Orbital...

Not sure I like the orbital being so easy to get...I just played a game where one guy built orbital literally 5 mins in the game. He was first to the moon & got all the resources & won the game. There was no ground battles or really any battles that took place during the game..I feel like orbital is now way too important & it allows for NO REAL WAR TO happen...I was hoping this game would be more similar to supcom (only in terms of war of fighting back and forth)& TA but its become too much about orbital which ATM is the worst/most boring part of the game...Am I the only one who misses having hundreds of units battling back & forth against each other? I feel orbital takes this away from the game...

Sounds like you may need to re-think your strategies and push for orbital sooner?

We're all having to re-learn how to play the game.

I like the idea of orbital being easily accessible. It means everyone has a much more equal opportunity to colonize other planets.

I don't see the problem to be honest. It has always been a space race, it just so happens that the space race starts a bit sooner now. Sending your commander away early might even be a tricky thing, considering you probably won't have the best defenses up yet and a comm-push might be able to tear through his base.

Then you go orbital and fight ground battles on both planets. RTS games are strenuous on the concentration at the best of times, battling on multiple planes just cranks that up to 11. I can see why team armies will be popular.

I just miss the back and forth battles of rts games such as supcom and ta, there was hardly ever nukes used but actual ground and air units to win the game...its all become about getting to space first then nuclear or planet smashing war is all the game ends up...

Well a lot of aspects regarding PA's balance are still mostly untouched. Currently many feel that overall progression is just too fast, in no small part due to T2 Eco structures, which still haven't changed yet.

I can certainly see hwo some changes are made worse by other balance aspects, but until the untouched aspects get worked on, it's hard to say if there is an actual problem or if the issue is just a side-effect of balance being very much a WIP right now.

Mike

I understand there is more balance to come but I hope they lean more towards sup com and ta style battles.Nearly 95% of games end up being nuke/planet smashing wars and not a real rts game using units to win..nukes were hardly ever seen in sup com and only used in bigger late game.

i couldnt DISAGREE more! yes orbital now means people can get to other planets faster! means more battle fields, and if you win a small battle over a moon, it means you can wack a teleporter down and a few factorys and move use it as a production base!
if anything its more back and forth;
i take one planet they take one, i invade they invade, its just back and fourth on a larger scale.

and if people go to orbit too quickly smash there base and steal all there stuff, then send a MASSIVE force to take there planet!

Pivo I was in the game you were talking about. At the 5 minute mark 3/6 players were going orbital. The reason he won was that noone did anything about him spamming eco. If you see another player going to a moon and you don't have orbital, just go and kill his base on the starter planet. You can't spam eco & units as good as someone else spamming units... you will lose. Also get a deep space radar real fast, you'll know where the bases are that are rushing orbital.

My understanding is it's better to have these fast progressing games to hash out the issues, if you only got to nukes/planet smashing 3-4 hours in we'd barley get any testing done on them.

Ha ha you were pink I remember, the earth is but a scale one planet bc of the internet lol
Going and attacking his base is not as easy as you say..in an ffa your not going to go across the planet to attack the strongest player, your usually going to attack the nearest opponent right?
I just don't like that there is no battles taking place. It's almost as if most battles are not even important anymore. That game we played last night had zero battles. It was just rush to the moon spam eco nuke/moon war. I'm thinking once air transports are added and the game is balanced alot will change in this area.

No offence, but that sounds symptomatic of fairly low level play. I challenge you to find me a single gameplay video made by skilled players where units don't play a decisive role in who wins.

If people aren't building any units... Then build some. And crush them.

I agree it can be tough in a FFA when someone on the far side of the planet is allowed to get too powerful. Always annoying when you've bested 4 enemies only to find one guy who's been untouched the whole game and has built 100 T2 bombers and 6 nukes

"I agree it can be tough in a FFA when someone on the far side of the planet is allowed to get too powerful" This is exactly what happens...I actually had about 12 bot factories but they were useless bc one player owned the entire moon alone. I was actually attacking one player & focusing on that made me not be able to go orbital as fast as the ONE guy that was left all alone to go orbital in 6 mins flat. It feels a lot like the supcom games that were all about rushing to get an experimental which is why I had more fun playing 1v1 or 2v2 on smaller maps that made experimental impossible to build. The battles were more about using your units wisely/strategically and not like PA where u just spam Eco send nukes/planet & win, just dull gameplay not exciting at all. Now that adv radar LOS has been nerfed so heavily its pretty hard to see what enemy is getting too powerful & hit him quickly.

