Since everything pertaining to the unit cannon is very much lofty theory at the moment I thought it the right time to graft on some venues of implementation and how those might translate into a unit that is capable of being far more than a simple means of getting stuff from A to B. Implementation: Capacity - single unit or multiple unit drops with T2 counting for several T1 Impact - kinetic impact on landing (read: damage for both ends) or soft landing Packaging - units being actually shot themselves or out into a container and unloading on impact (or shortly before) Precision - pin-point precision or (range dependent) inaccuracy Range - sub-planetary, planetary, orbital Role: Bombardment - kinetic impact artillery if unit landing implementation allows it, plus bomb bots Invasion - insert troops right into the fray, punch through orbital entrenchment Transport - get stuff to near orbital bodies quickly Interaction: Counters - units (unit packages) targeted by anti-air and anti-orbital weaponry when in those layers and/or recovery time on landing Obsolescence - poaches roles or parts thereof from air transports, artillery, halleys, teleporters Synergy - bomb bots My personal preference would be for multiple unit capacity, no packaging, high inaccuracy, orbital range, high kinetic impact on landing and the shot units being valid targets for anti-air and anti-orbital weapons as long as being in those respective domains to enable meaningful defense against insertion. The unit cannon should consume more energy than a teleporter (plus mass in case of a packaging approach) to not invalidate the teleporter as a means of long distance mass transport. Additionally it should be inaccurate to not supplant conventional long range weapon emplacements and cause damage on impact to both nearby units and itself to differentiate it from conventional air and orbital transports in usage and utility. Do you think those (potential) implementation details would help to make the unit cannon an interesting addition and asset to the current roster instead of just being a one-way transportation tool to supplant the teleporter and help breaking orbital sieges?
AMAZING BALANCE IDEA Unit Cannon can only shoot T1 units because T2 is too heavy. TAKE THAT OP VANGUARD.
Implementation: Capacity - One unit, one 'point' of capacity. The cannon has a limit to the amount of bots it can fire in one 'magazine' and they all enter from the back, are stored, and fired out from the front. Impact - Soft. Packaging - Packaged in flight, blowing open before it impacts like it does with the Noah. This is just a stylistic catagory and has no impact on how it functions, so i think that packaging the units first makes more sense. I will look less ridiculous since none of them are exactly aerodynamic and saves the "need" to create some sort of 'inflight' animation or pose for every unit. Precision - Range dependent inaccuracy, but not a severe one. Mostly for path finding reasons so we don't have units melting into each other and potentially causing problems, but also for balance. Range - Planet to moon (ie, same gravity well) plus high-atmospheric transport on the SAME planet. The teleporters 'niche' can be that it transports you anywhere you can build a gate too, the unit cannon can be used as a means of rapidly invading a hostile planet from a moon/opposite continent you currently own, such as firing reams of AA, some tanks and engineer units at a weakly defended area that will give you time to set up a teleporter, with the benefit of some defensive capability from the air response team (which would be the first to get there if you chose your spot well). Role: Bombardment - For bomb bots only. Regular units crash down (with no damage to anyone) and operate normally. Bomb Bots should have high synergy with the Unit cannon and should be placed in a specialized 'search and destroy' mode when the touch down, immediately seeking out and attacking the nearest enemy unit or structure within a specified range (through a limited radius Circle Select option on the cannon). This specialized command will only fire out stored Bomb Bots in the cannon, ignoring any other unit types in its inventory. If there are no bomb bots the function is greyed out. I am not opposed to making that function work for any unit. Upon landing, all units when fired using that command will indiscriminately search and destroy all valid targets in the radius unless given a different order by the player. If there are none, they consolidate into the center of the original circle radius and wait for orders, attacking enemies that come into their FoV like normal. Invasion - Quick, efficient and unstoppable. Units cannot be attacked until after they land, but will be scattered and out of formation (depending on distance). Opponents that wish to defend from this form of attack should should aim to have the invaders picked off rapidly before they can consolidate and focus themselves, such as by scattering some laser towers in the area, facing many directions to minimize turning time. Interaction: Counters - Counters come in the form of limited unit capacity and large size of each cannon, forcing real estate choices on the part of the builder who could use the space for someone else (Like nukes on a small moon, or MOAR FACTORIES on a big planet). How limited this capacity should be is up for debate. The Noah Cannon had 21, however my first instinct is to say that this is very low for armies on the scale of PA, however 21 Slammers or Vanguards in the right spot could cause obscene amounts of damage and building multiple cannons in the same area does two things: A) Doubles, triples and quadruples the amount of units that can be delivered, greatly increasing effectiveness, and B) Creates a vitally important strategic point that must absolutely be defended from the instant, vicious retribution from the poor sod that the guns are aimed at. Obsolescence - The cannon will fill its own niche as an efficient planetary invader and unit mover-per-time spent. It does not have the range of the teleporter and would be significantly more of an investment than an air transport. It is not a