It's time to talk unit ideas

T2 Grinder vehicle - no weapons heavy armor and moderately fast, but can run over everything that isn't commander size and can slowltly grind commander sized units and structures to pieces. Maybe it generates metal when grinding.

Also I'd like to add his feature:rebuilding wreckages. It's qn opd feature from sup com where if you build the exact same thing over that wreckage thnb you get a head start on production. For example if you build a bot factory over a wreckage of a bot factory you start building from 30% instead of from 0%.

is it to late to ask for a guardian/punisher -lookalike double barreld rapid fire artillery cannon tower ?
proposing a change in how the current pelter works, more like a high powered long range (like anti naval) slow firing coastal gun, and the above mentioned rapid fire (like good ol´Ta fashion) artillery for the time you need them...

Pelters aren't slow fire anymore. They fire once every two seconds.

Had a thought on what might be a good (and advantageous) gimmick for the adv factories.

Since they are so big, and the units they seem to produce not so much bigger than basic units, would it be better to produce two at once? (with the construction power of the factory split between them so they produce at half the rate but you're always working on two). The image i have in my head is the adv vehicle plant, where the unit start, construction at the back and slowly rolls forward as its constructed (imagining some kind of production line). As soon as its moved forward far enough the next unit in queue starts constructing behind it. Heres the tricky bit when the first unit is in roll off the factory would immediately be starting the next unit. this way the factories are more efficient and deserving of the advanced moniker

Battlestation Essentially a big, expensive orbital Turret, can only move (barely) within the orbit, good Vts laser satellites and space fighters
Can not dock with Jumpship

GunStation Essentially orbital artillery that can fire at any planet in the system, highly inaccurate Kinetic (Enormous Railgun provides lots of damage to an area, might hit anywhere on the facing side of the target planet however) Takes lots of energy, and some mass for each projectile fired. Projectiles take a while to reach the target planet.(Made by Orbital Constructor) Can not dock with Jumpship

Orbital Yard large orbital building, can build larger orbital units. Can't move once built. Made by Orbital Constructor)
Can not dock with Jumpship


Orbital Constructor Can build orbital buildings, extremely expensive to build (made on planets) Can board Orbital Carriers.
Can not dock with Jumpship

Orbital Destroyer. Good vs. orbital buildings, can launch long distance missiles, weak vs. space fighters or other mobile space units. (Made by Orbital Yard)
Can dock with Jumpship

Orbital Cruiser Good vs. orbital units, weak vs. orbital buildings (ie long range but weak shots, can shoot Orbital Destroyer missiles down, can build anti nuke missiles) (Made by Orbital Yard)
Can dock with Jumpship

Orbital Carrier Can carry up to 8 Space fighters/Orbital Bombers, or 4 Orbital Constructors. Can repair them if they are docked with it (at a cost of course)
Can dock with Jumpship

Orbital Bomber Made the same way as space fighters, strong vrs space buildings and Orbital Battlestations/Destroyers/Carriers, weak vs. Spacefighters and Orbital Cruiser.s
Can not dock with Jumpship

Orbital Dropship A space unit transporter. Up to 12 T1 or 4 T2 units or up to 2 Orbital Landers (with units on them) are carried by this transport between planets. This unit has light defenses, but is relatively weak. (Made by Orbital Yard) Units are dropped from orbit, the dropship can not retrieve them, they must be retrieved by either Orbital elevators or orbital elevators.
Can dock with Jumpship

Orbital Battleship Has strong firepower and is tough, can perform orbital bombardment, is Very slow and extremely expensive. Weak vrs Destroyer shots or Orbital Bomber shots.
Can dock with Jumpship

Gas Planet Extractor a floating blimp like building that can be build on an orbital yard, sent to gas giants, and will extract mass from them. Expensive, yields lots of mass, but weak. (think the mass version of a solar station) Lots of damage to a large area around this if it's destroyed (i.e. put Battlestations etc. near it)

Orbital Elevator Very expensive building that goes from ground to orbit, useful for quickly moving ground units to orbital transports. Uses a lot of energy. Build by Orbital Constructors. Orbital Dropships can dock with it. There is a large defenseless station at it's top that can hold up to 48 T1 units or 16 T2 units.

