Planetary Invasions

If the map is too small to have asteroids, you probably don't need them.

Well that's what orbital units are for, aren't they? There's all sorts of wacky things they can do.

- You can use mini-KEWs like ark-ships filled with bots, or walking-nuke superbots.
- Sat-tillery like the rod from god
- Interplanetary arty such as a railgun with so much power its minimal range includes the very planet it's sitting on.
- Orbital drop platforms like prefab factories and the like.
- Metal world superkillers
- Other game enders like 1-way teles and comm snipes.
- permanent planet wounding weapons (which include anything BIG).

I might have mentioned this already, but I think this is an ideal use for the megabot. Make it so that it will always be more efficient to build an army of tanks instead of one megabot, but allow the megabot to drop into another planet and wreck a base. Experimentals didn't work in SupCom because they either had to be more efficient than an army or less, but in PA we have the opportunity to use them in a single very specific situation.

I think it should be the other way around. If there were a megabot (not saying there should be or will be), its nerf should be it's limit to it's own planet. That way, attacking it from orbital, or escaping it through orbital, is it's counter, because no matter how many you build they only work where you built it while large armies can go anywhere.

That being said, I think the KEW and interplanetary nukes would be the counter to a megabot.

This is only hypothetical, superweapons and a moving unit superweapon are very different things when it comes to function and balance and such.

I was imagining the megabot as taking a one-way trip to the other planet. It wouldn't be able to hop around the solar system on its own.

It limits it more though. For instance, when made, could you launch one at your own planet? Could you control where it lands on that planet? Will it land randomly? Will the chance occurance that it lands smack dab in the enemy base center be possible? Can it be intercepted, or can you create it anywhere and send it anywhere else?

THAT kind of a thing. At least being bound to planet of construction requires: Planet Control, Massive Resource, Longrooted Establishment on Planet.

I think you might be right. In that case, I'm probably against it entirely. What I really don't want is a single land unit that has to be balanced against many land units

The focus of gameplay in PA is the war on the surface of each planet. Therefore, planetary invasions should be designed to expand upon and leverage the surface war as much as possible, and not replace it.

I think a planetary invasion should look like a limited-capacity attack of units that can be used from the surface, such as land units and aircraft. The transportation of units from one planet to another is necessary, to some extent, in order for a large-scale planet invasion to be possible (otherwise players will just always proceed directly to asteroid planet-killing). However it needs to be limited in capacity to encourage players to seize a beachhead on the planet, and then use factories and territory control on the planet to contest control over the planet, instead of merely building them on a different planet and throwing them directly at the enemy on a different planet. Making transportation possible, but difficult, is the best solution, and it must be carefully designed to create the right incentives for players to start building on the target planet.

In regard to direct orbital attacks like missiles, cannons, and laser bombardment, such weapons should be extremely limited and prohibitively expensive. Much more so than transporting surface units and aircraft. Such as making orbital bombardment cost a great deal of resources to fire each shot; i.e. energy for orbital lasers, and metal for cannons/missiles, etc, in addition to a high cost for the unit. A high flat upfront cost just delays when they can be acquired and limits their quantity; if they are still dominant a super-high cost won't stop players from focusing on them if possible.

Orbital fire support should be very powerful, but should be expensive and limited enough that the player should prefer to use almost any other means of eliminating the target before resorting to orbital bombardment. Attacking with ground units should be vastly more efficient, and even using an air strike should be preferable to spending a lot of resources to bombard the target from space. If orbital fire support is too efficient, then orbital units can move from planet to planet and just glass each planet from space, completely obviating the land war.

Orbital nukes are another type of fire support, but a more expensive and individually destructive variety. Whether fired from another planet or from a ship in orbit around a planet, this kind of attack really needs to be limited in its strength, and/or make it easily countered. Otherwise when economies get very large, players may just focus on glassing a planet instead of actually fighting over its surface. However nukes are probably in a much better place than the current state of other orbital stuff, due to the high cost of each missile. Perhaps PA should have different missiles for interplanetary nukes and for local missiles, with a cheaper local nuke and more expensive interplanetary nuke, but have the same antinuke system work similarly on both. Or perhaps the distinction could be between tactical or short-range nukes, which would have long range, and ICBM's which can attack anywhere on the planet, and can be fired at other planets orbitally locked with the ICBM's planet of origin.

As has been pointed out by me and other people in this thread that with current mechanics, and even the known proposed mechanics, stalemates are very plausible.

Let me provide you with a very plausible scenario.

A 3 planet system. 2 planets and 1 moon. The moon is taken by team 1 and both teams are fighting over both planets about evenly. With the current mechanics, there is no viable way to invade the moon. There is no way to get units to that moon aside from an Astreus. That's bad.

Orbital transport ships filled with units are not confirmed to be in the game, which is one of the main purposes of this thread – proposing that very thing.

Laser Satellites can destroy stuff, only if you obtain Avenger dominance, which is difficult to do (as illustrated earlier in this thread). Laser Sats also can't send units to the planet.

Interplanetary arty is not a confirmed feature and is a good suggestion.

Orbital drop platforms are what I'm suggesting, and isn't confirmed by Uber, and is a large point of this thread.

