Something I've wanted for ages is a simple T2 bot unit that can go from the ground layer to the orbital and back to the ground. Ideally this unit would be built in the T2 bot factory for slightly less cost than a slammer. It would have an anti-air missile and a high ROF medium range laser weapon with moderate DPS. The unit should lose handily to any solid ground vs ground engagements and function almost as a tier 1.5 unit in terms of metal:damage ratio. The idea is that this unit can be built in groups of 5-10 in the mid-game to open up much more quick interplanetary harassment. This way even if a player is isolated on a single planet, these units could be used to quickly and easily launch sorties against mex fields and fabber clusters. Overall I believe this would make interplanetary warfare a more smooth curve that transitions naturally from our early game raiding. In general the unit should not be worth the metal cost for direct ground to ground warfare, but rather be something you can pump out around the early-mid game to do some harassment on other plants. It should have a quick inter-orbital transit time. I am open to it being built in the T1 bot factory, but only if it costs at least 1.5x more than the t1 bots.
A ground unit can't be given an astraeus or nuke like ability to go between planets? Doesn't have to be especially pretty.
Poo. Well then Uber, consider this request to have this be modable. Could someone explain why it is impossible, for curiosities sake?
First lets look at the Astraeus. It's a unit that can pick up other units. The only way it differentiates between the air transport is that it's an orbital unit (not much difference seeing as orbital acts very much like air), and that it can travel between planets. There's nothing to see here. You could try and give a ground unit a "system_velocity_multiplier", however IF that works you will have issues with units arriving on water and probably in features as well, along with all the other issues of unit being able to teleport around the planet.
Yeah I guess I was wondering if it was possible to 'swap' unit types. Like when on the ground the unit has the surface tag, but when you select it and send it to another planet it swaps for the orbital tag and just takes off. When it arrives, it sits in the atmosphere until given (or queued with) a command on the surface. Then it swaps back and falls to earth. Sounds like there are not hooks for anything like this though.
This may actually be possible (I don't see why not). I turned a ground based teleporter into an orbital one. When I built it, it instantly fell out of orbit and landed on the ground; however, by taking JSON script from another orbital unit, I was able to give it a stationary orbit. I believe this same concept could be applied to what you're saying. Give a ground troop some of the orbital transporter characteristics and, BAM! PS: Here's a snippet of code I added to the teleporter to give it a stationary orbit: Code: "spawn_layers": "WL_Orbital", "physics": { "radius": 5, "push_class": 50, "gravity_scalar": 0.001 }, "recon": { "observer": { "items": [ { "channel": "sight", "layer": "orbital", "radius": 100, "shape": "sphere" } ] } },
