It's time to talk unit ideas

I would like to see a slow ponderous heavily armored unit with a relatively powerful but shout range weapon. Something like a tribute to The Can. It could be useful as a level one or level two unit. It could bulk up your level one army with by giving it something that can take a little damage or if it were level two it could specialize primarily in defensive roles and be used as the first unit through the star gate when invading or a last ditch effort to protect your commander when being swarmed. I should think it would balance nicely as a level two unit if it had about twice the armor of a Leveler but about half the speed and half the range. The firepower could be comparable to that of the leveler.

LOL, that took me back a bit. Red Alert II anyone. I used to love the tesla tank and the mirage tank that could camo as a tree. The good old days for sure.

"Turtle" troop transporter Idea, Large(comparable in size to teleporter footprint) troop transport spaceship built by orbital fabricators (it sound familiar, but wait a second), it can fly freely on orbit and between planets.
Ship is able to land into planet surface and load/unload troops, but it's not able to take off on its own after it lands on ground - it need boosters assembly to launch again into space... they cost more than ship itself ,but you can use assistance of ground fabricators.
This would split price of the ship so you can produce and land few of those and keep filling them with units before they ready to take off and also made them sitting ducks after landing on hostile territory so If your troops will fail, you will most likely loose immobilized and unprotected drop-ships as well.

I've created, although roughly done and with errors, a table of different weapon types against unique properties a weapon may have to compact some unit design.

Good work on the table.

The units in the game so far are great ideas. The ideal concept for each unit should be that micromanagement should be discouraged (i.e. no special abilities, like in small-scale rts games.)
So, the objective is to create a unit that is different from all the others, while still obtaining an idea of its independence (meaning we don't have to tell it what to do all the time.)

My idea for this is going to be a unit called the Geo. Geo, meaning land. When idle, it AUTOMATICALLY, NO BUTTONS PRESSED, burrows underground and waits. (This unit is a t2 bot.)

Essentially a modified slammer, it is invisible to radar however not to vision, meaning if a unit is close enough, it can see the burrowed Geo. When a unit is in range, it pops out and preforms like a slammer, doing all necessary attacking, flanking, whatever, before dropping back down and waiting.

Its weakness would be the t2 artillery bot. With superior range, It is capable of blasting at the still-burrowed Geo and destroying it. T2 Artillery tanks + radar would be a kryptonite for Geos.

It should take a fraction of a second to come back up from the burrow. The idle time required should be ten - fifteen seconds. Once burrowed, the fraction-second concept is required so its user doesn't get frustrated with long unborrow times.

Mobile radar. 'nuff said.

Sandworms. A minelaying air unit.

Hi by the way all, i'm new, just decided to be a contributor-
I tried quoting Artemantix, a few posts above regarding his graph, but it wouldn't let me have more then 0 links? as i'm a new user... anyway

Regarding the graph of weapons. It exactly hits on what I've been thinking about.
I was wondering, among other things, whether Uber would create an army builder, for lack of a better term.

Briefly on a side note, i really like friendly fire on, for example flak, being able to negligently kill your own planes.

I am hoping for feedback from Uber regarding the idea of templates for units, rather then templates for commanders. Purely as an alternative to "different factions". Since they have, so far as I've seen 4 different templates for different commanders. I've not seen where they're going with that, or maybe it's purely aesthetic.

I don't see any reason why they can't give us templates for units- tanks, bots etc, and a huge wide range of weapons. They units they were making would be the "preset" or baseline, and people can customise
based on templates. Weapons and armour, speed etc would have different costs.

Also, if we're having gravity, it might be too complex, but are we having wind too? That would affect
aerodynamics of units, particularly aircraft. armour/firepower/expense would be particular factors in choosing units, why not making units too?

Hi all, I have a few thoughts/concepts to put out there. A warning though, I haven't looked
through every single page of posts so thoroughly, so forgive me if there's some repetition.

Is there some direction Uber is going with the different commander templates other
than simply appearing different? Based on what little I am up to date with, there will be
no new "factions" or "teams" being added (core/arm; cybran/uef).
Based however, off the assumption multiple discreet factions/races will not be present.
How about extending the armory, or the ability to customise commanders with any degree of complexity
past what's been advertised in livestreams?

And also, how does Uber feel about army customisation in the armory? Instead of only preset bots/vehicles/air. How about templates of bots, even if it's only in a very simple way.
It would introduce variety to the games even though everyone has access to the same things.

Say light bots, heavy bots, light tank/heavy tank. Combination of weapons if we assign weight, and cost
and armour factors to the weapons. Or armour classes. light bots cannot carry heavy missile launchers.
Light Laser anti air on fast scouts?

Some more unit ideas, thoughts etc.

I was wondering about implementation of orbital laser weapons, point defence etc.

Weapons firing at different planets in the same solar system?
Maybe, if the guys at Uber aren't happy with forcefields.
I was wondering how you felt about orbital armour, individual armour pieces
floating above in orbit. but not a complete barrier.

Orbital defense, against units/interplanetary weapons?
or interpletary cannon/beam weapons, either on a surface or sitting in orbit?

Found something similar from another guy in a different post, forget where. His suggestion
seemed a bit too extreme though, requiring lots of attention.
Orbital aircraft repair station maybe? That can only store and repair fighters.
perimeter monitoring? maybe automatic waypoint patrol for all planes sent
to be repaired at the repair station?

Ground/orbital laser or point defense laser? boring a hole through other planets or shooting
down incoming units through space.

