Teleporters

The more units you send through, the more embarrassing it gets when a single nuke wipes them all out. Isn't that pricey enough?

While a variable energy cost might make sense, it doesn't change anything particularly important about the gate. You still need energy to move units. The method of payment doesn't change that fact. It only changes how many generators or energy storage you typically need to make it work (granted, energy storage could stand to be more useful).

An energy-per-unit price could allow the delivering gate to cost more energy than the receiving gate. This can create a soft form of 1-way travel that favors moving units off world, but restricts the ability to recall them home. But that can only work if energy has some form of being localized, instead of being shared across the map. (reason #4096, I guess.)

It makes no sense to compare a teleporter to the Nydus Canal in Starcraft because maps in starcraft are tiny. The travel time saved by the nydus canal is only barely worth the cost of the structure. And in fact in serious play it is generally a terrible idea to ever build one.

On very large maps with very long travel times, a teleporter has a tremendously different character. Especially if such a teleporter grants access along paths units cannot easily travel. Such as in PA, where a teleporter lets you move between planets. Teleporters on very large maps can enable units to reach places that would otherwise require prohibitive amounts of time, or which would be impossible. If it's going to take an hour to walk somewhere, you won't bother sending the units.

My concern is about the need to micromanage whether your teleporters are on or off, and the need to micromanage groups of units to make the process more efficient. If the gate is a large energy drain while it is open, then having the gate be active and idle is wasted energy. It makes sense to prepare a stack of units to be teleported, allowing you to activate the teleporter, dogpile in, and close it as quickly as possible.

Ideally we want players to be able to just rally units from factories to the teleporter, say which teleporter is the destination, and require no further micromanagement. The best way to do this is to have each unit have a fixed cost to teleport, regardless of interval between teleports or manual activation and deactivation.


Another possible idea would be a stargate in a ship. Such as an orbital assault carrier. So you can build units on the surface of a planet, and teleport them into the hull of a transport in orbit around the target planet, and then deliver them down to the planet's surface from the ship. The same orbital assault carrier might also be the source of the deployable stargate.

Anything that is a structure can be a structure on a moving asteroid. The game really doesn't need "space" versions of much of anything. Just strap it to a rock and go.

Perhaps the most important exception is to make sure players always have the ability to move lots of combat units between worlds, even if asteroids or cannons or bases aren't available. This probably means a drop ship of some kind.

That problem is not unique to the teleporter. Any structure that burns obscene energy is going to force player intervention to save energy. The solution is to not require obscene energy for things that shouldn't require player management. So place more cost on the gate and less on the generators. EZPZ.

As a side note, running rally points directly to the target will always be a bit faster and more useful than doing sporadic bus trips of reinforcements. Keeping the gate on and fresh reinforcements available on the front line is going to give an edge, especially in a situation where your gate is suddenly popped. Technically, that means an always-active gate should cost more than the mere cost of units involved.

Why not have it cost build power? This would take into account the energy usage required to run it?. You need x number of fabbers to make it work from the place you're teleporting from?

It's not about micro management. It's about investment vs reward.

Why should the cost of 1 leveler be less than the cost of 10 levelers? Because the destructive power of 10 levelers is greater. Why should the cost of sending 10 levelers through the teleporter be the same as sending 1 leveler through? Because 10 levelers cause greater discussion destruction.

If anything, always on is more micro management than x energy per unit. When you invade, you need to turn on the teleporter, and then when you're done invading, you need to turn it off. With the cost tied into units, you know exactly when and how much energy you'll be using only when you send units through. You have to send units through no matter what, so there's no extra steps. With the energy cost tied into whether it's on or off, when you invade you have to turn it on, send the units through, wait for the units to go through, then turn it off. It's more steps with the always on mechanic than with the cost per unit.

Let's convert this to factories. If factories worked like the teleporter, then when a factory was "on" it would consume x metal and x energy per second whether it was creating a unit or not. So you have to build a bunch of units, and then turn off the factory when you're done building units. But instead, we queue up a bunch of units and let it go.

As someone who's used them a ton, I can agree, but it's worth noting that in Starcraft, time and distance both are measured in smaller increments. The ten to twenty seconds you might save with a Nydus Canal are more vital than you can imagine - especially if it bypasses one of the game's endless supply of chokepoints.

Teleporters here are going to be much more about projecting one's existing armies from planet to planet. Conquering one world and having a gross excess of now-useless fighting units on the ground sets you up for a massive invasion as soon as your unit cannon/nuke/orbital bombardment clears a space to build.

My view has nothing to do with the cost of a unit. The teleporter opens up a hole between two points and the energy is used to keep that hole open.

You mentioned in another thread that energy is practically free in the end game so leaving the teleporter on wont be an issue. I just don't like the idea of my units not all being able to go through at once and be picked off in small groups on the other side. If I need a large mass of units somewhere I need them to all get there at a similar time.

I say don't make it super expensive: make it cheap and disposable. Think about it: if the teleporter is super expensive, whats the point of even building it? By the time its a viable option, you could start building nukes or just spamming facs with all that build power.

(I wrote in a lot more detail the first time, but I closed the wrong tab and I have to start all over. Ill rewrite the whole thing if anyone thinks its a good idea)

Instead, have it as a cheap option to expand to other planets faster. Make it explosive, and make individual units cost instead of constant charge (so you cant just send in a entire army, but you can establish a foothold easily).

Greater discussion? More like greater amounts of "Screw this, let's GTFO of here and abscond with our lives!"

This is the reason why it has to cost a lot of energy to teleport units. It lets the teleporter be inexpensive, but still makes players prefer simpler and more direct methods. Like building units on-site instead of always teleporting them wherever they are needed.

I also thought that "greater discussion" was funny. Total inhalation, followed by widespread discussion.

