Being able to shoot them down is good. But it is also necessary to differentiate. Shooting down bombardment satellites isn't the same as shooting down a spy satellite. The one provides an imminent threat, the other one doesn't. The orbital layer is going to stay pretty much empty if shooting satellites down, was cheaper than to bring them up. Thats why you can assign a cost to take down a satellite, place the harmless satellites on the one side, and the harmful satellites on the other side of that barrier. One group is worth to be shot down (and you should do so anyways, since they are dangerous), the other one isn't worth the effort.
Giving your opponent intel about your base and army is also dangerous. Compare it to a spy plane, you also want to shoot it down. The harmful satellites should be more expensive and thus more cost-effective to counter.
Just what I meant. But it's not that simple with the spy satellite. The issue isn't the radar radius or the fact that it moves in orbit, but the quality/amount of information it delivers. Thats a flaw in the intelligence system though, which has no support for graded information (like excluding units, only showing buildings). Letting the enemy know where your factories and pgens are is fine. But the rest shouldn't be visible from the orbital layer.
Personally I'd consider intel satellites more dangerous than a bombardment satellite. As rather than direct damage it gives the enemy alot of information about your base, it'll allow them to spot weakly defended areas and resource extraction etc. And not just your core base put possibly everything you've got on that side of the planet! The enemy can then use that to place nukes or launch raids at the points of your base that'll do the most damage. A bombardment Sat on the other hand is just another damage source it's not a damage multiplier like intel. This goes doubly so for Sats which might give more info than just "here is something".
Thats just because the satellite DOES give that kind of information, although it shouldn't. It would be sufficient if it only gave away the location of large structures (this does NOT include walls, moving units and towers!), thus reveling the location of your base, but not the actual structure.
I don't think the current system is too bad, you only see 1 icon for all units/buildings. Just an ordinary radar. A satellite is quite a big investment so you should be rewarded for having one. Maybe limit their range if they prove to be OP. You won't be in range anyway most of the time if they actually implement orbital satellites. If you just want to scout your enemy, just use spy planes.
And do your large structures include Metal Extractors, because that in it's self is very valuable info. Also it's a pretty crappy radar if it can't spot unit movement and fixed defenses I'd agree it shouldn't tell you what type of unit or building they are but it should reveal there existence and if you watch it for movement you should be able to work out what are units. Also if it doesn't revel big assault forces moving towards your base it has serious issues, and would need to be very cheap to compensate.
The range is not suited as a lever in this case. You can still fly over the enemy base to charter it, it only hinders the capabilities of FINDING the enemy in the first place. It still gives you the same amount of information (which is just way to much), but cripples the usability if simply you reduce range. Large forces are a different thing (they should be detected, but thats not that simple), but yes, making the satellite CHEAP is a valid option. Otherwise it will be locked away for the better part of the game and orbit will stay rather empty which would make the development of this feature a pure waste of resources. You can't just hide stuff behind an economical barrier just because you forgot to add the levers to balance it.
@arm2thecore the PA release will probably fan the flames even more, imagine this debate with 1000's of more people added most of them not aware of any of the previous debates/discussions!
Something in orbit is WAY outside of your perimeter. This is a basic fact and you are refusing to acknowledge it. Unless you have assets in orbit, space is a whole new Territory that you have no claim over. If you are launching attacks against orbital assets from the ground, you are making active offensive actions, not defending your base.
This precludes absolutely any ability for a satellite to attack the ground or otherwise provide a benefit over the ground it's orbiting above. If it can, and it's range isn't global, then it definitely is inside your perimeter. Its only a basic fact under a certain set of assumptions you're making. Perimeter is the area that can directly affect your base, either by damaging you or giving an advantage to the opponent.
I get where you're coming from, and somewhat agree....... but taking that thought to the next level, why have land AND air scouts? They both have the same vision, which is the point of scouts, so what's the real point of non-air scouts, since air scouts can go more places, directly-er, than land versions. Is air scout just land scout 2.0? /sarcasm
So do you agree or not agree? I don't know where the sarcasm starts. I know where it ends... but not where it starts.
A more terrestrial analogy would be, you having another base on another continent near the enemies, separated by an ocean. You can lob nukes over the ocean, or send naval or air units over, and your radar might even have enough range to see across it. It's close enough for you to threaten each other, but not close enough to be considered inside your zone of control. If you want to get your enemy off of it, you are going to have to send units into it, and they will be fighting on there turf not yours. Conversely while the enemy can use this place as a staging area for attacks, and gets a slight advantage from occupying it, they are still not close enough to just shoot at you. I think if orbit to surface attackers exist, they should be along the lines of nukes in terms of cost, Micro, and counter-ability. For instance a Rod from god might work like a slightly cheaper version of a nuke that only effects one target and can't be aimed at moving units (it's uncontrollable while re-entering the atmosphere) Anti-air can sort of shoot it down if there are enough of them, but if you don't have any defenses the enemy can just casually pick off your T2 energy plants one by one. In general surface units don't attack orbit units and visa versa unless specifically told to, it just takes too much energy to put something into orbit or bring it back down. Orbit should offer great advantages, but not overwhelming ones. Perfect hard to destroy orbiting radar sats are a good example. The enemy can destroy them, but you only need one orbit to see exactly where there base is (by the time they get shot down you will have a map of there base that is only a few minutes old) Orbital droping units is another example of where space could be handy. In orbit the units are mostly safe (it won't be worth it to shoot them down while they are in orbit) but while they are landing they will be vulnerable to anti-air defenses, and when they are on the ground they still have to beat your army. It could allow a skilled player to outflank an unsuspecting enemy, but won't be overpowered if smart players practice defense in depth and thus have no weak points to exploit.
