Orbital vs. Fog of War

I guess it depends of the amount of thrusters, the relevant gravities of the sun and neighbouring planets. But to throw numbers around, 4 minutes for the first phase, 1 minute for the second, 1 minute for the third. Ofcourse this might be much higher, it would directly depend on the build times of orbital units, so that a rush can be defended if a player starts preparing immediately.

I think the only way you should be able to avoid being destroyed by an Asteroid, would be to use giant wind turbines to push the planet around so your base avoids the asteroid.

EDIT: Fo' real.

Four minutes (if you're generous) to assault a potentially, heavily fortified asteroid? Not long enough. The window of opportunity needs to be at least double that.

Also you're effectively saying that 6 minutes after getting to the 'Orbital Stage', you're able to hit your enemy with an asteroid?

That's nuts. You're a nutter, Nutterboy.

Artificial rotation of a planet sounds like an interesting game mechanic...

I'M SORRY NANO

True dat ya know

everybody needs to understand that regardless of what you think, what the developers think... Nanolathe is always right regardless of anything - he's got it figured out.

I thought this thread was going to be discussing things like vision vs radar coverage. But it's turned into this discussion about an example gone wrong.

I think that orbital sattelites should have VISION in a circle like a scout plane (maybe a bit bigger?) below them, along with large radar coverage. The tradeoff is vulnerability to anti-orbital threats, and the economy it takes to create it. To counter it, you attack it with orbital fighters (or whatever uber decides as the anti-orbital weapon of choice). To counter the counter, you destroy the anti-orbital threat. The enemy can also make their own radar sattelites. The advantage to having radar sattelites is mobility. One example of this is movign the satellite over the site of a large battle taking place. Thereby allowing you to see the enemy's troop movements and plan countermeasures against them.

Curve ball this one, what about adding GPS? As in normal pathing is pretty dumb until you throw 3 or more sats in orbit. You could do something like the pathing (F11) only takes into account what is currently seen (might be difficult to do, don't know) but get 3 sats up and you can path for the entire planet.

I think making pathing worse than it could be for want of a later game upgrade would be pretty annoying. Having my engineer stuck in a crack I know it could have avoided doesn't sound like a gameplay feature, it should be as good as it can be! The GPS concept could be a good idea though, perhaps in a mod, where the range and accuracy of your catapults and lobbers increases once you've got orbital in the air.

I do think the satellite should provide vision, to a limited area around it, and radar outside that.

So it's a Mobile Adv. Radar; an upgrade? It's just a straight-up better option than building the ground-based building equivalent 99% of the time as it provides the same bonuses as the building, yet it's a mobile unit? There is literally only one situation not to build such a satellite and that is if your enemy has 'Orbital Superiority Fighters' in abundance...

Reducing the players choice to a binary calculation, rather than one of strategic significance.