Teleporter + Cookie Clicker = Interesting Teleport System?

I was gonna say the exact same thing if you had replied with a big post! ;p

We are getting teleporters, we just don't know what flavour yet.

Mike

1. How many phases of the game will there be?
• E.g. tech tiers, economic tiers, scales of growth and risk, etc. Knowing this is the framework for every question that follows.

2. What methods of transportation will be available through the various phases of the game?
• Without knowing this, answering following questions could prove difficult.

3. At what phase in the game does teleportation become available?
• So we know which of the other methods of teleportation will be in play, what the economy is like, what other techs, what scale...

4. What demands will be put on teleportation, compared to the other methods of transportation?
• What makes it essential to the game's strategy? What features must it have? Will it need to teleport experimentals? Space fleets? Or will the game become a nuke and asteroid chucking match?

5. How would it serve those needs compared to other forms of transportation?
• What makes it unique and more valuable than the alternatives?

6. What costs should it place on the player for serving those needs?
• Now that we know the answer to all the other questions, we can finally ask this one. You're not designing teleportation in a vacuum, now are you? ...Don't answer that.


I'm not saying you need to answer these questions now. Each of them might be worthy of a thread in itself. But you certainly don't want to answer them in the wrong order, or you'll get a long thread with nothing in it.

I'll tackle this tomorrow, in fact I'll probably do 2 sets answers, one based on my ideal PA and a second set based on extrapolating from the Current stat of PA.

Also worth noting that my proposal here is just the underlying system, in theory it can be balanced to fit into many different roles within many 'varieties' of PA.

Mike

Not what I meant. I meant there is no need for a traffic/mass counter like in EVE for wormhole like tele-porters.
One can easily take out the portal on the other end with turrets and other defensive or offensive tactics. In EVE, wormholes are not destructible hence there need for mass counters which will most likely not be the case in PA.
Anyway, this whole discussion is hypothetical and it's a tad pointless in the current state of the game.

First the game needs to be stable and game-play needs to be fine-tuned/defined before adding more "features"and "units". Adding more features and units is a tactic used by majority of game publishers/developers (ie. SEGA, CA, EA and the likes) to wow people into buying a game, it does not improve game-play if game mechanics are not fixed or set in stone.

Personally I would prefer to see pathways and current units fixed and balanced before we add a whole bunch of other broken/OP/imbal features.

Thats' just my opinion and everyone is entitled to it (joke).

Yes. This. Otherwise teleporters are going to be a bit overpowered (imagine building an army of 500 Slammers and 500 levelers on planet A and transferring it in 1-2 minutes to planet b to steamroll your enemy). Teleporters should be considered a great advantage in lategame and should not become the ultimate OP mass transit system (in lategame you can use them to transfer medium sized armies at the most).

I have had a think about this. This is only way I see them working well and fitting into the game.

You need to build a gate on both planets. You turn on the gate and is sucks a large amount of power. Every unit that passes though costs a set energy amount. If you run out of energy the gate turns off. Friendly and enemy units can pass though both ways.

Now the question is, do you balance with massive metal costs, or with massive energy costs. I would like it to be energy. That way you can send a small trickle of units though with a poor economy, or you can flood the enemy planet with the full economic power of your planet.

They wouldn't be overpowered if there's no alternative, you have to have a mediocre mass transit system in place first before you can complain that this will be too good at it.

Currently all we have is an individual transit system, it's overly expensive and can't transport military units.

They wouldn't be overpowered if there's no alternative, you have to have a mediocre mass transit system in place first before you can complain that this will be too good at it.

Currently all we have is an individual transit system, it's overly expensive and can't transport military units.[/quote]
And the alternative to the Teleporter is just the Unit Cannon, which is fundamentally different as I've explained throughout the thread.

Mike

And the alternative to the Teleporter is just the Unit Cannon, which is fundamentally different as I've explained throughout the thread.

Mike[/quote]
we don't have a unit cannon yet.

And? We know the jist of how it works from the Pre-Viz and Dev comments.

Mike

could have said the same about the lander, but that's vastly different.

Off topic but shouldn't the unit cannon be a moon to planet launcher or on the same planet launcher????? Just doesn't seem feasible watching 50 dox float across a system.....

I think you are introducing unnecessary complexity with too many magic numbers and hidden multipliers.

The way I imagine teleporters

• Teleports one unit at a time
• Cooldown for N seconds (like factory roll off time)
• Consumes M energy per unit

Simple, easy to understand and works like everything else in the game.

I don't think the end result would be more intuitive honestly, the act of punching in the number and having to check first your current energy status is probably more awkward for the average player. Maybe doing something on a slider might be better. honestly if you're worried about having/needing a fail safe you could try having it that it stops teleporting if you run out of storage maybe.

