Was just playing a game trying to crack a planet, and thought of a simple way to make doing so a bit easier and more fun. Currently I find the controls for linking two portals very finicky and difficult to time right. You might only get a few seconds to put units through, so you really can't waste it switching back and forth between planets. It seems like you should be able to cue units to 'standby' a built teleporter and stream through the moment it is opened, and cue up the linkage while the teleported is building. This way a mass of fabbers could plot down a teleported and in just one command your units would be ready to start streaming through.
I'm pretty sure that you can actually do just that by giving them a "use" command before connecting them.
Increase your energy income. Teleporter shuts down when you're out of reserve. You can maintain it online all the time, if you do it right.
I don't think the issue has anything to do with energy reserves. Judging by the OPs mention of "cracking a planet" I believe the situation being described is the one where you're constructing a teleporter on a hostile planet dominated entirely by an enemy and then as soon as it's built trying to stream a pile of units through it before the enemy spots you, sends an army of units, overruns your position, and destroys your teleporter. If you don't get your army through quick to defend it, there's a good chance the teleporter won't survive long. I managed to get into a situation like that once with the AI in an earlier build.
You can already set the connection while its building, you will see the finnished teleport spin it wheels trying to connect to the one building and it connects when the building one is complete. They also automaticly reconnect when power is restored. And you can queue units to move automaticly into the teleport, but I am not sure if they try again if the teleport was out of power for a while. Also I am not sure if connecting 2 teleports that are both still building works.
Exactly. I do this all the time. I also used to be in the habit of hotkeying all my built teleporters. I'd use them to swap between planets, and also use the keys to quickly swap gates at any time.
One thing I've noticed, wouldn't it be better if you could give a move command onto another planet linked by teleporter, the teleporter automatically turns on when unit approaches, and the unit can carry out its move order. I am unsure of how difficult this would be to work into the pathfinding system however; It is theoretically simple, but this game has defied theory in many cases.
I like the idea of selecting units and telling them to go to a planet and they're sent to that teleporter, but here's a case to consider: what happens when the planet you tell them to go to has multiple teleporters? Pick one? Evenly distribute via round robin?
I have two separate answers for this. Firstly, if this is a command where you're doing a move command on a teleporter and selecting a planet from there: Since you're selecting a planet from the teleporter and telling them to move there the UI could instead list a 2-level list of planets that have teleporters on them with the list of teleporters on them. PiP could also show where the other teleporter is and what's around it. Secondly, if this is a normal move command where you're looking at the other planet and you give a unit order for a unit that happens to be on another planet: In this case you'll be picking a specific spot you want them to move to instead of simply picking a planet, and you're not actually selecting a teleporter on either side. This case is actually relatively easy, which teleporters are used is up to the pathfinding system, which would just have the concept of teleportation points mixed into the normal pathfinding routines. In a cross-planet move command for ground units the pathfinder would find the local teleporter with the shortest path to get there and pick the destination teleporter which has the shortest path to its destination. This method could actually also take into account other methods of transportation like orbital cannons. Why trek to a teleporter when you're sitting next to an orbital cannon that can send you directly to your destination. Though, you might not want to mix in the Astraeus. It wouldn't be much harder than handling teleporters and orbital canons in pathfinding. But Astraeus have long travel times and you don't want them to be tied up with transporting someone who could've used a teleporter when you want to do something important like transport a fabricator/commander to an unexplored planetoid.
Pick the nearest with a pathfinding check. Again, pathfinding is the grey area with this concept, I'm not sure how easy it is to just tell the game "Please do a check for pathfinding from here to here, but don't actually pathfind anything there."
Okay it sounds like you're looking for telling them to go to a point on the planet. I had thought "tell them to go to a planet" for some reason, which would have been lingo for "just end up on the planet, I don't care where".
I got a reply from one of the devs re: this, I just can't find it atm, and it's omission was indeed to do with pathing complexities. IIRC the primary concern was units wandering blindly through hostile territory trying to take the shortest path via a teleporter and generally taking non-obvious paths...
