Quantum Gates

[FunkOff]

In a discussion about SCUs, somebody linked to a mod that allows gates to teleport units to other gates. A basic summary of the function is this:
Quantum Gates have the "teleport" ability. When activated, the gate checks where its rally point is, selects an appropriate other gate nearby (can be same player's or allied player's gate), then begins a 30 second teleport sequence and teleports every allied unit nearby. During this time, it uses -1000 energy base, plus more energy for each unit. Tech 1 units are -50 each, with higher techs being more expencive and ACUs/SCUs being about -5000 for a total of 30,000 energy to use the ability, 1,500 energy to teleport a tech 1 unit and up to 150,000 energy to teleport an ACU or SCU. Experimentals can also be teleported but are more expensive. The sequence cannot be cancelled, allied units cannot move or shoot while being teleported and if a receiving gate is destroyed during the teleportation sequence, all units being teleported and the sending gate die.

Having reviewed and tested this mod... I think it has a lot of potential and I would like to incorporate it into FAF... but I think a few changes would be necessary.
-First, the gate itself should be made more durable and more expencive. Right now, it's cheap and fragile.... 3,000 mass and 10,000 health. 5,000 mass and 20,000 health are more fair, imo, if we're going to make it useful for teleporation.
-Second, the teleportation mechanic needs to be able to work independant of a receiving gate. Although potentially useful in limited situations such as supporting allies or whatever, requiring a recieving gate is simply too much, in my opinion.
-Third, to balance not requiring a recieving gate will be two components: First, a teleporation beacon will spawn at the rally point is a nearby allied gate is not present, such as when teleporting into an empty area. This beacon (we'll call it a tether) will be vulnerable to attack and, if killed, will destroy the sending gate and all units being teleported. Second, the time needed to send units will be doubled, from 30 seconds to a minute, thereby also increasing the energy cost associated with gate-less teleportation. Seeing as gates cost less than 100,000 energy to build out-right, this will make tethered teleporting considerably less efficient and riskier than double-gated teleporting. Ideally, it would encourage strategies such as sending and engineering team through a tethered teleport to a remote location to build a gate there, and then teleporting a larger army through double-gate teleporting after that. Also, with the beacon vulnerable to attack for a full minute before arrival of the attack force, teleporting units directly into an enemy base is... not viable except in conditions of extreme negligence on the part of the defender. Further, defending against teleportation would require, at most, a few scattered T2 PD or a gunship on patrol.
-Fourth, I'd increase the range of the gate teleportation ability to allow for naval units to be teleported if the the gate is built near water. In this way, ships can be teleported as well.
-Fifth, I'd enable teleportation to all gates... allied AND enemy. With this, it would add a very unique gate-against-gate warfare. The teleporation effect is visible at both sending and receiving gates... so attempting to teleport to an enemy gate would have both risks and rewards. Risks would be, obviously, they'd see you coming 30 seconds in advance and could kill your entire attack force if they Ctrl K their own gate prior to the arrival of the gating forces, causing all gating forces and your own gate to perish. However, you could use this intentionally... you could decide to gate a T1 scout to shut down the enemy gate for 30 seconds. Or, you can link your gate to the enemy gate directly and simply Ctrl K your gate to kill his. Further, this allows quantum gates themselves to be used as a defense against teleportation.... if you don't ever use your own to attack, anybody using theirs to attack you will give you a 30 second window to destroy your own gate and thereby instantly destroy all attackers.


So yes. That roughly sums up what I'd like to do with quantum gates in FAF.

Thoughts?

[FunkOff]

I'm going to ignore all "no" votes that don't have an associated post explaining why.

[ToejamS]

I just dont think its a game mechanic the game needs. If you need to move units, there are transport drops. If you dont have air superiority, no drop, drop, droppies for you.

[Treble]

I certainly think it is worth trying. Such a drastic change must be thoroughly tested of course. Sounds pretty similar to the Illuminate Teleporter in SupCom 2 which was extremely powerful. Having a long, 30 seconds of warm-up time is a good thing, possibly longer even.

60 seconds for tethering sounds good to me. Would make it nearly impossible for any type of hit-and-run tactics as the tether itself would be destroyed.