I get that you (or most people here) don't just want orbital to be a copy of air. I think that always moving orbits is one way to separate it (as you can have your planes stop and land), as well as making it more of a utilitarian zone than having much, if any emphasis on combat. Hence my suggestion of a ground based structure that reduces the effectiveness of enemy orbitals. I don't know much about orbital physics (last time I did any digging on the subject was back in high school, for a physics class), but does it take more or less energy to put something in a geostationary orbit vs moving? To make the comparison fair, I'd be talking about both sitting/moving on the equator. Cus maybe having to have to use more energy to keep it stationary would make orbital radar more for ongoing scouting than say having one sitting over your base for early warning. I also don't thing that having an orbital radar which tells you were something is makes ground/air based visual scouts any less meaningless. In fact I think that it would mean you could more effectively use them since you know where stuff is, but don't know what it is until you use a visual scout, but you actually know where to send them. There is also a lot of difference between a scout plane patrolling a circle around an enemy and a sat making a pass over the enemy every so often. I think that orbital units can have the same ROLES as other units, but still be FUNCTIONALLY different in how they operate. In terms of combat, I think there should be something to remove sats permanently, but require some scouting of enemy orbit paths (via buildings like the one I describe above) in order to use effectively in that manner, but also have some purpose in being a first line of defense against planetary invasions. The sarcastic part was basically about how far do you wanna go with the "every unit/class of units should be unique". You don't want orbital to equal air, yet there are some similarities between units like air scouts vs. the land equivalent.
Personally I think all unit classes should be entirely unique, with no crossovers whatsoever. In biology, in terms of competition, only ONE species can fill a specific niche. You can't have two bannanna-eating-***-scratching-ant-stepping monkeys. You can have one that eats red bannannas and another that eats yellow ones, but when you have two species that do exactly the same thing, one eclipses the other. The lesser species is forced to either adapt to fill a different niche or BE COMPLETELY EXTERMINATED. This was a huge issue in SupCom. T1,T2, T3 and Experimental main combat units filled precisely the same role. A land-locked high-health medium-damage unit with moderate movement speed that lost out to massed defenses and kiting artillery, but could easily destroy masses of direct fire units due to their high health density. The Cybran Mantis T1 Heavy Assault Bot was eclipsed by the Rhino T2 Heavy Tank which was eclipsed by the Wagner T2 Amphibious Tank (better cost:effectiveness Ratio + submersibility and superior speed) which was eclipsed by the Brick and Loyalist T3 Bots, all of which were eclipsed by the Monkeulord and Megalith. There are no identical species in life because identical species have a tendency to overshadow and nullify one another, with the better species always winning. You may know this as an "imbalanced unit" in RTSes, for example, the Monkeylord in the last official GPG patch was an extremely effective unit in Forged Alliance for its cost, to the point where you could field small squads of the highest-damage, lowest-profile experimental in the game; which would, cost-for-cost, eradicate any land unit it came across. This goes contra to the example of a "balanced" environment life has set for us. It's impossible to have a numerically OP Apple if there is nothing to compare it to but Oranges. This is the same way a game should be balanced; everything fulfills its own roles, has its own natural counters, and has its own natural strengths. If something has more strengths than it does weaknesses, it is OP. If it has more weaknesses than strengths, then it is underpowered. Anything else results in redundancy and extra work that nobody wants to do. Going back to Infuscoletum's post, a radar satellite, a recon plane and a recon satellite fill different roles because of their movement patterns, assuming satellites have a fixed, mostly static orbit path, they would fill a different role than the controllable, vulnerable Recon Plane. The Satellite's strengths are resilience and coverage, and its weaknesses are lack of live control and increased cost. On the other hand, the Recon Plane is cheap and controllable, but has lesser coverage and is very vulnerable to AA fire.
Ok so tell how Orbital will work on Gas Giants? As most of Orbital Units will come into play there? As there is no Land/Water/Air to play on? I'm not supporting any argument! Just wondering how this will be done? Because the original idea was to have refinery/defense platforms, etc...
If you'd rather not waste your time, then please don't waste our time dragging down threads with your pessimistic crusade. I was once a fan of what you wrote, but now I can predict your posts' contents before even reading them. Orbital gameplay should be significantly different to air-based gameplay in order to fulfill it's own niche (as per the post above mine - EDIT - mushroomars' post!). However, certain vague functions of orbital units may have slight overlap with regards to purposes (transport, scouting) given how they are basically units above the ground that do stuff (like air units are). The point of the orbital layer is to take this overlap and focus it in a different direction. If you have scout planes, your spy satellites should provide a different layer of information. Perhaps allow them to act as deep space scanners as supposed to tracking activity on the planet beneath them. Or if so, give them access to an infrared spectrum instead of a crystal-clear player-based view of the rest of the planet (that only the sat can see at that point in time). However, that is more fanciful than the basic implementation of recon satellites. As mushroomars has said, assuming we get orbiting satellites, they can function in a different niche to that of the scout planes. And all of this is about twenty times more constructive than your constant moaning in this thread, Nano. You may consider yourself proud of your own bitterness (as seen in replies to those calling you out), but quite honestly I'd say it does little to help a thread, or this "developer interaction" that you seem so fond of. I'm an eternal optimist. I often find that this gets me more attention than being an eternal pessimist. But that's just me.
