Orbital destroyers

The simple fact of the matter (and I apologise for the metaphor in advance) is that uber had the orbital layer castrated because they were afraid it would **** them and all they are left with is a barely functional limp noodle.

How is orbital barely functional?

cant intercept threats, unit stacking is buggy and you can play and win even an orbital game building only one orb. Fabber.

It's.tacked on and you know it.

No, I don't believe that.

And the orbital game is dominated by mostly mobile units, even the solar collectors a mobile, so saying that you can win with only one orbital fabber is to ignore the fact that players also have access to a complete air/land/sea position, as well as a gate network to other planets.

In that position, and without gas giants, why would you even need more then one orbital fabber?

The nature of the orbital layer allows units to move at will from one planet to another, so units upon arrival seem to appear above their targets, I agree that this is a problem but not that this makes orbital barely functional.

Unit stacking is no different to the stacking of aircraft we have experienced before hand, this does not however make it a barely functional unit layer.

So to say that orbital is a tacked on feature is to suggest that you believe that orbital is not actually required in the game with multiple planets, which is incorrect, as orbital acts as the bridge between different planets, and is important as the logistical and support layer to facilitate cross system play.

teleporters are necessary to multiplsnet play and you could have those without any orbital units, in fact the base concept didn't even have any other than the lander.

Teleporters are only necessary because the landers are kinda crappy.

And even then, just because the concept has something don't mean that that is what uber had to or has to stick to.

My 2 cents :

Avenger - stays much the same as it is.

Anchor - remove ground fire. Make it a lot tougher (equivalent survival vs avengers as double (maybe even triple) barrel turret has vs bolos).

New unit 1 : orbital layer assault ship - vanguard uber cannon with sniper bot range, lower projectile speed (~2/3). Take down orbital buildings quickly but will likely miss avengers if they're moving, can sit out of range of anchors. (I reckon squishy's design of a ship would look awesome for this (weapon fire leaving from the gap between the body and the fin at the bottom rather than the turret)

New unit 2 : orbital missile ship (near identical to t2 bomber) - paper thin (2 hits from avenger) but can sit out of range of umbrellas and hit ground targets. Same movement speed (possibly slightly slower) than t2 bomber.

Alternative new unit 2 : orbital dive bomber - drops down from orbit into air layer to do high damage shot. dive length > umbrella radius so can kill umbrella without taking damage from it. Will become vulnerable to anti-air for middle 1/3 of dive. 2-3 hits to kill from standard aa missile. 3 bombers together 1 shot umbrella.

New unit 3 : orbital bombardment platform - drops 4x t1 bomber payload each time, fires 6x per second, AOE size of t1 factory. movement speed slow enough that it takes >10s to cover the length of a t2 factory. No anti-orbital weapons and can't hit air (intentionally) . Basically a scorched earth policy. Ground units are fast enough to get out from under it. Should be able to close on and kill 2 umbrellas (ie, survive under fire from outside of range to over building). Scary as hell to see coming but so slow that a sizable force or a ring of close grouped umbrellas will wipe them out before they can actually kill anything important.

SSX - remains as is. not entirely replaced by bombardier as its speed could be useful for rushing in a sneak attack on a single high value target.

New unit 4 : Multi-unit transport - say 10 t1 vehicles/15 t1 bots/3 t2 vehicles/5 t2 bots/2 t1 ships/1 t2 ship. tough enough to land under fire from single umbrella but will die to umbrella plus 4 t1 aa on the ground.

New ground structure : orbital navigation scrambler - prevents any orbital unit dropping in within a given area (say t1 radar range). Minimum spacing is 2.5x coverage area (basically leaving a gap for landings in between).

This gives us an orbital layer battle of avenger<anchor<assault ship<avenger. Anchors are meaningful again for orbital combat and now you have an alternative to massed avengers for taking out orbital. Massed avengers should be more expensive for the same dps, but they're also more versatile and are available from orbital launcher.

Orbital could do serious damage to structures, clearing a path for a teleporter or holding the area until your units are through. However the enemy can prevent you from dropping them directly on their main base/power fields/nuke silos, so no more really cheap snipes. Avengers will rip through orbital missile ship/dive bomber, and assault ship can quickly dispatch bombardier (assuming you've got one in range otherwise it'll be a long wait).


