Orbital units - 2 directions

Well, for me this is not a discussion about realism vs fake Shell, the only thing i really want for the orbital layer is to differentiate itself from the other layers, so that it feels novel instead of just more of the same.

If you consider 3D chess as an example (This is hyperbole):

• Think of the shell approach as adding a new layer to the chess field, it makes the game more complicated but doesn't add much strategic value.
• Were you instead to introduce a new unit with very different movement rules, the game would alter significantly providing new angles.

However i'm not in favor of the realistic approach because it is realistic, but because it guarantees an interesting addition to the game.
I don't think it's impossible for the shell approach to do that as well, (it's only a very small part of the orbital puzzle after all) it's just not as easy.

Someone suggested a scenario with a fake geosynchronous belt, and the poles being traversable but not occupy able, i think that might be very interesting as well. After reading your answers to the other posts i see that the orbital you envision differs greatly from what i thought it would be, basically realistic orbits would not fare well with huge amounts of units in orbit.

But, independently from how units in orbit move, i still think there should be early game orbital units, and orbital fighters should not be a thing, or at least not the main thing. I'm not completely against orbit vs orbit capabilities, but if orbit gameplay is just orbital factories spamming fighters to gain 'orbital superiority' much in the same way one would gain air superiority, i'd be very disappointed...

First and foremost. Jon, I can't thank you enough for opening this thread. I'm extremely grateful and I must rescind any comments I made previously about the devs ignoring the community.


I used to watch the hovering satellites in Forged Alliance, I hated them but I just assumed they were like that because you can't orbit a flat map. I had made the assumption that now we had spherical maps, we could change all of that.


To me (and I appreciate that this is not the same for others) satellites that hover are something else entirely. If you shaped them like the Czar from FAF and called them a flying saucer (or similar) then their current motion would not bother me, they are clearly using anti-grav and why couldn't future bots do that, seems completely legitimate.


As they currently stand I find them as jarring as a bomber that comes to a complete stop in mid-air, turns on a dime and flies off in another direction. It jars because momentum isn't conserved, but I'm sure you could defend it as 'future tech'. However bombers like this aren't done because it defies what the player expects and as a result looks unpleasant. By the same token, my expectation of orbits is responsible for how unpleasant the current 'satellites' look to me (and to others).


If you want a really cheap sensor array above the planet though, then a satellite (and by satellite, I mean something that exists in a non-powered orbit) is the obvious solution. Once in orbit, it doesn't have to expend thrust to maintain its position, and you didn't have to spend loads to put it up there. Fling up a cheap metal box that swings around the planet and can only detect large buildings and I will be a happy man. (I honestly lost sleep last night over this, and yes I know that's ridiculous…)


In terms of UI. To make it very simple, you could have a number of default orbit 'slots', once you fire it up, it just stays in that slot and you can't change it. For a cheap unit that seems completely reasonable. Each slot could have a polar orbit, with a small % of coverage of the planet at any one time, and if you managed to launch enough sats to fill all of the slots (might be higher numbers for larger planets) then you could end up with 100% coverage for the planet, but only for large buildings. You could consider even having no counter for this unit except some kind of camouflage for large buildings


For the expensive orbital units (maybe the ones with massive lasers?), sure make them anti-grav in the way that other players want, they can hover over any part of the planet, they can be shot down with ground based weapons etc etc…


All of this is just a first pass of my idea and there might be holes in it, but basically, I'm asking for a cheap orbital satellite as a low tier unit in some orbiting slots, and surely that would satisfy everyone. What do you think Jon?

Units would move around basically in a very simple circle or elipse around the planet, basically disregarding the rotation of the planet. Normally it would move along the white line, but for the sake of gameplay it could just move perfectly along the red line.



The interface I imagine looks much like the system editor we have now, you basically select a ring around the planet, and you can rotate that ring any way you like. Perhaps some limited eliptical capabilities, but nothing that would minimise the earths coverage too much.

Units would basically select an orbit, and they would need one full rotation around the planet to change from for example red to orange or red to yellow(How much are units allowed to rotate per full trip around earth?). You would be able to see the exact orbit of enemy units, so you would simply tell a unit to steer into an orbit that is on or next to the enemy orbit. The red line could for example interact with itself and with the orange lines next to it.



