Just a thought. The current teleporter mechanic is pretty clumsy for invading. It mostly encourages vast amounts of air spam to automatically counter anyone trying to build one. I was thinking, What if the teleporter was an orbital unit? Units come out of it and then fall to the ground somehow. And then, What if the teleporter was actually a unit cannon? Units step into the source teleporter and get shot out of this orbital teleporter. Straight down is default but you can also target an area within some range of the teleporter to shoot the units to. So the only way to really stop this teleporter is to shoot it out of orbit, which may not be so easy with anchors (and a decent amount of hit points). You can still build ground teleporters as usual, but this orbital teleporter would be how you invade established planets. Air spam? Just start shooting a lot of T1 air onto the surface until they get a clearing.
I find the idea of an orbital unit dropper/cannon quite interesting. Could really add more pathways for cracking a planet however I don't think it should be done with a teleporter. More like different unit that orbital fabbers build.
Unit cannons are already almost definitely going to become a thing, but they probably won't be orbital. Most likely it'll function exactly like a nuke launcher except you load units into the "nuke" and instead of doing AOE damage, the "nuke" deposits all of your units where it hits. Anyway, until the unit cannons become a thing, I don't see nonorbital units as becoming effective for invading another planet. I do think they should be added soon, because anchors are pretty much the go-to at the moment. It discourages variety.
Seems a bit redundant to have both this and the unit cannon. It would also get shut down quite easily by relatively cheap umbrellas.
I think the unit cannon will end up being silly and impractical, though. If it's only from planet to moon and back then it's not going to help crack a new planet. And even if it launches units from a planet to a completely different planet, I think it'll end up being silly to have units arrive 5 minutes after I sent them, when circumstances may have changed (and once their landing spot is figured out, they'll arrive to a deathtrap). Making the unit cannon into an orbital teleporter seems a whole lot more practical.
Except unit cannons can't be built on all planets nor can unit cannons fire to planets that aren't sharing orbits. Surprisingly, I like this idea. A lot.
I have a feeling unit cannons will be able to be built on all planets but can only go cross planets from moons to planets
First of all, it won't take 5 minutes to send units through a unit cannon. I'm sure it will be a matter of seconds. Uber's plan for orbital is to make small planetoids & asteroids into mobile assault platforms IIRC (Well, I hope so. Change orbit is already implemented after all, even if it's very buggy). You should need them to mount an assault. The issue with a teleporter like this is that it takes away from that mechanic. Why bother spending the resources to set up an assault platform with unit cannons when you can just send an orbital teleporter-cannon to a planet? Why bother bringing in an assault platform with nukes to clear ground and set up a ground teleporter on-planet when you can just send an orbital teleporter-cannon? I guess it doesn't kill the planet-smashing, so at least there's still some incentive to use halleys, but I don't think it's a good idea to undermine some of the most interesting mechanics in the game. As for the common point that asteroids/planetoids won't/shouldn't be part of every system, all I can say is I hope we'll be able to build replacements for them as well. tl;dr I want to see asteroids turn into important weapons of interplanetary combat, not to be relegated for planet smashing alone, and this undermines that, so I don't like it. Kinda hope we'll also be able to use them to fire from one side of a large planet to the other though.
That reminds me, I was thinking it might be interesting if Anchors could be told to land. When they land, they turn into anti-aircraft (probably not with the same damage statistics as the Anchor, because that would be crazy). I suppose we could also just let orbital fabricators build flak. But the orbital teleporter unit cannon is more flexible and can be used to attack a lot of different types of defenses, not just air. Unless they plan for unit cannons to teleport units to the destination, your units will still have to take the normal flight path that all orbital units take. Orbit flight paths between separate planets can take several minutes. You wouldn't. Because that plan would be ditched. Because it is silly. If I can bring in a platform with nukes, I'm not going to "clear ground and set up a ground teleporter". I'm going to nuke you off the planet and skip invasion altogether. That's what I do with moons most of the time. SOMETIMES I'll invade a moon against a really squirrely opponent who keeps managing to scramble around and build stuff but generally I just nuke moons without invading them. I actually think interplanetary nukes and orbital nuke platforms are a bad idea. They won't lead to invasions. They will replace invasions. If planet smashing is the primary method of winning and invasion is really difficult then most games will just be a race to claim asteroids and smash them. Asteroid smashing should be a tricky thing to do; not just "I got here first; here's some bombers and some anchors and now you'll never stop me."
Unit cannons will only fire between planets from smaller bodies to other bodies they are in orbit with. Not all orbital units take those flight paths at the same speed; the astraeus is considerably slower than other orbital units, for example. Have you seen the kickstarter video? What makes it silly? Because it isn't just traditional RTS on a ball? I doubt that throwing nukes at someone's fortified planet haphazardly is going to be effective in final balance. I could be wrong, but I suspect you won't usually be able to nuke their main base with any results, so you'll probably have to use other (hopefully more interesting) methods. Depends on the balance, but I don't think that will be the case. Smashing an asteroid means wasting resources, and probably won't be the fail-safe planet-wide killer it is right now. I don't think invasion with the unit cannon would be really difficult. I agree that we need some way of denying air units from the orbital layer, but that's not directly related to orbital teleporter-cannons or planet smashing. I suppose dropping AA units onto a planet helps with that, but then we're back to the orbital teleporter and a unit cannon performing the same function.
Because it WOULD BE*** silly, your orbiter-teleporter-unitcannon-deathstar-georgeforemangrill isn't an actual thing in the game. The unit cannon is confirmed by uber. They're not going to implement a unit that would render the unit cannon "ditched" and "silly." Period. It seems like you guys are trying to design a unit to "cover the weaknesses" of the unit cannon, but it has those for a reason. And they're not going to create a unit with no weaknesses that's strictly better. While you're at it, give your godlike flying invasion portal the ability to jam umbrellas and avengers and give it an array of ten uber cannons that it can spam without using energy to clear the way for the units it dispenses.
dont like the idea ... still waiting for orbital multiunittransports as those have their own pros and cons ...
Orbital multitransports might be useful but they'll have the problem of "I sent 150 units. They got blowed up. Now I have to wait 5 minutes for the next transports to arrive." The point of orbital teleporters is to give you a way to stream units from your home base without always having to wait that 5 minutes after a wipeout. An orbital teleporter would be a lot harder to get rid of than a ground one, allowing you to keep the pressure up in real-time rather than via a 5 minute delay. Basically the orbital teleporter unit cannon is just a better way of implementing a unit cannon. It would actually be useful. The concept I've seen of unit cannons so far does not inspire me. They are too limited. I don't really see the point of implementing it if it can only be used on small planets and can only go between moon orbits. I don't even bring up unit cannons as a solution to any problem because most of the time, they won't be available.
it would be to powerfull ... a ground teleporter already has a very high capacity of bringing units to different planets ... a unitcannon while possibly having a lower capacity then a teleporter has the benefit of being pretty safe on but being limited to be build on an asteroid ... the telecannon combo you propose would not only have a high capacity and being relatively save from anything that isnt antiorbital but also give it semi endlessrange ... so no it is not just actualy usefull ... it is frickin making every other transportdevise obsolete which is totaly rediciolous .....
If you have to spam air power to prevent a gate from going up, then your doing it wrong. Get a few mini defense bases to cover the planet: 2-3 catapults, Orbital D, Radar, anti nuke.
