I have created a very small server mod that turns the commander into an orbital unit. The tech tree stays exactly the same, but there are a couple small balance changes on the commander. Commanders can fly to other planets. Go make as many bases as you can as fast as you can! Commander health becomes 2000 (Down from 12500). Umbrellas kill the commander fast but avengers have trouble hitting it. This is due to a small bug that actually leaves things balanced exactly the way I want. The commander spends most of it's time up in the orbital layer. You can s-move down to the air layer, but as soon as you give a new order the commander will move back up. Replaced Uber Cannon with Yamato Cannon (thanks @elodea) Extremely powerful against units and damages buildings Massive AOE 2.5 minute cooldown and uses up 1k energy per second. Don't use this weapon unless you need it. It's surprisingly fun for such a small mod! This allows our games to scale out to a full solar system in just minutes.
Something to remember: if your sim goes from awesome to lagging hard, it means elodea just started a 2000 Dox invasion of your planet.
Since there don't really seem to be any bugs aside from the funny ones, it should be ready to release. I'll get it up on pamm once I get some sleep.
Updated to v1.1.0 New commander model. Replaced Uber Cannon with Yamato Cannon (thanks @elodea) Extremely powerful against units and damages buildings Massive AOE 2.5 minute cooldown and uses up 1k energy per second. Don't use this weapon unless you need it. Increased commander health to 2000 (was 1250) Decreased planet arrival waiting time to 3 seconds (was 15) Fixed annoying movement audio problem Increased build range just enough to avoid the bug that was forcing commanders to spin in circles and build really slow. New icon (thanks @proeleert)
As usual with my mod releases, I already found a bug. When the commander moves to another planet the glowy ball effect stays on the original one. I'll try to fix this but if I can't...
did you use my .pfx as well? I was still using some really bad looking blue ball ubercannon.pfx thing i hacked up when learning how pfx's worked. Never got around to making it look like a proper yamato cannon or some such aha.
The weapon trail is pretty much yours (the uber cannon) but team colored. The explosion is definitely yours. I changed the weapon stats to work in this balance but that's all. This is still more or less your weapon.