A player could easily count, this is going to take me X-amount of rotations around earth, where the number is never larger than 3. If you manage to determine the orbit of the enemy unit before launching your own unit into orbit, it would be on the right orbit straight away. This would force players to atleast control 4 different orbits in order to gain full planetary coverage and it would mean that you would need to think differently about how you counter enemy units. Instead of just sending existing units to them, you would need to send units that have the right opportunity to do so.

When several units move in the same orbit, they can "catch up" to other units by the use of a temporary booster, this would automatically happen by issuing any movement command. Let's presume here that this booster would not affect the orbital trajectory itself and that it does not provide them with a higher speed. Eventually units would return to their default speed.

Chaining commands would essentially be boosting up to other units, and build something in orbit. Yet you could also chain several orbit changes in between though they would take some time.

The ground layer should essentially be able to stop small amounts of orbital units, but in order to counter a large number of orbital units, they would need to make an orbital launcher of their own. Though I don't think orbital should be much more expensive than anything else.

This idea is my attempt to simplify something as complicated as orbital behaviour. I really find it difficult to create a new idea from scratch. But hopefully this will give some inspiration so that a proper idea might be put forward.

I personally hope that Interplanetary travel is possible at t1 in small scale at least. I would like to see early one engineer drops to moons and asteroids because i think multiple planetoid combat is an essential part of this game and confining it to late game could mean it not being present in most matches. Obviously you shouldn't be able to send your comm away until late game, that would make a standard one sided game take far too long. Uber team has not to my knowledge made any announcement about their plans concerning this aspect and I would really like to know their plans concerning it.

As for orbital, I like the idea of orbital navy ( air 2.0 doesn't quite cut it imo ). However I fear that their plans for defence structures in orbit make it have some unfun aspects to it. For instance, how do you counter stationary turrets in orbit? The things I can think of are orbital artillery units ( which sounds dumb ) and land to orbit missiles and nukes. I think the defences add just lines of stationary combat to orbital that doesn't sound fun at all. I am also a huge hater of counter to counter ( anti-rocket-lasers, rockets with anti-anti-rocket-laser-shields etc. ).

Lot's of people have complained that free moving orbital units are not "realistic" however I think they are. Given that units have endless amounts of fuel on them, I think units are able to move in orbit to whichever position they want and stay there. Some movement tweaking could be nice, like high max speed and low acceleration/deceleration that has been said before would help orbital units feel more "orbital".

MOVEMENT
i picture orbital units to have a arrow type of direction movement they ALWAYS MOVE in the direction the arrow point at wich is handy when you didnt tell him anything to do and hes just floating about
but when you tell him to go somewhere his thrusters engage to adjust its self

SPEED
the speed of a orbital unit is something that you as player can change but it is not a slider (in the UI) that actually says "SPEED" but it is a slider that lets you control the hight of how far the unit is up in orbit. The higher the unit is up the slower it rotates around the planet with 1 being the fastest/lowest and 10 being the slowest/highest (or someting along the lines of that) and the unit will go up higher and lower so units with the same speed are on kindoff the same hight (this hight difference will not effect assisting, building or (counter) attacks (in other words if you want to destroy an orbital unit one does'nt need to chance the hight level of its own orbital unit) since orbital is its own layer and its own playstyle) when commanded to build the unit will build on hight level it is currently on
and when unit 1 is commanded to assist unit 2
unit 1 will adjust itself to the speed/hight level of unit 2
(havent actually figured this building and assisting part out)

keep in mind that the hight thing is not how every orbital thing is going to be it is only there to make sense for the units and their speed in orbit
also you could lock the "building in orbit" thing to a certain hight so that if you command a unit to build
it will automaticly descent or ascent to that certain hight.

HOW TO CHAIN
so you have a unit up there click on it and it shows you its direction its currently going and within the UI the level of speed (10 lowest). So you want "Orbi" (any orbital thing) to go from A to B and then to C. BUT you want Orbi to go as fast as possible TO B and from B going as slow as possible to C.
- you simply click on where ever location B is
- then a slider pops up on you're screen and you drag it to: 1 (fastes / lowest orbit hight)
- this tells Orbi to go to B at hight level 1
- then you click on where ever location C is (slider pops up and stuff)
- you then drag it to 10 (slowest /highest orbit hight)
- this tells Orbi to go from B to C at hight level 10 (slowest / highest orbit hight)
And after that Orbi does'nt have any other orders to fullfill so he's just floating about in the same speed it was last on and the arrow points in the direction it is going to float (this is where the arrow is for)

The speed/hight slider doesnt have to pop-up it can be in the UI all along so you can keep track of the unit's status.
ALSO
The speed/hight slider doesnt have to contain 10 levels. it could also have 5 or 3 so that the hight difference is more easily noticeable and that there is less micro.

