade planet 2, 3, and 4. When if we didn't have the large unit cannon, we would use the moon based unit cannon to invade planet 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Point being, the Unit Cannon needs to be moon based only so we have incentive to not smash it. If we have alternative unit cannons for multiple invasions, that means we don't need the moon and we should just smash it.

Yes. Drop pods have an increased cost because they're single use. Every time you invade a planet you need to build another fleet of drop pods. With the unit cannon, you just pump out units and don't need to re-build the unit cannon.

So drop pods do many things in terms of diversity and balance.

1: They give us a reason to not smash a moon – so we can use the unit cannon to invade multiple planets. (If we could place unit cannons on large planets, then there's no need to use a moon)
2: Drop pods allow us to invade planets without using a moon – but they have a drawback of a larger cost as the fleet of drop pods must be re-built for every invasion
3: It adds diversity. For the same reason why we have other types units rather than an "Ant" and a "bigger Ant"
4: Drop pods raining down from the sky would be #@%$ awesome.

Another thing to remember.

Unit cannons will have a limited range.

Ok so why not have 3 types of unit cannon - planetary, lunar, interplanetary.

Planetary unit cannons - are limited to firing within a planets atmosphere
Lunar unit cannons - are limited to firing from moons/asteroids onto adjacent planets
Interplanetary orbital unit cannons - are limited to firing between planets but not to moons/asteroids

The further the range the higher the cost of construction.

Planetary unit cannons - are limited to firing within a planets atmosphere
-I think this would easily be countered by AA if it's limited to atmosphere.
Lunar unit cannons - are limited to firing from moons/asteroids onto adjacent planets
-We know this will be implemented
Interplanetary orbital unit cannons - are limited to firing between planets but not to moons/asteroids
-I don't see how this is justifiable, even with the faux physics. If you can shoot a unit out of the gravity well, distance or type of celestial body wouldn't matter. I don't see an advantage to this unless it were to allow for bulk unit shooting (which I basically end up seeing as drop pods).

Upon reading some of these explanations, I have to agree that making the cannon interplanetary would incentivize people merely to see moons as KEWs and just use the cannon to get to other planets because late game resources are never a concern, making the moon disposable. This may not be the case on maps without moons, but in maps with moons it would devalue the gameplay.

The cannon will be useful enough once they integrate the ability to relocate small celestial bodies.
I'm viewing the unit cannon as more of a "watch out for it" kind of thing in late game, like nukes. I don't think it was meant for planetary invasion.

Since the primary reason for the topic was to address the whole beach head invasion thing to establish some sort of foothold on an enemy planet, I think the solution just comes down to an alternative invasion schema that has yet to be included, of which, drop pods and large transports seem to be the most generally supported ideas. I recall that the devs said early on that the amount of KEW destruction would be proportional to the mass of the body. So once proper asteroid belts are introduced, you'll probably have mini KEW weapons to help clear out a good portion of planet to land units and drop in a teleporter.

The epitome of invasion devices is actually the teleporter because of its instantaneous movement of large numbers of units. Once you get that laid down, it's practically game over if you have a massive army automatically pouring through and auto-patrolling. It just seems like we are missing the inbetween, which is why the cannon topic has come up for establishing a foothold.

In regards to the scope of the game that Chrono was getting at, I'm inclined to say we should wait and see how the gameplay plays out once we have transport units; depending on their size, durability, and cost, we'll probably be content with the way the cannon is currently conceptualized.

EDIT: Nvm.

That's all well and good but you are thinking that you will always have said moons and asteroids to utillize as KEW's in every game you play, what if you happen to get stuck in planetary siege fest with out moons and asteroids to use as KEW's and the enemy has his own planet completely locked-down to the point that you can't get into that planets orbital sphere to lay down a teleporter so that you can invade with?

The answer is that the game becomes a stalemate in that nobody wins.

When all is said and done why would you play without kew type planets??? That's playing outside of design therefore you're asking for a stalemate.....

Why not have two or three kinds of unit cannons?

Because of everything I just wrote.

Why are we limiting ourselves to the concept of a Unit Cannon? Why can't we make something different?

Everyone constantly suggests having lots of diversity when it comes to units, but then people push for no diversity in other areas. Doesn't quite make sense.

Hence my suggestions that we wait until transports are introduced. Even through umbrellas are great, they have a slow rate of fire. And even if the atmosphere is littered with avengers, if you have already assigned a spot to unload units right where your transports entered orbit, it'll drop to the ground pretty quickly. I expect in those cases you will just need to have enough of them.

