heres something that wasnt even mentioned in the demo. "Once a gateway has been established, it can be reconfigured to an even more remarkable device: a warp gate. Functionally a warp gate is similar to a gateway in that both devices open a spatial rift. However, protoss forces moving through a gateway must emerge in close proximity to the structure, whereas those summoned via a warp gate can be projected to any part of the battlefield that lies within the psionic matrix." http://www.starcraft2.com/features/protoss/ This is different to the phase prism in that the building unit appears anywhere you want within the pylon network (including phasing prisms) phase prisms convert armies into energy and then they can be sent anywhere
What do you mean "wasn't mentioned in the demo"??? He demonstrated warping in units in power fields at least 3 times. He didn't actually mention the word "Warp Gate" but buildings weren't the focus of the demo, units were.
he only mentioned it when he talked about the phase prism, maybe thats where the stalkers were coming from. but the impression i got is that the units are prebuilt then warped in.
I have another theory for you, one that I find rather original and innovative for the Protoss, but it's too long to explain and I'm not in the mood right now. I'll start a thread on it tomorrow.
Heres what i think and im sure im right.. You can warp in 1 unit per warp gate, i feel this is why when he first uses warp in he can only warp in 4 units (you can see he couldn't ahh more from the build options.. Then later with more warp gates or upgrades he was able to warp in 12.. the warp gates would then could back up to the number of units aloud to warp in.. you can see this happening after he warps in..
when he "warped" 12 units.. they were in the phase prism... the warpgate is just like a rally point.. but instead of ordering the unit to walk to the rally point, the unit is teleported there.. and the "rally point" MUST be in the pylon network...
well, how they actually work is still in dispute, but for stratagey porposes, you could establish a beach head with a phas prism, and becuase phase prisms dont require energy, it could just sit there phasing, and any new units jsut warp straight into the phase prisms feild as soon as they are built, scary stuff
I am quite sure warp-in is recall and rally for fresh built units all-in-one. More so the latter. I will explain. If you take closer inspection of the warp-in process, it is done by selecting the warpgates. The phase prisms have nothing to do with the actual process beyond providing a remote power field in the absence of pylons. When the demonstrator selected a group of warpgates, in the command window you can see that units available for warp-in are shown, along with a number for each unit type equal to the number of selected warpgates. At one point when 16 warpgates were selected, in the command window to the right, showed zealot, stalker, and immortal. And on each button, showed the number 16. So first we establish that the number of warp-gates is the determining factor of how many units can be warped in. Now for the interesting part. If you observe carefully, you will see that for every unit warped-in, resources were deducted. Meaning, they were built right then and there, but warped-in right to the destination. Hence, proving the theory of remote rally. I thought about the possibility of pre-building, but the fact that 16 were available for all three unit types and resources were subtracted at the time of warp-in suggest that the units were not pre-built and waiting inside the warpgates for warp-in. Just by this, and how Protoss is based on superior units, would lead one to think this is overpowered. But keeping game balance in mind, I can't help to think there would be a penalty after the warp-in in place of having build time prior to it. So a downtime equal to that of a warped-in unit's build time would seem likely. Also, since warpgates are gateway upgrades, there is no proof at this point to suggest that non-gateway units can be warped-in.
