I was thinking about why a commander explodes and your army goes with it, so i came up with a good explanation if theres room for implementation, i think the commander should in lore contain a "regulator core", which regulates the power generation of energy plants, and the power usage of other units, upon destruction the power generators begin to overload (Nuclear Power), explaining the cascade effect (If you notice you have about 5 seconds with your units to kill something), what if this was somehow also connected to gameplay, the regulator core being buried so deeply in the commander (As it protects it itself from explosion) that it cant be easily removed or removed at all, costing a ton or not being possible to be removed. I just think its a good idea for lore.
I covered some of my thoughts in this thread. The Basic idea is that the units aren't robots, they're essentially just giant RC tanks, themselves not being able to do anything on thier own, so they self-destruct when they lose connection to thier commander in order to not be "turned" by another commander. Mike
They could just be trade federation battle droids? I.e. They have quite a sophisticated AI, but the commander is the highest thing in their hierarchy so they simply deactivate when it is destroyed because they have no reason to carry out orders. Doesn't really make sense that any faction in the lore is just one commamder snipe away from being completely destroyed.
But are factions composed of singular Commanders? Don't forget that the Commanders were created by someone else, possibly to simply do the dirty work, in which case it could make sense to have it set up like that as a safety measure really. Mike
The army is just an extension of the commander's body. If your head gets cut off, none of your fingers and toes can survive very long.
it is a scorched earth mechanic to prevent enemy getting the resource of your remaining intact army. It is because your commander controls them and loss signal is self destruct by default. It is because the commander does regulate power like glados regulated it in aperture labs and without regulation you get nuclear power unmaintained and meltdown. Perhaps it is even sympathetic because the units share the same mind and exploding causes the units to visualize the death so well they follow its action. I considered lore and all these can be true, possibly at once.
Well the most resource intensive part of building a giant death robot would presumably be the computer running a highly complicated AI. So as a highly efficient war machine, with ample raw materials but perhaps limited fine manufacturing it makes sense to have robots behaving as Mike described, as giant RC weapons controlled by a single hyper powerful computer (the commander). This lets you build the complicated, fragile components in safety, and confine field manufacturing to simple metal chassis, weapons and receivers for broadcasted orders (presumably heavily encrypted) I don't have any real knowledge of what I'm talking about here, so d that was total bs please call me out on it
The Commader have a Nuclear Reactor, but it don't give too many energy because you need to make Metal from nothing
Plus a vague sense that this game is set in the same fictional universe as TA, but at a different time period. No mention of the ARM or CORE though, so maybe that's just my nostalgia.