Jumpship. Can create a wormhole Allowing much faster travel between planets. Up to 6 capital ships (ships built on a space yard) can dock with it. Highly expensive. Defenseless. Massive. Can take a lot of damage though. Jumpships can teleport between planets, but require a massive amount of energy to create the wormhole (you'll NEED solar satellites) Jumpships are extremely important for this form of PA, they allow you to move a significant force to the target planet

Jumpyard Huge orbital building, can only build Jumpships or Jumpstations. Built by Orbital Constructors. If you have to ask how expensive it is, you can't afford it.

Jumpstation Similar to a jumpship, a jumpstation is a building that must be constructed then linked with a another Jumpstation using a stable wormhole, once constructed, capital ships (and their cargo) can move between those two locations much quicker and for a lower amount of energy than a jumpship would take. The Jumpstation moves like a capital ship (ie slowly) to the target orbit then unfolds.
Once the stable wormhole is constructed, it draws a fair amount of energy (and a lot for jumping ships) if the energy runs out and the wormhole collapses, then there is a massive explosion at both ends. The jumpstations can not move or unlink after a stable wormhole is created without destroying themselves (and likely nearby ships)


Note, I know they've mentioned there won't be deep space combat any time soon. These aren't officially deep space units, however they're orbital units, they make planetary assault more likely and more fun.

Overall, current travel between planets would be doubled in time, Space Fighters or Laser Satellites can no longer do it (they must travel in a carrier) This is not for a fast game, this is for the strategy lover.

Maybe one should allow the Jumpship and Jumpstation to store the energy needed over a longer time. Like a factory which can be set to "no consume" and just pauses the current project. That way one could -if needed- start storing the necessary energy when you're in a plus and if things go wrong dirtside you can stop the jump generator to free energy to whip out more units.
Otherwise: Very cool ideas!

I'd like to see unit ideas limited to problem-solvers. That is, the game has problem X, here is a unit which can help solve that problem.

If we just throw in units based on cool ideas, we may have the same trouble that original TA developed, which was introducing units that were, themselves, the cause of problems. They didn't solve anything but they threw off balance. They were cool but they broke the game.

Agreed, but you've got to admit, it does seem like an awesome idea for a mod.

Exactly, they would essentially need to build up the energy. This way the actual travel between locations would be fast, but you wouldn't be able to do it very often overall unless you have a HUGE amount of excess energy.

This would keep them from being OP, factions without jumpships could still move their capital ships between planets, but once you got jumpships or jumpstations, you could respond quicker or make surprise attacks. Overall travel capability would be reliant on defending your energy building capability. Attacking those could cause jumpstations (very expensive) to destroy themselves, and could essentially strand jumpships where they were till energy was built up.

So for example, an emery ends a force to one of your side's planets to bombard it with two battleships, a carrier, and a cruiser for defense. You send a jumpship with 3 destroyers and a cruiser to their solar station fields and maul their stations. Now a large part of their fleet is stuck in orbit (they can move back to one of their own planets still, but it will take a while)

This also gives Gas Planets a reason for existing, (Gas Planet Extractors) Their mass bases.

Another option might be to have smaller planets take less energy to jump to or from, making them less resource bases, but good for fleet locations. Gas planet defenses on the other hand would be expensive to build up, but potentially necessary in the late game.

These systems provide a use for late game mass and energy needs, Currently it's almost limitless in late game, there aren't enough things to buy. Large orbital units and buildings would be highly expensive, but very fulfilling to use (while a laser satellite is all well and good, an orbital Battleship is...more

Well, my idea here is that it's difficult to make planetary assaults currently against a well defended planet. Some of these units provide that capability, and also give the player more flexibility in making a force. Think of a Battleship as a T2 Laser Satellite, a Gunstation as a way of breaking fortress planets, Battlestations as local defenses for Solar Satellites, Gas Planet Extractors, GunStations, Orbital Yards, Planetary Elevators, and Jumpyards.

Current orbital fights are a bit sparse IMO, and I tried to design a force list that was balanced and needed a mix in order to be effective

I would like for different types of planets to provide different uses in the game.

