Teleporters

Awesome! cant wait to get some game play in with this. I like the idea of gates using fixed energy rather than per unit, the idea of being able to steal and enemy gate is annoying and painful to balance. The idea to me would be to make a foot hold on a planet and then build your own gate assuming two gates can be active on the same planet.

This is one of the best comments I've ever read on our forums. It makes all the late nights working on this feature worth it. Thank you.

Is this really terribly important? Everything needed to use the gate is already paid for. The units that travel through must be built, the gates themselves have to be built, and if it's on an asteroid there is the arduous task of making sure it reaches the destination. That's a lot of trouble even before running energy is taken into account!

A steady running cost means that you won't be bankrupted by a billion dox running through at once. That's okay to work with.

Protip: Anytime you aren't happy about how good a structure is, just make it a little bit more explosive. Pretty soon the problem will solve itself.

Wow awesome!

Im thinking a massive energy cost....like 50k

or something less to make it more viable

Enough Said

Damn, only 8 chevrons. We can't dial the Destiny

This is what is going through my head when I saw it.

i know right ? I want Destiny

The Nydus Canal from Starcraft 2 is free to use.
Even with speedlings, the fastest units in the game, it is not overpowered.

The Nydus Canal is probably the closest comparable unit from another RTS. Don't forget that the canal and Zerglings have to be purchased, which is no different from the obstacles to using this gate.

A flat energy cost is workable. There's no immediate reason to believe it should be changed, made more expensive, limited, or free. Even if energy was a gravity-well-centric mechanic, it'd still work out okay. So the energy use is just a thing for now.

Looks awesome!

Fixed energy cost seems like it would be LESS micro, not more. Otherwise you'd have to turn off a bunch of stuff to prepare for the unknown surge of energy usage when moving an army through the gate. Better to have it just drain a fixed amount and if your economy cant support it, then turn it off. Simple.

Wholeheartedly agree.

The cost to send a unit should be dependent on the distance as well as the physical size of the unit – not whether it's on or off.

Another thing this doesn't address, what if it's a water only planet? Can we not teleport units? How will we be able to invade water planets? Will there have to be some new special thing for transporting ships?

Walk the boats through the gate, obviously!

Wait, that means you need some walking boats.

Connecting a naval teleporter to a land teleporter would be awkward, and that's really the only way such a dilemma could occur to begin with, since you need to have built a destination teleporter before you can use the originating teleporter. (Which also means that teleporters are probably the worst way to invade a planet, since you need an operational and well-protected T3 base before you can build a teleporter there.)

It'd be funny if you could use teleporters to drain one planet onto another.

Lol, yeah and just extinguish all the lava on a lava planet. Turn it into a desert planet or something!

I agree with the distance between teleporters should cost more energy but I think once the hole between two points has been opened the energy should be a constant to keep that hole open and not just a user pays per unit system. I dont want to be stalling my energy just because I sent 200 levelers and not 100.

But that's the thing. You should stall energy because you sent 200 levelers instead of 100.

The more units you send through, the greater the energy cost should be.

Thats just adding alot more micro management into end game battles when I should be concentrating on defeating my enemy. Why make planetary invasions harder than they already are?

I think we want to avoid random economic fluctuations. Having a fixed energy cost (and perhaps not being able to turn it off), would be preferable to a energy cost per unit basis.