A comprehensive Example of Orbital Combat

Don't paint those that are speaking out about gameplay decisions as "haters". We're not haters. I'm certainly not, I have a lot of love for the guys working at Uber. That doesn't mean I have to lurk and agree with everything that happens.

We're all very well aware of the fact that it's Jon "Neutrino" Mavor at the helm, and that he has a vision for the game.

All we want to know is what that vision is.
Even just the vaguest hint of what is envisioned for the more esoteric elements of the game would be greatly appreciated over the complete dearth of information regarding the games direction.

Things like

• T1 - Generalised, T2 - Specialised, vs. the tiered "upgrade" system that is currently in place. Weren't you trying to avoid that?
• Orbital units;
  • "Space Planes 2.0" with "Space AA"? Wet-Navy in space? Space Mines?
  • Solar Generators that need LOS to the sun, or "Space Fusion"
  • Are they envisnged to be Early, Mid or Late-game? Or the much more preferable "all of the above"
• Commanders; ~100 commanders sharing 4 skeletons, isn't that going to water down the uniqueness of the standard models and put severe restrictions on what the $1k backers want for Custom Commanders?

I'm open to suggestions. I'm just not sure exactly how to make "the process" more transparent. Also, what process exactly are you referring to? I have this weird feeling that you guys still are making a bunch of assumptions about how we make the game that aren't true, and that everyone has a different set of these assumptions.

I don't know how to communicate the vision without building it first. I don't have the vocabulary to describe the output result of a process before the process is finished. Most of the vision revolves around the core principles of the game which I think I've been pretty vocal about. Things like being able to tell what's going on from looking at the game world, and have a large scale to the game.

Apparently I've been unclear. The creation of the game is a process, there is no "blueprint" for the final game, only rough direction.

The only thing I've said is that I want T1 units to continue to have a role and be useful throughout the game. I think there are a number of little things that can be done to make that possible. That's simply a design goal though.

I described orbital units in another post. They are in "fake geosync" and there are a number of things we can do to differentiate them from air units. Solar generators LOS to sun is up in the air. Space fusion is for gas giants.

Mid game but definitely not doable on a small starting game economy. At one point I wanted T1 orbital units but decided it didn't make sense.

Four skeletons is plenty IMHO. No I don't think the restrictions will be too severe.

I thought I was quite clear that there would be real interplanetary transport using the landers.

Wasn't clear to me, I thought they might be "one time use" only.
Somehow launched by rocket and then stay in space until they land at the location where they are destroyed to release the unit, just like in the Kickstarter video.

They do make a lot more sense though if they are reusable. Might even be quite interesting to use them on planet, go up into safe orbit, and drop at another location on a planet.

I thought I described it in my orbital post. Landers can take off from moons and airless planets but can't take off without a rocket from earth type atmospheric planets. The idea here is to give the "high ground" an advantage for attacking.

Think of a lander as an interplanetary transport.

Would it make sense, to still let the empty lander launch back into orbit, even on atmospheric planet?
So that it can get additional units? Maybe even just let the "lander" drop the units in pods when it wouldn't be able to launch again, so that it can stay in orbit on such planets, not wasting the "lander" as an unit.

Would it maybe be possible to have orbital units just sit in geosync orbit by default, but be able to make them orbit? Say you want to patrol around the planet with spy satellites? Or you want to have orbital battlestations orbit your homeworld to defend it from enemy assault, or you have a base on a pole and you want to just patrol your perimeter?

I must say I understand the gameplay reasoning behind making orbital units always default to geosync. It would be a nightmare to try to coordinate them properly into groups or prevent them from killing themselves if they wouldn't stop moving. But I also think that giving them the option to orbit would help gameplay as well. It would be as simple as using the gui from the system editor. Hell you could even make them able to orbit the planet in unrealistic ways, like around the "East" side of a planet, if that's where your base happened to be. Then again, that would be pretty much the same as just setting them on a regular patrol...

Sorry for rambling a bit, but my point is also that I believe orbitals are far too close to the planet at the moment, and I envision them being controlled in a more macro way, where setting patrol points on the surface of the planet would be more cumbersome than simply defining an orbital patrol circle.

Also, maybe for gas giants we could have floating "air" units, maybe factories would look and function kind of like cloud city? And then orbital units would be farther up above the "air" units? Also, battle balloons...

Why don't T1 Orbital Units make sense?

Anything can be dangerous. It's simply what I've had in mind. Use the resources of space to win the battle at home.

So we balance it so that it's possible to get a beach head. Of course if you can't get one you can always just destroy the planet.

There are plenty of cases where you will end up "owning" a planet because you've dispatched the other players.

Also the whole "tiered economy" thing people keep talking about is not coming from me. In fact I'm really seriously considering nuking tech levels because it's because such a terminology issue.

It's hard to find roles that they wouldn't be massively superior for over the T1 versions we have now. For example a radar satellite at T1 would make it so you never need to both building ground radar. Getting into orbit is a BIG deal because it means expanding to other planets and having the high ground. It's simply not a T1 type of thing.

In addition because orbital is a bit "weird" because you are building stuff in orbit the build tree setup doesn't support a T1/T2 factory type thing as well as the normal units. Make no mistake, orbital is going to be a different beast and not simply "air 2.0".

If that means removing it from the game I really want to see what that would result in. It would be interesting to see how definitive sidegrades would pan out.

Use patrol? If you want your orbital units to move around tell them to do so. It just doesn't happen by default.

Sure we could add another orbital layer in the future that's different. That's just not the current plan. We don't have unlimited resources so all of this is a tradeoff.

I'm not building a completely different unit control system just for orbital units. We simply do not have the resources to do that.

You don't understand. I wouldn't change anything about the game. You would still build advanced factories etc. I would just nuke the terminology to avoid confusion.

There have been quite a few independent voices, who asked why radar from satellites couldn't just return less informations.

Not a smaller radius, but actually just less informations about the observed area. Biggest concerns where the location of defensive structures (towers and walls) as well as the location of armies. Mexes and pgens are a bit tricky, but there is nothing wrong with seeing factories and other large buildings.
Right now, that satellite is even considered overpowered in late game, as the recon is far to detailed, completely preventing surprise attacks and rendering classic recon units obsolete.

Although there is some need for an unit, which lets you find the enemy base early game in the first place and warns you about relocation / expansion attempts.

So are you or are you not in favour of Adv. Units being an "upgrade" over the starting units ala SupCom, or are you happy with some of the starting units actually being more powerful toe-to-toe, 1-vs-1 with Advanced Units ala Total Annihilation?

What do you mean by "Having a role and being useful throughout the game" exactly?

Under the current design no. Although it's easy to change that if we want to. The primary thing here is to make it hard to escape the gravity well that those with the high ground have an advantage.

Dropping from orbit is actually something that sounds like a good idea and could probably work as a compromise. Since we will already have the pod tech from the unit launcher...

Giving less information would be a fairly interesting way of balancing it. Basically just radar and not vision, or something like that.

I mean that T1 units should still be useful later in the game if at all possible. I'm ok with having more powerful tanks etc. but there should be other tradeoffs that make it make sense to still use T1 units.

Anyway the decision has been made and we no longer have "tech levels" in the game. That terminology is getting nuked from orbit.

Adv. Units FOREVER!


Sorry, I edited my post.

Does this mean that you are able to go throughout an entire, "long" game without upgrading to Adv. Units (except in special cases, like the Orbital Transport) if you wanted to stick with the standard units and still remain competative?