Are Orbital Fighters Over the Top?

Ok, so I am posting this here in the Backer's forum. We are all invested. We all saw the promise of PA in the kick starter video. We all want PA to succeed.

With that weighty introduction, I ask you a big question: Are Orbital Fighters bad for PA?

Orbital Fighters were not in the Kickstarter. Orbital Fighters do not exist in modern war fare. Orbital fighters don't even have their own model yet, so Uber may be considering their value as well in their current incarnation.

1. Suggestion 1: Reduce the importance of Orbital Fighters and orbital fights.

The way you remove satellites from orbit IRL is with surface to orbit missiles.

Right now, you cannot nuke orbitals away. You can use Umbrellas to fire surface to orbit, but they have an issue as described below.

Side topic: You cannot nuke other planets. Nukes, which could be fired on the moon with today's technology cannot target other planets currently in PA, however, nukes were fired on the asteroid in the Kickstarter video.

2. Suggestion 2: Nukes should be allowed to fire on other planets and asteroids. They should also be allowed to fire on satellites.

When Nuetrino first mentioned Orbital Fighters I did not know what to expect.

Umbrella Issue: What orbital fighters are turning out to be is the sole fighting force to win late game: planet to planet. The Laser Satellites which bombard the ground do the clean up, but orbital fighters win the orbital space for this to happen. And there is very little you can do from the surface of the planet to stop Orbital Fighters from gaining and keeping the upper hand (no pun intended). Once there is no enemy orbitals Umbrellas cannot see Laser Satellites to fend them off.

IRL you can see satellites from the surface of the planet.

Suggestion 3: The ground surface should have LOS to the orbital layer above it and satellites should be able to see the surface below them.

I am afraid the Peewee Cannon when introduced will not add enough value to ground troops and their ability to affect the outcome of the game. Other than a planet smashing asteroid or a nuke, I want tech 1 units to be an important part of the action all game.

These suggestions will make the orbital layer more shared and require a hefty investment to remove enemy satellites. Instead of being the most important battlefield it should become an intelligence layer and an arena for extremely expensive weapons with expensive counters. Nukes and anti-nukes should be a full game component. Laser Satellites shouldn't be an invisible knife.

Further hair brained ideas: Satellites could be given more health to dissuade Orbital Fighters. Orbital fighters could be allowed to enter regular air space. Better yet advanced fighters and bombers could be interplanetary and shift between air and orbit like the Astraes. Umbrellas would only be able to fire upon them in the orbital layer. This could be used to further dissuade orbital fighting and increase the importance of good old low-tech combat forces.

That's my discussion of the current build.

To be honest it's hard to suggest anything until we know if Uber wants to stick with the way Orbital is designed, right now it's a hyper expensive T3/Experimental class all of it's own.

For me, I'd Much rather see Orbital Fighters replaced with a Hunter Seeker Satellite that uses it's own Kinetic Energy to take out other Satellites.....and itself.

Mike

I think the orbital fighter concept should be replaced with a suborbital fighter, which can enter orbit but cannot travel between planets. You would need to put it into an orbital carrier in order to transport them to a different planet. The "fighter" wouldn't be a full-fledged interplanetary unit like a larger ship.

The suborbital fighter would be primarily an air unit and not an orbital unit like a satellite or space vessel. But it can also act as space defense and intercept orbital units around one planet. But they are bound to the orbit of one planet, and you won't get an armada of them flying off to another planet.

Because they can't travel to a different planet on their own, they could be much cheaper than a current "orbital fighter." This also lets all the fully orbital units like large vessels and space stations, satellites, etc. be fully space-bound, and design them so that they stay in orbit and never land. They can launch suborbital units to go down to the planet.

For me, even if Uber keep their current 'T3' approach to orbital, I would really like to see that fighter get removed. I would much prefer a short range combat satellite. Basically just an art change, but I really don't like how the current orbital fighters look in combat/at all other times .

Can't you build the orbital and deepspace radar?

To Ledarsi: The problem is that the game is disjointed. Your contribution so far does not address that. T3 is almost completely unconcerned about T1 and T2. Doesn't that concern you?

To ZaphodX: You cannot build orbitals if you lose an orbital fighter war over your planet and your enemy has laser satellites to destroy your Orbital Launcher(s).

Orbital victory is most likely good game and your tanks and air had very little to do with it. They might be needed for janitorial services (clean up on planet 4!). Currently the laser satellite cannot hit a single moving unit such as the enemy commander.

To Mike: I am glad you understand the concern. My take is that the situation is worse than experimentals, because experimentals are not invisible as well as can be attacked by air and ground forces. The UEF satellite dies if the ground station goes down.

My concerns stretch far enough to cover the entirety of Orbital units as 'Air 2.0'.

I really wish Uber would do something interesting with Orbital units, rather than just making a layer with a bigger height modifier.

As to the topic, yes; Orbital Fighters are bad for PA, plain and simple. It's not that they are over the top... it's that they are boring.

My opinion:

1. Remove orbital fighters completely
2. Decrease the cost of the umbrella. Maybe make it less powerful as well. Can fire into orbit with its own LOS
3. Add orbital missile launcher which does essentially the same thing as the umbrella, but can target a MUCH larger range, but requires prebuilding of missiles (with optional auto-fire). Overall be much more expensive than umbrellas. Requires constant radar/LOS view to hit target. General idea being it would allow you to be a nuisance to an opponents orbital on same planet and halt little raids before making it to ground, but won't do much for a full out invasion. That fight should occur on the ground.
Alternate 3:
For simplicities sake, could just have an orbital catapult (call it a trebuchet or something). Would have a very slow rate of fire but would fire automatically and wouldn't have the added hassle and micro of pre-building. Cost would of course be higher. Again requires constant radar/LOS to hit.
4. Decrease the cost of ground based orbital radar, and make it restricted somewhat by planet curvature (so if an opponent is on the opposite side of the planet, you'll have to work a little harder to see their orbital units)
5. Allow the advanced radar satellite to see deep space stuff as well. It is already a nice expensive and juicy target, might as well get a little more out of it. Mobility would allow it to bypass somewhat the ground based restrictions.

