Suggestion: Orbital Commanders issue

It would be interesting to have a life support feature on the orbital which sets a timer when your economy crashes... so you have x amount of time to restore power or your commander will perish. This would stop people leaving their commanders in the orbital forever when all their economy has been destroyed.

I too would love to know how to deal with orbiting commanders.

Is space the new underwater hiding spot?

Least if a commanders underwater you can still flush them out.
Space? Unless i'm missing something i cant do anything about it.

Well, you can always build orbital fighters and then go kill them.

But yes, I can see how doing that on every habitable planet would get very old very quickly.

So your robot commander with its own internal power generator that can indefinitely survive independently on airless moons and underwater dies if he's in space for too long without power?

There's no need for such a hacky solution when more sensible solutions involving paying per interplanetary transfer have already been suggested.

Well, that's not what "i" mean by orbital commanders.
My problem is when they're travelling between planetoids forever...

The commander doesn't die of lack of power but it overheats eventually. Getting rid of the excess heat generated by its anti-matter power plant is very hard in space.

But not when in the physically equivalent situation of hovering over an airless moon?

Ah, but you added hovering just now. Sneaky.

In case of an airless moon (not hovering) the commander can just use any mass to bleed of excess heat. May not be very efficient with solids but there should be plenty of elements/materials with a low melting point that can be used by its reactor as a cooling fluid. Then you just flush that once it gets too hot and replace it.

A quadrillion tons of raw planet tends to work well as a heat sink.

If the Commander has to worry about overheating, then he can at least shut down his resource generation systems to stay cool. Unfortunately, that kind of penalty doesn't mean too much in the grand scheme of things.

Reason #4149 to have planet-bound energy: The Commander can't simply sit in his shuttle while fabbers do all the expanding. He's gotta be the one to move out.

Is the commander hanging in interplanetary space really an issue? I mean unless you seriously want to troll someone if your forces got wiped and your commander in a lander is all you got left, are you seriously going to spend the next 50 minutes buzzing around the start system just to not let the other win???? That kind of tactic is pure trolling, and troll-proof games don't exist. If uber get an easy solution for this, good...otherwise, I don't think AIs, ladders or E-sports will be affected by that.

They tend not to work so well when your commander is in geostationary orbit and the planet is far below it.

It completely removes the Assassination aspect of the game. A player that's economically behind can snipe a commander to get a comeback victory. But if everyone can make their commander invulnerable at the cost of one lander, Assassination becomes the notably inferior Annihilation game mode.

The easiest fix:

put a cooldown on the lander so it needs to recharge a while before it can leave again.

This might be solved with a game mode option. Two choices - 1. true annihilation where you have to hunt down the sneaky player's Com and do the whole tedious thing with finding and chasing him down with fighters or however that works. 2. If the game detects that the escaping Com is simply flying through space and has no chance of building anything within the next two minutes, and everything else is dead, the game is over. That way players can just choose whichever sounds more fun.

Or add in deep space units. Ahem.

Well that could work but I haven't seen yet, can the commander be always in space by changing the lander destination back and forth during travel? If so, then that solution is not viable as he just won't land at all.


And about the comeback victory, yeah I hadn't seen it like that. But if you're behind in economy or military to the point your enemy manage to get away to another world even if he doesn't fool around and just land to another planet you are screwed up. I mean the way I see it, as soon as your opponent can get a lander, any hope of raid attack is over wether he go to another world or chill out in deep space.

It's still possible that he'll screw up and you can ambush his lander with fighters or space fighters in the descent phase. Or sneak a laser satellite or a nuke through. (Nukes are planned to have interplanetary capabilities). If he's in deep space there's nothing that can touch him.

Mythoughts on this from another thread;

In particular 2 would require an Orbital Launch pad at both locations and would require the building of the Boosters and require more player attention to keep it going, not a perfect solution but a good first step IMO.

Mike

It used to be the only way you could get a Commander out of the water was to engage him with your own Commander, or reclaim him with Fabbers. I always chose the latter for the ensuing lolz.

But yeah, this could be an issue. Just bounce your Commander between two asteroids and you're invincible forever.

I think the lander should be moved to an air factory unit, and move around like a plane transporting units and perhaps comnapping (if it can get past the AA) but then you load it into the orbital launcher and fire it at another planet where it would land where you told it to but also would then require another orbital factory to be launched again I think this would solve the lander problems people are having plus it gives us a air transport that we can use to bypass islands and mountains with our units, If they then allowed it to carry every land unit and added a ferry system we would be able to transport armies over the water or flank a player that's using a mountain wall but has no defenses there :3

then you just make all the other orbital units forced to stay orbiting the planet except for maybe the interceptor as it looks a little like a spaceship and never goes down into the atmosphere it would be good if it could move around and protect your commander or other forces as they move around. not to mention if they made the lander beable to carry normal units you could transport some AA units or just alot more builders so that when you land you can defend against an air force or quickly build defenses and a base for your beach head