Unit Cannon & Asteroid Belt Discussion?

So back long ago when i got hooked on the kickstarter and supported we all saw the Unit cannon, It was one of the reasons i supported cause it looked awesome. Just wanted to ask what the stand on this was as far as implementing it in the future? has there been talk about it? and is it still happening?


Also how will the Asteroid Belt really be implemented, can we pilot them? and will there destruction be OP?


Thanks,
Guni

Yep the unit cannon is still coming, it's just low priority at the moment.

Do you think it really will be as beneficial as it once was? I mean we have access to Orbital Transports and Teleporters. However i do see the need to get units on a planet quicker and easier.

Teleporters currently are a broken unit in that they cost next to nothing, yet have more health than is reasonable. It's a "hack" in gameplay to allow transport between two disparate world, largely because there is no other feasible way to transport large groups of units between worlds.

Orbital transports (aka Astraeus) are woefully inadequate for the job. Too expensive, too flimsy and WAY to micro-intensive to be a viable alternative.

The Unit-Cannon is needed. The entire game breaks down during the late game due to its absence and planetary invasions, something that could should be a real highlight of a game, are written off in favour of Planet Smashing; which is fun for the first dozen times you see it and swiftly becomes pedestrian and oddly anti-climactic after that point, again due to completely unsatisfactory planetary invasion mechanics that mean once someone has built the Halleys, there's no way to stop them and getting a foothold on a tiny asteroid that can be largely defended with a much smaller investment of time and forces (due to its small surface area) is next to impossible, even if you spot what your opponent is doing.

Transports are too expensive?

I beg to differ on that one, even before hand they were fair for their price.

All transports need is a better UI to facilitate mass scale commands and to allow the transport to within 2 clicks be able to pick up an army and deposit it, with them doing the rest.

The balance is secondary to an effective UI in this instance.

600 metal (last time a checked) means that transporting, say, a dox is a complete waste of time and resources. There are only certain units that are worth transporting, and the cheaper and more numerous units are on the high-end of pointless in a single-unit transport.

D-Day like invasions are entirely infeasible with transports as they currently stand which, in my opinion, is a shame.

So then rather using the transports for large dropship archetypes, that is what they implemented the Teleporters for? I suppose teleporters need a bit of a nerf in health or cost/build time and when the cannon comes along it will allow for d-day type scenarios to be more feasible.

However from what we saw, the cannon only worked with Bots, would this be efficient when raiding a planet if your going Bots up against Vehicles?

Currently, I will agree, but again, the lack of a proper UI to allow an invasion completely stops units that ARE worth transporting.

Once we can get troops onto the ground as easily as setting up a ferry point, or ferry area in regards to nukes then moving amrys should be easy enough if the players are willing to devote to the proper construction of transports and a army to conduct the invasion.


Too many times have I seen people complain that their 30 transports didn't make it, when the minimum is clearly 300.

The balance of how many units transports move and their costs are not what im questing here, but the commands to pull it off in one move without having the horrific micromanagement to ensure they even follow your order that we have now.

A invasion shouldn't be a small operation, it should be a conflict of scale that most players haven't even seen before.

And that's wonderful.

The "pods" the Unit-Cannon fired seemed to have enough room in them for 4 Dox. I don't see why there couldn't be a capacity value for those pods that would allow, say, one Ant or one Slammer to take up all 4 of the slots that 4 Dox would.

@igncom1, I'm not arguing the UI aspect. What I'm saying is that, even with a good UI, transporting Dox one-by-one is a mug's game that no one is going to play. There needs to be an option for mass cheap unit transport that doesn't rely on a "hack"ed in teleporter that is clearly being forced into performing a function that it was never intended to fulfill.

If the Teleporter was supposed to be a "beachhead" unit it wouldn't be built on the ground by orbital Fabricators, but would rather be dropped from orbit after being built and transported from elsewhere.

Yesterday I had a game where i implemented 500 Avengers into the orbit of my opponents planet, going up against 300 avengers of his. Although I was able to make a bang and take the orbit, getting the 10 different "landing partys" down to try to successfully build teleporters for my army to move in on the planet was extremely difficult, due to his large amount of bombers roaming the planet and the amount of micro it required.