What do you reckon?

this comparison just gets redundant ..
i didn´t ever say we should have only one orbital unit ... i however ask people to realy think about what they want to have in orbitalwise be it something you can use against planets or stuff for orbital/gasgiant gameplay


if you consider the air layer by it self ...
there is only one fighter currently that deals with any other aircraft in that layer
then you have 3 aircrafttypes used AG (antiground)

we tried a t2 fightercraft and what did it do? totaly made the other one obsolete
can we have another fightercraft again? theoreticaly ... but it can´t be more powerfull than the other if we still want to have the t1 version to be usefull ... instead just add advanced manuverability such as crossplanetary travel

what have we else ....
now since fighters don´t attack ground we have 3 options for ground
a gunship and 2 bombers ... how are they countered other than fighters?
missile turrets, flakturrets, aa vehicle and dox with additional aa capabilities ... focusing only on ground that are 7 options for ground/air interaction ... narwahl and stingray are merely water alternatives rarely used at the moment even if more effective than their ground equivalent they are limited to water ..
ok so you have 7 options for ground vs air ... not realy that much, is it? do we however realy need more?

as further comparison lets look what we have for ground vs orbital
umbrela, anchor, sxx ... so that´s 3 not counting the avanger as similar to the air fighter that is aa in the airlayer it is AO in the orbital layer

now lets count something else ... the ammount of antiground options from both air and orbital
3 aircraft 2 orbital ... not realy much on both sides, no? both toghether are however still 5
and now imagine you could transport the 3 aircrafts better would it realy make sense to have those 3 aircrafts as orbital equivalens aswell?

and this is just an example i like you to consider if you want to add truely diverse units/structures to the game ..

i made one example long before i could see being usefull/intresting for the orbital layer and also being versatile
in the form of a AO and AG mercytype orbital unit
http://supcom.wikia.com/wiki/Aeon_T2_Guided_Missile
in other words this wold be the orbital equivalent of the boom but more exspencive and better against structures than mobile units

so what is peoples problem with orbital .. not enough combatunit variety for its own layer
lets take a somewhat weird comparison for that this time
for the layer itself we got avanger and anchors so 2 options
for air we got only one but air as it is right now is bound to surface and doesn´t interact with orbital at all
so just for comparison lets take the surface aa options against it
wich are 2 towers 2 groundunits and 2 wateralternatives
that are 4 options not counting naval to it ... so this realy isnt that much again
but we still want more for orbital

so why am i bringing this up? maybe you can take something from this and make kind of orbital antiorbital equivalent to it
so we have avengers that are rather like your doxes
then we got anchors that are more like the flaktower

how could a spinner equivalent look like ? or maybe better use the narval as a base after all but with a different weapon?

so this brought me to the idea of a more longrange (torpedo or beam/shell with high damage, low firerate) "tank" that could be used against everything AO, after someone mentioned the idea of having a more sturdier orbital unit
but since i still like the avanger to be the general AO unit i thought of the the"tank" to be more usefull against orbital structures than against a number of avengers

as a "spinner" alternative to the "tank" (and i think you yourself had a idea like that) there could be a sort of torpedobomber with the same weaponbehavior (high damage, long range, low rate of fire) but the unit itself being weak ...


now sry for the long text but this whole thing should be a example of how imo people could (not neccesarily should) think of implementing truly diverse units ..
because honestly when i see many of peoples ideas i often feel they are rushed out and not well thought through
after all we want all the game to be intresting on every layer and not have too much samey stuff in it ..

You misunderstand, I'm saying that orbital was always a stretch goal(like naval), uber considered it unnecessary to the base game and it shows.

It can be a lot better if they got rid of this "has to be crap or people will use it", ahem I mean, "focus on ground warfare" philosophy they have when making the game so far. At the very least an extra orbital shell needs to be added to differentiate direct orbit (where orbitals units can interact with the planet) and approach orbit (where orbital units cannot).

Although if you wanted to really improve this game, avengers should be sped up, we should get a really fast moving orbital scout, slower moving more powerful anti-orbital units (that can't shoot ground), and two types of mobile bombardment platforms, SSX is fine but we need one that's a little better at shooting moving targets at wider angles, have it have to enter the air layer for balance (so fighters can shoot it down)

It does?

Yes. As does naval, countless posts have be seen to that effect.

Naval I get, like, they are utterly worthless.

But orbital is just shoddly balanced.

It's shoddily balanced because of it's shoddy (sorry uber) implementation.

Edit: I should probably expand on that a little:

The problem that orbital has that you certainly wouldn't accept for any other unit is the way they move. If you could move tanks into an enemies base right on top of their commander ignoring all defenses and possibilities to intercept the movement of those tanks, you'd be outraged at that. Well you can, except you call them satellites, so that's okay.

Yeah...yeah... but its not broken.

"Edit: I should probably expand on that a little:

The problem that orbital has that you certainly wouldn't accept for any other unit is the way they move. If you could move tanks into an enemies base right on top of their commander ignoring all defenses and possibilities to intercept the movement of those tanks, you'd be outraged at that. Well you can, except you call them satellites, so that's okay."

You probably missed that part, Although their orbital layer meets it's design goals I would say it is very broken. They don't want players to ignore planets and combat on planets but people will do that anyway even with a half an orbital layer to play with.

Balance at the moment for orbital goes along the lines of, "how can we make it fair for everyone when someone wants to abuse this".