For Backers Only: One Moon, No Waiting

Off topic!
Mod: delete it and this and back to topic!

What is there to discuss?
It's a picture of a unit on a moon. We were able to do that in the Pre-Alpha. (glitched there, yes... but there nonetheless)

Glad you went with rockets over alternatives as per Rule Of Cool. Rockets are cool.

As for the flaps discussion, well, rocket engines do look surprisingly flimsy. It's not a bunker, it's a non-combat engineering megastructure. Maybe it's a bit too much visual noise but we'll have to see them in action to see how steering works. Maybe pivoting the thrust spike would have looked weird without the flaps being there to signify they're moving it.

They do look surprisingly static, as i'm going to assume that you will not require people to know beforehand which side the engines have to go on for the body to go in the right direction they will certainly have to rotate said body before initiating a burn, now either those huge rockets can gimbal or you have another set of angular rockets that has to be build. I can see advantages and disadvantages in both... Having to build a second set of buildings needlessly complicates the situation and simulation, on the other hand those angular rockets could be a lot cheaper and sometimes all you want to do might be to rotate the body you're on, see THIS age old thread for examples...

Eh, I'm pretty happy with complex animations.

I always loved the pop-up and pop-out animations in TA. Even if they made the unit die before they could deploy their blue laser of doom.

Animations that contribute to unit death are a subject of special hatred from me. Dawn of War had that issue with sync kills (as cool as they looked).

Dawn of War 2 'fixed' that by greatly reducing damage taken during sync kills (actually they were invulnerable for a time, that was amusing). Kinda made things go the other way. Still an improvement, mind.

Nah, long animations are simply another balance mechanism. An unit may get a super strong weapon with incredible range but its downside are that it takes some time to deploy. There are various ways to prevent an early death of such an unit unless it gets suprised/rushed/ambushed by the enemy. And in that case one got outplayed so its deserving.

As fas as the economy of the super rocket things (what are they actual called? Orbital rockets?), should they be a really difficult building to construct, or should they consume a massive amount of resources when they're in flight?

I personally like the idea of the rockets being relatively easy to construct (i.e. somewhere between basic and advanced factory level amount of resources needed), but then having them use some ridiculous amounts of power when they're actually in flight.

Having them both expensive to build and expensive to run is fine, it's the way teleporters were in FA. Useful in circumstances but required a massive eco to pull off.

I guess it would have to be balanced largely on the size of the asteroid. It should be the case that enough eco buildings could fit on an asteroid to power the rockets. (i.e. They can be self sufficient, and won't necessarily need power from your other bases)

It will also be interesting to see how Uber decides to implement inter-planetary transport, because stranding a ton of engineers on a ballistic asteroid with no eco-efficient way to move them to another planet would be... interesting.

Needs more power,

UNLIMITED POWER!!

*muhahahaha*

yep.

So we're getting closer and closer to the actual Planetary Annihilation. I really don't want to be a planet right now.

This^

Just have the engines on a socket that can rotate in the direction of movement.

To have all the engines pointing the same way, you can have them built like this:

To be honest flaps or gimbals are fine for me, I know they both work conceptually, so just give me whatever looks cooler.

Can't wait to give this a try. One of the best features in this entire game.

Now put some guns on it and no one can complain about not having spaceships!
Give em' the unit cannon broad side D:<

AWESOME GUYS............

I actually like how this looks, it looks dynamic. and it makes how to rotate/spin a planet in a direction more feasible too. of course this picture is a bit grainy and they look a little noisy which will hopefully be fixed, but I like the idea of engines that can, perhaps, change their direction.

I must say, after taking a long look, the engines simply seems to big in scale compared to the moon, it looks a bit odd. I liked the simple but complex design from the KS video more.

That being said, I don't mind flaps and before I am sure if I will like it or not, I would like to see it in action. Like Garat and Neutrino said, those thrusters have some nice animations I would like to see first.

Still the scale seems of for me... instead of 6 big ones, I would have preferred 12 smaller ones like in the video? That was just for the asteroid and not for a big moon.

>Implying you can stick a rocket designed to move several-ton to several-hundred ton rocks out of their orbit and into a rendezvous on a gimbal.

But I'm not going to draw the realism card.

I'm excited for this, but being my subversive trolly self, I want to know how you got onto the moon and built those. And no, developer hacks are not a valid answer.

Aside from that, if there are going to be flaps, they must be FLAMBOYANT and ROYAL.