Scenario 2: Patrol
- to patrol you do the same as above but you will click on location A again (slider pops up)
- you adjust the slider to the desired speed/hight you want
- this will tell the unit to go from C to A at hight level "?" and will continue to loop this proces with the correct hight levels from the other locations

also you should have a max and a minimum orbit space in mind with the questions: "at what hight can i say that this unit should be in space right now" (max hight) "and when is this unit concidered to be still in atmosphere" (min hight)
(not really good in english but you know what i mean)

GETTING SEEN
also when you launch a unit into orbit that the chances of it getting detected is larger than any other units but not that it is ALWAYS detected even if the enemy does'nt even have a single unit on that side of the planet
its like saying "if i can see them they can see me" because obviously you can see it coming up at the horizon just like the sun (wich is different from the way air ground and naval gets detected)

in the end you guys deliver the product so grab whatever you can to the point that it still is fun and awesome

I just named it upgrades, I meant to say that these Dock stations can build fabbers which can ONLY build defense systems ONTO the station...like an expansion

Or like an "upgrade". Expanding on buildings and structures is also an iffy area that Uber was keen to avoid. Factories and other buildings don't get point defence. You build a Light Laser Tower for that.

I don't post often on this forum, but felt the need to offer my suggestions for how orbital could work for PA in a way that's distinct from other craft. It does have some overlap with what others have said.

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Hi,

I know orbital is the hot topic at the moment, with the whole realism vs fake conflict going on. To me this isn't the game for having full orbital mechanics on units; we already have KSP for that. I personally want to tell satellites where to go and see them do it, without having to relay complex instructions to them. So to me the Fake approach makes the most sense, however there are perhaps ways to emulate the ideas of orbital mechanics and make the behaviour of such units distinct from all others (rather than just Air 2.0 as its been called).

Using the idea of the shell that neutrino mentioned, all units launched onto the shell automatically enter a geo-synchronous orbit. This means that if a satellite is launched at the equator it will automatically be geo-stationary, but if launched further away then it will have the figure-8 wobble I’ve seen people post about. This would be the standard behaviour of a satellite, so if you command it to stop moving or it finishes a move order, it will return to geo-sync. Of course if you launch from the pole then the best it can do is a polar orbit.

If you want a satellite to move to a new location you simply give it a move command. Rather than having the full complexities of orbital and have the craft change its apoapsis and periapsis, instead this is ignored and the satellite just accelerates and changes it's inclination to get to the target position as fast as possible. If it bothers people that the orbits aren't changing then a visual trick could be done whereby the altitude of the craft is a function of its speed, with faster moving units existing on a lower shell, and slower moving units existing further out. This would be relative to the planets rotation though, so if you select a position in the spinward direction then the unit needs to increase its orbital speed and reduce its altitude, and visa versa.

Once a satellite reaches its target, it will then perform the stop routine I mentioned earlier. This means that rather than just hovering over that point like an aircraft, it will instead create a geo-synchronous orbit with as little wobble as possible. This has the advantage that it allows the grouping of satellites together as they can all be commanded to the same location, and once there will align their orbits to be geo-sync. For the times where you actually want a satellite to perform fast orbits, you could place down a single patrol point (or perhaps a patrol orbit instead) and the satellite will move to it and continue to follow that path at its higher speed. To make understanding satellite behaviour a bit easier, there could be the ability to show their current orbit when you select them.

If you are to perform orbital construction, then you select a fabber and tell it where to build, and that structure will automatically be placed on a geo-sync path. This means that there are no fixed structures in space. The fabber then just needs move to the construction site, geo-sync and start building. Maybe there could be the option to snap constructions to the equator to make that sort of placement easier.

The key thing to take away from this idea is that satellites are always in motion on their shell. Their default behaviour from launch or after a move is to enter a geo-sync orbit, and if that happens to be on the equator it will be geo-stationary. This sets them apart from aircraft and makes their behaviour unique but not too complex to understand, and certainly not complex to control! Getting multiple satellites to arrive at the same location is easy as they don't need to worry about applying delta-v at the apoapsis or periapsis to be "fuel efficient". To me this seems like the best way to make orbital units a unique class of craft, without introducing all the complexities of real orbital mechanics.

