Shameless Self-Advertising (Orbital Warfare Overhaul Mod)

Ah. I see what went wrong. I updated the strategic icons mod, but not the overhaul its self.

Edit: Impressions of changes-

1) The wraith seems to be clearing away the fog of war, but not actually revealing ground units.

2) Omg, SSX. This thing is basically a flying nuke launcher.

3) The lancer seems dangerous, but I fear its crazy-slow turn rate will ultimately make it a poor choice over the umbrella in most scenarios.

Ok so I played a match to try this out with some Promethean buddies, we had a 15-minute non-aggression pact so we could tech up and try out all te cool new toys.

The good news: nice unit designs, reasonably well balanced, although orbital-ground/air could use some tweaking, lots of fun variety (feel the units are a bit bread-and-butter at the moment, but then that's true of all PA). Basically, really good attempt at fleshing out orbital into a fully fledged layer with strategic depth.

The bad news: all this did was make me realise how much I hate orbital play. I don't know why, I don't know if it's the way you select the units, or the flat featureless nature of the layer, I just hate it. In fact, this mod made me think that the game would probably be better off with no orbital at all beyond transports.

So, if you like orbital, download this mod and you'll have a blast. But I'm afraid I'm gonna continue to try and pretend the whole layer doesn't exist until my comm is reclaimed from orbit.

I agree on orbital being hard to play, even with this mod it's still not that great because of selection issues and overlapping icons. Unfortunately, there is not much we can do about that at the moment :/ However, this mod, in my opinion, does massively improve that which can be improved at the moment. So when you need to go orbital, it's much more interesting than before.

What did your buddies think? Any specific balance complaints?

I agree it makes it more interesting, I'd just rather play games where people aren't too likely to go orbital in the first place.

I think our general feeling was that the static orbital defences were just too strong. It may have partly been due to our 15 minute grace period where we weren't allowed to attack, but I turtled up a base using the 3 static orbital defences and more or less left it there, and they had a pretty tough time breaking through in any layer. Of course, once they had those rail guns (the Excalibur I think?) it was easy enough, but against T1 I felt they were either too powerful or too easy to build quickly en masse.

I'd also quite like to see the hammerheads tweaked a bit, as they pretty much rule out avengers as soon as you have them other than in a light raiding role.

Other than that, no glaring balance errors we found to exploit, although we only played one (admittedly very very long) game.

1) Yeah, we fixed this in our local build, sorry about that :/

2) It should be about the same price if not more expensive, it also has a cooldown time on landing before it can shoot of ~5 seconds, and a 30 second recharge time.

3) I don't know yet, we'll see.

Which static defences, orbital or surface? And any ones in particular?

Really? We thought avengers were to strong and that the hammerhead needed a buff... How many avengers were being used? They're pretty spammable late-game now...

That would be interesting to see your take on it haha. It's now unit roster complete and 'polished' enough for proper games. Only a few small visual 'bugs' like fabbers sometimes getting pushed out while being built - gameplay irrelevant stuff I don't really know how to fix yet.

Wish I had the modelling/animation skills of emraldis to make proper looking big, badass battleships. These screenshots look pretty kool.

Carriers and suborbital fighters sound awesome if these guys can get them working! I didn't have much luck myself.

It's @nicb1 who does the modelling, I'm just a code monkey!

EDIT: Fixed, IDK what happened there :/

Man! This was in the g-discussion for visibility!

Eh we knew that this would happen eventually. Not entirely happy about it, but atleast we got a bit of time in the general discussion section.

It was in there for a week - which is probably a bit more than it should have been. Unfortunately, as great as General is for getting increased visibility, if everyone did it it would become near unusable. I'd spam the Realm recruitment thread in there, everyone would put their videos in there, every other mod would have its own 'visibility' thread - it'd just be a mess (and conversely, things would probably become less visible). That's why we have to have subforums.

Fair enough.

Can't remember the names, but just the basic orbital-ground, orbital-air and anchors. As I said, I was able to turtle up fairly effectively due to the 15-minute no attack period, but they really struggled to break through without the excaliburs. It just feels like for T1 equivalent units they're very strong against T1 ground/air and difficult to counter until you reach 'T2' orbital (ie. orbital factory units rather than orbital launcher units). I was ignoring fairly large T1 ground/air pushes as my 5-10 defensive satellites were ripping them apart before they could inflict much damage, and the anchors did a pretty good job of killing decent groups of avengers.

As for avengers vs. hammerheads, you may well be right, I wasn't thinking in terms of damage or health per metal. It is worth taking into consideration the fact that far fewer factories can get you a greater equivalent force of hammerheads due to factory cost and roll off times (ie it's easier to have 5 factories building hammerheads than 15 building avengers, even if you have the eco for both).

Do take my points with a grain of salt though, I haven't played enough to really know how all the units interact, those were just my initial impressions.

It could be possible, that the anti ground and anti air. defense satellites come into the game too early. The solution to that is just a cost increase. I would like to see a game on a large single planet without the 15 minute no rush before making that change though.

Also, the anchor and Hammerhead need to hard counter avengers. Since is really easy to spam avengers, they are available early and they are really fast.

Interesting mod, just gave it a go. My 2 cents:

-Travelling between planets is a little janky with the removal of teleporters from the orbital fabbers kit. I understand that people don't like orbital units building land structures, but it means that managing expansion to other planets requires a lot more fiddly work than it should. maybe like a cheapo t1.5 unit cannon that can only send t1 fabs and maybe a slow trickle of dox would be able to replace that? I dunno. Better yet, are we able to have some sort of fabber built by the orbital launcher that is essentially an astreus pre-packaged with something to drop on a planet? that'd take away some fiddly work.

-I think cruisers are great, though i'd like to see more structure to the orbital layer, being able to drop a tonne of ground attack cruisers on point anywhere on a planet is a bit crazy. Personally, i would make cruisers possibly even a bit stronger than they are now, but make them unable to travel between orbital layers on their own, and then make them need orbital teleporters to travel between planets, this locks down orbital zones of control to be more centralised around wherever you can successfully build orbital gates, and gets rid of some of the chaos of orbital units showing up literally anywhere (I'm especially thinking of gas giant combat here), avengers could then keep their unique role by retaining their ability to jump between planets solo and re-enforce their raiding role, while cruisers become the head on assault units, but a more cohesive front line develops since they can only come into play via an orbital gate or an orbital factory, instead of dropping in wherever they want.

-not sure about commanders currently, in this mod there's a much larger variety and availability of orbital nasties that can snipe him, but the commander remains unable to retaliate against orbital, and is the only layer he doesn't have a weapon to deal with. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but might need some thought.

Actually, it's pretty hard to snipe the commander with the current arsenal...

Yeah, i didn't push that point so strongly, cause i don't think it's really problematic. Locking down the cruisers to orbital gates is really what i think would improve play the most, especially on Gas giants.

Yeah we're trying. What I think we'll probably do if we get orbital gates working is just reduce the interplanetary speed of the larger units a whole lot, so that they take a long time to arrive, but not if you use a gate.