PTE build 79270-pte now up

I think Gas Giants are what concern me the most. Left alone someone can get a huge advantage by taking the Gas Giant, and the Gas Giants are well "Giant" so scouting them will time consuming and boring because you will be almost forced to rush the Gas Giant in some form or another, either to build up yourself or scout the enemy and destroy their foothold on the Gas Giant. I just think this change will put unnecessary focus on the Gas Giants. As I have said before I welcome the change/fix to the Deep Space Radar, but I just think it will leave a void which will be exploited to the detriment of balance; just my opinion and only time will tell. And maybe Uber have additional changes to Orbital in the pipeline which are yet unannounced which will spice up Orbital even further, one can only dream. I enjoy orbital gameplay as it is currently but a bit more variety would be welcomed

Many of the balance decisions for orbital units have been made with the premise of infinite intel. This is why Avengers are slow as opposed to fast, and why anchors are hardened defensive structures that kill everything. It's also why Umbrellas are so OP right now.

Orbital needs completely overhauled, and this will become even more apparent because of this radar fix.

Actually, I take it back. It won't be apparent. It will be so obvious you'll have to be completely blind to miss it.

Random maps are not that good. You can only pick a couple different systems and all the normal planets are 80% water.

We need more options. But the symmetrical metal spots and stuff is nice.

Still the old random map button was better LoL. I had a lot better planets/systems then this one.

A lot of people don't like the water units and the water planets too lol.

The new walls looks cool btw

What orbital is going to need is a really fast scout with a large vision radius.

Or a cheap one, with interplanetary travel that might be fastish, a bit of range, and a larger orbital vision than land vision.

Really, the t1 radar being punted across a few planets as a probe isn't so bad already. A cheaper cost, possibly lower health, and bit of vision, means you can probe a few planets with it, and it doesn't even necessarily have to be t1 ground radar neither.

I really think we need a about for orbital. It's the biggest playfield and yet it is made up of relatively slow units.

The scout doesn't need ground vision, it just needs decent vision and speed to scout out large orbital areas. Once you know the orbital situation, you can determine how to scout out the ground. There's no problem with it being a two step process to invasion intel, but right now it's just spam ARKYDs so that you can get half a second of vision before they get obliterated by avengers or anchors.

So the SXX has been acting funny for me, if you give it a chain of attack commands it will move between the intended targets without actually finishing off each target (unless it can one shot them) this occurs when I tell it to attack a single target as well, instead of killing a factory or what have you it will shoot and then go look for something else to kill. Also when I build one and have it on the opposite side of the planet from the enemies base it seems to have a mind of it's own and will go find something to attack without said order.

Now that I'm writing this down I also noticed if I told the sxx to attack something relatively close by it would sometimes move over and past it, continue all the way around the planet and either attack the intended target or basically prioritize something else. This would happen but if I hit shift my attack order or attack order chain would still show up.

Was playing on the 1v1 planet's when noticed, can test more tonight on a larger range of planet sizes.

Unit cannons and self-destructed astaeuses, just to keep a low profile?

Anyway, I would give it ground radar, I meant to say that, but the unit can be cheap, faster than most other orbital but not air scout fast, and just have a decent size orbital and land radar, maybe 3/5 a t1 land radar?

I love fighting over water planets!

OP updated:
Build 78594-pte - 2/23/15

Bugfix/Polish
-Fix for cases where army vision was not granted correctly.

Your title is incorrect! Tricksies! Tricksies I say!

How bout making anchors alot more expensive to build would be nice.

Thanks for the response, that all sounds like good news. Not sure if it's been taken into consideration, but as ViolentMind said, something like the Awesome System Generator mod would be amazing to have right from the lobby.

lol, Still cant change commander in GW when steam is in offline mode

lavaplanets with islands
and planets with mesas

Thank you for your response. However, what I'm thinking at this point is why bias any certain planet configurations? What I mean is that depending on who you ask, you will probably get a different answer. In other words, wouldn't the option to just allow us to tweak the general planet config of system generation (similar to what is done in the Awesome System Generator Mod) be the option that appeals to everyone? Why not let the lobby hosts decide what they want? I don't think that the majority of people are interested in taking the time to create their own custom systems, but most people generally know what they want in terms of number of planets, relative planet size, and planet type, when it comes time to host/create a game. Options to quickly spin up a system, so you can jump into the action quickly, is what I think most people are looking for at this point. The competitive map options are already there, and I'm sure more will be created going forward. However, what will keep game play fresh is the power to create something new on the fly that is tailored more toward individual preferences. Something like the Awesome System Generator mod with check boxes for the planet types to include would be ideal. You could add more, but the point is not to recreate the entire System Editor in the lobby, which is why the general options in that mod work nicely.

This is not what happens for me. After I choose the option for PTE. I have to wait for a download and then I only have to option to play PTE until I opt-out and then wait for a download. I don't get two versions with steam. I wish.

Edit: Earlier, when questioned about this very thing. I was shown this image as an example. In that image, you will see that there are two copies of Company of Heroes 2 and that one is a beta. This is not the case for PA.

Does this include naval? I had a game in the stable build recently where an enemy Leviathan kept shooting my commander and eventually killed it, even though it lost the vision on that commander, and there was no radar coverage on it either. (Game ID = 5545116976462026094) The enemy vision on my commander was lost at 22:47, yet the Leviathan fire followed him as he walked away and it eventually destroyed him 10 seconds later in the enemies' fog of war.

In the same game, are also examples of Orca and Leviathan fire that didn't hit their targets and sailed well past their defined ranges. In some cases, the Leviathan fire would travel almost half way around the planet (on the Pacific System). At about 23:30, there was Leviathan fire that traveled almost 3/4 of the way around the planet over the water. The Awesome Projectiles mod helps to illustrate this a bit better.

I do use this batch file though:
taskkill /f /im steam.exe
cd "C:\Planetary Annihilation"
rename "steamapps" "steamapps_temp"
rename "steamapps_other" "steamapps"
rename "steamapps_temp" "steamapps_other"
start "" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\Steam.exe"
What you want to do is to put PA in its own directory. After downloading the stable version, rename the "steamapps" folder to "steamapps_other" or something, then redownload PA, and set the stream to PTE. The cool thing about this batch file is that the streams switch automatically when using this batch. Remember to change the "cd "C:\Planetary Annihilation"" line to the line where your special PA library is.(Or you can install PA in the same library as everything else, and this would still work)