Planetary Invasions

I think that might be acceptable. The solution to this is to keep your commander moving, which you can do by putting him on patrol (or put some other unit on patrol and have him assist it).

I don't think we can worry about "dropping it next to the enemy commander" or else you can't drop anything anywhere since the commander can be anywhere.

I would also expect an incoming teleporter to be vulnerable to first umbrellas and orbital fighters, and then air fighters and missile towers. Your commander should be relatively safe.

Then someone sends in 5 teleportation gate units and out comes 25 levelers.

The only way a teleportation gate unit would be valid is if it had a 10 or 30 second warm up time and only X amount of units could come through.

And with the warm up time, it'd pretty much get sniped by aircraft or artillery, invalidating the unit again.

That or a hefty energy cost per unit.

A bit like the jump jets in SupCom, as usually players would float armys of about 300, with a 300 energy cost to use the ability.

Not so bad on the power right?

Well that 300 per unit becomes 90,000 energy, and suddenly its a whole lot harder to use the ability in quick succession due to a 'tactical error' like jumping into a death pit of turrets.

So having a large power tab on units using the teleporters could easily stem that initial assault, sending in 25 levellers without support, and now way to back out.

Except there's no need to back out when you're right on top of the Commander.

And it's also VERY easy to spam out crazy amounts of energy late game thanks to adv power gens and solar arrays. Obtaining energy is very easy and any powerful gun/unit/etc that requires energy to accomplish X is easily exploitable late game. Although most anything is easily exploitable late game, so it's a fine line.

Well yeah, but as long as you get the just of my point about the economic bottleneck (Could make the cost exponentially increase when players try to funnel forces through in such a little time).

Personally id like units descending from orbit to move slower, so that umbrellas can shoot them down and prevent these kinds of base ignoring attacks.

This is compounded by the idea of scalable battlefields, in a game where you can play on a tiny Moon, or an entire solar system's worth of planets, moons and asteroids it's just a really bad way to balance anything by trying to attach some kind of 'flat cost'. because depending on the scenario it will be either effectively out of reach or not worth considering.

Mike

How do all these horrible game scenarios run around your heads? There is no reason to build anything in hazardous territory, so stop using this terrible premise.

If you want a mobile base, it goes on an ASTEROID. If you want teleporters on the front, fly it on an ASTEROID. Army delivery system? ASTEROID.

Practically everything needed to wage war across planets is solved with asteroids.

But what if there are no astroids in the system? Or what if the opponent has the only astroid?

Planetary Annihilation CANNOT be about "first person to get to the astroid wins."

Why are playing on such broken maps then? It's like trying to play Starcraft without Ramps! The game is designed with asteroid use in mind and while you might not need to use them in smaller single planet games, you will certainly need them in larger games.

Mike

Why is an astroid a requirement?

What's more, why is "get to the astroid now you have dominance" in game?

What about low end computers that can't support a bunch of astroids?

Planetary Annihilation cannot be "First person to get to X wins."

What about small solar systems? Are you saying that playing on a 3 planet solar system is a bad map?

There's simply way too many variables to just say "astroid is the answer and if you don't have an astroid you're screwed."

its about adapting to the battlefield and use different strategies
playing starcraft without ramps doest even sound as bad as you might think

Ultimately there has to be a way to drop combat units into an area that's covered by Holkins, Pelters, missile launchers, umbrellas and nukes OR there has to be some other reliable works-on-every-map method of smashing a hole into any defense.

Without one of the above, you will have stalemates.

I had a game stalemate last night. The system was a scale 3 starter planet and a scale 2 secondary planet -- no moons. We took one, they got dug in on the other. End result: there was absolutely no way either of us could invade the other. We both ended up with 100% Holkins and Umbrella coverage.

Typical scenario:
He has 50 Avengers. I have 200. I send my 200.
By the time they get there, he has had time to build 50 more Avengers because it takes forever to get there.
Now it's my 200 vs his 100 but he has numerous Umbrellas.
He wins. The tables turn! He does the same thing to me with the exact same results.

We both tried mass orbital lasers combined with mass Avenger attacks, including dropping the lasers right on top of their intended target but it's impossible to kill stuff faster than they can be rebuilt so no real progress was made. Landings were quickly wiped out by Holkins -- there's no time to build.