direct attack weapon like artillery and its projectiles (the units themselves) can be destroyed upon landing. The units might even be destroyed instantly with no chance of resistance, severely limiting its effectiveness at direct damage vs Artillery, whos projectiles (and resultant damage) cannot be stopped once they are fired. Synergy - Bomb bots. Yes, very much so. If the unit packages themselves are ever made attackable as a balance move, i'd make it so only Tactical Missile Defense can respond to them, but not as a complete 1-1 counter. If one cannon (with 21 units) fires at an area defended by one TMD, id say ~15 (give or take a couple) units will land. The TMD will obviously be much cheaper than the cannon, so your opponent can out build your cannons faster than you can overwhelm the defense. Additionally, with regards to the cannons place vs Artillery. Artillery is a defense structure that can automatically react to radar signatures and line of sight, and proceed to defend itself. The Unit Cannot has no inherent means to defend itself and can only be used directly by the player. A possible (if potentially overpowered to the Pelican) function can be 'Autofire'. Similar to the Ferry command, factories can be set to "assist" the cannon and units built will automatically load themselves into it. Autofire will make the cannon instantly shoot loaded units to a predetermined point after its storage is full (this is not a Bombardment attack, units do not seek out targets after landing, just consolidate themselves). I don't know if this impacts the usefulness of the Pelican or even if the Pelican has the Ferry command to begin with right now, but its something that can introduce some automation to the cannon and make it require less babysitting.
Thanks for this in depth answer. I would still prefer unit packages to be valid targets for anti-air/orbital to make defending against the unit cannon possible - on the other hand packages could be treated as projectiles to enable them to literally punch through air and orbital defense screens. I just think the unit cannon would profit from being half actual cannon half means of transport rather than a one way teleporter with cool looks.
My issue with making the packages counterable is because it will then be possible to make the cannon totally useless. The only structure at this point in time that suffers such a comparable direct counter is the Nuke launcher. Additionally, the Anti-nuke has a fixed amount of very expensive ammunition per launcher and the Nuke has a huge amount of destruction potential for the metal and time invested per warhead. However all AA units are rapid fire and have limitless magazines. Coupled with the proposed inventory limit and how cheap (not to mention viciously effective) the various anti-air systems in this game are, these can be quickly amassed to make the very expensive cannon useless. How much HP will the packages have? Too little? The cannon may be too easily countered for the investment (which i assume here will be high). All i might need is a squad of spinners/mobile flak between the cannon and vital areas of my base to negate the threat while i build up permanent defenses i may have neglected before i realized the cannon existed. Too much? Its possible that given the speed that they should travel (very fast) then it will be next to impossible to destroy them without building massive batteries of AA turrets. Its easier to simply let the far weaker units touch down and fly in a mass of gunships to make short work of them. Who can fire on the packages in the first place? All AA units or just Missile/Flak turret? If only structures/only units can fire on them then this is simply an arbitrary restriction. I don't believe Uber likes doing arbitrary restrictions on a unit-by-unit basis. Peregrines are an AA unit and in your proposed system (excluding arbitrary restrictions) should be allowed to fire on the packages. A fully covered Air layer filled with globally patrolling peregrines will be a serious barrier to the effectiveness of the cannon on the very situation it is supposed to solve: establishing a beachhead on a fortified planet that has a fighting chance to last more than 5 seconds against the Global Air Patrol/gunship response teams. Transporting an entire army of hundreds is achieved far more efficiently and cost-effectively with a teleporter built at the beachhead you are trying to create. The loss of large amounts of packages in-flight, as well as the patrolling Hornets/Bumblebees that will undoubtedly be a part of this fortified air layer, will remove any fighting chance of a unit invasion through the limited inventory Cannon method. I realize that at the moment the orbital unit roster is incomplete, but as it stands now there is nothing capable of attacking air units from orbital and I have not heard of any plans to implement one. The Laser Platform being a slow-to-react unit ill suited to taking out masses of land units, despite the fact that none of them can shoot back. Should one be implemented then this may require an aircraft or vehicle capable of retaliating against orbital so armies and squadrons are not utterly defenseless against it. Since you mentioned Anti-Orbital being able to fire on the packages as well, this creates another unit capable of countering them ontop of what is currently available. This unit must also be balanced vs current anti orbital units: Umbrella, Avenger and Anchor, the latter two cannot defend themselves against terrestrial units or even SEE the ground over which they hover without a radar satellite. Can the avenger and anchor fire on the packages too? Avengers are cheap and if you put a swarm of them above the cannon, take control of orbital while being vigilant in destroying enemy umbrellas you can totally lock down a cannon from the orbital layer. With the current mechanics there is nothing an opponent can do against something like that without help from another planet. Though quite honestly if you have absolute control over the orbital layer on a actively contested planet then i'd say your opponent is pretty much boned anyway. Laser platform spam ahoy! It will also