1] Well, everything is sorted into 2 Tiers but isn't really set parameters for cost or anything, Cost is one of many balancing levers after all.
2] Well from what we know so far, The Single unit Lander, the Unit Cannon and the Teleporter. In PA's current state they are all Late game tools, Mid game for the Lander if you're left along and rush to Orbital. Ideally I'd like the Lander to be Early to Mid game, with the Unit Cannon and Teleporters being more of a Mid-Late game tools.
3] Well primarily Mid-to-Late game once you have multiple secure locations you would want to send units in-between.
4] It contrasts with the Unit cannon in terms of Range and it's ability to be used from within a Planet's Gravity well. So one could have an asteroid with factories and Unit Cannons, and also a Teleporter to help supplement the Asteroid's factory output with units from your main planet for example.
5] Teleporters function on the idea of "Instant Transmission", as I've said prior I don't mind if it moves units around in rapid succession but the point behind the exponential energy cost is to keep players from just build a huge army in the safest spot and teleporting it where ever it happens to be needed at a given time.
6] See 5] really and the OP.

That is the intent from my understanding.

And how does it work with the other Transport options? Does it need to be paired with another gate? Details man details!

Mike

The OP has a real fresh idea here that after some adjustments of said arbitrary numbers could come a long way.
First, I will let out my excitement on the idea, then I'll pitch in:
I am just imaging a halley sized gate made of two blocky semi-circles charging up and suddenly peeling reality open like an electric quantum taco.

Some thoughts on how this should sit in the game:

-Large building with room for units to manuever through the middle, as much or a little less space as a basic factory's width of movement room.

-After building the wormhole generator, it starts in a shut off state. Similar to using a halley, you pick a target and "engage" or for this device "lock". The gate is not activated, but where it will begin generating a portal is set. I have concerns on how accurate this should be allowed to be, but I have some proposals to counter this later down this post.

-Like knight was saying, the gate constantly draws power at a rate, and increases the amount of power required per unit pushed through. I was thinking that we could have a visual feedback to this, by having wormhole start very small, like a crack in space time etc, and it peels apart as the gate is stabilizing it. The visual feedback could go into direct relation to its power usage. The smaller the wormhole, the more power required as it is trying to stabilize a collapsing wormhole. The larger the wormhole, the less power it is using as it is a stable gate now. As units are pushed through the gate, the power usage would directly increase and the portal would begin to shrink. Send a massive batch through and you risk collapsing it completely, and having units on the other side without backup until you re-stabilize the gate. By doing it this way, the initial startup of a gate takes a considerable amount of energy. Maintaining the gate gets cheaper only if it is not in use.

-After a gate collapse, there would be a cooldown. So there is reward to careful usage, and punishment for sending a massive mob through.

-I like the idea of the gate not just bumping in units one at a time. It would be absolutely awesome to have a hoard of bots spewing out of the electric maw on the other side. This would also be more useful as an attack as 1 unit at a time means placing a turret on the end of an incoming wormhole that stabilized itself on your planet. The turret would just start popping units 1 at a time. This could also be governed by the size of the gate. So a fully stable gate could send in tanks 6 abreast, and as it drops in size, down to 1 abreast until collapsed.

-The wormhole on the target side should have equal visual feedback to what is being created. So a player would see the wormhole begin to develope, get some time to react. Attempt counter measures. etc. I also think it would be cool that the opposite end of the portal was a different colour. Perhaps blue going in and red going out. I just think it would be more menacing.

-If the location of the portals creation is to be dead accurate (which would solve any bad pathing such as it showing up in a mountain like some of the metal spots do), then perhaps a countermeasure building should be allowed. Similar to the anti-nuke, a few short range "Quantum Dampeners" (has a ring to it, thats all ) could be built around your base. These should suck up alot of power at a constant rate in idle situations to prevent a wormhole from stabilizing. HOWERVER, they dont stop the initial appearance of the wormholes development. What this means is that players would wage a power war. Similar to firing more nukes than the players anti-nuke supply, when a wormhole is in range of the dampeners, the dampeners use additional energy to sap from the energy put into the wormhole. Keeping it at its lowest level. The dampeners will begin to use more continuously as the wormhole would until either the wormhole creator's power is unable to keep the wormhole and it collapses (resulting in cooldown), OR the dampeners side destabilizes and THEY go into cooldown (probably shorter cool time than the gate)

This will need some balancing but that's my thoughts on an initially awesome fresh take on the use of teleport systems in games.
Let me know what you think, Knight.

I disagree that hard linking teleporters creates less micromanagement than allowing them to be rallied.

Fixed links between teleporters is going to mean the player has to either remember which teleporter goes where, and send units to the correct teleporter (assuming there are several to choose between) or go check. A base with 5 different teleporters going 5 different places is a bigger problem than allowing any teleporter to go anywhere, with the ability to rally them, and change the rally point later if you want.

I think it is possible to incorporate soft and reconfigurable pairing in a limited capacity, but hard pairing of the entire (expensive) teleport structure seems like a bad idea. Think about the issues of simultaneous construction of both ends like a single structure, as well.