The smaller the planet, the easier this scenario can be setup.

I was disappointed that nukes couldn't be launched between planets. THAT would have gotten us past the stalemate eventually.

Maybe what we need is an ability to build our own "mini-asteroid". For, oh, 100,000 metal you get a big piece of metal with a rocket on it that can hit any target anywhere in the system for 2x nuke radius and 1x nuke damage...

Nukes are only launchable to planets that have shared orbits

Sheilding! gives better players an advantage. But some people never figure out how to properly play and that is an essential ingredient to the game believe it or not

I think shielding is sloppy and makes the game into much more of an economic rush as the shields really raise the bar on how much power you need to cause targeted damage to the enemy.

For example, you have a nuclear missile launcher. Without shields, I can scout for it, find it and send a modest number of aircraft to go kill it.

With shields (e.g., Supcom), I may know you have the launcher, I may know where it is, but it may take an absolutely absurd number of bombers to first break through the shield and then kill the launcher. I don't think shields give an advantage to the better player so much as they make defense that much easier.

I'm not sure what the relevance is for planetary invasions. If my invasion force has a shield, you can bet the guy living on the planet has 100 shields.

Not every combination of map is going to be fair. This is the tradeoff of procedural, we are going to have more random scenarios, and will be less tournament-like than starcraft or the symmetrical maps SupCom provided.
This is where putting the time into making a "good map" is important. That's right folks, you can be bad at making maps, the game is not always going to be fair for you.
If a map has one asteroid, then clearly it is not going to be used for KEW anyways since that would be an endgame for ALL players, seeing as both playfields are wiped.

A 3 planet solar system is most likely a fantastic map once the game is feature complete.

I really think one of the solutions to this map wiping business is variable levels of destruction based on the KEW size vs the target celestial body size.
If you send a 150 sized moon biome (asteroid) into a 900+ planet, there should be just a wicked crater, large structural loss radius, and a bit larger unit destruction radius.

Slapping 25 rockets to a planet suggests you mean business, and are willing to wipe an entire playing field/resource to virtually knock an equally sized playing field right out of the game. A two planet collission should be the complete un-usable destruction of both if the sizes are close to equal.

If we get a proper asteroid biome that is similar to the moon but the height variance and size can be more extreme (very small with alot of height variance to make it lumpy) without it being a broken game asset, we could be seeing more abundant, smaller, single rocket asteroids that do damage similar to that of a large nuke.
With more abundance we would see the celestial pin-ball we imagined in our heads when we first saw this pitch.

It really comes down to how fair a map is built in the first place, I have never imagined that the first person to the asteroid wins. Currently, in most cases yes, but the ability to invade planets is very feature incomplete and really the greatest defense from a KEW is prevention of launch. This comes down to harrassing the acheivement of orbital, assaulting colonies in their early state, and nuking the Halley's with interplanetary nukes should they be in orbit. If smaller more abundant asteroids get implemented, then using asteroids to take out others comes into play. This is a similar to the Defcon concept of play: Nuke the nukes. KEW the KEWs.

Edit:
My point here is that if you set yourself up with a game that has the end of it looming above, then you knew how it would end. We can call this "king of the hill", except the king takes the hill and slams it into those below it in the end and everybody dies, the end.

I agree with you in the need for being able to pour massive volume of units across the cosmos, in my personal unprofessional opinion anyway.

I am happy that the one we have isn't the only thing we will have for sure.

The unit cannon is a good way honestly, and the teleporter is another good way although not entirely different really.

Suggestions from little old me:
1) The egg maybe should carry 6 units or something and also "bolster nearby building" possibly with a high-efficiency high-metal-output fabber gun that auto-assists. Maybe make it have free metal use but it self destructs after 30 seconds or something. That way game-starting and planet-invasion can use it.

2) Multi-unit transports or faster-to-spam individual one-way unit transfer.

3) Orbital factories being able to produce and drop units of some kind. Definitely limit their blueprints, don't give them the ability to build everything or whatever, but do give them the ability to flood units as well.

have you seen the empire strikes back? The greater the shielding the greater the Qdos for bringing the fuckers down.

Because a movie is a great example of good game balance.

Shields are a confirmed now because traditional bubble shields are OP.