need to be balanced against orbital unit HP which right now are quite low besides the Anchor. High HP packages will necessitate high damage Anti Orbital guns if they wish to be effective, and the orbital unit HP will need to be adjusted so they are not utterly vaporized when they come into view with the low HP they currently have. I write this all out with the assumption that the cannon has a limited magazine. As can be gathered from the pitch video showing the conga-line of bots filing into it. If it is limitless inventory and is only held back by its rate of fire (which should be at least as fast as the Noah Unit Cannon is Supcom2, firing at roughly two units per second) then the cannon is simply a shittier version of the teleporter, having a much shorter range and one-by-one unit delivery method in a scattered area. Contrasted with the far longer range of the teleporter and the ability for units to exit it in twos and threes (depending on size) while retaining cohesion. In summary, units can be broken down into Land, Naval, Air and Orbital, with any single unit so far only allowed to fire at a maximum of two other categories (such as bombers being able to fire at both Land and Sea, bots/tanks at each other and naval. The exception being the Narwhal that can fire at everything except orbital) allowing units with Anti air and/or anti orbital capability to fire on the packages (which seem to count as both air and orbital units during their flight) gives permission for a massive amount of the available unit roster to shoot them down from every theater of war. That is an obscene amount of counters for a single unit and the roster isn't even done yet. This can either be remedied in one fell swoop by limiting the cannon magazine and making the packages invulnerable, removing the cannon entirely (TOTALLY NOT GOING TO MAKE LOTS OF PEOPLE VERY BITTER) or doing some significant re-balancing to air and orbital unit damage, their HP and the DPS of land units and turrets that work against them.
Failing to do so will grace us with even worse Vanguard drops than Astraeus and Pelican already provide, though. Making unit packages count as air or orbital units, respectively, makes them subject to the same counters that any unit from the respective layer faces and as such would be easily integrated into the overall layer balance. Giving packages projectile-like behaviour in terms of movement speed and collision on the other hand would enable you to get them to the surface fast enough so they do not take fatal damage as well as batter through air and orbital screens with sheer weight of force by damaging or even destroying units in their flight path. But that is only my take on it - I simply want the unit cannon to be a cannon not only in name but also functionality.
If a squad of 20 or so Vanguards is enough to put a massive dent in your war machine then i'd say thats a perfect use of scouting to identify weak points and take advantage of it. Knowing a cannon is aimed at you should make you bolster defenses as well as work to actively destroy it with some associated risk on your part (taking up your micro to deliver units past the cannons own defenses), not simply reward turtling play styles by being able to negate the threat almost passively without leaving the safety of your base. Thats why i favor a limited magazine with the effectiveness of the unit drop relying on the units themselves and the strategic decision of dropping them in the right place. If you don't fire it at a good spot then its nothing but a waste with no additional benefit, especially since the units can be replaced cheaply. If they can take a leaf out of the Titanfall special effects handbook and make it feel as good as the slam from a Titan hitting the ground then i'd love that. My issue with allowing the packages to actually damage units on landing is if the projectiles can indeed 'punch through' defenses and do damage themselves... then are they still actually vulnerable in-transit in the first place? Also if Autofire or concentrated micro with even one cannon implemented, then you could simply whittle away someones base directly (from the combined impact damage and anything the unit can do thereafter) from a different planet with not very much strategy on your part. You wont need a beachhead on his world at all, just fortify your own and ensure he never gets a chance to destroy the cannons with anything less than a KEW. Having them do appreciable damage and 'punch through' defenses will cause it to become an un-counterable interplanetary artillery whose projectiles continue to do damage after they've hit. At the point in the game when they become commonplace it may force everyone to start mass turtling with AA to shoot down whatever they can, patrolling repair bots to counteract damage and turrets to defend while building their own Unit cannon battery. The defenses could be so thick from this process that any regular land assault will be suicide and anyone that DOESNT do this will get wiped out. Eventually only KEWs, mass nukes or utterly overwhelming cannon drops will solve the stalemate. This was fun, but its 3:40am here and i have my uni graduation ceremony in the afternoon (i don't wanna go ). Ill have to come back a little later
Well, I imagined something along the lines of balancing them via their speed of descent - having them go down so fast that only weapons more or less directly in their flight vector will reliably be able to hit them. Which would amount to Umbrellas and ground based anti-air destroying or at least severely damaging descending packages going to land in their vicinity while mobile air and orbital based defense would be largely ineffective due to their projectile trajectories being not properly aligned with the descending packages' flight path. This way an orbital body covered in ground based defense will still be effectively locked down and impenetrable - which I am fine with given the necessary expenditure. Just spamming the living bejeezus out of your air factories and orbital fabbers to cloud a planet in swarms of fighters on the other hand would still leave you open to unit cannon bombardment.