Metal World Superkillers are not confirmed by Uber. It's just "ancient activateable technology." We don't know what that will be.

1 way teles are not a confirmed addition and would probably be a bad addition to the game.

Com snipes don't help you invade the planet.

Permanent planet wounding weapons like astroid smashing is only valid if you control the astroid. The whole purpose of this thread is to point out the flaws in relying only on planet smashers. What if there's only 1 astroid or no astroids?

I always thought they should be even, attacking from surface and attacking from orbit.

The idea of the unit cannon trades distance for volume for sure. Moving celestial bodies with halleys adds intriguing strategy to that.

So far, orbital has one not very fun thing for travel. If they had a blend of different flavors I just thought that would be useful.

Honestly, the unit cannon adds cost to send units still, and yet it still requires "land" to attack other "land", just with a void gap between it.

Orbital should be even steeper in cost and even limited in what can be made, like I said earlier. It should be self sustained sure, but it should also be sluggish in movement and sluggish in growth and limited in effect on terrestrial units. I mean you start on land and everything should require some form of land.

I just, to reiterate, think that you should be able to conquer all the planets, using only land, only orbital, or both travel. They should be unique but still able not to come to a "stalemate" like current orbital games come to.

Also, I know for a fact that their recent livestream had them talk about transports. Orbital ones? Not specifically. Transports nonetheless. I think talking about them is in fact worthy.

Actually I like the "Megabot" idea.

So the Megabot would be:
* Very cost-inefficient
* Very high health
* Amphibious
* Slow moving
* Slow fire rate
* High shot damage (relatively low DPS due to low fire rate)
* "Dumb fire" -- weapons do not track moving targets (rocket barrage??)
* Can launch itself from planet to planet or even from location to location on the same planet (costs energy + 10 minute cooldown between jumps?)

It's intended purpose is as a "beachhead breaker". You can throw it into any defensive mess and it is guaranteed to cause damage, especially to buildings, due to its high damage dumb-fire rockets.

For same-planet assaults, it's almost always better to use T2 bombers or Levelers, which do way more damage and get way more total health for the same cost but when you absolutely positively need to throw 60,000 metal into the teeth of someone's defenses, this unit can do it.

The idea is that it's good at breaking up fixed defenses like Holkins and Catapults and Umbrellas. It's not very good at fighting units. So you throw it onto another planet, have it break all the defensive buildings it can and then you land your fabrication force and try to turn it into a real beachhead.

For a lot of situations you may need to launch 3+ of them at the same time to move out and bust up a perimeter large enough for your beachhead force to land.

They CAN kill a commander but only if the Commander just stands there getting hit in the face with dumb-fire rockets. Any amount of moving will end up making the rockets miss. They are meant to kill structures.

Ok so there's a real problem with asking for confirmation of anything at this point. Uber is very aware that there are issues posed by interplanetary combat, specifically against an entrenched foe. We only have the scantest information regarding the topic in terms of 'official information' and most of what we do have are concepts that do not much more than a name.

It's very smart to be asking these questions, but it's unrealistic to think that anyone has the answers.

With interplanetary combat in such a formative phase it's nearly impossible to conceive of every possible permutation of system set-up. For example you can't assume the asteroids will be part of every system, but equally you can't assume that they won't be. However, if the only answer to an entrenched foe on particular planetary set-up is an asteroid, we definitely have a problem. (just as much a problem with lack of options than issues of balance that 'favours the defender')

Ultimately though these are questions that don't really have hard answers yet.

I don't like the idea of a megabot. I don't like giant game ending single units.

Also, just fyi, there was a huge megabot discussion and I'm pretty sure Uber ended up shooting down the idea.

Very right. No answers. And Uber is right to not talk to much and get people's hopes up only to change their minds.

But hopefully this thread has given them some great ideas.

We will be sure to keep an eye on this thread for any great ideas and relay them to Uber if they haven't already seen them.

Great ideas, hmm? I have some random words which will spark some:
Cannon
Egg
Leech
Mega
Juggernaut
Portal
TARDIS
Wormhole
Black hole
Reverse KEW
Tractor beam
Hub
Space station
Space shark

I vote for space sharks!

hmmmmm

Keep in mind that was a vanilla "giant robot with giant guns, just like Supcom" sort of deal. It wasn't promising in Supcom, and PA can't suddenly make a bad formula good.

The BETTER design is the "dropped from orbit, decent guns, giant nuclear Krogoth" that TA wished it could have. It's a clear cut role, placed right where it needs to be, with the right tools to make it work(protip: that's how you make stuff good).

Sure, players will try dropping these things on Commanders as a game ending OHKO... but it makes sense to drop anything on a Commander. That's just how the game works.

To be fair, I've been pointing out the direction orbital needs to go at least half a year ago. Even made a pretty diagram and everything. Does it really take that long for the rest of the forum to catch up?

Eh. There's no real counter to that since "invade the heavily entrenched enemy planet" isn't a counter, nor is "send nukes to be sniped by anti-nukes"

Then give the node low health and allow it to be targeted by umbrellas while trying to land or give the teleporter a short transportation time so that it can move multiple units at once but you don't get swarmed all at once.