I'm not saying that we can't implement some other solution though, only that having an infinite range unit cannon devalues the game in the scenarios where there are moons. If it were just planets, the idea would work well. But given that both the with and without moon scenarios are equally likely to occur, we need to find something that works in all scenarios and doesn't devalue half the game, and an adv. cannon doesn't seem to be it.

That said, just as @brianpurkiss has tried, I gently nudge us all back to the Planetary Invasion thread (which apparently I can't link to because of how little I've commented - arggg). Even though Chrono has said this thread is more about the cannon, at its heart we are talking about ideas for planetary invasions to get a foothold into enemy territory.

The numbers will change quite a lot for the final balance. I do understand that after a certain point in game, economies get absurdly large. However, I suggested metal cost being a limiting factor as well as energy. I might even say that there is probably added energy build up time for the interplanetary unit cannons compared to the moon based ones that make them just a little more of a hassle to use comparatively. There are a number of ways to balance the unit cannons to come out at different levels just like ants/levelers come out at different levels.

This sounds more like theory then actual "strategy". Why I say theory, because the whole idea of your invasion rests on asteriod bases and unit cannons to perform beachheads while teleporters take a secondary role. I'm not against the idea of unit cannons and asteriod bases being used to assault another planet as well. but they are not always going to be there. What then? No unit cannon, no asteriod base, how will you invade? Drop pods provide a good example of planet to planet invasion, but why should we be limited to only one proposal for planet to planet invasion techniques.

This is hard for me to argue because I'm not sure about the connection between having moons being smashed because they are not needed. There will also be asteroids and maybe a need for a resource hub. unit cannons on moons were just visualized in the trailer, why can't they have a bigger role?

Interesting, I like the idea, however, if this invasion tool is expensive and single use. If it fails, it doesn't sound like it would be a lot of fun.

So two unit cannons doesn't fit into the category of other tiered buildings? Ant leveller, dox/Slammer, pelter/holkins

I agree, it would be awesome.

This is something I don't agree with. We don't have to ground ourselves to the ideas of the Kickstarter trailer or some arbitrary value we/devs cook up. We make the range depending on a spectrum of if it feels balanced or unbalanced, Or better yet Fun or not Fun.

The reason i'm limiting myself to the unit cannon and made this thread just about the unit cannon is that Uber is spending a lot of Development time and resources to make the unit cannon possible, I figured if they made two units with the same mechanic it would be a better payoff then the limited view point that a unit cannon must be:

• restricted to moons
• limited range
• can be eliminated if there is no moons/asteriods in a system.

We can make something different but I figured this thread would just discuss other cool ways to use the unit cannon functionality and expound upon different ways to view it. I'm all for invasions, but considering Uber hinted about the unit cannon in October, and it hasn't seen the light of day for a good month. That its a real dev time killer and needs to be made prevalent to show off the hard work.

Guys the unit cannon isn't even out yet and the dev's said that they haven't really even started working on it. It seems to me you guys are trying to make something to talk about. Maybe we should all wait to see what they release about it (what they're thinking) and then go from there....

hmmm, I want to steer away from the idea of an in-planet unit cannon. We are going to have ground transports for Air and it would make it feel redundent. But that is just me.

Interplanetary and lunar is something I am all for since the transports that do exist in those categories are just not quick enough to establish beach heads.

Drop pods might be good, but they will probably follow the same orbital mechanics as other orbital units currently

I do see the concern that having interplanetary unit cannons
This may not be the case on maps without moons, but in maps with moons it would devalue the gameplay.

Watch out for it? I'm hoping the unit cannon doesn't become an antithesis like the nuke currently is when people deal with that binary relationship. I figured it would be one of the more fun planetary invading weapons. similar to drop pods.

The primary reason for this thread/topic is to discuss unit cannons and how to make cooler more fun versions considering that we will not be fighting on just 1 planet, 1 moon and 1 asteroid belt. planetary invasions sort of sprang up as a byproduct, but this thread is all about the glory of the unit cannon.

Wait n see? Why wait? there is much to discuss!

While discussion is good, I'm more inclined to wait and see how the new balance plays out. Especially after this last patch that showed me that a lot of my fears were unfounded and that some things play out better than they sound.

Why not have an orbital ship capable of building units that are deployed via drop pods? It would mean that you don't have this crazy orbital supply chain going (increasing computer stress). It could also be used to balance out the econ a bit late game.

As for the 2 unit cannons, it's a pretty good idea. Everything else is in 2 tiers, so why not unit cannons?? It'd also make them a little more common place, which sounds like a good thing.

I don't have fears about the unit cannon or its implementation. I was just presenting one version of it being added to planets as well. Really i'm just adding an idea to add travel from planet to planet utilizing the unit cannon as my medium, not exercising fears that planetary invasions are impossible without moons or asteroids.