A comprehensive Example of Orbital Combat

Or......we put nuke silos ON asteroids!

If your opponent allows you to build such a structure, then you ARE better than him.

I have already pointed out several ways to make such a weapon irrelevant.

The current size of nukes are very large. If one considers a Commander as the "absolute largest" cargo, then there is no hope of fitting a nuke through.

Of course, real life nukes can be pretty damn small! However, destroying human stuff is very different from dealing damage to a pure machine. Even a simple tank can handle its nukes pretty well!

you forget the EMP^^
Not every Machine is protected by a Faraday Cage,
so a Nuke is pretty good against Meatbags and Machines

Its likely that by now they might have taken steps to shield against it.

It's likely these tanks have inbuilt Faraday Cages. PerfectTech™ and all

I am pretty certain that, if the tanks still use metallic material for their hull (which seems like a good guess considering we have metal points), tanks ARE faraday cages.

An EMP fries electronics by striking a surface and generating electric current. A big current in the wrong place is bad. But if the entire shell is made of metal, there's nothing to worry about. It all gets harmlessly absorbed on the skin.

It's more common for a sci fi setting to use ion type effects. The theory is that anything critically short of electrons turns into a fine mist plasma, and anything with too much is bound to screw up. I guess.

Yourlocalmadsci, I personally envisaged a much simpler version of the orbital layer, dedicated almost wholly to recon with a few exemptions. If we start adding units that can bombard the ground then the orbital layer turns into, in effect a more expensive air layer. Therefore I believe the layer should be restricted to satellites that are launched in the launch tower to provide recon such as radar and visibility. The exceptions I mentioned would be economy units (solar panels, gas giant resource units). The bonus of orbital would be their untouchability, in effect providing a reliable source of energy/intel which is harder to destroy. The reason they are harder to destroy is that to destroy it would require the enemy to launch a single use weapon from the launch pad, when instead they could launch their own intel. This makes intel become more common as the game progresses.
I also subscribe to the simple launch pad ideology, one building that can launch you and a rocket anywhere when it is charged with enough energy. Reasons that people would launch a spy sat are that it is cheaper than launching to a moon/asteroid. In my vision the unit cannon is also restricted to a lesser role of simply from a moon/orbiting asteroid to a planet, and not for satellites.
With regard to the orbit system I think that satellites should have a degree of control once already in position. Inclination and apoapsis and periapsis should be fixed, but phase shouldn't, and you can order a sat in a synchronous orbit to shift it's phase round to the other side, for example. I would also like a system where when deciding in you orbit a path is traced on the ground as well as the orbit itself and both can be manipulated, to make it more accessible.
I don't want to see a new layer that claims to be unique but in reality shares too much with the air layer to add any large amount of variation to the game.

RabidFrog

Don't massacre me.

rabidfrog, did you read nuetrino's post?

No? Link please?

Edit - found it, sorry. Still kind of more what I had in mind, not too complex and maybe even simpler than my idea

Even though we will have a simplified orbital layer, some of YourLocalMadSci's unit interactions could still be valid. Currently nukes act like cruse missiles (which may be placeholder). This could be changed to function like an ICBM and take a path near or through the orbital shell, in range of orbital anti-nuke. I like the other nuke/anti-nuke ideas in post #3 as well (MIRV and HANE).

I don't see why teleporting nukes is even an issue if it were implemented - you still need to build the "exit" teleporter.

But in SupCom if you teliported something without an exit gate, it would create a nuclear explosion on the other side (prompting the question why they even bothered with armies in the first place if they can spontaneously cause explosions with no counter)

..............what makes you think it's a nucklear explosion? If it was as strong as a regular Nuck, how does the ACU(which is essentially at ground zero) survive when other nucks can kill it in one hit?

Mike

The Commander survives because he appears a split second after the explosion. I imagine the explosion is caused by new matter bumping into the existing matter and causing fusion. This would normaly also destroy the object being teliported, but if you set up two teliports, with the first just being a bubble of air, the first explosion would cause an temporary vacuum, into which the commander can be teliported into relatively safely. Normaly in a neuclear explosion there is a secondary shockwave as air rushes back in to fill the hole left by the explosion, but in this case that hole is filled by the comander and the bubble of air around him, so it is safe.


...oooor I could be talking out of my ***, anyways it was a bit explosion whenever the ACU warped in.