The general idea is to encourage land fights. Orbital should be a means to facilitate and support land fights, not be a totally separate layer you have to pass through. The restrictions on anti-orbital are to encourage intelligence gathering so you can counter an opponents orbital from the ground, which means A: gaining map control or B: build stupid expensive and vulnerable orbital stuff an opponent would just love to shoot down if they have good ground based intelligence (ground control > orbital). The slow rate of fire/limited ammo/limited range of anti-orbital defenses is to give a means of defending against raids while still allowing easy access for all out invasions. This may or may not be all that relevant depending on how they implement the rest of orbital and trans-planetary transit.


Not sure if I'm totally barking up the wrong tree here but something has to be done with orbital fighters, one way or another.

Yes, it does, but that involves a lot more than just orbital fighters.

Suppose that suborbital fighters were produced from the advanced air factory or had their own factory, instead of being full-fledged orbital units on their own. This actually creates some interaction between orbital and the surface other than orbital blowing up whatever it likes.

The tricky bit about orbital is their very special target profile that makes them difficult to destroy. Strong anti-orbital options are necessary in order to pull their prices down from their currently stratospheric levels. Reducing their functionality will also help. Orbital satellites that orbit but don't move or travel to other planets, for example.

Currently they are free-floating pseudo-aircraft with very powerful weapons, and few weapons that can even hurt them. It should surprise no one that they are a problem, or that they must be ridiculously expensive in order to prevent them from completely breaking the game.

So the Astraes, Advanced Fighter and Advanced bomber could build from the advanced air and enter orbit. Ok, yeah I was leaning that way.

So you are proposing adding the Battle Star Gallactica to transport the sub-orbitals. In all seriousness this would look more like a super satellite right? Also, isn't this adding a layer between planet to planet combat that is going to clunk up the game? Is advanced air traveling from planet to planet by itself such a bad thing? Are we supposed to fire our air through the unit cannon too?

Removing planetary travel from units is not the best way to improve the flow of the game.

The gist of the concern.

In all seriousness the result would be quite similar to the Battlestar Galactica. You have a large ship, possibly with its own weapons, which transports fighters and other short-range, atmosphere-capable craft to other planets.

In addition to being pretty cool, there are a lot of quite compelling gameplay reasons for this. Firstly, a player who does not have orbital superiority can fight against orbital units using suborbital units. They build fighters or whatever on the surface, and can hold them on the ground until they want to fly out and fight. This is vastly superior to having to launch your own orbital units immediately upon completion, where they will probably be immediately killed by an enemy with a superior orbital fleet.

Furthermore, limiting these craft to one planet means you cannot build them in arbitrarily large numbers and just send them off. This lets the fighters be cheaper (important if you want to recover space superiority from the surface) while an attacker has to pay for interplanetary transit capability. One player having control of space and the other having the surface should be an interesting gameplay situation, not just a blanket "you're screwed" to the player on the ground. Besieging a planet from space should be an interesting game state, not a death sentence.

I like the look of the orbital fighters. They do remind me of the fighters from the original battle star galactica ;-)

I think that orbital fighters should be a counter to satellites as they are now. The issue is once a player has enough fighters up to control the orbital layer how do the other players break into that layer?

Same way you dealt with ASFs in SupCom:FA, build a bigger blob than they have. And we know how fun that is![/sarcasm]

Mike

Oh I thought of another idea .... maybe the way to break through an orbital fighter swarm or orbital control is with a really fast interplanetary transport trying to reach the next planet. You would need to clear a bit of space for it to get through with an ion canon... I mean Orbital defense... think rebels fleeing the battle of hoth in Empire Strikes Back.

Or we could wait patiently till Uber develops orbital further. We are probably missing a couple units in orbital. So now (in beta) is not really the time to determine the worth/role of the orbital fighter.

Yes, I do agree the orbital fighter is currently OP.

But before deciding to sack it, I would like to see a couple things
1. Orbital with a complete set of units
2. Orbital that is accessable at a lower tier
3. Orbital with reasonable cost
4. Orbital should be balanced (or course)
5. More ways to counter orbital. Anti-orbital units/structures.

I think that orbital fighters are just placeholders, just give uber some time - they will know their plans at best

There is a ground radar that lets you see orbital. It's the one with no icon. That threw me off for a long time. I just thought it was an empty spot on the build bar. Nope. It's orbital radar. It lets umbrellas shoot.

Not that Umbrellas are terribly good, especially considering their cost.

I like the idea of a surface-to-orbital missile launcher.

I also like the idea of nuking other planets (and satellites) but we need to drastically reduce the cost of anti-nukes first. I don't want the late game to purely be a nuke fight.

I agree that orbital fighters feel...wrong. They aren't fun but they're necessary, especially when you need to attack another planet and need to secure an area for your laser satellites and landers to come in. Basically I think everything about orbital units and orbital combat needs to be carefully re-thought.

personally, I am not fond of orbital neither cross planetary wars
TA on a Sphere/Planet is all I want!

I believe it was a nice idea on paper (kickstarter) which have costed the devs a lot of resources in applying it. which I rather have it spent on all other parts of the game.

that's just my personal opinion!

Of the atmosphere?

I guess so.

Maybe orbital should require a control structure on the surface. If that structure is lost orbital goes dead. I wouldn't want the orbital stuff to die but a replacement of the structure should be built before it can be controlled again.