KNight's Proposals: Interplanetary Mechanics

Hey everyone, so I've talked about a lot of different aspects surround interplanetary gameplay is many, many threads over the last 16 months but I've always tried to keep things as open ended as possible because we still had so few hard details back then, but withe the stage PA is at I think I can buckle down a bit more and it'll be nice to have things compiled in one place for me and others to reference if needed. I'll try to keep this as concise as possible, but lets be frank it's a big topic, so big I couldn't fit it into a single post!

With that in mind a few things to consider while reading this, first this is purely my current ideal view on the matter, second, all numbers going forward are completely arbitrary, not related to current or prior balance and are only being used as examples.

Alright, so with all that of the way lets get started with a basic overview of the goals of my proposal. The primary goal is to introduce "Force Allocation" as a "Strategic/Logistic" element of the game, along with secondary goals being the "Standardizing/Stabilizing" of interplanetary expansion and the reduction of stalemate potential. None of these are accomplished by a so for change or element but are actually the result of many interconnected elements and side effects which well be getting to soon.

But there are some things that are required to make my proposal work that aren't quite directly related to the specific interplanetary stuff.

First off, we need asteroids to always be available more or less, it's not so much that there needs to be an infinite amount of them, just more than you'd reasonably need. These are a key component in utilizing Unit Cannons in many scenarios and just having penury on hand for KEW Smashing also helps to break up stalemates as well. A bit more on their applications as forward bases will come later on.

Secondly, we need a better way to scout on the interplanetary level. At the moment I don't have as much I want to commit on this point as I feel it will fall more so into Orbital to achieve this and that is a topic for a different thread but a few simple ways I could see it work off hand;

- Some kind of "detector" that won't be radar or lift any Fog of War but would only be able to tell you if there was any form of enemy activity in orbit or on the surface of a planet.

- An orbital unit specifically for scouting, maybe stealthed that could initially only detect things going on in orbit and would have to permanently land on the surface to get any surface based Intel.

Last thing on the list is kinda the odd one out as it isn't a mechanic per say, but rather its the fact that we will need to teach people how to play the game in a manner that works well with the "Force Allocation" concept, in older games this wasn't really needed and no matter how much you built it was always rather easy to move it around the map. With my proposal it will be much harder in PA, still possible in some ways but not anywhere on the same level. So teaching players will be important if not directly related to create the mechanics I'm aiming for.
So with those out of the way we can get into the nitty gritty details! Starting with;

The Astraeus

Ah the Astraeus, quite the problem child current in PA if you ask me! My changes to the Astraeus are the primary changes that aim to "Standardize/Stabilize" the interplanetary expansion phase. Key among those changes is that the Astraeus will only be able to transport Commanders. This is key because it puts a fairly hard limit on how fast you can expand to other planets/moons/asteroids and the choice of where you go and where you land will carry a lot more impact and be worth serious consideration. Do you go for the big resource heavy planet, or do you play a bit sneak and head for an asteroid right away?

Second big change is that the Astraeus will only be capable of making one trip, no more will you be able to build a single Astraeus and zip around the entire system. You'll need to build a launcher at each stop you make to travel to a new planet/moon/asteroid. This really helps slow down the speed at which things progress and makes things a lot easier to keep track of during the transition to Multi-Planet play. For smaller Moons and Asteroids where a full size Orbital Launcher might not be practical(primarily in terms of scale) my proposal also requires a smaller Orbital Launcher, possible with a more limited unit selection(pending on whether or not moons and in particular Asteroids would support an Orbital layer) that focus primarily on 'Orbital' units that are sent directly to other planets, in particular the Astraeus and the Probe/Scout I mentioned above as good examples.

Another smaller, but still relevant, change is that the Astraeus be Lunched in much the same manner that it was during the Original Pre-Visualization. Otherwise it will still function in a similar manner to how it currently does. There are some difficulties to this approach, primarily in that the original intent seemed to be that the Astraeus would only require a booster for getting off Planets, Moons and Asteroids would be far easier for it but I don't like that. While I agree that it is logical and well grounded in reality I feel the current state of PA shows that leads it to being some what "exploitable", you don't need to stop at any given planet or moon, you just land your fabber long enough to build a factory or two and fly off right away to do it again somewhere else. Basically I feel this is a scenario where gameplay needs to come out on top, which lead me to the idea of a "single-use" Astraeus. This will be even better if we see the Commander's Lathe become more prominent as it will also encourage having your Commander around longer to help get the core base up quicker instead of leaving as soon as you are able in many circumstances.

All in all we end up with a less flexible Astraeus, but the benefits to the gameplay and pacing are well worth striving for.

