Planetary Invasions

Let planes shoot it down. Let AA shoot it down. Let umbrellas target it. Problem solved.

New problem created: now I can't establish a beachhead because you are shooting down my beachhead establishing device.

Bear in mind we must also be able to establish beachheads on planets that are fully enveloped by defenses. On a small planet, this is very easy to do. There is literally no place you can select to drop that isn't covered by numerous defenses, including umbrellas and AA.

That was my #1 "MUST". If the invasion device can be destroyed before it can land and cause damage then it's not a very useful invasion device.

It MUST be literally unstoppable in terms of landing and living long enough to do some damage, even if it's very cost-inefficient to do so. If you can stop it from landing then we have accomplished nothing and unassailable planets will still exist, in which case the drop pod solution is still a failure.

That's not strictly true. You don't need to establish a beachhead on a planet to, shall we say, remove it from your enemies hands.
There is another option available to you.

Any unit that can attack is infinitely effective against anything without a weapon. The only real defense for a transport is to reach its target quickly and to survive enough hits to deploy its cargo.

Then have a d-gun that doesn't suck. Melee class units are always going to be the toughest, biggest punch units in the game. That's why the d-gun turned scores of them into plasma vapor.

What option would that be?

If you mean smashing asteroids into planets:
A) Yes, that's great, if there is such an asteroid
B) Yes, that's great, unless that's the asteroid I need to get a beachhead on before it kills me

I think a lot of these solutions are born out of very specific ideas on what a map must look like. It must have a couple of really big planets and a couple of moons on each planet and the moons are smashable. Well that's great, for maps that are like that. But we need a solution that works for all situations, not just some.

Once you allow people to breach defences regardless then there's no way to prevent the commander assassination scenario. The point is to force a defender to defend key areas heavily, but not realistically defend everywhere cost effectively. If they've covered a planet in defences then I should be able to afford enough transports to punch through their weak point, or perhaps even right at the commander because they spread themselves too thin.

You also have new tools like inter-planetary nukes. For someone to cover their moon in enough AA, planes, umbrellas, anti-nukes... what the **** were you doing all game? Anyway, if they have a moon and you have a planet, congratulations you've won, you can almost certainly buy more nukes than they can anti-nukes.

It's also a map balance issue. I would hope the game will ship with templates which work well with the game. No tiny planets on a far flung orbit unless there's also an asteroid belt present.

This is why I think there should be some type of space ships. Yeah, the devs said there wouldn't be interstellar warfare, but if we have orbital up, why not be able to produce some ships some how that could assist in the take over of a planet, kind of like D-Day invasion. They could still be moved planet to planet like orbital, but just would not fight in between. Ya know, just keep the battle at the orbital level like it already is.

If you're asking how would we build a space ship? Well, we could launch an orbital fab that builds space station or a factory that could construct ships. My idea is probably going to get shot down anyway, but I mean, if we already have orbital satellites in game, I say why the heck not?

Jon has been relatively clear that Asteroids and their movement is a core mechanic of the game. If you're creating maps that exclude them, that's your prerogative, but as I understand it, Jon intends for all randomly generated maps to have asteroids and moons available for smashing. As for asteroids; they're so small and Halies take up such a large proportion of the surface I find it hard to believe that a defender would be able to defend that area completely and effectively from every form of invasion due to the halies taking up much of the space that you would need for full saturation of defensive structures and units .

If however, people in the thread want to go on crying Doom! and impossible situations then please, don't let me stop you. I'm just thinking calmly and logically after all.

Watched the Kickstarter trailer again, the unit cannon as presented in the trailer is very limited capacity...looks like it only shoots bots and seems more suited to surgical strikes / harassment, or giving you that decisive edge in a single battle with an unexpected flanking force of a small number of bots. We will see what it turns out like or if it happens at all, but I quite like the approach in the trailer. It keeps the unit cannon from being too OP but still makes for interesting scenarios. Especially considering the teleport gates presumably will be for transporting larger masses of units.

Otherwise, the whole planetary invasion thing seems pretty complex.. so many variables. In any case, scouting intel is very important always. Somehow the current advanced satellite "maphack" radar seems very OP and kind of boring, it makes commander sniping by whatever means a bit too easy. Then again, from the invader's point of view, it would make sense to have some way of disabling enemy radar coverage when making an invasion, like some have suggested. The lack of information makes for more exciting gameplay.. you know they are coming but can not be sure what is coming. If radar disabling is a limited area of effect thing, you should have several of them going on at once, one for the real invading force and several others for decoy. Invading a fully entrenched planet might go something like this: 1. preliminary interplanetary nuking 2. creating uncertainty / information blackout by disabling enemy radar coverage with an EMP bomb/satellite, 3. establishing a teleport gate on the surface with unit cannon support / astraeus.