Looking back on this I should of looked at bringing a lot of anti-air in dropships as well

Indeed, but with the current transports, they move far too slowly to make a proper combat drop, and Id like to see that changed.

Transporting forces should be the easy part, and they shouldn't need to even BE in the orbital layer, their job is to go from surface to surface, not lurk in orbit.

So id prefer if they can't even be in the orbital layer at all, make invading easy, all about getting boots on the ground.

The fight for orbital should be for orbital control, not to even begin an invasion.

However if they become default out-of-orbit then you are confronted by the next problem of say a spam of fighters on patrol around the planet will clean them up before you even get a chance. At least with avengers you are able to make a break into the planet to get the dropship safely in there. At this point in the game, there is no plausible way (to my knowledge) to get anti air or other aircraft's on to the planet without placing an air factory on the surface. (I'm discounting anchors as there primary goal isn't really to eradicate air)

Again... all the more reason to STOP using these one-unit transports for a role they are clearly not supposed to be fulfilling.

Either we need multi-unit transports with good UI control or we need the Unit-Cannon with the ability to "transport" a large variety of units. However I'd prefer both be added since they're both completely different and viable options.

A mainstay of any good RTS is that it has multiple options available to the player to complete their strategy that differ in implementation and consequences.

Very true, but depending on planet size, this would vary from a thicket of fighters, to the odd couple every few miles.

In a fighter thicket, with a large number of transports getting AA to the ground would be essential, and even with casualty's would be well.....what you would expect from a invasion right? It's always going to be bloody, and your enemy is actively trying to stop you, getting transports to the ground should be easy so we get back to the surface conflict.

Not that I wouldn't mind a anchor that only shoot at planes, not ground forces. And Q-transports could even have an edge here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-ship

But as the game currently is, fighters can still shoot down transports, so even in the current game this is a problem.

And of course on a planet where the fighters are divided, it's a lot easier to land a concentrated force of AA to begin thinning the herd.

Not that invasions are going to be easy, mobile flak would be appreciated to punish concentrations of air units, much like artillery to land blobs.

It's not going to be easy to invade, but the first step is getting there right? So lets cross one bridge at a time and find the best way of getting a large force from planet A to planet B, quickly and easily before we worry about what we do when our enemy was expecting us.

I don't see the problem with one unint transports, all it means is that you need a large number of them, and during a hot landing it prevents major losses from AA as they only lose 1 unit when shot down.

Really one unit transports are much better for a landing into enemy territory then a multi unit transport which puts all of your eggs into one basket.

Now Im not saying multi-unit transports shouldn't be added (Before my hand gets bitten off) im saying that they aren't the best choice for starting an invasion.

Single unit transports might not carry much, especially in a game of this size, but that further reinforces the need to scale your forces up, even with large transports and unit cannons, you won't be invading with less then 30, and that puts a large cost in the loss of each individual transport and cannon.

Exactly, there could be separate roles for both transports. One has higher health and can transport multiple units, let's say ten, but it's also slower and costs more. It's main counter are both single shot anti-air and similar single shot anti-orbital (anchors/fighters), the single unit transport could have lower health and be faster as well as cost less, but be easily spammable. It's main counter would be anything with an are of effect attack, such as flak, as multiples of them would easily get chewed up by multiple flak turrets.

Basically it encourages separate uses for separate units.

frankly, what's the aim of a tranport unit being able to transport a single unit ?
In all SF movies i've watched, planet invasion is all about big ships transporting tons of units.
Awesomeness and epicness of planet invasions relies on massive amount of units begin dropped within one single shot.
Ground Control 1 & 2 used to have such transport units :

I'd like to see some transports SupCom Style.

The transport weight of every transportable unit is 1, and every transport has a weight of 1.

We need bot transports with a weight of 5 or 10, vehicles by standard have a weight of 5-10, and individually smaller units have a smaller weight like dox have 1 while gil-e has 2 and ant has 5/10 while leveler has 8/14...

And a weight for units is a start and by itself useful, but a number of how many can mount or something would also be nice.