Yes, because Nucklear explosions only last for a split second. >.>

Mike

Yes but the secondary shock-waves are canceled out as the ACU's arrival re-balances the pressure.

Ok, so moving back on topic:

Orbital units are now in the game! Well a little bit at least. Let us discuss what this reveals about the direction that orbital units are going in. These are obvious placeholders for parts of the full system, and are clearly still very much work in progress, but there is still stuff to talk about.

At the moment, orbital units have a number of characteristics. They operate very much like airplanes do, just higher up. This may be because the full orbital layer is not implemented yet. I don't know for certain. They are expensive. There is a very slow radarsat and a fast fighter.

This concerns me slightly, but its clearly so WIP at the moment that I'm not really that worried. The cost is perhaps my biggest concern at the moment. The launch-pad and the orbital units are ludicrously priced. I can understand the rational for this now, as players are limited in how they would take out a radar-sat, so it makes sense to make it very expensive. However it is my hope that orbital unts plummet in cost at some point in the future. If orbital units remain as expensive as they are, then I suspect they will rarely be used, unless they start to become extremely powerful. This creates a situation where they become difficult to balance. At the moment, aside from people messing about, and testing the orbitals, I very much doubt they will be seen in competitive play. Obviously as an alpha, competitive play is not the focus, but this does highlight the direction that balance should probably go in the future. My own instinct is that T1 orbital units should be very damaging, slightly more expensive than a the average T2 unit (perhaps somewhere around 2000m), and be as capable of withstanding enemy fire as a wet toilet paper can stand up to a machine gun.

Next, lets talk about how they move. Garat has stated that orbital units will likely be very slow to move. This does move away from air-combat a little, and moves things back towards surface or ship combat. However, even if orbital mechanics are out of the question, I still think that there are better ways to distinguish orbital units.

Firstly, at the moment, all move commands are given relative to the surface. This really encourages the sense of "air but higher up" style combat. Maybe it's just me, maybe it's just psychological, but ordering satallites to move to a point on the surface on the planet just re-enforces the fact that they are not different from any other combat form. This is probably a silly suggestion, but just giving the move order to a spot on an invisible sphere around the planet, yet higher up, would give a sense that this is a new realm we are battling over. This is largly cosmetic, and may sound like a silly idea to some, but i feel it would really create a psychological de-coupling from the ground.

However, this is only really a psychological thing. What is really necessary to make orbital different is a new movement paradigm, compared to land, sea and air. With the existing tools in the game, I actually think there is a pretty simple change that would introduce this.

Simply put, de-couple the maximum speed, and the acceleration. At the moment "fast" units all tend to have a high top speed, and a high acceleration/braking in order to get up to it quickly. For orbital units, I'd like to suggest that they have an excruciatingly high speed (in excess of fighters, scouts, and anything that has to worry about an atmosphere), but a terrible acceleration. I would almost have gone as far to suggest no maximum top speed, however, I can forsee this being easily exploited.

The idea is that satellites will gently accelerate up to the midpoint between their start and their destination, then steadily decelerate the rest of the way. Changing the direction of velocity is a similarly slow process, meaning satellites will tend to move in large, graceful circles. Satellites attacking each-other will aim to come to rest with respect to their target, but will likely overshoot, and be forced to make long and time consuming course corrections. This also offers another unique little possibility - the pseudo-orbit. By placing patrol points in a path around a planet, satellites will be able to continue accelerating, and eventually hit their top speed. This would make them great tools for hit and run attacks, but give them a lack of flexibility as slowing down would also take a long time to achieve. Overall, I think this introduces a movement paradigm that is roughly inspired by reality, without being a slave to it. It would offer interesting and unique tactical and strategic considerations, without the full depth of orbital mechanics. Furthermore, to the best of my knowledge, it would be really simple to implement. Units already have "acceleration", "brake" and "move_speed" variables implemented, so this would really be just changing a few numbers.

Any thoughts or criticisms?

Sigh. Reserving judgement until beta.
Not happy about how this looks right now though.

I agree with most everything you're saying MadSci, Orbital units do not need to be this expensive... at all.
And them behaving like ships in space... is something I thought they were trying to avoid.

30,000 metal for the launcher, 24,600 for the Satellite, 9,750 for the Fighter-Plane-In-Space.
Just for comparison, the cost of the Nuke Launcher is a mere 5,412 and Nuke itself is 32,400.

Combine that with the "T1" Launcher being in T2...
The direction Uber is going with Orbital is concerning in the extreme.