Teleporters

Jump jet cloaking unit. It can move, undetected onto plateaus. It can change position while cloaked. It can't fire while cloaking because that's OP.

Basically a one way teleporter means you would just teleport units on top of the enemy commander, with no ability by them to intercept. As already stated in this thread.

If they are instead cloaking units, you can decloak them, and they have to spend more time getting into position. So it doesn't become a race to achieve 1-way teleportation.

well now they didn't, there really isn't any question about it anymore.

Um... Quick question, aren't we supposed to be getting gas giants later? What happens then??

......I'm confused as to what Gas Giants have to do with teleporters....

Mike

We still don't know what would happen on a gas giant map right? What if we are forced to use all air units? Which I am pretty sure they said can't go through the teleporters

Its orbital only from Ubers last comment on them.

Cloaking JJs is a might bit over the top don't you think? Maybe cloaking spiders is a reasonable compromise. I wouldn't mind seeing stealth submersibles myself since a chief role of submersibles is surprise attacks.

JJs actually perform a very similar role to short ranged teleporting. My reference point on this would be SupCom2 although you could easily look at the role of Star Craft Stalkers too. JJs of course should have longer range due to the draw back of transit time and being the target of AA during that transit period. Neither JJs or short-range-teleporters would be functionally capable of crossing a space vacuum (planet to planet).

Personally I am not a big fan of cloaking in PA because unlike in Star Craft your TA and SCom never had detectors and to develop a detector system would be extra work just to add a feature many people don't like from Star Craft. Without detectors cloaking units is only really a thing I want to see on Commanders and we haven't even seen it on commanders yet.

Instead PA has radar. The obvious unit to put in a game with radar everywhere is a stealth unit. The value of stealth on a fast heavy hitting unit is remarkable and could lead to more challenging and competitive play. Recently Uber said we probably won't see stealth at release. That's kind of sad, because stealth is by far one of the easiest units/roles to add to the game.

Anyway, good discussion and sorry I wasn't more elaborate when we started but as I see it cloaking and/or stealth fill a valuable but quite different niche to self-teleporting and/or jump jets.

What about orbital teleporters?

Currently it's excruciatingly slow sending orbital units from one planet to another. So you'd send an initial force with some orbital fabbers, hold position, build a receiving gate.
I always thought being able to build and drop an 'egg' for planetary invasion would be a great idea to establish a quick base on another planet's surface. An orbital Fabber could build one of those? Send it through an orbital teleporter aswell.
What about a nuke?

Space is big yo.

IMO
NO Orbital Teleporters
YES, two Stargates, I mean Teleporters, to transport land vehicles/commanders

Daisy chain multiple teleporters? I don't know, I reckon only two per team/army can be active at any one point to send units through.

I don't see why we need that kind of limitation to be honest. So long as as Uber's system doesn't factor in Distance to the cost one could manually always ensure a unit can go directly to where ever it's needed but ont eh other hand having a network of teleporters for each planetoid would allow for both redundancy and less effort on the players part for a higher energy cost.

Mike

Let's at least get them in game first, limit to 2, see how that goes, then bump that number up, once the initial bugs have been resolved.
Fixed cost vs variable cost? Should cost, ie Energy to keep any two active rely on physical distance.
I would rather see a fixed cost, try it out, and give feedback to the developers.

It'd make more sense to not have a limit to begin with, no sense making a limit if it doesn't need it. Basically what Neutrino already laid out is a good starting point.

Mike

Orbital speed really applies to all kinds of orbital units. If the current system is too slow, then it's better to rework the system so it can keep pace with the rest of PA.

It's not unreasonable to allow a cheap "warp drive" that sends invasion orbitals around the solar system at a very high speed. Warp travel does not invalidate the central plot of gated Commanders fighting over worlds, but it can definitely help the game here.

Which is a really dumb thing to do, honestly. The toughest part of orbital is connecting battles between disjointed moons. A gas giant acts as the perfect staging ground for pure lunar warfare. Each player gets their own moons, cheap GG energy provides easy access to orbital weapons, and a strong set of orbital tools make such battles possible.

PA is based on TA, which is not a unit cap kind of game. The only true unit cap in any one of these titles is how much stuff you can get before the computer sort of breaks down.

just in to second this.

Honestly I'm not seeing teleporters act as offensive invasion structures, with them likely high cost structures I see them as a means to connect up interplanetary bases. For example; my moon base is getting invaded, "oh no!"
so I power up my teleporter and send my army from the home-world to assist defense. After my moon base is secure I send the army back to the starting planet and continue the fight for the planet. I personally plan on relying on the unit cannon to invade other planets, well initially. My premeditated plan for invading other planets is... to first barrage the planet with all sorts of attack units. A little later send some astraeses carrying engineers, then just maybe I would construct a teleporter. How about an orbital unit that can transport a building, now that's an idea!

See to me this is the kind of thing that Uber needs to be careful about, if it's easier to just move armies around you'll just end up with centralized production and moving armies.

Mike

What spicy said makes sense, though. You don't necessariy want your tank production on a small moon without much space. So you have a teleporter for emergencies there. Now your units still have to walk to the teleporter and through it and then go to the fight, which can take a while. So it's probably not the most efficient way of defending a planet. But it's good to have as an emergency tool. And also your enemy can just snipe it before the invasion to prevent that from happening.

But I thought about the recall-ability we talked about earlier here. And that's the thing that Uber should really be careful about. Because what you said is 100% true after all.

I think you misunderstood spicy, he wasn't talking about emergency use, he was talking about building units in one place and just moving them around as needed.

I think that kind of play is boring and lacks depth. I'd much rather see a system where trying to do that is expensive and instead you need to actually think about what units you build where and how many you build.

Mike

I don't really think as you said: "lacks depth" is truly fair to the situation. First Linking bases w/ teleporters would likely be very expensive, and quite risky. And teleporters are limited to the creativity behind the player not the mechanics listed on the patch notes. Think of it like this: I've got all my production on some off sight planet that's heavily defended, yet to keep up the production and ability to dispense the force I require mining on moons and asteroids. But to properly defend the bases my force can quickly arrive to defend via the teleporter. With a limit to how much space is on a moon production on it would be terribly in-efficient. But say that moon was the only celestial object close enough to the enemy base too have an effective unit cannon to invade said enemy, so now tons of units poor out of the teleporter and into the unit cannon raining terror upon the Enemy base. A base can easily be cut off from the "homeworld" with the destruction of a teleporter. So a large amount of macro comes into the game, deciding where too pressure the most defense and what bases have less metal... blah blah blah. Too me that doesn't seem to lack depth, too me that seems like a game I would I buy, play everyday, and say wow... Money well spent!
And... What is war but too forces mobilizing on each other till one or none remain.
That's been my opinion on teleporters.