I didnt read the whole thread but has anyone though of Orbital factories ? They would be able to sustain a lot of damage and create units that would be dropped from orbit in small pods, then it would need to be protected by Avengers.

This is so wrong that it hurts. 95% of Commander issues are solved with cloak. You can't strike what you can't see. It's really that simple.

So can we leave the Commander out of this discussion? Comm issues are supposed to be solved by the Comm. If they aren't, it's a problem with the Comm and not with anything else.

A cheap bulk transport is almost required for the game. The initial infrastructure can be fairly expensive to get up, but beyond that the cost/unit is cheap cheap cheap. It has to be, otherwise a direct invasion is not feasible and we're back to playing defcom nuke wars. Yay.

Unit cannons and teles and orbital factories are only good if you can build a forward base. The whole point of being entrenched is to make a forward base impossible. Any half competent player will work towards this end, so invasion tools need to be built with the defender's advantage in mind.

A bulk transport is designed under the assumption that a player can get their own home base up, but has great difficulty getting a base close enough to the enemy. It helps spearhead an invasion by allowing an extremely high unit count to invade all at once. Their goal is not to linger around in an enemy gravity well, and they do not benefit from being a 2-way tool. In fact they can be drastically improved by directly crashing down on the enemy world(dealing some damage) and releasing their entire payload at once.

Nukes.

Yes there is. I've already stated it several times:
Megabots.

* Expensive (therefore it's hard to build and drop 10 of them suddenly without warning)
* Dumb-fire weapons (therefore they cannot kill a commander that simply is left patrolling in a circle)

Again you aren't thinking of all possible scenarios. I can make a small asteroid (aka the most dangerous planet in the game) totally impenetrable in, oh, 5 minutes? Less? I mean anything you build is going to pretty well cover the whole thing. You're thinking of like a scale 5 planet, where you'd be correct, and not scale 1-2, where you'd be wrong.

Aaaand again you have a very narrow idea on what the map must look like. The "moon" is really just a small planet in its own orbit. Nukes can't hit it.

And even if they could, all you've really done is replace the need for an invasion. I don't invade moons anymore. I just nuke-spam them to death. So the nuclear solution is largely a failure in my opinion. It doesn't open the door for an invasion so much as it allows me to glass the planet without setting foot there.

My suspicion is that the only way to convince people how flawed their ideas are is to actually let the devs go ahead and take time implementing them, testing them and releasing them just so that the flaws I've been telling you about can be demonstrated. Maybe after the second round of implementing, testing and releasing we'll end up with a solution that works all of the time instead of in the specific cases you guys are thinking of.

Incidentally, asteroid smashing doesn't solve the invasion problem. It just eliminates the need for it.

And it also turns into more of a race than a battle. Once I have an asteroid established, you won't be able to invade it so your only option is to try and smash it first or else keep a close eye on it and try to not have your commander on the planet it's going to destroy.

Can't hit what they can't see.

If the best option is to eliminate a planet entirely with nukes, that's a different problem entirely.

Arn't commanders supposed to be assassinated?

Notice that I didn't actually say that " smashing " is necessary, nor the only option available. Orbital bombardment from an asteroid that's been moved into orbit around your target is also an option that's being experimented with.

In fact, unless I'm mistaken, Nukes already exhibit this behaviour.

Sorry to disrupt your regularly scheduled Doomsaying.

Sure! But no one said it had to be easy. Just because Commanders can hide doesn't mean that it's impossible to find them. It only means that the best methods of detection can be centered around the best parts of the game.

For example, ground tanks are really good at finding units under TA cloak, because TA cloak is broken by proximity and tanks like to get close. Air units are not, because TA cloak is broken by proximity and air units are far away. Artillery is not, because the field is large and artillery can't light everything up at once. Expensive super weapons are not, because every shot is a waste of valuable resources (although there's a good argument for having it break cloak far beyond its destructive range).

Blowing planets up is the ultimate cloak breaker. You can't hide on a planet that doesn't exist anymore!

That's not what you mean as nukes have no dependency on vision, but I get your meaning. But then you may as well not have assassination since you're tying victory to elimination of the majority of someone's stuff.

Cloaks suck balls.

Ideally this happens after smashing some appropriate part of his army and infrastructure.

Which is why I like commander cloaks. You can't just assassinate him with some gimmick. You'll have to take out enough of his power generation to make his cloak fail, first.

I don't know why "foreseeing problems and discussing viable solutions to them" is considered "crying" and "Doomsaying". Kind of a jerk attitude to forum discussions, isn't it?

If we all really thought that developers had all the answers and always created flawless games with no need to discuss them, we probably wouldn't be here bothering with a Kickstarter project. We'd be playing all those awesome flawless games out there.

I would caution against reading into the visualization like this. Yes it's true they only showed bots being shot, but the Visualization only had like 4 combat units total, a tank, a bot, a bomber, a fighter but we know we're going to get more units than that in all likelihood.

Mike