Teleporters

Video?

I understand how people immediately called them stargates and compared them with those. But while they might be inspired by stargates, I think I'm safe to say that there's a reason why they're called gates and not stargates.
The similarities are indisputable, but we should give Uber a chance to create their own and unique version of it. Also we should maybe take a step back as to how stargates are supposed to work, and think about a solution that makes sense gameplay-wise.

On the technical side, if I understood it correctly then we will have to link two gates A and B together so that a unit can go through gate A and come out of gate B. Are travel times instant? If yes, then I'd suggest something different than linking gates together, because I think it would make it easier to play with multiple gates:

If one unit goes into a gate it becomes stored in an imaginary stack. If you click on a gate then you see your current stack of units stored in those gates. Now you can "unload" them freely at whatever gate you want. This would make it very easy to keep overview of your invasions (and prevent a lot of micro).

Edit: There could still be limitations, like the rate at which units unload from a gate, to make building multiple gates at the receiving end a good idea sometimes.

Greetings

Technically, the point of the wormhole is to connect two points in spacetime so that you do not have to travel at relativistic speeds at all.

The metaphor is of a piece of paper. If you are standing on one edge of the piece of paper and were a nanometer tall, the other side of the piece of paper would be an absolutely ridiculous distance away. Suppose the speed of light on this piece of paper is one inch per year. It would take you several years to cross to the other side at the speed of light.

But if you could fold the piece of paper to connect the edge you are standing on to the other edge, then you can just step across because the distance is now a single step. Speed of light not broken.

As for gameplay, I think the primary purpose of teleporters is to allow rallying units through them, so units you build on one planet can be teleported and used on a different planet. This means that treating the teleporter like a huge transport is actually not ideal because of the clicks required to unload. It makes more sense to have the player specify a destination teleporter, and then to instantly send any units that enter the source teleporter to the destination teleporter. Units leaving that teleporter could then be rallied using a rally point from the teleporter.

Perfect.

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Bends spacetime RATHER than send you at the speed of light?

Ledarsi can you please work on reading what people say?

It is indeed necessary to be able to waypoint units through gates. But you can have that with the system I suggested by having an "unload all" task and a few other simple unloading commands like mouse-dragging over a screen of units to select which to unload.

You just have to remember if a gate is still locked on "unload all", but I think that shouldn't be too much to handle.

I'm just seeing a micro problem with having to link gates together.

Linking gates is literally a single click. It's a rally point. You don't have to do anything to it until you choose to change it.

I fail to see how the "micro" burden can be reduced. It certainly isn't reduced by introducing any kind of "unit stack" that the player has to click to unload, or select specific units to unload as you suggest, like mouse-dragging over a UI panel full of unitpics. Such a system is more complicated, requires more implementation, and requires far more mouse operations to use.

So how do I have to imagine that?
Say that I have 4 gates on planet A, and want to send units through them to planet B, where I have five gates (just for the sake of argument). Now do I have to zoom to planet A and select a single gate, zoom out, zoom in to planet B and select the receiving gate, then repeat that three times? Or am I able to just select all 4 gates on planet A, then zoom out, select planet B from orbital view and it will allocate gate exits automatically?
If so, and planet B has 4 gates at point A and one gate at point B, but I want to only use 3 gates at point A plus the other gate at point B, how do I do that? Do I have to look at which gate at planet A leads to which gate at planet B and manually change their allocation?

Maybe the UI could give you a list of available gates by planet when you're trying to set up a link, streamlining the process.

If the gates were visible on the orbital layer then you would be able to click your home gate then waypoint the destination gate quite easily. Hot keying camera locations to your gates would also make it easier too.
As mentioned above a list of gates beside the planets on the system view might be the way to go.

That list would have to show me where those gates are to be useful. I wonder about how to do that.

Picture in picture? You select gate A.

Which can connect to B, C..... Et al to ZZZ.

Each gate you click gives you picture in picture of the area surrounding the destination gate

Well in terms of pairing gates...... I think that some system like this would work:

Say you have gates A, B, C, and D...... So you've set up a small base with 10 vehicle factories all making ants and your transporting them through gate "A". Double clicking on a gate will set it as the "entrance" gate.... and then at the bottom of the screen a block pops up where gates B, C, and D are listed. Then click on the gate to set it as the "exit"gate.

You click "link," it brings up a by-planet list. You can then click on the one of the list options, and it will move the camera to that gate. You then click "confirm" if that's the one you want, and the camera returns to the starting gate.

Exactly!!!!!!!

Seems like a nice solution.

it looks cool but it need more visual effects

Taking that a step further, even after the linking of two gates has occurred, I think it'd be nice to have a very similar mechanism when you have a group of units and/or factories selected, and click on the origin gate as a waypoint. The camera moves to the (now known, single) destination gate, and you can select a target destination for that group of units (or a patrol route, assist command, etc, etc).

This way, different groups of units or factories can have different destinations outside the remote gate, allowing some units to patrol, others to congregate into deathball, and fabbers to assist as soon as they arrive with no added micro. Otherwise, if a destination gate is limited to a single waypoint target that all units coming through the gate must stop at, there will be a lot of unit micro required while teleporting a relatively balanced force (especially fabbers + combat units).

Edit: That's not to say that a destination gate shouldn't have it's own default endpoint destination for units; it should. But that default should be overrideable for selected groups of units, IMO, assuming the UI works out as I'm hoping it could. Perhaps a single waypoint click on the origin gate sends a group to the default (no camera move involved) endpoint. Whereas a double click initiates the camera move for an alternative endpoint assignment.

Wait why explicitly link gates at all? Why not just make it so that units take the shortest route to their destination, and gates rediall on the fly as needed?

I was thinking this way initially too. However, I conjured up my own counterpoint (in my head) that it might get overly complex and sub-optimal (and require even more micro) in cases with multiple gates on an origin planet and multiple target gates on a destination planet. I'm not *sure it'd be a problem, but the pathing could change radically as new nodes are created (ew), and I found myself wondering if it'd tend to create artificial throughput bottlenecks where you have multiple sets of teleporters on each planet, but many end up being hardly used. Fixing that with complex waypoint orders might be tedious.

I think you're right that Uber should consider it though, and try it out if it seems probable to them to work alright. If the edge cases don't kill it, the standard cases sure might seem simpler.

Well... I thought about it.

I thought that complex way point orders would take less time than telling your troops to go through the teleporter, waiting, and then changing the destination to issue the next order