Orbital units - 2 directions

I dont really care about fake or real as such.

But what i think its awesome is that you could only move orbital units in orbits,

It should be fairly straight forward to grasp and understand, that a unit can only move in an orbit, it cannot stop. Thus if you wanna scout and or attack you have to plan ahead.

And base defences or air units cannot shoot up into orbit anyways.

You simple have an interface where you click an orbital unit then drag a ring that becomes visable, into the orbit you want said units to fly in,and the units will then based on its acceleration and power will switch to the new orbit.

Lets say you have a unit cannon or whatever in orbit, you select it, click on a base, it will fire next time it comes around above the target and in range.

I think the upside to this is that with satellites you cannot just hover them above a players base, its harder to take down the satellites, but it gives you limited vision everytime i passes above their base, which i think is awesome.

But maybe im just to stupid, but i dont see why orbital units moving in orbits has to be hard or bad, doesnt even have to realistic, i dont care about that. i just care about them being different than air units, and have an ORBIT, as the name implies.

The way around the planet which the orbit units orbits, will be determined when you launch it and cannot be changed.

I think it would be a lot easier/simple to just set a direction. It would be too fiddly and hard to set up more detailed orbits.

That doesn't change anything, the satellites don't give you that foot hold, they might make it easier if you use them properly and take advantage of the situations they can create, but you won't have that foot hold if you don't DO something beyond launching satellites.

Mike

Wow this is very cool some good ideas going around here. I think however that a fake orbit will be better the game is begging to be Big and vast in what its doing so more units the better. All so with all this going on the easier the better to control orbital needs to be a game in its own right lots of units but not so complicated that it needs time to master. While looking different should play the same.

How's that a bad thing? I'm really not sure what you're trying to point out here though. Do units need to fit a certain profile according to you or what?

There's no guarantee that the orbital fighter will remain in the game. But as an example, you still use fireflies even though you can also scout with a hummingbird. There's a distinct difference in field of view that a scout unit has.
Just because a unit can do something as well doesn't mean it can do it optimally.

Actually the "countering" in the video was to show the futility of trying to defend against an asteroid using nukes. You aren't changing the kinetic energy in the system by nuking it, only breaking it up.

I'm not sure what to say about all of this in detail, but I think the mechanics of attacking and moving in space will be quite different from other layers if done with the low acceleration/high speed thing as said earlier.

It'd be best if there were NO units with a turn rate anywhere NEAR the current orbital fighter. I think the hit-and-run idea as proposed earlier in the thread would be pretty interesting for how it actually worked. Some examples:

You build a t1 radar sat.
You send it to sit over the enemy base.
They build a t1 orbital fighter, and due to the low distance, it shortly destroys your sat.

You build a t1 radar sat.
You somehow order it to pass over the enemy base at maximum speed. (It turns multiple move orders into a line? It has a "return to starting point" toggle?)
They build a t1 orbital fighter.
They send it to chase after your sat. The fighter accelerates slowly enough that your sat survives for a while before the fighter catches up to it.
They leave the fighter idle.
You've built a couple of orbital fighters in this time and you take it down with a pass. It's unable to run away like a fighter group could because your fighters started accelerating earlier.

It would be MUCH more difficult to have a straight-up air battle in space at high speeds, because the engagement times would be more akin to a classical naval battle, where there's intermittent broadsides from passing ships. The important thing besides a simple control scheme for hit-and-run, would be that units remain moving as fast as possible when ordered to move somewhere else. Going to low speed/acceleration or being a slow structure should be a big disadvantage, and open you up to counterplay like ground-based weapons. Fast-moving things should be very difficult to kill. I think any kind of orbital-to-orbital weaponry should be relatively short-ranged. Long-ranged missiles would kind of break the mechanics outlined above.

I would also just like to mention that I think it's very important to have orbital available very early in the game, as well. Also, while I think limiting orbital to a smaller area of the planet is interesting, I don't think it adds too much in the way of gameplay.

Didn't use enough, obviously

So around and around we go with nary any kind of consensus amongst the players.

How do we cut through the BS here and get to a decision on this? I see a lot of people asking for stuff that's, quite frankly, simply not realistic. Lots of "well you could try X, Y, Z" type stuff. I need solutions that we know are going to work, that are internally consistent and that fit within the framework of the rest of the game. Madsci's design is at least consistent with itself but I haven't really seen anyone else post something comprehensive enough to even begin considering it.

I would argue that pushing forward with my current design and getting it to the point where it's playable and then going from there makes sense. For example we could experiment with not allowing the units to stop or with some of the other ideas about only being able to stop near the equator.

Thoughts?

Could I get some more feedback on the orbital being availably early game? To me this is a mistake. Specifically I see being stuck in a gravity well until you can build up a bit being a critical game mechanic. Keep in mind it may be more accessible if you are starting on a moon or airless body.

I say go ahead with that, but could we get a comment on what you feel is insufficient/lacking from the proposal over https://forums.uberent.com/threads/detailed-real-ish-yet-simple-orbit-proposal.51036/ so we can continue to work on it?

As far as i'm concerned, i think you should move forward with your current design. At some point, you're the one who has to decide. You know what's reasonable and i can't believe you're going to make wrong decisions that would ruin the game. I mean, basically you took the time to explain, listen, argue and justify. and regarding other topics (units scales) you have proven that you're listening to the community. It's basically what i was expecting, so i'm ok with your current design which without any doubt will reflect most of reasonable suggestions which have been made so far.

I don't like the idea of a whole layer of gameplay being in a higher tier of cost. If you're gonna make it playable, make it playable form the start.

All of the decisions that I make are wrong to someone. The only real methodology that I can follow here is to listen to people and understand their point of view, then go with what feels right to me. At least I'm being true to the original vision of the game when I do that. I can also make sure that long term we have the right hooks in it so that other game designers can play around with the technology to create other types of experiences that my limited brain cannot come up with.

Why? Other than not liking the idea what are the practical considerations?

Should we be trying to make orbital a first class citizen like naval so that we never have to touch down on a planets surface if we don't want to?

well whats your opinion about games with players starting on different planets? Will those games be "no rush" for 20 minutes? Or will there be some quite fast way of interacting? will orbital units play a special role in this? This is quite important I guess, but does not depend on the mechanics of orbital units^^

"Could I get some more feedback on the orbital being availably early game? To me this is a mistake. Specifically I see being stuck in a gravity well until you can build up a bit being a critical game mechanic. Keep in mind it may be more accessible if you are starting on a moon or airless body." /Neutrino

Could you explain how this would be a mistake? I would love the idea of starting the eco race on multiple fronts by sending an engineer in the beginning to a nearby moon. Comm should be locked till late game to avoid comm hiding happening in every game, but other than that I don't see how this would break the game.

OT I think your plan sounds interesting and it can easily be tweaked to make orbital feel more real if needed. I say go ahead.

If you are starting on different planets by yourself? Yeah you aren't going to be engaging right now, that sounds completely valid to me. A more common scenario in my mind would be multiple players on multiple planets which doesn't have that issue. Of course with game options you could always give people some serious starting cash to make the transition happen more quickly.

A nearby moon is a *lot* more distance than any place on the planet you are on. Why wouldn't you expand and capture all of it first?

BTW I'm not saying it's going to take an hour of gameplay to launch something into space. I think people are generally overblowing this issue in terms of what the cost will be. I just don't see it as being equivalent to building a vehicle factory and getting some energy plants going beside your commander