What effect does 'severely damaging them' have? The package is not the unit, when it breaks open on the ground will the unit itself be totally unharmed? If that's the case, then the effort to lock down the planet with AA is effectively worthless unless it is 100% effective. Also AA never misses. come to think of it i don't believe any units in this game can fully 'miss' and do zero damage to the target within visual or radar range (actually i think orbital can still miss, but everything else tracks trajectories and fires to compensate). With that all AA that the packages pass over will hit them and to do otherwise could just be an arbitrary (not to mention a very hard to identify and plan for) restriction. Also when it comes to interplanetary shots; how much time would the packages have to actually be vulnerable to ground AA? you will have to declare a 'line' between Orbital and Air layers that once crossed the packages count as air units and can therefor be shot at. This exposure time heavily depends on the trajectory the packages take: if they basically plow straight downwards from the upper atmosphere to their target then AA might only have a couple seconds of firing time, meaning that the packages will have to have low HP and the required 'expense' of locking down a planet against the unit cannon (your proposed way of balancing against it) is reduced, but if they take a long route the increased risk may result in higher HP and we're back to plastering the planet in static defense (covering ALL possible angles the packages might take) in order to maximize the free damage opportunity. Spamming swarms of aircraft is a counter to the cannon by being able to destroy the disorganized units upon landing. You will indeed still be 'vulnerable' in that the cannon can fire and successfully land units, but these units now have a chance to defend themselves and not be faced with an 'all or nothing' situation before they can ever have a chance to fire back. A numerous pack of spinners or mobile flak AA launched over as a first wave can punch a hole in the passive air layer and keep it open while some tanks/bots mixed in can break down whatever static defenses are in the area. This can effectively pave the way for some engineers to build a teleporter and defenses, or at least some additional cannon salvos bringing in reinforcements. Invulnerable packages will make the need to plaster a planet in static defense (both AA to attack the packages and lasers to defend against any that get through) and repair bots a waste of resources better spent on expansion and assaulting enemies, leaving a patrolling air layer the most cost effective counter at best and early warning system at worst. A carved out hole in the patrolling aircraft will force the victim to counter the threat with something more directed and substantial (such as ground forces or gunships). Actually making him THINK about how to counter the gun rather than just letting the patrols and turrets do it for them, and when it doesn't: MOAR TURRETS.
Probably I'm just derailing the thread but I don't really understand the need for unit cannons... I think that best solution would be adding new orbital disposable unit that can be dropped from orbit anywhere you want like one-way teleporter drop-pod: Art made by sirmantron You could link teleporter on ground with teleporter pod on orbit before drop, so it opens and deploy units right after landing (i.e. smashing into the ground), allowing coordinating simultaneous deployment of couple of such devices during an assault. Droppable teleporters could remove need for other troop transportation by using existing mechanics combined with benefits of drop-ships and unit cannons.
A unit like that could replace most methods of transportation in the game depending on how expensive it is. Why is it called 'disposable'? does it have a time limit on how long it is active for once deployed? if not then its functionally no different to the teleporter except it can move, making the regular stationary one practically obsolete since you can build it in safety, then launch and deploy. It also still has no means to defend itself from the global air layer. It is supposed to be really sturdy as well? If not then it is definitely going to need some form of escort or clearing team to keep enemies away from the pod in orbit and the deploying payload as units come through. and they will be tightly clumped together leaving them and the structure vulnerable to Hornets and gunships who are very likely to be directed by a human player well aware of its presence. I don't see it obsoleting the unit cannon should it be nearby, but i do see it removing the need to have an orbital fabber overhead or shot with an invasion to build the teleporter during combat. It is easy to see how this thing can work WITH the cannon as a means of expediting the transport of the main army instead of as a replacement. I do really really like that thing though and i hope it gets included
Double post: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/will-the-unit-cannon-be-added-in-gamma.57450/page-6#post-905856
