Ideas for units

You forget that hovercrafts cost more and tend to be slightly worse than their counterparts (or at least should if they dont). The point is there is a trade off for that extra ability making them one of several legitimate available choices.

Heh, yes. I apologize for not quoting you properly but I couldn't for the life of me find the post again when I went looking.

It's a good idea, I liked it. Had to make sure it got into this thread somehow.

It was in that list of unit ideas i was making but no one really seemed to be looking at that so i stopped updating it.

While I find cloak fields are interesting, this idea has a couple of problems. One cannot simply cloak something another player already has a base on. Invisible asteroid bombardments sound a bit over-kill. Maybe just radar jamming/cloaking of a certain area. that makes all the structures and units invisible, but not the planet itself.

Also:

Deployable units in general. Deploying could give a unit a variety of bonuses, such as more range or more defense, a repair aura or making the unit just able to fire.

Well, if you read my original post, you'd see that I said you can only cloak things you have captured completely (say, taken over the planet), and that they would become visible if you approached them (i.e. TA stealth, but over an area) very closely (i.e. closer than most units normal LOS). Plus, seeing as TA had insane energy costs for just cloaking 1 unit, cloaking an entire planet would be extremely expensive; though if you have control of a whole planet, you are bound to have some insane resources.

To address the elephant in the room of this very cool idea, how does one target an invisible planet? without the knowledge of about where it is, you would relly on luck to pick it up with advanced sensors that tend to have shorter range. in the mean time the owner has an unstobable base to amass troops for the inevitable suprise tidal wave of robots (even if 90% of the planet is fusion reactors).

Although i suppose if you required the power output of more than the planets space to support it things could work but with something that size we would be talking about millions of power (or much much more). giving you the weakness of you reappear if they strike where you are visible, but really whats the point beyond gimmicky coolness.

This seems something for single player scenarios that we almost certainly wont be getting

Why are you so negative :s

Gravity, and I think that a player would start with knowledge of where the planets are in a system.

1) An anti-radar cruise missile, that when launched to an area would divert it course to intercept active radar installations.

2) On the walking land mine bot, I would like it to be self-replicating. It would best be used in an area after there has been a battle. It would: reclaim wreckage, build more of it's self, and slowly expand outward. It would be an area denial tool, however it needs to be able to chain react :twisted:

Exactly, just fire a rocket into the star system and note down any unusual gravametric phenomena that throws its trajectory offcourse

As I am a fan of giant structures I would like something like a space elevator.

The space elevator could bring units from the surface of a planet to its space station and loads it into transports. The space station could also be used to construct orbital units like satelites. Maybe you could attach advanced radar or deep space observation on it.
On the ground you should be able to combine it with factories for an automatic transport to space. Then you load into the transports ships and invade an enemy planet. Th transports could use to type of unloading. Drop the units into the atmosphere or drop the whole ship. The first method would keep the transports in a save distance and you could use them again for bringing new troops to the battlefield. BUt the units would be spread out and very vournable to enemy AA fire.
The second method would be a fast drop and sacrifice the transport. With this the units would be standing together and having additional damage through the impact.

The difference between a elevator and a massdriver like in the video of PA is basicly the distance of travel for the units and you could bring bigger units into landing operations.

Made a fast sketch for the hole thing..

Spy units that are actually useful because in TA the Parasite and its ilk could be detected even when cloaked which made them useless. Id like to drop something from orbit that could commit sabotage [cloak when it lands for instance]. It could capture your units/factorys and provide intel when you aren't looking. Steal your metal and shoot it back to the enemy base on another planet?

Id also like to maybe see some buildings turn into units not necessarily with guns. So the metal storage could suddenly rise up and start shooting or more simply a factory could actually drive away from the base ala Terrans in Starcraft. Moving factories anyway?

flying aircraft carriers would be pretty cool
(or a 'carrier' type transport that could bring a large amount of air units/land units planet to planet, acting as a mobile base- without having to put those giant engines on a moon)

making entire planets movable with giant engines would be epic

On the planetary cloaking debate, I was kind of leaning towards the idea of cloaking all units and structures on the planet, not the planet itself.

Naturally, there would also need to be some detection options as well.

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I'm kind of assuming a bit that this will be an option. Asteroids can certainly be moved, but moons and planets should be too. It is just a question of scale. the larger it is, the more thrust you need to move it.

Moving planets should be possible, but it should not be cheap or easy.

Yes we definitely need space elevators. I think it would be very strategically interesting. For a reasonably large investment it would dramatically reduce the cost of transporting units off planet so once you take a planet it could be set up as a factory world. It's also a powerful single point of failure and those are always fun.

Off planet activity can afford to be expensive early game because the space elevator would make large scale activity viable later on. I wouldn't want this to be a no-brainer construction though "well 20 mins in better get space elevator". The ability to project units cheaply should still be expensive and there should be good alternate options.

With the orbital stretch, (or without ) maybe add an orbital unit cannon to that. The devs said a unit cannon on the moon fire at the planet as an example, but not the other way around, which makes sense. If you have an unit canon in orbit+space elevator(or other transport), it could be possible I think

has anyone thought about suggesting customization like they had in warzone 2100

Dust scrambler? Covers the planet in thick clouds. You would know somethings there but not actually what's there.

The problem is that they could all be detected by any unit which made them ineffective as scout/spy units although they did have some tactical value if you could manage to get them to cloak an attack wave in transit.

If cloaking is included in PA, I am hoping that they will limit detection to select units so it isn't a worthless feature as it was in TA/SC.

Space elevators in the middle of a war is a really bad idea. All it takes is someone to cut the cable and suddenly you have a massive KEW strike on your own planet, and your elevator is gone.