Unit Cannon: Design Vision

I think it would be cool to have it repeatedly fire units at a location if you give it a set rally, but wait for it to fill up a whole volley before firing. A special command for that pls? Also, an area-attack/area-repeated attack should scatter your units within the area, that would be cool, though attack/repeated attack then shift-area attacking should have them pinpoint land, then area attack.

Why not change the teleporter instead so that both can fill distinct roles?

As I said in this thread: Make teleporters non-buildable by anything other than T2 fabbers. Make teleporters have a cost of 2000 and an energy drain of at least 5000. There's no way instant transportation of units from planet to planet should be that cheap.

Now there's no logical ingame reason for why unit cannons can't load prebuilt units. If I already have 50000 units on a planet I should be able to load them into UCs so send them to enemy worlds. You shouldn't even think about building teleporters when invading until your beachhead is fully secure so I don't think that allowing unit cannons to load units would invalidate teleporters (or make unit cannons useless once the teleporters are online as the unit cannon would be much lighter on the economy). You can make which units it can load based off of the carry weight of the unit to avoid infernosnipes.

You're already turning the orbital metagame upside down by introducing the UC. I don't think people are going to complain if teleporters are changed so that unit cannons don't have to be shoehorned into a role they were never intended to be in originally.

At the very least make this modable so that we can make them load units if we wish.

I'm hoping for small individual parachutes or small thrusters

Why build dox at al if you can build slammers?

personaly i would have the uc rather loadup units you built from other factories than to have it build its own units ...
about how teleporters are treated ...
no idea ... i dont have too much a problem having them still be buildable by lower tier units or the commanders
but i guess we'll see how that works out on the pte ... still could be changed before going stable sooo not realy that big a deal ...

I'd still love to see the interesting idea of unit cannons only working between bodies that orbit eachother, coupled with the ability to change a body's orbit using halleys, turning a small moon into an assault platform.

Orbital gameplay has been greatly diminished in favour of ground based capabilities by the cheap teleporter/unlimited ranged nuke/unlimited range unit cannon combo. There's not really a massive difference from a gameplay perspective between PA's planets and a flat rts map's islands because of these.

I kinda liked when in beta going to a different planet was a bit difficult, and had it's own challenges... i still think it shoud be a bit more expensive endeavour, and to have it's limitations in order to make solar system level strategy a bit more interesting... Moving bodies to get yourself into attack range and that sorta stuff... Currently your enemy being on a dafferent planet is barely different than them being right next to you.

Yeah, because what the orbital game really needs is slowing down.

The transition to orbital needs to be sped up. Orbital should be viable in a small planet 1v1.

However, the expansion, once it starts occurring, is way too fast.

Make orbital available earlier, make teleporters available much later.

You can see in the picture that if fires the exact same shells as with what the commander spawns with. So it'll probably work the same like a commander spawn ( though probably a different landing effect).

I think the idea to use it as a factory's is good because it sives time and money for animations ( loading up a unit in the unit cannon won't be necessary). Also saves up some of the annoying micro.

It exactly how I thought about it . Curious how it'll influence gameplay!

orbital is already fairly early available .. as such should do teleporters ... the moment you set down on a planet with a builder you quickly want to have a save footing ... a teleporter does that ... it shouldnt be limited to t2 builders only imo because you would always have to teckrace to t2 just in order to expand planets ... i dont think it would make fun to wait till you have that ... ... the unitcannon however is more for offensive actions ... so imo they both have their roles already ...

You can still expand onto planets without teleporters. Teleporters should be a thing of convenience with a serious cost late game, not the absolute necessity that they are ATM.

Imho the first thing that orbital needs is a UI that makes players not go mad at the game for being stupid.
Like have a zoom out stage that makes it possible to see orbital and only select orbital.
We had some great ideas on the forums about that in the past. The current state of orbital controls makes me hope we will never see orbital in 1vs1 until they are resolved.

It's tiny issues that can be implemented rather quickly, but they need to be implemented.

they will always be a nessecity for backup troops or for large offensive attacks ... they are you main proxyoption

They won't be a necessity for that if their cost (metal cost to build and continuous energy drain) were high enough and the unit cannon was allowed to be used for those roles.

wrong
the biggest advantage the teleporter has is its immidiate point to point transportation by that allone it will be always supperior to the uc even if it needs an exit on the destination ... cost doesn't change that ...
on the other hand the uc is the unit were you can transport units to destinations more aggresively ...
the teleporter is easily dispatchable ... the uc is untouchable unless you invade the planet its used from or send missiles ...

Your explanation makes sense to me. Seems to be well thought out.

nooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I also believe the teleport needs to be nerfed in sum fashion..building it is very easy and makes transportation instant vs uc taking awhile to reach its destination...

@stuart98

What happened to the philosophy of change the unit based on balance, don't change the balance based on a unit?

They're clearly meant to be used for two different roles, the teleporter requires that you hold an area already in order to build the receiving end for mass invasion. The Unit Cannon is for smaller invasions like raiding, or to start a beachhead for the teleporter to be built. Because they're designed for two different roles, comparing them is like comparing Dox and Bolos, two similar units meant for different things.