I like the sound of having it more effective to teleport from gate to gate.

I dont see this change having any effect on 90% of games. Only the largest team, FFA and phantom games will ever get to this point. Speaking of Phantom, everyone building gates and not knowing what or where anything is coming from, could get spicy.

[FunkOff]

Also prohibiting hit-and-run tactics is the fact that you cannot teleport from point a to point b without a gate are point A.... if you have only a gate at point B, that's called a recall and, save for the ACU pilot, I don't think we'll introduce a recall system to FAF.

And actually, I think gates could even see use in 1v1 with tethered gating and CERTAINLY in team games. I just had a 1v1 ranked game on vya 3 that lasted 32 minutes... it came down to several percivals being air-dropped into the enemy base. He and I both had T3 pgens, T3 land and air, just no experimentals. I think at the 5,000 mass price point, Gateways will definitely see use, most likely before experimentals too. Also, because they will be able to teleport allied units, I'm confident gate rushes in team games will be a viable and desirable strategy.

Further, I intend to make gates capable of teleporting enemy units, so it will have limited functionality as a defensive structure, too. Basically, to kill a gate, you'll need either long-range weaponry (MML or better) or you'll have to wait until it's activated (perhaps by using bait?) and then kill it... or you can use your own quantum gate to entagle and destroy it :3

I intend to make gates teleport

[AdmiralZeech]

I think the tether system is too complicated. Double gate system is obvious and intuitive, and contains no special cases or alternatives.

Make gates cheap and fragile. Cheap, so it's feasible to construct a destination gate in risky territory, and fragile, so that they can be sniped. (SupCom needs more snipe targets apart from the ACU!)

Rather than a group-teleport, I would instead make it work like this:

- When activated, the Gate has a large constant energy drain.
- Destination Gate is specified by something other than rally point, since that is used by SCU construction.
--> Can Assist be used? Or Ferry? And/Or Attack? Assist > Friendly Gate / Attack > Enemy Gate might be a good way.
- Quantum Gate has a certain very small range.
- When activated, every 0.3s or so, Gate will teleport the nearest unit inside its small range to the destination gate. The unit will appear outside of the destination gate's range.
- An activated Gate is one-way to its destination. To return, activate the other gate.
- You can only command a Gate that you control. However, you can exit any Gate.
--> If you warp to an enemy gate, you're stuck unless the enemy has activated his gate. And the destination of his gate is chosen by him.
- If you build an SCU at an Active Gate, since the SCU spawns inside the gate, it will immediately get teleported to the destination gate. Just a consequence of the system.

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Some of the above rules are a little strange, because I'm thinking about how to make things work within the current UI in a simple and straightforward manner. I dont have any ideas or plans for how it will affect gameplay - I'm just proposing a simple system and letting the gameplay impacts be discussed / be emergent.

But basically it's easy, command a gate to activate, choose a destination, it will use up lots of energy. Then just roll your units in and they will come out the other side one by one, like a tunnel. Deactivate the gate and the energy drain stops.

It doesnt have as many crazy functions as your idea FunkOff, but I'm going for simplicity here.

[Kekouse]

Using the gates to teleport is a good and obvious idea. It's there and we cannot use it in game :/ And in big games it's a pain to move land units.
So yes to the teleport function. But it must be easy and understandable, FA is complicated enough.

-Yes to the double gate system. It's better to use a fixed amount of energy than the pay X per unit. What amount? How long?
A constant drain of X.000 energy is more logical and fits in the way we play FA. You build the two gates, it drains energy but you can teleport unit when you want. Maybe we need to limit it to T1-T2-T3 units. If you want to construct Monkeylords in front of the ennemy base, you need to teleport engies or even your com.

-Why not to the tether system, a PANIC teleport option...but it must cost way more than the normal teleport and the gate must have a max range to prevent the teleporting of units directly into the ennemy base.

