Idea: Mobile Teleporter

In a late game, it is extremely difficult to invade a planet.
The planet may be locked by many orbital and air units.
There are only few methods to invade it,
such as orbital lander (Astraeus), unit cannon, and teleporter.

Orbital lander only work for early games,
it is very fragile to air and orbital units.
The unit cannon has another problem.
The landing unit can't stand too long under the enemy air superiority.
They may not be able to build the teleporter in time.
Even if they build the teleporter, the teleporter can be destroyed quite quickly.
Using orbital fabricator to build the teleporter also encounters this problem.
This problem is more critical for planet with large water area since the teleporter can only transmit the land units now.

So I propose this idea: Mobile Teleporter.

• It is can be built by orbital fabricators on orbital layer.
• It is a high price, high HP, and slow unit.
• It can move and cross planets.
• It can be dropped to air layer, land, and water surface.
• It can only connect to another teleporter with same layer condition, such as air-to-air, land-to-land, water-to-water, or orbital-to-orbital.
• It can connect to T1 teleporter under land-to-land condition.

This unit can reduce the difficulty to invade planet.
The basic concept is not to build the teleporter under enemy fire.
Instead, the teleporter can be built first, then it will be sent to battlefield later.

This idea has been muted a few times in various forms and I agree with you it would be a nice option. The closest was a gate that would be built in orbit in a 'drop pod' then when deployed would crash to the planet and deploy a fixed land teleporter.

That wasn't initially technically possible, although thinking about it now that we have the unit cannon (complete with the ability to spawn units on death) perhapse it could now work?

Calling the modders! @KillerKiwiJuice , @nicb1, @stuart98 orbital drop pot teleporter plz!

I would absolutely love a teleporter for orbital units.

I'll see what I can do.
I know building are really hard to use that way. No promise

I hope it is a general purpose teleporter to unify the transportation of all kinds of units,
including land, water, air, and orbit units.
This functionality is very important for invading a planet with large water surface.
I have had a game on a custom map with multiple water planets,
and both sides were unable to invade the water planet of enemy.
The game turns to spam a lot of nuke, anti nuke, and game ender.
This problem is due to current teleporter can only transmit the land units.

My idea is more greedy than the drop pod teleporter.
Its shape will be like a gate or orbital factory with the bottom of naval building.
So it can be placed on both land and water surface as the air factory.
It also has the engines of gunship, so it can hover in the air or slowly fly back to the orbit.
This also solves the requirement to transmit the air and orbital units.

If the air units can pass through the current teleporter, I think the ability to hover in air can be taken away.

About its price, it should be more expensive than the unit cannon.

Well I think modded gate can transport anything you like. Uber decided to only allow land to prevent seriously OP air invasions (imagine 1000 gunships or bombers pouring through a gate, you'd not have a chance). I don't think there's anything technical to prevent it. Water is another issue- you can gate water to water ok but I don't think there's any tech to prevent a ship going from a water gate and targeting a land gate the other end (apart from the fact the ship will get stuck as soon as it exits) which is why water gate isn't in imo.

If you like i can try using the model of the orb factory and make a mobile tele

I also consider the water to land connection should be invalid.
The legal transmission should be land-to-land, water-to-water, orbit-to-orbit, and air-to-air.
I don't want to send a ship into the space.(Though a battleship on orbit may be awesome )
There are two methods to solve this issue.

1. Constraint on teleporter, a teleporter can only connect to another one with the same placement condition.
2. Constraint on units, units can't enter the teleporter if it can't survive in the condition of the other side.

The ability of air-to-air transmission may be too overpowered, I think this is another balance issue.
This problem also similarly happens on orbital units now.
Player can send a lot of SXX to assassinate a commander if he know where the enemy commander is.
The commander is extremely fragile in late game.
I don't know how to solve this problem.
Maybe allow the players to build the secondary commander as backup or fake commander as dummy?

