I think this might actually be a bug, but I'm not sure. For whatever reason, units on a planet can assist orbital structures being built above them. Orbital fabbers can do the same for planetary units. Building more than one orbital fabber is a bit pointless, as of now, since you can just get a bunch of combat fabbers to instantly fabricate anything you need. The only purpose they serve is to put down the blueprint for the structure, and even then, you don't need them anymore once you get an orbital factory up. Orbital and planetary shouldn't interweave like that; normally, an orbital player will have orbital fabbers and orbital factories up, mass-producing orbital units and travelling to planets. With the assistance of planetary fabbers, the transition from planetary to orbital can take but a few seconds, whereas it should take a bit longer to be established in orbit. Also, you can use three combat fabbers to reclaim an SXX faster than a dedicated anti-orbital umbrella could shoot it down, while getting a ton of metal in the process. If that's not silly I don't know what is.
Yeah. It's currently in the game. Kinda a uncommonly known ability. I definitely think it should be removed because it's overpowered and not intuitive with the UI. The few times I've seen people talk about this subject, they're generally against this mechanic. Either that... or maybe make it allowed, with a huge efficiency dropoff? But that wouldn't be very intuitive with the UI either. But at the same time, I'm not so sure how I feel about keeping the two layers completely separate. I'd love to have an Advanced Fighter built by the Advanced Air Factory that can hop between the two orbital layers. Either way, ground fabbers assisting orbital and vice versa should probably just be removed.
So Uhhhh... I can't actually believe this got burried. This should be moved to general. Noone's gonna see it here.
I made my own thread in General that's more focused on asking the devs if it's intentional or not. there is no balance to be had in this functioning of things. period.
T1 combat fabber is almost 50% more efficient than the orbital fabber (45.5 vs 33.3 energy per metal). This is a neat trick, I will have to employ it in GW while it lasts. The main thing, i think, is that a single orbital fabber costs nearly 10x (6000 metal) as much as a combat fabber does (720) while being just a tad faster (88 build speed vs 60). This is a huge difference when rushing to orbital, and the efficiency advantage is just icing on that cake as it were, and eventually comes to dominate, but really it's the cheapness for early build power that counts the most, IMO.
What I generally do is use large quantities of orbital fabbers to just reclaim units from orbit. Killed an AI commander this way once since they have no idea how to defend themselves. Course it's probably a better idea to just build anchors. I do know I killed a commander by dropping an anchor on him haha.