The Unit Cannon

Ah, this one is still a bit of an unknown quantity right? So far the only real "hard facts" we have on the Unit Cannon come from the Pre-Visualization and lets face it, they aren't all that hard. That being said I think the Pre-Viz sets a good framework to work from so Here is what I'm building from it.

The Basic Idea behind MY Unit Cannon is Cheap Delivery. The only thing it does is shoot units out, so naturally that means it can be fairly cheap in the grand scheme of things, Probably somewhere in cost between a Basic and Advanced Factory, where-ever that that ends up being. It would not have much in terms of a raw limitation, it's biggest one is that it would only work from a smaller moon/asteroid and it would only be able to shoot at something that moon/asteroid is orbiting. I would also tone down it's rate of fire(at least initially) to something kinda slow, like a unit per second, this is mainly to build some about of "variable" usage into it. For example with a single Unit Cannon, your well equipped already to put down small raiding forces or fabbers to start out a new base, but if you want to invade an enemy held planet you'll want to get your forces planet side much quicker, so you'll want to build maybe 4 or 5 Unit Cannons to make sure you have plenty of units dirt side when the enemy tries to rush you so he can defeat you piecemeal as you land. Speaking of landing, how do the units get down? We saw in the Pre-Viz that they seemed to have been shot out of the Unit Cannon in little Drop Pods, but we also saw the Drop Pods open up and let the little bots "Hot Drop" into the battlefield. I think a good middle ground is letting the drop pod go all the way to the ground, fire some retro rockets right before touching down and collapsing so that the unit can walk off in an direction.

It sounds excessive but given that we should already have ample access to asteroids, and hoping that Halleys are balanced(Heck, it could even go so far as to have different Halley types for each role, allowing for better fine-tuning) around ample usage of asteroids in both Smashing and Forward Base/Invasion roles, it's not quite so restricting.

As far as a Unit Cannon's "ammo" is concerned, not much in terms of limits here either, in fact, there are some interesting combinations that I'm sure many have already thought of, but I'll repeat for the sake of those who haven't really thought about it. The most interesting/applicable one to be is Unit Cannons and Mobile Bombs, it basically turns the Unit Cannon into an Artillery Cannon. But this brings up some other issues, primarily to me what is stopping you from just dropping units directly into the enemy's base. To me this is a pretty big concern, especially given I've set my Unit Cannons up where you can control the rate of unit deployment by building more fairly cheap Unit Cannons, so one could build 10 Unit Cannons, even if you only have 100 units, but because they drop ten at a time it would be much harder to defeat them piecemeal, even from within your base! I think that AA represents a great middle ground. The obvious answer to me is Anti-Air. We already see Anti-Air spread out throughout bases so it's already a factor that present and helps discourage dumping units directly into a base, oh sure noting but a completely overwhelming density of AA would completely STOP a large Unit Cannon deployment, but it would cause damage, and do so before the enemy forces have had a chance to do any damage of thier own, it helps make those super direct assaults on your base much more manageable.

Orbital Defenses could also play a part as well, but like I said, Orbital is kind of it's own topic so I won't delve much into it here.

That about Sums up Unit Cannons.

Teleporters

Ah yes, we've had a taste of this one! A very rough and early taste, but a taste nonetheless.
My proposal is all round, quite simple and only have a couple of changes that have fairly far reaching effects. For me Teleporters aren't strictly about "high bandwidth" unit transportation, but rather I focus more so on it's raw speed.

With that in mind let me talk about the main change in my proposal for Teleporters, switching from a constant drain when active to a per unit cost. Now there are a lot of factors in a per-unit system that are variable and subject to balance so I will be leaving the specifics as open ended as possible for now. The Benefits of such a system are that it does give a lot more "balance levers" that can be used for fine tuning behavior and balance, you could even given each unit a specific/different teleporting cost, thought I feel that might be more complex than is suitable for PA.

So what are the fundamental reasons for going with a Per-Unit system? One of he biggest to me is that it allows you to have a much cheaper upfront cost for Teleporters. It makes them a much safer investment and makes it a lot easier to set up a network however you like. Another big benefit is that you can use teleporters however you like, whether its just as an emergency escape route for your commander or moving an army to battle on another planet, the only limiting factor is your economy, not whether or not you can afford a teleporter to begin with. Something to consider alongside this is that there might be the need to limit how fast the teleporter functions, kinda of like a weapon's rate of fire, I'm hoping this isn't the case, I don't think it will work as well with teleporters as it does the unit cannons.

This leaves with a very scalable system, from earlier on you can use it with a small handful of units, mid game you can start moving around small numbers of re-enforcements and in the late game you can start shifting whole armies around. The system also has multiple weak points, sure the teleporter structure itself is still a valid target but so are the generators/storage that enabled the use of the teleporters, while the system is a bit more robust earlier when there tends to be a larger margin for error but late game the suddenly loss of generators/storage can really hamper the enemy.

