A problem with asteroids

The new asteroids look amazing and I love the concept but am i the only one who finds it kinda boring that the asteroid blows up the entire planet no matter the size of the planet? Whats the point of the system respawning asteroids if after 2 asteroids there is no more system planets?

Personally I believe its better for asteroids to do craters and then lets say after a few asteroid hits (which can be predetermined) then the planet blows up...

The crater system was broken, it's gone, it's never coming back. End of story.

what do u mean by broken?

It never once modified pathing. Not for one patch. It always either left invisible ground that units would float on or permanently destroyed anything that walked nearby.

Fine then just make the Asteroids explode like really large nukes with an effect and power that scales with their size without any more terrain deformation than nukes already make. Gameplay comes before graphics, and asteroids wiping planets out is insane.

Why can't craters place csg on the planet? Is it because csg is permanently in place after the planets loaded?

That depends on the velocity of the asteroid. Technically, the engines are on at all times, so it's safe to assume gravity isn't the only thing pushing the rock. That means it will have significantly higher velocity than your average massive asteroid accident (like the Yucatan Crater). I'd say if an asteroid that size didn't break the planet into its subsequent parts we'd be pushing reality.

The reason that the crater system is gone is because it was very hacky and never worked exactly like it should have.

Then lets fix it.

You are welcome to try.

I am assuming you are posting out of frustration. Uber can fix it if they try. What else are they working on? Not balance it seems.

(Sorry uber ... Love ya work

I seriously doubt they are sitting on their hands.

If I recall they are doing a bunch of background fixes to bugs and optimization.

Balance takes a back seat to game braking bugs.

Uber is doing its best since more than one year to polish the game. We have the proof that PA is probably its more important IP, some kind of "look what we have been able to achieve". So i definitly think they would have fixed it if it had not required major rework. Now i tend to agree that depending on size/speed of asteroid it would be Nice to either have some kind of explosion like for nukes (but different FX) or global planet explosion.

Doing CSG operations (this is adding a mountain or substantiating a crater) on polygon meshes is computationally very expensive.
Did you ever notice the few seconds after joining lobby, where PA goes to almost full CPU usage? This is where PA bakes all the CSGs into one polygon mesh per planet. Imaging doing something like this during a game, and not only on all clients simultaneously but on the server as well. Every correctly subtracted carter would be a lag feast.

This is about gameplay. Trivializing the sacrifice of a planet while also making respawning asteroids really not that important if they'll end the game in a couple uses anyway is not good for gameplay; making planetary smashes and asteroid smashes is not good for gameplay.

I'd like to think you simply wanted to put that realism quip out there and not actually use it as an argument for advocating realism, because in which case I can also talk about how cheap Halleys really are; a large rocket engine today already costs more than a nuclear missile, an engine capable of moving planets in a reasonable timeframe would cost many times more, assuming any kind of refinement that went into making nuclear weapons cheaper also went into rocketry.

Plus, the planets follow the same paths as orbital units so I like to think that Halleys simply push the planet out of its orbit so it falls towards its sun and then apply correction burns while getting gravity assists from the sun and other large bodies, instead of driving them up to the target planet.

Meta is meta. Point is, the devs decided to change it for various reasons, including that it didn't work right in the first place.

It's like orbital - they've applied bandages but have yet to stop the bleeding.

Well if there was an "easy" fix for the broken craters, they would have done it...

Well @jables was pretty clear in the initial asteroid thread, uber don't have the budget to fix the crater system.

That said there could be a compromise where asteroid impacts don't destroy the planet, leaving a large decal instead? I think we have to be realistic about this.

Planet smashing is about the least polished aspect of the game, asteroids as is are an improvement and closer to the original plan, although I agree there may be ways to improve it from a gameplay perspective.

As for orbital, I don't view it as that bad, it's secondary to ground combat but that is correct given pa is a ground based rts.

I think if anything I would simply pair back orbital to its essentials (transport and recon) and as luck would have it @stuart98 is providing just that with ga

So how difficult would it be to make asteroids have nuke-like impacts but maybe 4x size of nuke impact area? I'd rather have (IMO) better gameplay than fancy craters. I know scarred planets look cool, but it is secondary.

I like the way they work now, personally.