A low-cost proposal for moving units between planets? Gravity lift pad.

hahahaha.

Yeah. I put a lot of work into being everywhere on the community. You also shouldn't forget the Steam discussions and bug tracker!

I do tend to be blunt. It's how I operate.

So if there's a series of murders with consistent signs of cracked skulls and fractured bones, we know it's you?

Fascinating idea. It may work, and may require not much coding.

But what if the big obstacle with stuffs like the Unit Cannon is the orbital journey of the units, or packing them together, or something we did not yet grasp very well?

I would say, perhaps a simple Dropship may solve tons of problem and keeping it simple. It would be one single object to move through orbit (or a fleet of them, like we do with Orbital Fighters), and once on site it will simply *drop* units into air, avoiding the orbital layer altogether. Air and ground interact well already, as we see in-game.

The Unit Cannon still looks cooler, but any solution to bring some fresh air in this aspect of the game would be very welcome indeed. Perhaps we still didn't see anything new on this front, because at Uber they want to dedicate time to the best option they could produce, and that may very well be just the Unit Cannon.

I would be happy about that.

It's a good idea but I'm not sure it fits with the design ethos of the units - everything we have seen so far has been very kinetic, ballistic and explosive - it's just the design they chose for the game, which is why they had the unit cannon in the trailer.

An energy based transport would solve a lot of the same problems as the unit cannon, but from a technical perspective I would imagine it would be difficult to implement. From our perspective it's easy to say that clearly this functionality exists already as units can travel between planets from the ground (such as nukes etc) but in practice we have to assume there are non-trivial reasons why this functionality can't be adapted in the way we're talking about here. The solution you've proposed is, as you say, essentially the same mechanic with different art assets; whereas I think it is safe to assume that art assets arent the limiting factor at this time.

Bifrost would be awesome though. The game could benefit from more energy based technology such as the teleporters.

There being the issues of landing for said unit. A gravity lift pad doesn't really make sense at the other end. Nor on how units actually leave orbit. You have to bear in mind that Uber are still following the conventional means of how spacecraft travel in space with slingshot-ting units around the star etc to a degree. Where as the Unit cannon shown in the video which was essentially a way to launch units into space which were encased in a capsule that were controlled and landed safely on the other end due to rocket boosters.

Yes but we are not talking about a teleporter, the units still fly through space and take time to get there. What I was trying to say is that it does not have to be in the form of a cannon. I mean I don't really think that a launch pad would take too much coding stress of the devs, but in the end I would even be happy with done thing like an orbital pelican, which would be fast light and easily spamabble but could not carry fabs or commanders. I am simply asking for a way to get units onto another planet without having to build anything on it in a reasonable way.

I think leave it at unit cannon. Then bring out an expantion that has larger orbiting space units that can take a few hits and do orbital bombardment and bombing runs ect. A counter to that could be umbrellas and land units with orbital rockets. Make that the counter.

that would soooo fix a lot of issues .... but in itself .... sounds sooooo unsatisfactory ....
it pretty much sounds like the "lazy" way of doing things ....
seriously you just could create a beamingplatform and be done with a whole lot of issues but it just takes away strategy and effort to be honest ...
like considering teleporters you always require 2 of those ... this means i have to get on the other planet first after a possibly long austreus travel with the potential danger being shoot down midflight ...
the gravityliftidea on the other hand "just" would requier those platforms and lots of energy ... not even avengers might be needed
oh some of those got shoot down? just build a bigger stream then ...
again a risk/reward issue were there is too low of a risk for a high reward imo ...
now you might say "wouldn`t this aply to the unitcannon aswell?"
the thing with the unitcannon is it would be only effective on small celestial bodies that orbit bigger mainbodies (at least it is suppossed to be like that from what we heard ... subject to change though) ...
with no such bodies being in those cannons would be obsolete .... and some of us would actualy like to play on such systems were you cant move planets around to get units to nonorbiting planets next to you (i know ... HERESY!!! .. -_- ) ... why? because we want to have options to get big armies over that don`t rely on having to send a fabber to the other planet first ... how that could look like? cheap austreuses+areacommands (possible but just isnt worth it in the current state because of cost and timereasons) +* ... one-way-rocketpod-launches from the orbital launcher ... and last but not least multiunittranports and orbital flightcraftcarriers ...
(*)what also realy would help with transporting more units would be ferrycommands ... those would be as helpful as ever compared to supcom ... the problem with all that? .... hard to implement

This is an interesting response, I do agree there is an overall ethos of explosive ballistics, although the existing teleporter seems more in this vein. I agree that I don't think the art is the principal limitation - I think we should take the Dev posts explaining how difficult it was to implement multi unit transports in SupCom as very illustrative. Having unit classes do things they don't normally do like clump on and become a part of another unit is what isn't easy. I think a unit cannon involves quite a bit of this especially if it is a 'massive railgun constantly shooting a stream of units into orbit'. How exactly is a a stream of unitsn going to help make a beachhead anyway? You need a clump.

For these same reasons, we can all forget about a drop ship. Its both an interplanetary ship, which has been conclusively ruled out, and a multi-unit transport.

Some might be OK waiting months - or years - for a unit cannon. Personally I just want a simple mechanism to open fronts. I suppose something like this will be moded in anyway, but I suspect a robust interplanetary front is going to be key for this game to go beyond its niche audience.

/sorry for typos on my phone

Bryan what are you gonna do if PA falls flat and you don't become a procaster? I think we need to start an emergency fund for you as it must be difficult to keep up with classes with all this free work you are doing

I envy your confidence and also hope this is true; but say that day never comes, what then? Also, what other changes? I think we're looking at close to the full unit roster based on the focus of gamma on ui, polish, and social features and between everything said in Dev casts. Which is fine with me, worst case scenario we mod a beachhead solution and hope the tournie scene continues to grow. I honestly don't know if I see PA ever appealing to a mainstream crowd, but maybe launch will bring in enough fresh blood for a final round of feature additions. Anyway getting off topic.

That day will come, just that it might not be from Uber, but a Modder instead. Either way, Uber is in this for the long haul, this isn't some franchise they're popping out, this is like 90% proprietary Technology Uber has full control on so it'd take quite the drastic circumstances for PA to get completely dropped.

As for other changes, it's hard to say exactly, but I outlined some of my thoughts here.

Mike

We have already units that can move through orbits, and a Dropship doesn't need to be a Transport in any way. It can simply be a factory, where we have factories already and we will have Orbital Factories soon as well.

What likely is the big obstacle with the Unit Cannon is the need to implement a new piece of code into the core, or/and totally new behaviors for old and new units, and that obviously would require great efforts from the engineers at Uber (engineers aren't famous for art and graphical design...).

The addition of a Dropship could very well be one of the quickest and easiest way to fix the poor planetary invasion mechanic of the current state of the game.

Actually, I expect a Dropship to be modded into the game in a matter of weeks after release.