Results

So with all these changes what happens to the gameplay itself? Well if we just imagine a game in our heads, the first thing we'd notice is that expanding is a lot slower initially as we have to use the Commander without support, and we know he can only be in one place at one time of course. As the game goes on this doesn't stay the case because we can start using asteroids and unit cannons seeding planets with Fabricators becomes a heck of a lot easier. Speaking of unit cannons, once we get asteroids we can really start to lay in some pressure on enemy planets with asteroid/unit cannon powered raiding. Once territories have been drawn up is when we'd likely see teleporters spring up more and more, working with asteroid factories to really open up some beachheads and serious assaults hopefully allowing us forward bases on the planet itself and a more direct route for our teleporters while still using the unit cannons to apply pressure elsewhere on the planet. Late game we have the ability to move large forces around to deal with the biggest attacks.

A nice benefit to all this is that it really helps cut down on the hectic-ness of the early interplanetary expansion phase which should help out some players that are having a hard dealing with just how quickly the amount of stuff one is needed to keep track of.

Now, everyone remember earlier when I mentioned Force Allocation? Time to explain how it works in this system and it's effects. This element mostly comes into play in games where enemies spawn on separate planets, but even when starting on the same planet the game can expand to the point where players aren't "sharing" planets anymore. One of teh effects of my proposal is that it can actually make planetary invasiosn easier. Think about it, you have a system where moving stuff around is hard an expensive until the late game(and even then you had to slowly build up to it) so it's natural that you can't just continue building units on planets, you're basically making a long term investment that only pays off if your survive to late game and are invaded. You'll want to instead build some units(think like a quick reaction force) and instead of building more units, you build more factories, so that you have some units to immediate responce against say an enemy Commander landing on the planet, but if you see an enemy's asteroid base come into orbit you spin up the factories because you know that it's gonna start raining units pretty soon. Compared to how things are currently, as long as the enemies' teleporters are up you know you'll be dealing with the greater majority of the opponent's mobile force. In my system because you need to build things "on-site" you don't ever have to deal with the entire enemy force at the same time, things are spread out more.

Final Notes
Alright, I'm kinda running of things to explain really, hopefully I've explained things well, if anything is confusing, please ask for clarification before making judgements/assumptions. But man this has been awhile in teh making, been thinking about bits and peices of this for quite some time, it was pretty interesting to bring it all together and even that presented some issues I had to work out that I hadn't thought about previously. But we'll just have to see how this all pans out!

Mike

You had me at one trip Astraeus.

I see this debate all over, and I think there is plenty of sense to both sides. However, I had an interesting idea recently, and that is what if we combined the two teleporter energy use methods? They would both be dampened a bit of course, to make up for the fact that while transporting units you would otherwise be paying double the cost of either system. Essentially, the teleporter would have a lower general running cost, say about a half or third of what it is now. However, when you send units through it, you get an extra cost depending on unit mass, and maybe distance traveled. This way it is a safer investment because it doesn't make nearly as big of a dent as otherwise, but you still get charged per unit, making massive armies require lots of energy storage. I think that this would be a reasonable solution to the debate, but, i'm sure, someone will disagree with me.

I'll be happy with most any change that prevents commanders from hopping back and forth between gravity wells. I spent 30 min trying to hunt a commander down that was doing that, and I only caught him because he happened to arrive at a planet that I had swarming in avengers and bristling with umbrellas.

The Astraeus desperately needs to be one trip.

I completely support the idea of an orbital scout. Would be a fantastic addition.

I also agree that we need an abundance of astroids. No idea how that will work performance wise, if it'll even work at all. Uber has talked about how they want planet smashing to happen all the time, not just as a game ender. We also need to remember that smashing a planet won't destroy everything on the planet. It'll depend on the size of the astroid and the size of the planet.

The unit cannon needs to be inaccurate. So when units are fired out, they don't land with pinpoint precision but instead land in an area. Like paratroopers in WWII.

Plus it looks a lot better that way. Having them all land in one spot (ala SupCom 2) looks pretty dumb.

Well the idea of having them all NOT land in one place is better anyway, as it prevents an enemy from just shooting at the ground where the entire clip of units is landing.

And prevents comm snipes with bomb bots.

I mostly like the way you outlined this macro-topic. But I've few doubts.

If I use the Unit Cannon to shot Fabbers or Engineers, do I still need the Commander to start up on a new planet/moon/asteroid?

About the Detector. If I can spot enemy's activity in my Orbit (on a Moon or Asteroid orbiting my planet), couldn't I simply use a couple of Unit Cannons to promptly shot units where enemy's spotted, in order to prevent any further expansion across my domain?