Thanks for reading

I see the "realistic" orbital move pattern of the orbital units more like a feature than a disadvantage, bringing a new and more interesting gameplay.

Orbital units (recon sat, weapon platform...) are by nature extremely powerful (radar that show pretty much half the planet, weapon with same range; cannot be counter without specific weapons...), so making them spin around the planet and thus being available only during a specified window on each rotation is only a normal counterbalancing of their power.

As a player if i know the enemy sat will pass over me in x minutes, i know i have x minutes to prepare myself before the next scan/attack. As an attacker i had to time my attack with the sat's orbits (wait till getting most up to date intel, use attack to weaken defenses prior to ground assault..)

Sats's orbits could also be modified after launch to counter/optimize such preparation, modify trajectories to get a longer window of action (as the frontline moves), at the cost of time to replace it and energy consumption (for thrusters, directly treansfered from the surface using the same planetary subspace resource transport that allow to build anywhere without linking), nothing like "fuel" but more like the energy consumed by energy weapons.
Like on this film with Harrison Ford; "Patriot Games".

For complete covering we could launch a fleet of several satellites, the loss of one create a hole in the grid.

On the other hand the "fake orbits" is like only adding an "air+" layer, with even less restrictions.
Because even aircrafts needs to move and can't "hover" like on others RTS.
That made the TA aircraft's movements more interesting to play with than hovering "air" units.

There is still possibility to have a stationary orbital station (with radar/weapon addons) by building a space elevator at the equator.
The land building restriction make us need to hold and defend the ground attach point to keep the structure.
An expensive space elevator also becomes a cheaper way of launching satellites.

Satellites could be destroyed using specialized weapons fired from special aircraft, which are targets of choice for offensive sats as they can't reach space.

Balancing is a choice of either building a large ground invasion army or either spending resources in the "space race" and get superior intel and space weapons (uberpowerfuls but not too much, so a very large ground army still can attack the enemy base at ground).

Orbital units behave like air 2.0 don't make sense in physics anyway, so why not have something else that's equally not make sense and different to air mechanisms and still fits a macro-oriented RTS? Like orbital units become faster when floating above high grounds or something. Without the restriction of realism, we could have a lot more freedom for creating movement rules.

Jon:

To differentiate the layers you could add another 'zoom' layer into the game between planet and solar system, so that as you zoom out the interface/ui visibly switches to another mode. You get orbital construction UI, you get a lower LOD version of the planet and you can no longer see units on the ground, just 2D representations of the bigger buildings. I do think the orbital shell should be a lot further out than it currently is, so it really does feel like it's far out in space/orbit rather than just the distance of air to ground ontop of air again.

Secondly, is it not possible to have something between fake orbital and true physic simulated orbital.
Ie. when you first launch a satellite/orbital unit from the ground you can draw an orbital path it will follow, so no gravity/physics simulation, just a path which it will follow. Once this unit/sat is in that orbital path you can change the path but it has to slowly manoeuvre into the new path? (Also these paths could be forced into purely circumference paths, so no small area orbits, that way editing the path would always give a clear intersection between the existing path and the new path). This would mean you have to keep track of where the enemy is building anti orbital stuff on the ground and adjust your path accordingly. Orbital units could clip through each other if their paths collide, which they most likely won't because the orbital shell is a lot larger and not as densely populated as the ground shell.

What do you think?

Orbital weapons do have a limitation they would usually need to be pretty much right over the target. Right above allows you to benefit from a gravity boost to kinetic weapons dropping straight down and minimise atmospheric interference & burn up.
When you get away from the straight drop orbital weapons get a lot weaker has the increasing amount of atmosphere they have to pass through screws with the weapons & gravity starts to become an issue not a advantage as it forces the weapon into a ballistic path. Energy weapons have the same issues increased atmosphere really screws with them.

I was thinking this also, I would like orbital control to be totally separate with it's own distinct zoom level.

In the way of ground defenses? I would have expensive to build orbital missiles, that take just as long as some of the more expensive orbital units to build, so even though you're orbital units are moving over enemy base quite often, the enemy would have to pump a lot of resources to take all orbital units out. However cheaper orbital units such as intel satellites and the such should not be cost effective to counter.

