New Unit Suggestions

Sub Commander

• Has a nanolathe slightly less effective than the commander
• builds regular and advanced units
• Has energy and metal storage built-in
• volatile upon death
• Self defense laser
• Cloak ability (toggle)
• Costs a fortune
• (optionally) Upgradeable (ie. choose 1 additional ability from the following and upgrade the sub-commander to have it)
  • Uber Gun
  • Resource Generator
  • Personal Teleport

- Teleporters (galactic gates) have been pretty much confirmed by Neutrino

- You're talking radar scramblers? Or fake units?

- Neutrino has also mentioned 'directional' shields, and other such specialised defensive stuff, but bubbles I believe are absolutely out of the question at the moment

I'm talking about fake radar signatures. In supreme commander, there was some units that emitted 5 or 6 times their radar signature, making the enemy believe that a big attack was incoming.

I think it's pretty clear that this is not a valid unit suggestion as we will not have upgrades for units. Also the subcommander is pretty much superior to the commander in every way, as well as the ability to produce more than 1. This pretty much diminishes the role for the commander in the medium to late game.

Also are you actually saying that you want this unit to be able to produce units as a leveler on the spot without a factory? Or are you accidentally confusing units with buildings?

Giant "King Kong" robot with no guns, just stomping and picking up and throwing. Would be vulnerable to fast units (especially bombers) Blow up like a commander, could heal itself by "hibernating" on top of a metal spot or eating enemy units/buildings.

Not very scientific, but it would be fun as hell.

Perhaps not even controllable by the creating force, just doesn't attack them, instead it wanders around and creates havoc once built. AI only.

I think it's better to go the extra half step and just make it a full blown commander. They gotta come from somewhere.

really expensive lives?

So scramblers. I've not seen anything confirming or denying them for PA but my pfennig's worth: they weren't all that useful.
They were annoying but it was patently obvious that they were fake in supcom, because of how they moved, and extremely easy to guess the 'real' signature, as it was smack bang in the middle of the cluster.

So unless there is a way to improve on that (I doubt it on Uber's budget, and we're also talking in 3D now, which makes it all the more difficult) I don't think it's worth considering.

They were pretty obvious because they had such predictable patterns. If their patterns were a little cleverer, then I could see them being quite useful. Particularly when encouraging enemies to waste shots of expensive weapons such as nukes, catapults or lobbers.

For example, instead of making them just be a group slaved in movement to the original, what if they were modeled as a cloud of individual units, each with it's own pathfinding, and mobility, but no actual model or ability to attack? When giving a move command to the jammer, they would flow, flock and path around obstacles and actually look like a genuine unit blob.

Or alternatively, what if stationary jammers actually mimicked bases. For example, placing signatures on mass points, a few moving points clustered around stationary points (factories), lines of points, and a variety of other common patterns.

I don't know how hard this would be from a dev standpoint, or how computationally expensive, but I reckon we'd see a lot more intelligence and counterintelligence gameplay if jamming looked reasonable.

Agree with all of the above. If the scenarios you envision were possible, intel and counter-intel could become very interesting indeed, particularly at a multi-planetary level! It would be great to have some R.U.S.E.-level shenanigans.

However, as I mentioned, I think that time and money are going to severely restrict this sort of thing, at least out of initial release. I fear for that level of complexity, you'd need to have someone make an 'Intel Warfare' mod.

Spoofers will always rely on the simple idea that your opponent is an idiot and hasn't ever played the game before. It looks pretty on paper, but in practice spoofers don't work well because the interface has to be clean and easy to understand.

Stealth is forever. A unit your enemy can't see will always be impossible to see, no matter if he's a lowly noob or a supreme master gosu. In fact it's such a simple and efficient mechanic that I'm kind of surprised there aren't any stealth units yet.

should I have put the word Optionally in bold? You seemed to have missed that.

Wrong again. "Has a nanolathe slightly less effective than the commander." Sure he can build advanced units, but he also explodes violently when he dies and is super expensive. You can spam them about as much as you could spam killer asteroids. I see this unit as being a Support Commander. As in, they support your commander. Heading up construction on far flung worlds or close to the front line.

Are there any non-factory units in the game so far that can do that? Your the only 1 confused. Sub Commanders are builders and they build buildings, not units. Yes I imagine they could build a Catapult or Lobber on the spot. If they just start building buildings by themselves with no support and just a sub commander and that ends up killing you then you pretty must deserve to lose IMO.

When making unit suggestions, then I would atleast try and use the information given by the developers. Especially this thread https://forums.uberent.com/threads/confirmed-features-list-2-0.44950/page-9#post-781977 is a nice summary of a lot of the information that we know is (not) going to be in the game.

Just because he has a slightly less effective nanolathing beam and is very expensive to produce, doesn't mean that the the positives balance out the negatives. Things like being able to build advanced tech, cloaking and is upgradable with a choice of several things including a person teleporter make it a much better unit than the commander itself. If one commander is going to be just as expensive as making a "killer asteroid" then why build it in the first place, the cost far outweighs the advantages.

I was simply asking for clarification about it's intended function, because you clearly said units and not buildings. No need to call me confused.

Sorry, supcom counted buildings as units for unit counts which was where i was coming from with that. Basically modeled that unit after sub-commanders in Supcom FA but decoy commanders were in TA as well so PA would be the 1st game in the line to not have a unit like this which would be very disappointing...

Sorry, I'm still not seeing the point of the sub commander. It sounds just like a Commander except with slightly superior numbers. How droll.

There's also going with just a plain old different implementation, here's an old idea I had;

Instead of trying to trick the player, Jamming units should embrace the fact they can't and just create hundreds of false signatures to the point where within it's radius you can't identify anything by radar.

Mike

Sounds like a great idea! I'll take 50.

Code:

knight has disconnected
bobucles wins the match

Woo! De-fault! De-fault!

Not sure if anyone has said this already, but has anyone thought of changing the basic form of the commander?
all the ones I've seen are of the usual bipedal design
perhaps something more like a heavily armored scorpion? (eg. zoids death stinger)

Changing the Commander's form was the kickstarter's $1K backer bonus. There's going to be at least a hundred unique Comms out there, but we don't know when Uber will have time to start making them.

Shadow Maker:

T2 counter-intelligence unit

Unlike other counter Intel units that focus on stealth and cloaking technology's, the Shadow Maker rather then rendering units invisible to the many eyes of the enemy prefers a technique of blinding the enemy's sensors so they are unable to operate anyway. Through a series of complex devices and operations the Shadow is able to effectively disable the visual sensors of enemy units that come into its radius, making them blind and forcing their reliance on external spotters and detectors in-order to aim at targets and navigate the terrain.

In special operations the Shadow makes as a excellent escort for Fabricator units, able to keep them away from the prying eyes of enemy scout units and raiders.

In the thick of combat the Shadow is a effective escort unit for traditional combat units, enabling them to surround enemy forces in the fog of war, preventing them from returning fire, and even enabling long ranged units a great deal of immunity from detection that has become so drastically important in a war where you can be attacked from any direction.

The Shadow Maker as a part of a raiding force, or as a part of a combined army is a excellent addition to a commanders forces, protecting friendly forces from counter attack, and hiding the movements and composition of an attacking army.

Buy them today!