In the game's current stage, I feel as if teleporters render transports of all kind obsolete. For example, why busy a factory with building hundreds of transports when you can erect a teleporter on the enemy continent/planet? Whenever interplanetary invasion is concerned, the primary objective is to successfully clear away any orbital defences (which is find), but then to immediately and quickly build a teleporter in order to send through a mass of units. The only time in which orbital or air transports are useful over teleporter is in the case wherein the enemy has completely locked down all entry points to a continent, or plastered an entire planet (most often smaller ones) with umbrellas. This is how I envision intercontinental warfare: 1. Air strikes and naval bombardment - this seems pretty standard and most desirable to me; however, naval speed should be increased to keep up with the air force, and the air force should become more dependent on ground and naval troops. 2. Initial waves of ground troops via transporters to establish a foothold in enemy territory - naval transports should be added, with the advantage of a much larger transport capacity compared with air. 3. Build a teleporter - teleporters should be limited to tier 2 tech, whilst transporters should be brought down to tier 1; also, teleporters should take an extremely long time to build and should be easily destroyed, thus weighting more on the idea of establishing a foothold. The same goes for battles between a planet and its satellites: 1. Initial troop wave 'bombardment' - those bot cannons shown in the Kickstarter trailer seem to fit this 2. Orbital transporters to bring in a larger force - increase orbital transport capacity but disallow instant 'dropping' of troops onto planet 3. Teleporter Those bot cannons should be limited to be between moons and planet. As for interplanetary invasions, they should be much more intricate. Consider another scale of warfare? Or, we can have advanced orbital units arising from orbital-based factories that can carry a large amount of ground troops, some of which have those bot cannons mentioned earlier. The only sort of significant effect of this (the orbital changes) is that gameplay is then more reliant on orbital warfare, which is not necessarily a bad thing; but I believe it detracts too much from basic RTS gameplay.
Teleporters don't invalidate transports. Teleporters take time to setup and can be destroyed before units get through. Transports are much more useful for surprise attacks. Air transports are extremely useful on one planet because it's a lot easier, faster, and cheaper to pump out a bunch of transports rather than build two teleporters, plus the energy cost of running the teleporter. Orbital and orbital invasions are currently very under developed. I really hope Uber implements dropships, but we'll see. Right now, due to how powerful Advanced Air is and how small our planets are, intercontinental invasions are pointless. You're better off building some gunships and peregrines and just snipe the commander. Transports should NOT be basic. When they were first released they were built in the basic air factory and they broke the entire game. There was a completely uncounterable commander rush and also the early Inferno rush. The game was MAJORLY broken when transports were basic. Orbital cannons are going to be limited to moons and planets. The Orbital Cannon can only be built on small moons and cannot fire units from one side of the galaxy to another. It must fire to planets that share orbits. Right now the final game balance is far from finished and we're still missing units and structures. In short, you're quite wrong on some of your points and quite right on others. And for the things you're correct about, Uber already has plans for them. So hang in there. The game's not done.