Not been able to shot units from a planet, wouldn't stop me. I can always establish an outpost on one of my Moon, likely the bigger, to serve this purpose. Perhaps a network of Teleporters may serve a similar purpose.

But, on the other hand, not been able to shot units from a planet, could make a siege a bit too easy. In fact, I'm afraid that once I'm closed down on a planet by my adversary, I cannot move out any longer. Perhaps this is desirable. Just asking.

Unless we have other alternative to move on other planets, other than Teleporters, Astraeus and Unit Cannons.

I completely disagree with "only commanders in the astreaus". It's quite the opposite of what I'd like to see: no commanders in the astreaus. Or rather make travel in the astreaus so dangerous that nobody would want to place his commander in it.
One time astreaus sounds good to me. Making like 5 of them, each with an engineer and sending them of sounds okay.

Using unit cannons on asteroids as a primary way to expand sounds... weird? That stuff would have to be pretty cheap for that.

I am doubtful

personally I like the teleporters the way they are right now the only change would be to have an auto on/off for the power consumption that turns off the teleporters after a period of in activity and on when units want to go through.

I like everything - except for the teleporter change.

Also, the general idea is great....except that once you make interplanetary invasions more expensive with scale, there starts to be a point where a nuke is just cheaper and faster. That would be bad.

I remember Neutrino mentionning he thought about the per-unit cost for the teleporter. I'd like to know his thought process for choosing the constant cost option.

I made a similar suggestion some months ago but honestly I don't think that kind of system really works with PA and it's scale.

You's making assumptions about the Unit Cannon's capabilties, as I said;

"It would not have much in terms of a raw limitation, it's biggest one is that it would only work from a smaller moon/asteroid and it would only be able to shoot at something that moon/asteroid is orbiting."

So it's not like you can just get a single Unit cannon operational and have the entire system seeded with fabbers within minutes, there is a steady and deliberate progress.

See above and also don't read too much into the Detector suggestion, that was simply off teh top of my head as an example, the reality is that it's a separate topic.

As mentioned above, the Unit cannon is not really a primary expansion tool(that is primarily the Astraeus/Commander combo) unless you grab a truely tiny asteroid that can orbit other asteroids, it might be handy on planets, maybe larger moons where it can be nice to start up a handful of smaller bases instead of one.
As far as the Commander being the only one, primarily it was meant as a way to standardize the hectic expansion phase, there might be room for some kind of transport option that is similar to the Astraeus but I worry that unless its done right it'll just supplant my Commander Astraeus and only push back when the hectic-ness start instead of actually dealing with it.

I don't thought. I don't like the effects they have on gameplay, primarily how it centralizes everything. It makes it too easy and too cost effective to move things, but There are other threads where I've already talked about how I don't like the current system and that's not really what this thread is for.

Well honestly I don't like interplanetary Nucks at all, that's it's own topic as well and might be the next one I tackle. Not thats I think Nucks are really comparable to Invasions, in that instance Nucks are just like smaller KEWs and if you were going to invande a planet, you weren't going to KEW it as well except to maybe open a path/landing zone. Fact is that Larger invasions are always more expensive than smaller ones because of the number of units used, it is true that my system adds some cost to larger invasions in some cases, it is optional. In my system even if you have a 500 unit army you can still use a single unit cannon, it'll take awhile to get your units down planet-side but they'll still get there.

Mike

That's bad. Why even have multiple planets/moons/whatever when you have only a very limited and very dangerous way to expand? Sending the commander somewhere into the blue sounds like a bad concept.

But is it really "sending him out into the blue"? Don't forget your opponent is working under the same limitations, and because moving armies around would be difficult in the early game and even if commanders expand to the same planet it's not that much different from starting a game on the same planet.

Now sure once planets and moons have been "staked out" it's dangerous to send your commander around willy-nilly, but then it's not really about expanding anymore is it?

Mike

Well I read your suggestion thread, and what i'm suggesting is fairly different. Instead of the price increasing every time you send a unit through, which would be bad in such a large scale game as PA, I suggest that the teleporter has a low running cost when active, and then increases its running cost every time a unit goes through. This would take the good points of both arguments IMO, without introducing that many issues. If my idea has no place in a large scale game such as PA, then neither does the cost per unit system, since they are quite similar.

Soooo.....exactly the same as my system here, except with a constant drain? I don't see the point. I mean sure a constant drain is a balance lever that's available but it still does the same thing mine does.

Mike

It feels like an unnecessary limitation that can prolong the game without good reason. Players could end up on different planets and have no quick way at all to react to each other.
I think we should make it easier to move armies around, not harder. If you make it really hard to move armies around you basically make the player play multiple games at once that are mostly independent from each other. I don't think we want that.