You totally missed the entire point of the analogy. An open hole that you must turn on and off to effectively use your economy increases micromanagement.

If you need a large amount of units to get somewhere, then it shouldn't be cheap. You should have to plan the invasion.

Think about it. Why should teleporting an army instantly to any point in the system be easy or cheap? It should require planning and strategy and should be expensive.

And you're right, you need to get them there in a similar time. And that should require strategy. Not be free and easy and cheap. This is a strategy game after all.

EDIT: forgot to type before I hit enter

BUT, the flip side of this: players will build base, but without being able to have any support from any of there other planets. This gives a massive advantage to whoever got to the planet first, as they could just steamroll the newcomer without him being able to summon any support whatsoever from his other planets. Having all the planets isolated like that results in making it a bunch of isolated battles, instead of one massive engagement spanning entire solar systems.

This adds strategy: The player on your home planet is digging in, he has the eco advantage, and raiding is getting less and less profitable. So what do you do?

As it stands: Wait to die, he has the advantage, unless you get a lucky snipe (which is lame anyway).

With the option to teleport your units to a planet where he is not dominating: You swing your units over to the next planet where your forces are more or less equal, and hit him there, giving you the chance to regain the
advantage

(If I make any mistakes with my example, feel free to point them out so I can fix them )

Ok, the tenative, unplaytested, unpromised final plan (continue to add caveats until you submit) is:
1. Fixed energy cost when on
2. No additional cost explicitly but not limited to: number of units, size of units, distance of travel, whether or not your user name contains the string "Zap".
3. No naval or air units

Do you have plans for invading primarily or completely naval planets then? Teleporting or Transporting air and naval units is a must in some form or fashion.

My point was you dont have to turn it on and off therefore no micro management.

I have no problems with planning stuff its why I love RTS games. Being able to send troops via teleporters while lobbing nukes and shooting them from orbit with lasers sounds great to me.

Why should it be really expensive though? You have already invested in your army and the teleporter and there is a constant cost of energy to keep it going why should we restrict planetary invasions even more? If we want to speed up orbital gameplay then making things like this a viable option is a must

Love the stargate music playing over the screenshot. Damn I love sg-1.

Why should it be expensive? Because the ability to instantly teleport an entire army anywhere in the map is very very powerful.

Being able to do that shouldn't be cheap.

If teleporters are cheap, then there's no point in transports because transports would be more expensive and take more time.

No naval makes sense for reasons already stated in the thread, but no air actually surprises me. And... I take that to then also imply no nukes.

Probably for the best for gameplay (and targeting/routing complexity), I suppose, but I was already thinking that'd be a fairly efficient use of the thing, in some probably fairly common scenarios. I mean, if I actually was a death-robot and had access to these technologies, that'd be very high on my list of tactical options to employ.

Err, wait, and about nukes through the stargate teleporter again. Isn't that the second thing they do with a stargate teleporter in that movie? After sending a disposable robot probe. It's not like I was way out in left field there.

Mobility is immensely powerful because it buys you two very valuable things that are very difficult to obtain. Time, and flexibility.

It is not an exaggeration to say that time is literally money in any RTS game, especially in a game like TA where resource production is a function of time. Anything that makes any process faster needs to have significant costs or downsides attached. Teleportation saves you a lot of time where your units would be tied up in transit, letting them do more work in less time. Therefore, there needs to be a downside. An exorbitant energy cost to teleport units is a very small price to pay for instantaneous transportation. You're spending resources in exchange for time, and the only requirement to make that a profitable exchange is that you gain more profit from the time purchased than the raw resources cost you. Which is very easy.

Not only does teleportation buy you time, it also buys you strategic and tactical flexibility. To reduce this concept to its simplest case, suppose a player is concerned about two planets. If they are completely separated and it is almost impossible to move units between them, you must maintain an army on each. As a result you must build two separate armies that cannot help each other. You could be losing horribly on one planet, and hugely winning on the other.

However, if teleportation were free (even after an expensive construction), catastrophic losses or loss of important infrastructure on one planet don't necessarily cause defeat on that planet because of the option of receiving on-demand reinforcements. In fact, you actually don't even need two full armies any more. You can make do with less, because you have the option of moving troops from one planet to the other instantly. The easier it is to move assets, the more the tactical situation on the two worlds blurs together into a single environment that stands or falls together. What this means is that you're paying for options, not just speed. Even though some of those options will not be exercised, the fact that they were possible is very powerful and you have to pay for that capability, either upfront, or when you choose to exercise them.

Separation of planets is created by making transportation between them difficult. And this kind of separation is necessary in order to have different situations on each planet. If transportation is too quick and/or too cheap, you only have one status that applies everywhere. A doom army can just roll from planet to planet. Much like how a really large swarm of planes in TA can almost immediately reach everywhere on the map, and obviates the need to have many slower units or static defenses spread out to cover the map.

Naturally it is important to create options for players in strategy games. But it is also very important to have a clear idea of which options you want players to prefer, and make those options better. In PA, we want building units on-site to be far and away the best option. Transporting them by rocket, drop pod, or unit cannon from a nearby ship or planet is much tougher, but should be the next-best option. And teleportation should be the least desirable value proposition because it is the most convenient and the most powerful.



The problem with sending a nuclear bomb through a PA stargate is that you are blowing up your own teleporter on the other side. Allowing any teleporter to dial any other teleporter is asking for some extremely serious weirdness. Effectively that wasn't even the case in Stargate because of various different methods of blocking the portal, including the Iris, energy barriers, dirt, and whatnot.

That said, nuclear bombs are small potatoes on the scale of an entire solar system, so I don't see a reason why you shouldn't be able to build a nuclear bomb that walks around. Or carry a nuclear missile on a vehicle that you can transport through a teleporter.