I miss the good old vulcan cannon (hint-hint nudge-nudge)

Not sure the the uber devs meant by they weren't happy with the bubble shields.
maybe not unit shields? What about base shields? I personally kinda liked
that they only blocked projectiles, and not aircraft or bots/tanks moving through them
so once they were inside the shield was moot. Maybe if it's going to block projectiles,
make it block 2 ways, so you can't shoot out? I wonder if that makes things more interesting
to consider?

Being able to cancel build orders
Maybe rearranging build orders, for buildings

I was thinking about a new type of aircraft class. The Invader class.

These airplanes are similar to normal tech 1 aircraft. The key difference is that these units are equiped with booster rockets enabling them to leave the planet. The goal of these planes are early offence on other planets. In later stages they are usefull in a supporting role (defending teleporter locations for instance)

The invader type units only works on the surface of a planet and skip the orbital layer when moving planets. Orbital is the satallites domain. These planes and satallites cannot fight eachother.

I think that adding even more more powerful interplanetary weaponry will decrease importance of land armies even more... but from point defense weapons I would not mind to had orbital anti-missile (nukes, catapults) installation.

Also other variant of my troop transporter idea: I previously suggested relatively cheap orbital troop transport vessel that could land on ground but it couldn't take off from full gravity bodies without building (produced slowly by craft and assisted by fabricators) surface launch rockets and making it this way a more disposable (relatively cheap to build, yet more expensive to launch) type of unit during invasion.
Now I had other suggestion about this idea, how about big (like 3 anchors long) orbital unit that would carry large drop container (It can be produced by ship if doesn't carry any) attached to it's belly.
Ship would be able to quickly drop container filled with units (units are going out automatically after drop, and container is destroyed in process, but cannot be damaged during drop) or slowly (container can be destroyed by AA and air units) level it down (tractor beam thingy ?) so it could land without damage (for filling container with units) and could be brought back to ship again.
Also drop containers would be able to crush light units on its path .

I would be glad to hear other ideas about drop-ships and other units transporting troops trough space (air transports would be too small and naval LCU's probably will not be used often but it sound cool).

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Thor
One-time-use orbital bombardment unit. You put it up in orbit, maneuver it over the target, and then drop it down to earth and crush anyuthing under it.

Can we call it the "Orbital B****-Slap?"

Counter missile units/towers. Basically it can intercept stingray/ catapult and other smaller missiles.

Bomber that launches missiles similar to the stingrays but will a little less range.

Air unit that releases flares when nearby friendly air gets shot at increasing the survivability of nearby air units, or flares for T2 units.

Litterbug
Suicidal flying saucer that rams into enemy air units, taking equal damage. It explodes when destroyed, devastating clustered air units.

Nuclear Bomb Bot
Close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades... and these guys.

Advanced Combat Fabber Tank
Aggressively deconstructs enemy units as well as repairing itself and other vehicles.

Energy Annex
Power plant that provides no energy, and instead fully supplies any one unit nearby that requires 1000 or less energy. Useful for keeping an important unit (such as an orbital radar or umbrella) supplied with energy even during an energy shortage.

Yo. ^^

Two ideas I pitched in the general forum, figured I should probably pitch them here.

1) A new Tier 2 superweapon - a humongous bombardment laser that may ONLY attack units and positions on other orbitals (within nuke range, approximately.) The impact effect would be similar to a scaled-up Holkins - relatively inaccurate, but good damage in a medium-sized splash. It would be plenty more expensive than a Holkins but a little less expensive than a single nuke + nuke launcher. Note that because it is a direct-fire weapon it would only be able to draw LOS to targets in its hemisphere, and on the hemisphere facing the weapon.

Intended use:
- Shelling of enemy worlds and asteroid bases that is more gradual and less directed than nuclear attacks.
- Nuke is not supplanted because of the laser's lack of precision and lower damage.
- Terrestrial artillery (catapult/holkins) are not supplanted because it is not allowed to draw focus on the world where it is built.

Possible Names:
- Apollo
- Pulsar
- Europa

2) Dropship. This would be a mid-range-cost (~6,000-8,000 metal) unit buildable by the Orbital Fabricator. It would be relatively well-armored as orbital units go, able to take a good pounding (maybe 8-10 hits) from an Umbrella before failing. It would mount no weapons. Instead, it would be capable of lifting a large number of land and air units (like 20 or more) and deploying them en masse elsewhere, including on other worlds. Its interorbital velocity would be slower than the Astraeus.

Intended use:
- Planetary invasion tool. Use in conjunction with other orbital units to create a foothold on an entrenched enemy world.
- Surprise attack option for enemy bases on the same world.
- Astraeus is not supplanted because it is cheaper and faster for moving single units.

Possible names:
- Harbinger
- Hermes
- Cloudburst

That's all for now. ^^

EDIT

That's not too bad either, though in your configuration I think it would be superior to build them on the ground using terrestrial fabricators and then launch them from there.

The idea I had would use something like a tiny drop-pod to ferry land and air units from the surface to the transport. That way the transport never actually leaves orbit. The transport itself is less vulnerable this way, but units boarding the transport would be subject to anti-air attacks all the way up and all the way down - so you'd still need to be very careful about your drop point, and obviously any umbrellas/avengers/sky donuts could harass the transport itself.

Welp, missed that one too. =P More or less functionally equivalent to what I suggested. So there you go, we want dropships!

Well I kind off disagree here beeing a long time Supcom player. Cybran t2 walking destroyers in FA have a bigger range than UEF t3 anti land turret. Generalny the problem with them is that they can safely destroy t2 land defences guns and lots t2 land units and even the t3 light bots! Even when land units reach destroyers it takes quiet a ammount of time to destroy them. Furthermore the destroyers can walk back. Really the solution to them is t2 ground artilery or aircraft.