I am more for the two part of the orbital. The geostationary orbit near the equator and the orbital moving everywhere else.

That way you can have a place in to orbit for nearly stationary objection for buildings ect and a more mobile reconnaicance or attack satelites.

For the Gas giants that would work pretty good too. On the other hand you could get really far with that concept with enough metal you could even then build orbital plattforms for fabbers ect or a defense grid against invasions ect. Of course that would cost a lot of Metal/Energy but havng a fortified Planet with a Orbital Torus around it as a defensive plattform well that would be awesome, and maybe to much

Or getting so far that the conquest of the orbital layer will bring you to the staging area for interplanetary conquest.

Space lift sounds like an awsome mid-late game idea. Afraid I'm at work and can't come up with ideas to flesh it out, but fits in with the general vibe of gameplay and could have the counter weight at the top of the space lift as a low atmosphere launch pad to asteroids, reducing cost of colonizing asteroids.

I like that, did you have any other ideas about the units or unit roles that would need to be built 'in-Orbit'?

A few months ago I had an idea for an 'Orbital Drop Factory', the basic jist was that you launched it into orbit and it could build land units but it could only store a limited amount but because they were dropped from orbit it is primarily focused on providing a 'fast reaction force' as opposed to general production. Similar in theory to using the Unit Cannon from a moon or asteroid but on a different scale.

Also any thought how how detection goes? Like is a satellite detected by passing overhead of radar or do they have enough of a signal to always be detected from within a certain range of any unit? Any thoughts on an 'Early Warning' Structure/Unit/Satellite that can detect orbital units traveling to/towards the planet it's deployed on and/or unit moving just near the EWR?

Mike[/quote]

I was intending on having the orbital layers and above always visible to all players.[/quote]



I suggested an orbital factory that can deploy bots from orbit, much as I saw in the kickstarter vid in another thread. Could have a cone shape projecting out from the orbital factory, anywhere within the cone the player can click to deploy units. This would also work with having actual circular orbits as well. In fact maybe all orbital weapons, factories and satellites could employ a cone for deployment/visibility (Probably satellites already do!). This would work well to allow circular orbiting weapons some more space to fire/deploy even if they are not perfectly over the enemy.

I'm torn up about this. I want for there to be orbital mechanics with space units and I know many people may think it's all over the place an incomprehensible at first but really it's rather straightfoward. All it would take was to make your camera track the space unit and you would see what it's doing vis-a-vis the ground and your base. And of course this would mean you could end up with decaying orbits and loose units to this but it really would be so much more interesting than fake.


Here's where I draw the line. I can see how doing physics orbits with dozens of "units" E.G. the planets would work fine but with actuall untis which could be by the thousands would not. Not at all. How do we work this out, technically speaking? I think a place to start would be ditch the path and E.T.A. prediction and chain orders entirely and from there what? Is it possible to run seperate instances for each group of relatively close together 20-50 orbital units on the cpu to avoid a process getting too costly? would the Uber server be capable of handling these calculations for thousands of units or is it actually not a techincal feat at all and something that can be competely optimised?

Tatsu, the issue with an entirely separate orbital interface involving changing eccentricity, velocity, pitch yaw and roll of the orbit path, etc etc. Is that Uber doesn't have the time or resources to do it. It was either Neutrino or Garat that said this (probably Neutrino, him being a lead programmer and what not). A fully working, unique and separate orbital interface is entirely out of the question given Uber's immense crunch for time.

That's why I posted this, I'm willing to compromise my opinion, to get a still-orbital system that isn't Air 2.0 entirely. I'll just be adding fully simulated orbits to my list of mods to be done.

Mind you a 2-body formula is an expression that is complicated for a human to understand, but its trivial for a computer to run.

Any kind of orbit can be expressed as a trivial function of time. So much for the computational overhead, it's rather small.

However, this is only valid for units which don't accelerate/decelerate, latter ones require much more complicated calculations, even iterative if the unit was to steer while accelerating.


That does not mean I'm in favor of the simulation of orbital mechanics though, I'm clearly not.

Thats not for technical limits (there are none to my understanding), but for the implications caused by these mechanics. To name the two most important:

• Rather unintuitive ETAs due to the still quite complex mechanics in the background no matter how much the UI abstracts
• Great discrepancy in the effectiveness of orbital units depending on the Latitude of the target location.

And yet another quite heavy argument: