Unit Cannon: Design Vision

Couldn't agree more. Either energy cost per unit, or a significant increase in construction time and decrease in durability. Teleporters as beachheads just doesn't fit at all.

Right now, the Teleporter fits just so many roles at once:

• Better than the Pelican - Why use fragile, individual unit transports when you can just use cheap, tanky Teleporters?
• Better than the Astreus - Same as above, plus no delay for unit transport
• Better than Anchors - Why even BOTHER with dropping Anchors as beachheads when a Teleporter can be deployed so much faster?

I didn't read all replys so I don't know did someone else say this but I think teleport and unit cannon aint meant to same things, TP is meant to invade planets and unit cannon is meant for strategic hits and maybe for sending fabs to colonize planet.

e. Im going to assume that units which are sent with unit cannon does also have faster travel time compared to normal oribtal units.

Strategic hits with a capacity of 12(!!!) units? No way.

And for colonizing planets, you are better of using Astreus, since you can then also perform quick planet hopping between adjacent moons while only dropping a Teleporter and maybe a single factory per planet at first.

With 12 T2 fab you can build massive proxy base in a moment.

Yes, but you are much better of just sending a single T1 fabber by Astreus, have it build a Teleporter and then just send the T2 fabs by TP. This also has the significant advantage of the Atreus + T1 fab being far less expensive than the initial cost for the Unit Cannon, plus the ability to steer in orbit, so in case the planet has already been occupied you can still choose a different landing location and a loss is much cheaper, too.

Bonus: By sending the (expensive) T2 fabbers by TP, you are also not wasting any time in transfer, unlike the Unit Cannon would do. So you can postpone the construction of the fabbers until after launch.

There wouldnt not be point of sending one fab to build TP since you could do it also with it orbital fab.
I have played few games when my opponent had pretty big planet (~1000 radius) covered with umbrellas and antinukes, but he could not protect all area with his troops, if you can send some fabs and antiairs to unprotected area with unit cannon then make TP and start building proxy base it would be really useful.


Also:

Unit cannon isnt meant for early game and its not that expensive in late game that you could not build lot of them.

pelican is rather tactical for larger planets
austreus can be used for early expansion as orbital fabbricators arent often built in early game because limited in buildoptions ...
anchor is a defensestructure ...
the teleporter fits totaly as a proxyoption ..

Not the biggest fan of the unit canon, but I like how its turning out.
A nice way to get units on the ground where you may have trouble getting a teleport up

No vanguards is also a relief, still a commander's live just got alot more dangerous

They explicitly said that the Unit Cannon will need balance adjustments in PTE. Also, you did not take into account orbital transfer duration. With multiple, far away planets, once the Unit Cannon is up, player B could be everywhere in seconds and he will have T2. Player B needs to keep secret his starting planet or prevent player A from building a teleporter or defend against the bot invasion with slammers. Plus, why should rushing the Unit Cannon be a viable strategy ?

The tele does not need to be changed for the Unit Cannon to be viable. The Unit Cannon is a new unit to the game. A new unit being implemented is not going to be perfectly balanced, it hasn't been play tested nearly as much as all the other units. I am glad that the unit cannon is going in with as high numbers as it does currently have because it won't cause as much of a disruption. Imagine if it was spammable. It would turn PA into a giant Unit Cannon wars (modders plz make that a thing, i beg of you).

Personally I believe balancing should not be done by nerfing units to make the others viable. That just leaves you with two shitty units. Buff the Unit Cannon, don't nerf the tele (also the astraeus could use a buff, I mean really who uses those to colonize planets).

Also you do realise that the Unit Cannon is an end game unit. Right? The tele is a tier 0 unit. If you take the tele out of tier 0 then what are you going to do to fill that void?

The point isn't to make the UC viable earlier, but to take away to unnecessary early use of the teleporter in a place it has no reason to be in.

The whole reason it was introduced was because of the lack of a UC and the ineffective orbital transport, not because it actually had a good fundamental reason to exist other then for the fun of it.

But it does exist and with the UC being completed the Teleporter no longer needs to be free and easy to get, it needs to be legitimately balanced to account for all transport types and their uses.

Actually, there is a good reason to send Astreus +T1 fab, and that is the fact that this combination is inexpensive, plus it also drains less energy. So unless you are planing to build orbital structures as well, you don't actually want to send Orbital fabbers for early game expansion. You only need them later on when the AA defenses make it increasingly harder for the Astreus to land in the first place. Plus, you can also send T1 air fabbers by Astreus - which isn't possible by portal without constructing a local T1 air factory first.

Yes, the Pelican has certain advantages, but at a cost of mere 400 metal, you can as well just use the Pelican to fly fabbers around which drop Teleporters all over the place. After all, it's only the speed of the Pelican you are interested in, the durability is below average, and the capacity and therefor also the responsiveness gained is limited.

And as for Anchors being defense structures, yes, they are. Even though that's not what they were originally being intended to be, it's just that putting up a TP and sending ground units (or fabbers and then setting up Flaks/Umbrellas) is so much more effective. It used to be different when they were first introduced, as they were much cheaper and actually a legit choice to be spammed in orbit BEFORE invading ground, unfortunately no one at Uber seemed to have ever thought about introducing units with limited life time (once deployed) for such scenarios, so that Anchors were quickly abused as impenetrable static defenses rather than for breaching the local defenses.

Teleporter being a proxy is all good, but coming almost free of charge is the problem. You just don't want to have proxies with instant response all over the place.

It seems a little nuts to me that the orbital fabber can build ground units. Maybe once the UC is live they can remove this odd arbitration.

from my pov the teleporter is already ballanced in the way it works with the entry and exit mechanic ... increasing its cost and buildtime may make it even harder to invade any other planet and mostly favor the player who build the teleporter first on a uncontested planet ..
it is fairly easily countered with scouting
i say lets wait for the pte first ...

@exterminans
if you build too many gates that are active you drain your powersupply and render your gates useless as such the ammount of gates is limited to your ammount of powergenerators .. the unitcannon while comparibly expensive in metal may not need as much power and is rather limited in metaland buildcapacity i would imagine ...

I need to be shown some replays of games where teleporters were OP cause I can't wrap my head around why people are wanting it nerfed.

No one has really gone through all of the awesome situations where a Unit Cannon is better than a tele. Enemy starts building a tele on your planet? Flying slammers to the rescue. Enemy starts building a death laser? Flying slammers to the rescue. Enemy has started building halleys? Flying slammers to the rescue. Enemy has anti-nukes making your nukes redundant? Flying slammers to the rescue. Enemy building a nuke behind walls and lasers? Flying slammers to the rescue.

The possibilities, oh the sweet possibilities.

What if the Unit Cannon was T1 (and only builds T1 units) and the teleporter was T2?
What if you had to manually load units (T1 or T2, via rally point from your factories) in the UC until it has 12 loaded and then fire automatically on the target you set?

I want to see the UC getting used. I mean seriously, a lot. Cos it's more awesome than an ordinary, everyday teleporter. Teleporter would need a nerf then. Metal cost increase and move to T2 is enough. Yes, the UC can fire to anywhere in the solar system, but don't forget that the pods take time to travel between planets, while units trough a teleporter don't, and the teleporter really costs almost no metal. I assume flying units from the UC can be intercepted with Umbrellas and/or AA.

I think the teleporter is balanced currently, but when we get the UC, it should be changed. We'll have to wait until pte though and test out before giving final balance thoughts.

Well actually I have played SupCom2 so I actually am quite antiquated with the unit cannon.

And again this isn't about nerfing the teleporter, but actually implementing into the balance properly along with our other transportation options.

As currently it's cost might as well make it free when compared to air transports and orbital transports, that needs to change.

which i disagree on because of its powerusage
while i dont like the unitcannon being a factory i can see why they went for that direction as you could otherwise constantly spam units from afar if it were simply launch entering units to position x .. supcom 2 kinda showed that ...
and if you speak about balance then its mostly about adjusting contend in one way or another so multiple options are viable which can be something being buffed or nerfed directly or indirectly ...
because of how the teleporter works it will be always a strategicaly nessecary unit ..
it is the most usefull logistic structure you can have in the game having multiunitransports later on wouldn't change that as even they as well could only benefit from it if there were a orbital version .. as such the teleporter has every right to be as accessible as neccesary ..

Well It seems we disagree.

I feel it should cost and be at a tier appropriate to it's usefulness, namely very expensive, and T2.

then you would slowdown the pace of the multiplanet game as people wouldn't be able to quickly expand and establish bases and gateinvasionattempts would be even harder to make .. teleporters would lose their flexibility and serve as backup on already established bases only as they would be too much a cost and time investment to be lost ..