The mechanic must be simple.
2 gates = teleport ability
1 gate = teleport in the limit of a range and with a heavy cost.
If it's too complicated FunkOff, some people will use it to the full extend and the other not because they don't understand it. And I think it's not the way we must tweak FA. But it's only my opinon

The idea of the mod to pay per unit is a good idea but it doesn't fit in the FA economy. In FA it's more a streamlined economy and we must find a way to make the same thing with the teleporter. So having a fixed cost and limiting the teleport to T1-T2-T3 is maybe the best solution.
(even if the "pay per unit" is indeed more subtle)

[Kekouse]

In fact the pay per unit system and allowing the teleport of everything (T4 and why not naval unit with gates that you could build on water) is way better but we need to know in advance what it cost before pushing the teleport icon.
The cost must be shown somewhere and the player must not calculate it manually.
Now with this mod you must calculate it yourself and it's not "FAish"...it's a little bit: "I try it and I'll see if my eco can take it".

The best way would be that the mod calculate the teleport cost of units in the teleport range so players can know in advance if it's possible to teleport those units with their economies.

tl;dr:
If it possible to calculate "on the fly" the cost of teleporting X unit : go pay per unit
If it's not possible to show this easily : go fixed cost and limiting it to T1-T2-T3

[FunkOff]

It doesnt have as many crazy functions as your idea FunkOff, but I'm going for simplicity here.

Your idea of one-unit-at-a-time gating is viable as a concept. Certainly, it's simple and easy to understand, and it fits into the canon.... after all we never see more than a single unit gated at a time in supcom/fa campaigns.

However, I don't really like the idea because there would be no way to stop any units units being teleported into an enemy base. At .3 seconds apiece, that's extremely deadly for percivals.... you could potentially snipe an enemy with only 4 of them, so 1.2 seconds. I think it would be neceessary to mess with the time... possibly making it only 1 unit every 3 seconds. This would make it so a quantum gate could stream a steady supply of reinforcements and would help make SCUs effective... because SCUs would be used as the FIRST unit through the gate and could both provide light defense + build a shielded/stealthed firebase.... essentially securing the other side of the quantum link and enabling other units to pass through.

Hmm.

Yes I like this idea better. I'll have to use this.

The same principles will apply though.... it will cost -1000 E per second to run the gate, when running the gate will tele to another gate for a certain cost and be more expensive to tele to a tether rather than a gate. If the tether or destination gate is destroyed while gate sequence is running, the origin gate will also be destroyed. Etc.

Good idea, AZ.... but I'm not going to make gates fragile/cheap. That doesn't make for good gameplay, imo.

[uberge3k]

I'm going to ignore all "no" votes that don't have an associated post explaining why.

That's quite disingenuous of you, seeing as it's fairly obvious why this would get a "no" vote: it will either be extraordinarily OP or it will be never used.

- "Yes, but only double-gate". This will never be practical or cost efficient. 10k mass for two gates, the second of which could never be in enemy territory as I'd just be throwing away my army vs someone who knows what they're doing? No thanks, I'll use waypoints instead and move them myself. I'm wholly unable to come up with a plausible scenario in which it would be better than simply moving those units myself. If the distance really is that large, then I'll use air transports. If I don't have air superiority, then I have no way of defending this second gate anyway.

- "Yes, double gate and tethered". Same as above. I'll either transport them myself (I could buy all the air transports I'd ever need for far less than the cost of a gate, plus more air to secure superiority) or simply use waypoints and move the units normally. If I don't control that territory, then... what's the point? Throwing units away on a dice roll on the off-chance the enemy won't see the tether?

- "Yes, double gate, tethered, and enemy gate". At first glance, it's roughly similar to the current nuke and SMD counter system. The problem is, SMDs require nontrivial amounts of time to build their missiles, giving you a window of opportunity to stop an enemy's nuke once scouted. A 5k unit that instantly works to "entangle" the enemy gate could easily be rushed before the first transport sequence is finished. Speaking of which... how would that even work with both tethers *and* double gates? You're simply locked from using tethers if there's an enemy gate within an arbitrary distance?

Even in Phantoms, I simply don't see how this could possibly be useful. You can't teleport into someone's base as they'd see the tether and kill it. You can't use someone's gate as they'd simply ctrl-k it as soon as it was active.

Maybe, *maybe* it might see some use in 81x81km maps. They're simply too buggy (cough, move bug) and slow to see much play, however, so it's usefulness is debatable.

(and yes, I voted "no". )