Yeah TA had 'decoy commanders' to prevent easy sniping. It also had the ability to 'cloak' a commander, although only with a lot of power (which meant you needed to cripple your opponents energy supply before you would be able to find the commander).

I'm hopeful something like these may get added to PA eventually, although again it's probably down to the amount of extra work required to add in a new system for 1 unit that has prevented it so far. That said I don't see an obvious reason against a 'decoy' commander option (it would be easy enough to do I would have thought, although maybe with the number of different types perhaps not?).

decoy commander should be easy enough, I'll see what I can do about that.

EDIT: the real awkward thing here is the number of them as you said, a separate mod would have to be used I think for each commander, unless there is a way to dynamically change which model is uploaded in the server mod based on lobby selection.

also, since you probably wouldn't want a decoy commander to be the same as a real one, to avoid com bombing and other nightmares, I think it would be fairly easy to write a client side mod that would "unmask" the decoys, defeating the purpose.

hmmm, and interesting pickle...

While I have always preferred the idea of building a base on the planet being invaded, such as air forces and artillery cannons while importing the ground troops and orbital units.

Making invading easier could be good....in the later parts of the game, so we can get the AI actually competing on multiple planets with something other then sneaky teleporters.

i rather have static telegates for naval and orbital and for everything mobile multiunittransports for air, orbital and hovercrafts ... if you want to set up a teleporter then it should be build and stay in its respective layer ..

Its funny because this is an idea I had for the Imperial legion a while back.

Was planning to basically do the equivalent of a unit cannon that can launch teleporters which can be linked to a standard teleporter.
Infact I was talking to kiwi about doing this just before.

Great minds think alike @cdrkf

EDIT:

Spoiler: Convo with kiwi

Question about spawning units on death...

If a unit is not exploding by choice (e.g. impact), but by being shot down, does that also trigger the unit spawn? I feel like it shouldn't, but I assume it does?


On topic: I actually feel like there is a whole class of units deployable from orbit which would contribute a lot. Not only deployable portals, but also tower defenses or a "orbital mine thrower" (latter one actually spawning multiple mines on deployment).

i honestly feel that would be like a cheap way of invading ... ... hey throw everything down from orbit ... screw touching ground in the first place ... sry but i am totaly against that ... especialy considering that you have units already that can attack ground from orbit ...

Which are actually more troublesome, since you require any of the dedicated hard counters to even be able to fight back against them. Bringing the battle back down to a common layer, and using orbital mostly as movement layer only sound more reasonable.

Not exactly related but since legend modders are in the place let's go :
From a technical perspective, is it definitly impossible to mod a multi units transport unit ?
As far as i remember there's a restriction in Vanilla PA. Could it be worked around ?

Actually there's no restriction; it's simply a matter of increasing a capacity number. The only issue is that area commands get messed up.

bringin in mobile teleporters or allowing more building stuff from orbital does the opposite .. you may need orbital transition just once for that .. that way orbital travel may as well less relevant ..

the idea of teleporters is to cut orbital traveltime in the first place .. as such realy it should be limited to just those be it surface, naval or orbital but they should be tatic imo

otherwise i still stand by that multiunittransports should become you main way of invading ..
i still stand by that the first to touch orbital and ground should not be a structure or turret but a unit ...
unit cannons are one way for that but they are exrtremly resource and time intensive for that ..

the problem with being able to build stuff from orbit to let it drop down is you can´t realy stop it from happening
if you don´t build anything antiorbital anyway .. and while anchors may be troublesome they aren´t realy that powerfull .. however f.e. if you have something like a teleporter being able to drop down .. you may just build several of them and swarm your enemy .. .. this is a bit too powerfull imo ..

Multiunit transports will not solve anything, they will require just as much effort to use as the astreaus, thanks to area commands.

What we really need is make astreaus cheaper and stronger so using them in bulk is more feasible. The risk of course is making inferno/vanguard drops too easy. Umbrellas still need to make a mess of them, but air units shouldn't be able to chew through them before they reach the ground and unload like now.