I have two thoughts about this. Firstly, that I think the teleporter system definitely should multiply its cost by the mass of the unit, making smaller units cheaper to teleport. But teleporting many small units in sequence would get expensive.

However I very much dislike this highly arbitrary system of treating Basic and Advanced differently 'just because' and of changing caps. I think a smarter number to use is the unit's mass. And if we don't have such a number in the unit's data, then we should use its metal cost instead.

Increasing teleport cost linearly with metal cost is perfectly reasonable, and could even start to define the general rule of cost to teleport, i.e. 1 energy per metal cost. At peak efficiency, a unit that costs 100 metal might cost 100 energy to teleport. This would be the basic value that would be modified by any kind of exponential increase.

Secondly, I agree that it is an issue that if we count units, players will want to send bigger units instead of smaller ones. However if you think about it, that actually works if we make teleporting very small numbers of very large units the most efficient teleport approach. Instead of teleporting an army, you are incentivized to teleport a single builder and construct an army. Such as a commander. Even sending one Leveler doesn't really mean very much, much less one Dox.

Knight's originally proposed teleporter is for a single large teleporter which can be used to teleport a lot of units, for exponentially increasing cost. I think a smaller teleport would be superior, with multiple teleporters enabling players to teleport more units more quickly, for increasing costs.

Instead of having a single teleporter which keeps track of teleport 'levels' I think we need to shrink and simplify each teleporter structure/unit. The one large teleporter that moves 5 units and goes up 5 levels, requiring 5 time increments to cool down is overcomplicated, and results in a fat teleporter that would be overly expensive to construct because it can be used to teleport a group when you have a huge energy economy.

I think it makes more sense to have multiple teleports with an on/off status (or energy charge indicating how close they are to ready). You can use a teleport that isn't ready, but with exponentially higher cost the less ready it is. More investment in more teleports makes it more efficient to send larger numbers of units, but the flat energy cost still increases linearly

"1] Well, everything is sorted into 2 Tiers but isn't really set parameters for cost or anything, Cost is one of many balancing levers after all."

The point of the question is to illustrate what the gameplay will look like, not just to name off the tech tiers. If you don't know what mid-late game looks like, how would you know that teleportation would need nerfing? There may not even be an issue with units traveling between bases if, by the time teleportation is available or affordable, the primary method of attacking bases is with asteroids rather than units.

By answering the question in full, it paints a more complete picture for the rest of the questions, and eventually you know if teleportation needs to be limited.

Dementiurge makes a good point that we should really nail down whether teleportation is a midgame or a lategame asset. It may be that orbital units, and using asteroids, are the late game's focus, and that an expenditure to teleport units is not warranted.

That said, arguably teleportation could be used to bring land warfare back into the lategame by being a land bridge between planets. However that kind of teleporter would actually need to be able to move lots of units, which is somewhat contrary to the idea of this thread that we should design teleporters to be most efficient for moving a small number of units.

Noticed This thread has grown exponentially with more walls of texts. I'll just respond to this, I was hoping for shorter answers but the answers seem to get longer and longer haha.

I agree that moving a massive army quickly and have it arrive at someones planetary door step is to be avoided. Energy mitigation at the minimum should be a simple process though. It was outlined in someones approach for a simpler system.

The real question is: Is this approach simple and defined? Compared to Ledarsi's method of mass = energy required to teleport/ Energy exponentially increases with constant use but degrades to a nominal energy fee for all entry

I'm not sure if you discussed teleportation pace But your point here is indeed the same mentioned in your first comment. (players having the power to send 100 units at once cheaply) I agree that I don't want this to happen

I Think when establishing a Beach head on a planet where there is no available asteroids. it would be beneficial to have teleportation to seed onto the planet but then again it comes down to teleportation pace that is hard to define.

I agree with this. I think they should also assist as a supply chain to the front lines.

So your saying it would be okay for 100 units to pour out of a teleporter in a small interval? Even with energy limitations thats a small window of energy to pull from reserves to handle a teleport of that scale. I wouldn't be so okay with this, but thats my opinion on it.

Not a bad feature to it. I'll allow it.

Now were getting into the nitty gritty of exchange rates and different energy exponential to send units. I'm guessing at the point of the game where solar panels and Advanced power is common this power requirement won't be to steep even if its guesses.

Sorry to challenge your opinion on multiple fronts haha, I just want the idea to be solid.

Mike

Okay a lot of posts, but I don't quite have a lot of time so I'll just say that I agree my system does require some other circumstances to be met, but it's hard to say what exactly what will work because we don't know what Uber's plans are, I mean look at the Radar Satellites, they're practically experimentals in terms of power and cost compared to even advanced units. We hope it'll change, but we can't be sure yet.

This is definitely something I'd like to comeback to as we get more context for it but I think we've covered a lot of the basics here and had some good discussion along the way.

Mike