Gas Giants

this is my first thread in a while, but it's for a good reason.

The fact that units can arrive anywhere on gas giants is a really bad design decision. Avengers can snipe fabbers without even needing to be micro'd, just send them to a spot on the gas giant = profit.

So i think a pole-arrival system would be nice. I mean really, it would be much better to have units arrive on 2 different gas giant poles and expand from there, taking risks to build bases close to the poles, but taking the drawback of travel time if they choose to expand at the equator.

You might be able to spam anchors at the poles but maybe thats a reason to have more orbital units like something able to wreck anchors at a close range.

Here's an image of jupiter's poles which represent the spot where orbital units can arrive.


Thoughts? Seriously, this definitely seems better than the current whack-a-mole system...

yeah but why the hell do you only consider this a problem on Gaz Giants and not on the other planets?!?

I made a bunch of rants about the orbital arrival system in general : https://forums.uberent.com/threads/orbital-arriving-pinpoint-possible-change.64128/

because you could spam umbrellas at the poles on normal planets. Although i guess you could spam anchors at the gas giant poles as well...

maybe thats a reason to have more orbital units like something able to wreck anchors at a close range.

you're making my point.

also what i suggested wasn't a specific location. I think my idea had more riches to be dug up out of it.

we had this before ...
forcing arrival on specific points makes the game very predigtable and players just will put up their defences accordingly ..

I think
we need heavier Orbital units, but make them all locked to some sort of orbital teleporter network, so they can't travel between planets freely, some units can, move between planets on their own, but aren't good against structures at all, basically only good as scouts/defending against other fast orbital units.

Once you've built your orbital teleporter, you can then bring your heavier stuff through.

This way, serious orbital expansion is locked to where you manage to get a gate up, giving more structure to orbital wars in general. some orbital units can still freely move between planets, but the capacity to do that is now a 'special' trait that has the trade-off of the unit being far less powerful/cost effective than the bigger units.

sounds too much like " he who gets in first gets the advantage"

however i do would like to see orbital teleporters in general simply for the speedadvantage in reinforcing armies ... however locking advancing heavy units suverely favors the defender ..

Gas giant's are quite big, and I'm envisioning the heavier orbital units being quite slow, slow enough that they'd never be able to viably respond to a fabber building a gate, your avengers/quick scouty things might be fast enough to reach one of the fabbers, but if you drop multiple of them at once it'd be pretty dofficult to stop all of them, and once any one of those gates is finished, you have your heavy anti-avenger ships coming through straight away, so once the gate is up, you'd need to send your slow heavy ships over to respond to it.

In any case, i think we need some sort of method to bring structure to the orbital sphere, it's a bit too chaotic with the whole 'anything can drop in anywhere' system.

i would say a second orbital layer from which orbital units would have to transist through before getting to the main orbital layer ... similar to austreuses having to transist between orbital and air to touch down ...

the other thing i could think about is limiting spawning on around the equator instead of the poles ... not realy sure on that though either ...

that's not a bad idea tbh. All of this makes me want shields even more. (shield orbital unit to protect fabbers from the whack-a-mole hammer)

I think any form of 'entry restriction' in general is a bad idea.

1. it feels pretty arbitrary
2. makes it even easier to defend, cause the defense then knows they don't need to build anchors anywhere except those specific entry points.
3. creates weird balance restrictions for custom planets/systems.

please let us work out stuff without the need of shields ...
i mean orbital units already have an entry penalty so you can´t directly spawn above/into orbital defenses

maybe the need for scouting a gas giant would be better. You could have the deep space orbital radar show radar blips and the orbital sattelites show the actual units. Even then, you could still tell which units are the fabbers and then snipe them with avengers though.

You coulkd have the balance as such that a few fabbers dropping on a gas giant at once can build an anchor before the avengers arrive, the anchor then eviscerates the avengers, and they have to send in a heavier structure-killer orbital unit, but those are slow, meaning you have time to get up teleporters and bring in your own heavy ships, boom, front-line established.

..........why is your face jello now.................why did my stream do this to you.............why do I feel responsible for this................

Fixed insertion points? Maybe realistic, but not so much fun.

But we already had a working compromise at some point: Proper orbital breaking maneuvers. Insert into orbit at escape velocity (and make it a valid target starting the time at which it enters!!!), and force it to break to orbital speed until it reaches the specified target location.

Et voilá, you now have a system where orbital units are always forced to travel inside the orbital shell, which provides guaranteed action delays both on leaving and entering orbit, which is no too predictable for intercepting players, and which still gives sufficient control for the traveling player.

I think you need to launch the rockets yourself and wait for the right launch window to maximize delta V. Also add shock heating and aerodynamics, and we must have at least 10 different bi propellants and mono propellants so the user gets choices. Also the game should require the player to build solar panels, or else it would lose electricity and you would lose control, in which at that point you would need to get a kerbal dox to come in and open the solar panel or attach a solar panel. This way it will be more realistic and people will stop whining about the lack of unit diversity.

dude. just explain this : who the hell is going to care about your rocket when what you sent up (an astraeus) is just gonna come stright back down to the ground then lift right back up with all this extra load at no extra cost?

and when ships whith visibly no great boosters of any sort have trouble getting 50Mph in the orbital shell but sudenly break free of a planets influence and travel at the speed of light when they wanna go to another.

AND CAN DO THIS AS MANY TIMES AS THEY WANT? WITHOUT EVER REFUELING OR ANY STAGING OF ANY SORT?

dude the rocket that takes up of the ground is the LAST thing in need of a nerf when it comes to orbital.


Show of hands : who thinks it's a better idea to build a bunch of land-based orbital factories rather then a bunch of orbital-based orbital factories?

Well if you want to spam avengers there's no reason to waste metal on t2 orb factories.

... depends on what you need ... depends on were it makes sence to put the needed unit in ...


i have a different question:
for gamefluidity sake for when the game finaly gets multiunitstranports and carriers .. which factory do you think is best to put those in ... and yes consider that the t2 air factory has a unit capable of crossplanetary travel ...




personaly i would say t2 airfac should have a multiunittranport
then the orbital factory has the carrier and a larger multiunittransport ...

unless you have a gasgiant ... because you can´t build launchers on them ...




edit: ... whoops ...