Yes as brianpurkiss said, you need to re-think your strategies. If you are not on other planets fighting at around 5->10 min in game you are losing. This is planetary annihilation you need to have multiple planets as quick as you can as well as having an established fighting force on the starting planet. I just won a game because I went orbital at around 6 min just like all the other players. However I had a more powerful eco then everyone else did and I had rushed the player closest to me to destroy his eco so he would have a hard time expanding on the other planets. most of the fighting was on other planets and all of it was ground battles of rather epic size. I managed to take both other planets by tanks and bombers that I built later. I also won the ground war on the main planet.

Battles still happen on the ground you just are not expanding quick enough. If you let it get to a stalemate with only orbital and nukes to fight, yes it will get boring at the moment but that is something you need not let happen.

I understand that more battles are important, but honestly that's a flaw in free for all. If you go and throw your army at someone, someone else will simply attack you while your weak. So it's just a game of chicken to see who can safely forgo an army the longest. Team battles are much, much more fierce as there is less 'opponents'.

Like I said, he went to the size 200 moon and I went the size 400 moon. I was able to build complete radar, umbrella & and I had 100+ T2 extractors before one person sent is commander alone to that moon.

In fairness as well, the player who won the ground war on the main planet won the game that we were in pivo. If someone had sent a fabber after him and star-gated that moon it would've been lights out. No-one did so his risk paid off.

Here's how I think the orbital layer *should* work.

1. Satellites should have a much, greater speed. Sufficient to orbit the planet completely and give updates frequently enough to be useful, not enough to give a constant stream of information.
2. Satellites should have the same acceleration/deceleration values.
3. Turn rate should be quite small also.
4. Only advanced radar satellites and the orbital laser should be capable of geosynchronous orbits.
5. Laser satellites, defense platforms, orbital fighters and umbrellas should fire beams.
6. Lasers can fire while on the move. Lasers also use the new "deviation" mechanic.
7. The orbital launcher launches satellites at full speed.
8. Orbital fabbers can build satellites while moving, and then deploy the orbital structure.
   
9. You can assign specific orders to orbital units before they are fully constructed.
10. Addition to the "shaded building icons in the fog of war" that Uber speak of implementing. Satellites are capable of "taking an image" of an enemy base. Everything that they saw in their vision is a shaded unit icon, including movable units, possibly excluding certain units, like the commander.
11. Orbital fighters should not dogfight.

Reasons:

1. Satellites are actually satellites. You use them to continuously "orbit" the planet, because slowing down isn't efficient. Put them on planetary area patrol.
2. It is expensive to change a satellites orbit, but it is possible. It is more efficient to use a scout plane to gain knowledge. However, radar satellite will give you information
3. Turn rate is small so that "area patrol" satellites actually look like satellites, not aircraft.
4. It is more effective to build a satellite in geosynchronous orbit than it is to move a radar satellite to the correct location.
5. Satellites now move insanely quickly. The beam is to cut it down as it flies. Also, it would look insanely cool.
6. Lasers can cut an enemy base to pieces. However, lasers aren't insanely accurate unless they are geosynchronous. And you have some time to build an umbrella before the laser comes around again. (Never thought I would say that sentence)
7. This is to make it actually look like true orbital
8. Make it so that moving orbital units aren't weakened because they were deployed by an orbital fabber (i.e. advanced radar satellite is equally capable of orbiting around the planet)
9. This is to make previous mechanics make sense. Especially ordering orbital fabricators fabricating non-geosynchronous units in the orbital layer. Plus, you load your fabricator into a fabricating Astraeus, it helps construct it, and then the Astraeus takes off towards the destination immediately. Gives it an initial speed boost which makes the rocket delivery make sense. I think the Astraeus should remain maneuverable.
10. Satellite intel - photos of unit movement. You want to update it, you have to move a spy plane towards it. Gives you an overview of the situation, not the complete picture.
11. Air 2.0

Had a crazy 2v2v2 game today on a 4 planet system with the start planet being lava with 5 Islands.
Battles were every where on all planets.
To be honest it was way too much to handle with all the stuff going on, the enemy even managed to get a portal on my teams heavily fortified starting island with out us noticing until he had about 300 units jumping through.
Luckily we had around a thousand bots waiting for a portal connection to repel them.
******* hilarious and so awesome. I had to give up and quit after 2 hours, couldn't handle it any more lol. I had to have a rest.
Sorry team mate for leaving you.