Dropship

Im still of the opinion that we need a siege unit to be launched at a planet to create a beach head for an invasion. Something to give enough time for a teleporter to be built or a substantial army to be cannoned into position.

People keep saying this but can't back it up, if the entire planet is fortified to the point some kind of siege unit as described you shouldn't be trying to assault it, you should either be ignoring it and going for the Commander or destroying it outright.

Mike

So your saying the best solution is either just to smash a planet into it or multiple nuke spam until you kill the commander?

Im looking for invasion options, but if thats all we have to do then the unit cannon and drop ships are already redundant.

They are there, the problem is that Invasion isn't always the answer.

Mike

The production rate can be accelerated. Or units could be produced in numbers, not necessarily one by one, but perhaps five by five. It can be then balanced allowing a single Dropship to produce a maximum amount of units per time. Let's say 100. In order to produce the next stock of units a Dropship may have to wait few minutes, more or less the time needed to travel to an other planet and coming back.

Then you've simulated a transport without transported any units at all. Also, a Dropship that stays in an enemy orbit is vulnerable, while traveling to an other planet is not.

Plus, if you position a fleet of Dropships, the production rate accelerates even more. Of course that kind of Dropship should consume energy and metal accordingly, because de facto is a factory.

Anyway, this is a way I thought to solve the issue with the Unit Cannon and the Multi-Units Transports. There are surely many other ways.

Ok this could actually work nice idea

Dropships would take a lot of work for Uber. This is why they kept with a single unit air transport.

This would also make the astraeus obsolete except if the dropship costs more metal per unit.

Not really, it's just one unit, and it's even less work if the units aren't visible on the outside.

Aye drop ships shouldn't be a problem. They said loading and unloading was a problem, but a drop ship would be a unit you build and then when it deploys it spawns X number of units. That should be fairly simple to code.

As to the comment about the Siege bunker thing, I realize this game is call planetary annihilation but really don't like the idea that nukes and Plant smashing is always the go to win button. Com snipping bothered me in early games but the commander is coming along nicely now so that sniping isn't so easy as it was. I still feel the commanders should have build in AA rockets (every com I have seen has some sort of rocket launcher looking parts on them) and why would you ever NOT build AA defense on your most vulnerable part of your army considering how much Aircraft dominate this game.

If we keep this more complex orbital we need invasion tools for those times when Nukes and planet smashing isn't an option.

I actually don't mind the idea of an on-orbit factory as much this morning... interesting.

I could see this going two directions:

-a factory dropship with its own simple, custom unit roster... maybe a couple land units, a couple air units, each somewhere in the Tier 1.5 range.
-OR an on-orbit factory dropship equivalent of each of the Tier 1 factories.

I could also see factories having a small/medium internal capacity, so they store the units they produce and then deploy them in a group on command.

This is pretty much what I suggested and got flack for on post #29.
Orbital factories that produced units and dropped them all on command that would be tier 1.5.

We must have an option for invasion in a system with more than one planet but with no moons or movable bodies. I am not convinced that a unit canon alone can provide this.

Indeed - I think a lot of people prefer the idea of a thing being built by only one thing. Kind of my reasoning behind preferring a dropship factory with a custom unit roster instead of just a flying Tier 1 factory that drops the same doxes and ants.

I could see it dropping little hover bots and ufo-type air units... that would be pretty fun. ^^ And allowing them to target both the air and ground layers, but not outclass Tier 1 in either of those categories on their own, would give them the Tier 1.5 status we're looking for. Heck, letting them hover would let them travel over sea as well, so water bases could be vulnerable to orbital attack.

That would be more like a drone harbinger from DoW.

I see nothing wrong with this. =P

And I mean, nothing says Planetary Invasion like swarms of UFOs deployed from an orbiting mothership...

Indeed.

I tried to suggest a Dropship or Orbital Factory as an alternative to the Unit Cannon a couple of months ago, but apparently it was premature to speak about. But if tweaked properly, it can really give us the illusion of a proper Dropship, avoiding the technical issues related to load/unload multi units.

Perhaps times are more mature now. Anyway, it would be awesome to have something similar in game.

please no ... just no ... come on we are speaking here about basic transportation ...
are you seriously telling me we can´t have that? if it takes time to do it fine so be it i can wait but i personaly rather not have such long setup strategies for getting armies elsewhere like teleporters every time but options that allow for more fluid maintanance of reinforcements ... lose your teleporter - that maintanance is gone, lose your unitcannon - it is gone as well, lose your pelican - no big deal because you can throw out a hundred more in a short time unless you lose all your pelicans and t2 airfactories ... only then you lose that maintanance .... but as said the pelican is air only ..
and the austreus as i posted before is totaly illsuited for quick massarmytransportation in its current state ...
imo we realy need a unit for each air and ground ... because otherwise games will continue to have a lot of downtime between big pushes or just simply come to a stall because players are not able to reinforce quick enough ..
orbital factories take so much effort away imo, yes sure you need control of the orbit first but once you outproduced your enemy in avengers and dont need to care too much about his umbrellas what else would be there to stop you building factory after factory and just flood him? i dont want to HAVE to always build a beachhead ...
i want to be able to get ground and airunits over to the enemy without needing a building in enemy territory first... and i want a LOT of ground and airunits to get over ...


@KNight

even better! i don´t need ramps nor hills or other blocking terrain to enjoy my game when i still have the unitrooster for it ... that´s why starcraft has custom maps ...
who says you can´t enjoy a flat islandmap that is fully about rushing ?

if thats the case then they shall not allow such a system to be setup in the first place ... but appearantly they do ... so that to me says they want us to be able to get armies between bigger non orbiting planets ...
and i don´t want to play a match/systemsetup i can´t finish ... i want that match/systemsetup to be finishable and if that is again not possible then it shouldn´t be allowed to be made ...

knowing supcom that is not how uber wants to approach that issue and we see it already with the austreus an pelican ... it wont be such a "put invisible units in cargobay" solution like supcom 2 did ... and imo that is good

I would PREFER some kind of transport with actual visible units clamped to the underside or something - word on the street is that they're having trouble getting the code for that sort of thing to work, though. So we may have to make do with transports with internal storage.

it doesn´t have to be the answer ... but it just would be reeeeaaaly nice to have it as an propper option (not like it is now because that is a hell of a difficulty to pull that of)
i mean come on .. first orbital war between 2 nonorbiting planets were each player tries to get his orbital force to the other planet in order to siege/block it ...
then come orbital aircraftcarriers that unload bombers and interceptors into the air layer of the targetplanet to help get a propper landingzone ...
quickly after that you get your trooptransports to get and keep a foothold while bringing in further reinforcements until you finaly have your teleporters or/and factories up ...
BAAM unitflood more bots more tanks more build capacity more options ... all that with the help of trooptransports and aircraftcarriers .... .... and maybe AN-vehicles
yea this will have a good ammount of snowball to it BUT you can do it ...
or just go directly for a multigroundunitdrop ... but let us have that with the propper transportoption ..


the problem though with "drop"ships (as in drop units from orbit) as i posted before those would be too abuseable to on-comms-head unitdrops imho ... no matter if vangaurds, booms or levelers ...

MrTBSC, you're quoting me out of context, go back and read through the conversation to see exactly what I was talking about.

Mike