EG
Metal Planets- Cheaper to jump from due to ancient technology, possibly localized specialized buildings that can be activated if you control certain areas. (eg asteroid defenses, localized teleportation, etc.) Poor source of mass and energy (it drains resources produced on it)
Lava Planets- Faster building on (so long as you have the resources) because everything is already half way there. (Forge Planets)
Gas Planets- Best source of mass, but not everything can be built on them. Take much less damage from asteroid hits/Gunstation hits, Nuclear Explosions, Ground units can not land hear, orbital and air only. (with Zeppelin warships possible)
Inner Planets (close to sun) better performance from solar stations
Outer Planets (far from sun) Worse performance from solar satellites
Terran Planets Standard
Ice Planets Standard
Tropical Planets Standard
Moon Planets cheaper Orbital Elevators and orbital construction. No air units, orbital units can go to air space.

Actually I wasn't responding to your idea in particular... just a general thought after perusing some of the 32 pages of this thread...

I do agree that planetary assault needs serious work. I'm pretty dubious about the whole space element of this game as currently implemented. I think I might actually prefer a Stargate style solution to try and keep the focus on ground combat. My fear is that in a long running, multi-planet game, ground combat will simply cease to matter at all and it will be all about orbital fighting and spamming orbital gear while ground factories go silent because the units simply aren't useful anymore.

Well we already know metal planets will have a benefit, in that they're supposedly going to be like big battlestations.

Good point, the way to keep ground combat to matter is to keep the resources there, and have good defenses for them that make getting metal feet on the ground necessary.

Potentially CAPTURABLE buildings might also make just bombarding them less necessary. While capturing a lowly T1 turret might not matter, getting some T2 factories captured would be good.

Mass is always going to need owning significant planetary surface to get stuff made. Having Mass sites also be destroyable by nukes or asteroid strikes would make capturing rather than destroying sometimes the better solution.
(eg I don't think lava should be something you can wade through even with the commander without taking damage, and an asteroid strike should make a large part of the planet it hits into lava., meaning the mass sites in that area are essentially gone.

Air transports capable of dropping land troops point blank into enemy bases and defenses are required. No land force will ever break a dug in defense without something that can carry them over the vast fields of fire.

It's called artillery or bombers. =p

This thing does not make ANY sense (gas planets == best for mass -> I loled)
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The last thing we need IMHO is even more artillery warfare.
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pack of X new units for space battles is IMHO unnecessary. Even if it'd ever be planned - it should me more of a separate expansion pack as it'd require dozens of balance tweaks. Personally I like the game with current approach: Orbital unit == satellite. Uber-battlestations bring nothing good into the game IMHO. Keep PA what PA was suppose to be - game focused around ground combat with orbital units being just additional favor - not be-all-end-all kind of ****.

I have a thread on this unit idea I've made. Here are the two models of it:

I think we need orbital transports specialized in carrying only large numbers of t1 units in order to invade planets. I'd say 10 or 20 t1 units per orbital transport. I don't know if the egg is already being made this way.

Unit Cannons and some form of transport ship are both confirmed as solutions to this; they'll enable storming enemy defenses on other planets, assaulting planets from orbit with gun-moons, and ultimately giving your factories an interplanetary range of use.

I do agree with your point on units as "problem-solvers", but any unit that doesn't cause some kind of problem for your opponent is going to be useless. Problems of disproportion, like being too cost-efficient or outplacing other units, are easier to prevent.

That word again "balanced", if it's unbalanced you throw in something bigger, escalate the destruction, something really brokenly powerful just gets a massive energy and mass price tag and becomes a game ender.
There are no problems that need to be solved if we don't make some, the key factor in all this is how do i blow his thing up using less resources than he used to make said thing. Throw in some spicy units that create problems, throw in their work arounds as units and we get a mixed bag on fun, a game of cat and mouse where we don't know what counters we need till we see their mystery unit play and neither will they; all the while the basic bread and butter units will be grinding against one another and we'll have to choose our X factor units wisely to turn the tide of losing fronts or press home advantages of successful plays.

Anyway my Unit idea would be a simple minefield, a flying robot that you tell to deploy where you want the minefield, it flies over it and then pops into a shower of shrapnel that are mines hiding them in the soil; the counter is simple, once you blunder into the minefield you can either shell it with free fire artillery to blow them up or suicide some cheap units onto it to clear the way. A minefield would be about the same cost as a basic laser turret and it's area about the same size as the fire radius of said turret and it would path as impassable for your units because it would do friendly damage, they are not smart triggered mines. The idea is to provide a one time surprise defensive advantage, either deterring the attacker or softening up their attacking forces and granting you the time to redeploy your own forces to meet the attackers head on as they wait for the minefield to be shelled away.