Thunderhawks, Valkyries, and Orca Thread - Ultimate Apocalypse Mod (DOW SS) for Dawn of War

Hey everyone,

I'd like to talk about the balance of Thunderhawks, Valkyries and Orca as infinite range carriers. Currently, they're annoying but balanced by their use in PvE. In PvP, however, it is far too easy to break these. These units make it far too easy to bypass a front line and jump an entire army into an opponent's base. As you can imagine, this is almost impossible to repel unless you've dropped ridiculous resources into fortifying your base or if your army is within a stones throw of your base. That being said, these vehicles do have legitimate uses as carriers, so I've come up with 4 possible solutions to keep them useful while bringing them in line. For the sake of organizing the various responses, I've added a poll. That being said, I'd love to see a discussion on this.

1. Add a cooldown to the jump ability:
   There are two forms I could see this taking. One option is for the jump ability to simply have a short cooldown (30sec - 1min maybe). This would make it harder to bus an army in over multiple trips. This would require building more transports or that an army moves in much more slowly. The latter case is fairly straightforward, while the former would mean less assault vehicles. The other version would be to give these transports two jumps on a full cooldown with a longer recharge time for a jump. This would allow you to drop troops off and then whisk the transport to safety, while making it harder to immediately bring in another load of troops.
2. Reduce their range:
   Another option would be to reduce the range of these carriers. This would make them great for transporting troops and vehicles, especially over impassable terrain, while bringing them into line with other jump vehicles. I should be clear by this that I don't mean giving them a max jump distance of say 475 so that way they technically can't jump all the way across a 513 map. By this I mean longer than a standard jump vehicle, but not by a lot.
3. Make them into fliers:
   Making these vehicles into fliers instead of "teleporting" units would still give them easy access to basically the whole map while also making them easier to deal with. This would slow them down a little, plus the fact that they would need to travel to and from a base would make it possible to shoot them down.
4. Disallow transporting vehicles:
   Personally, this is my least favorite option, as it would impede upon "legitimate" use of these transports. That being said, I feel like it merits mentioning. If you could only jump infantry, it wouldn't be possible to transport an entire army across the map at almost instant speed.

Those are my thoughts, I'd love to hear what the community thinks.

I prefer the cooldown option. It seems like the best way to balance them out while still keeping with their original purpose.

I'm gunna keep my eye on this.

Either the cooldown option or make them into fliers. If they will make them into fliers they can have some guns to defend themselves with so it isn't too easy to kill.

Fliers seems like the best option, because it seems like the AI would use it more other than to produce troops in their base.

Fliers tend to get stuck on terrain constantly for me, so I'd prefer option 1. Them being fliers might fix the annoying builder dropoff problem, though.

Kryptan wrote:

Fliers tend to get stuck on terrain constantly for me, so I'd prefer option 1. Them being fliers might fix the annoying builder dropoff problem, though.

It's easy to miss, but all fliers have a global "jump" ability. It's not all that different from normal movement, but it will unstick a flier.

Wallabe wrote:

Kryptan wrote:

Fliers tend to get stuck on terrain constantly for me, so I'd prefer option 1. Them being fliers might fix the annoying builder dropoff problem, though.

It's easy to miss, but all fliers have a global "jump" ability. It's not all that different from normal movement, but it will unstick a flier.

Yeah, but it takes some time and usually has a cooldown.

making it fly across the map at a slowish speed gives players a chance to shoot it down before it reaches their base thus improving multiplayer game play. It stops back door army drops which I personally love