Vehicle Warp Gates

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Using a Warp Gate

In order for a vehicle to use a warp gate:

1. The vehicle must be near the entry gate (the one being warped from).
2. The exit gate (the one being warped to) must be in range of the entry gate.
   • If gate A has a range of 5,000m, gate B has a range of 3,000m, and both are 4,000m apart from each other, you could teleport to gate B from gate A, but not to gate A from gate B.
3. Both the entry gate and the exit gate must be fully charged and receiving enough power to support any attached amplifiers.
4. The vehicle must be able to fit through both the entry gate and the exit gate.
5. The vehicle, along with the fortresses it's warping between, must not be in combat.
6. The exit gate must be inside owned, allied, or unclaimed territory.
   • The cost of warping is paid by the entry gate, so warping to an ally's gate wouldn't use any of their resources.
   • There's also a caveat that I'll get into later which makes this less practical

(still continuing)

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Cost of Warping

There are a few ways you could go about setting the cost of warping, but I'll only cover 2.

Idea 1. Material Cost

Warping costs a certain amount of materials determined by the volume of the ship being warped. In this case, I wouldn't want to have the distance affect the cost of warping. You'd still need to "charge" the warp gates, but that would be more like a cooldown than a real cost.

Idea 2. Energy Cost

Warp gates store (battery) energy as "charge", and warping expends some amount of charge determined by the volume of the ship and the distance being warped.

Other Cost Effects

Stabilizers would reduce the cost of warping by some factor, but they would also reduce the rate at which the gate recharges and possibly require power to sustain.

Amplifiers would require constant mechanical power, and they'd explode if they don't enough for a period of time. I'd either make them require a constant amount of power and add a fixed amount of range, or make it so that they take a bit of time to spin up to full strength after changing the amount of power they use.

(almost done)

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Limitations and Caveats

In order to keep warp gates balanced, there are a few rules/limits that you could implement to avoid certain exploitative uses.

1. Warping a vehicle does not transport the resources it has with it.

So, if a ship is carrying materials, it'll leave them behind at the entry gate and arrive with nothing in its containers. I don't think this would apply to energy, ammo, or fuel; it'd just be raw resources that the ship leaves behind.

First of all, this would keep cargo transport vessels relevant. It'd be really cheesy if you could just warp a block of cargo containers from resource zone to resource zone in a chain of gateways.

Second of all, it'd require you to have a decent supply of resources stored at a warp destination for your vehicles to use. If you don't have much material at your outpost or are warping to an allied outpost, you'd instead have to use commodities (or wait for a cargo ship to arrive) to restock the ship's resources.

Third, it'd prevent you from shuffling resources between outposts if one outpost is about to be captured. It'd make getting some cargo ships there quicker, so it might still be problematic.

2. Warp gates located at the same tile can destabilize each other.

When two warp gates are relatively close to each other (like, within a single tile of each other), they would "destabilize" each other. What this means could be a few things.

1. The gates could basically stop each other from working until there's only one in the area.
2. A destabilized gate could have a chance of damaging/destroying a vehicle that it warps.
3. A destabilized gate could have a chance of destroying itself when used.
4. A destabilized gate could warp the vehicle only part of the way to the exit gate, or just to a completely random spot nearby.

Hopefully, this would prevent you from building a bunch of gates together and using them to warp an entire armada at once.