Unit: Djinn

Stats:
Djinn
Metal - 800
HP - 2600
Speed - 1.2
Build Time (Unassisted) - 1m, 24.2
Lighthouse (aka. Beacon)
HP - 1500

A somewhat confusing unit at first, the Djinn is a very expensive unit yet can also be EXTREMELY useful if you plan it right. What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a bonafide Teleporter. The Djinn is capable of teleporting units from one location to another, from any distance, for absolutely no resource cost aside from the cost to field the Djinn to begin with. Let's take a look at how this works...

To teleport units, the Djinn must first place a 'beacon' (the Lighthouse mentioned above) anywhere on the terrain, including underwater. After placing it's beacon a blue line will be drawn from the beacon to the Djinn indicating the teleport path; the circle around the beacon is the area units must enter to be teleported. After the Djinn has reached the position where you wish units to exit, 'deploy' it so it can receive units. Then take the units you want to teleport and right-click on the beacon; they will then be warped to the Djinn one at a time. Now on to rules of teleporting.

Note that teleporters are strictly 'Point A to Point B', meaning they are one-way; you can only teleport from the beacon to the Djinn, and if you want to go somewhere else you have to set another beacon and move the Djinn elsewhere. The time it takes to teleport a unit depends on it's metal cost; a Blastwing or Dirtbag will be warped almost instantly, whilst more costly units will take considerably longer. You can teleport any land or amphibious unit; you can even have a unit on the beach with a beacon underwater and still be able to teleport. Gunships can teleport as well, though fixed-wing planes cannot; they will simply fly around the beacon on a guard order. Two neat tricks regarding the beacon; one is that you can queue additional orders such as move/fight after you right-click the beacon and they will carry those orders out as soon as they finish teleporting; this also means you can set a factory rally point to the beacon and then to the desired destination for streamlined teleportation. The second is that you can cloak the generator and/or its beacon and neither will be revealed at any point during the teleportation process, though the unit will be visible for a split second upon completing teleportation.

Whilst the Djinn does offer you a handy way of circumventing the need to build large aerial/naval transporter fleets for your armies, it is still a massively expensive unit and highly vulnerable to attack. You must also choose your teleporting locations wisely; if the beacon were to be destroyed or the surrounding area to become unsafe, you would need to move all the way back to set another one, then back to the exit point (which could have been overrun by then). I suggest procuring an aerial transport for this unit so you can quickly set up effective teleportation routes. All in all this unit is very risky; you're paying 1800 metal for a faster way to deploy your armies or for an instant, massive backdoor attack on someones position, but this thing moves at the same rate as an unmodified Support Commander and is very easily destroyed if you're not careful.

>I've honestly never seen it in a game.

It's a huge investment for a unit that is defenseless. By the time you can actually afford one + a decent army actually worth teleporting, the enemy has enough units that it's next to impossible to sneak it anywhere worthwhile. The only "sneak" ability that is has is the ability to go underwater, which all amphibs can currently do anyways.

Want to make it worthwhile? Give it personal cloak so that it can sneak by enemy defenses. At a bare minimum it needs this.

Want to make it really cool? Give it area cloak, even just a small one, so that it can hide a few units as it's warping them in. It may need to have its cost raised to justify this change.

It might just be far too slow to be used without transports. That and the fact that most games are fairly tightly packed so a teleporter is not particularly useful.

this unit is fairly polarized.. either it works and unloads lulz into enemy base, or it gets detected and smushed.

Just dont give it cloak it would be total nonsense. Good example for use. Lets say supreme battlefield you have one sea won other has other team make cloaker ant transfer ships from one sea to another. Win win! Or some sneak attacks. It is new thats why it isint used.

Djinn is usefull on some maps I have used it and seen it used successfully on 2_Mountains_Battlefield and IslandParadiseV2 I think it could work on other maps as well.


However it cost alot and is very slow. I would increase speed and reduce cost to 1500.

Its good underwater

In a factory where everything is amph anyway, it is much less useful than in one where it is the only and major form of amph transport, as in the original concept.

The real problem, like the whole amph factory, is just that Google was way too afraid of things being OP and made them way too weak. He was utterly paranoid that people would use this unit to rapidly transport units, say, from one front on Comet to the other, so he made it cost 1800, which is just never going to be worthwhile.

It just needs its cost lowered A LOT, IMO no more than 500. If people start using amph teleporters on dry maps to quickly move their armies from one place to another, great, its another interesting use, I don't think it's going to ruin the mechanics of the game and the unit is so limited (one way, BP capped, really slow) that I doubt it would really see that much use even if it only cost 100. It isn't going to ruin games and if we see the metagame shift away from unit positioning because of extensive use of teleporters, we can worry about it when people actually use it at all...

Antelope use your brain! If you will terraform canal to get ships to other side you will need to transport land units across canal, and in case your attack will fail they will have canal where theyr ships will swim to your sea DOUBLE FAIL! ;)

>sea DOUBLE FAIL! ;)

Someone clearly doesn't understand that water can be shallow enough to allow units to walk yet deep enough to allow ships.