[Suggestion] : make any planet/moon smashable to any other celestial body including the sun

Hi !

I tried to search the forum a bit to check whether or not this suggestion was already posted, but I did not find anything that exactly matches what I am thinking about.

The idea is that any planet or moon could be smashed to anything that's around, including the sun.

For example, it would even be possible to play in a solar system with only 1 planet and decide to smash it into the sun (of course that would lead to a draw).

But I think that could add interesting strategies as currently most of the players tend to try to reach another planet quickly in order to build Halleys on it and then smash it against the "original" planet and thus do not really pay attention to what is happening on the "original" planet.

Here, a new strategy would be to build Halleys on the original planet and send crash it into the sun (or any other planet) right after having sent our commander to another safe planet. Then, players would need to keep an eye on the planet they are to make sure nobody is building enough halleys to crash it into anything else.

Of course, that would also require that any planet can be moved and crashed to any other celestial body. Just need the adequate number of halley (the bigger the planet, the more halleys you need, but even the biggest planet could be moved and crashed anywhere)

What do you think ?

It's been suggested frequently.

I suppose sun smashing could be implemented... There isn't too much of a point...

I don't think all planets should be moveable though.

Well, I like the idea that even with single planet game you have some kind of ultimate weapon (other than nuke) to end the game and leave the solar system empty of planet.
Also even if we may get the features that "spawn" asteroids from time to time, it is still nice to have the possibility to use the asteroid to save your own commander before smashing into the sun, instead of using the asteroid on the planet.

Why exactly ? I think that it would make sense that any planet could be moveable, even if it takes 25 or more halleys. If I find the time to build it without my opponent trying to stop me, I should be able to move the biggest planet of the solar system if I want.

lol I also never understood why you would want to smash a planet into the sun, I mean are people expecting some supernova type deal XD. As for all planets being smashable/moveable, I fell it could cause some real balance issues. I dont think it would hurt to have some feature like that in sandbox mode to fool around, but for ranked or ladder games definitely no. Oh and if you would like some way to dispose of a planet, I dont know why, but if you do I think the smashing it into the sun would be excessive. I mean you built halleys on a planet to basically waste it? I am not against it I just dont see much need for it, as for all planets being moveable it could create some balance issues and would be hard to solve since people basically create there own solar systems.

A more interesting question is: What hapens when you try to smash a planet into a gas giant?

Well gas giants are not really all made up of gas, most of them have solid cores, so there would be something to hit, if the asteroid was big enough to survive the very very thick atmosphere. I guess instead of the regular shreds of rock flying into the atmosphere animation, the atmosphere of the giants would be disrupted would kill all the orbital or the extra mass and gravity from the asteroid would pull all units into the planet killing everything.lol just my guess.

I do think it would be good if halleys where balanced such that by default everything would have an okay engine requirement amount. I think the difference is a being a binary "special stunt" and a fully fledged mechanic with a good continuum. I do recognise the value of actually living out some planetary sieges instead of knee jerking a asteroid always towards everything that vaguely resembles a fortified planet. Volume goes up even faster than surface area so maybe just have impractically big engine requirements on the larger planets? Even if the large value would be "imbalanced" it would only apply to megaridicilous sized games. How about using your halleys to keep the planet rooted at a good orbit? You would need X percentage more halleys to win the tug of war and plumet the planet to it's death which could be significantly more in absolute amounts than the natural move limit. Then at the very ridicilous sized games the limit would be that the halleys would run out of space and be built increasingly close to each other forcing conflict (or the actually the mat would be a sustainable mix of density of umbreallas, anti-nukes and halleys)

How about grazing the sun so that only part of the planet fills with fiery death?

I guess gas giants could ignite, blowing a lot of the gas away, reducing their gravity well, freeing their moons to orbit the sun. That is get shattered like any other planet. Another option would be to make it fiery fireball but have the actual smashing planet survive the event (ie pretend that the drag isn't enough to stop the smasher) you get the effects of an annhilation but don't waste any orbital bodies. That could prove problematic if it would mean infinite annihilations as resources are not spent. Althought it would force the attacker to invade the victim planetoid which would be a refreshing change to smashings. Althought if you can build a halley on foreign soil why not just clear it the usual way? Only answers I think are building in stealth and buildings as third party at a contested planet.

Well first off, doing so would be a very poor strategic move. It's not a good idea to destroy such crazy amounts of metal.

It also wouldn't be a good strategic move as building that many Halleys would cost a ton of metal and it wouldn't be worth it. You'd be better off to build... just about anything else. Laser Sats. Nukes. Avengers. Whatever.

The other reasons... ugh. I'm sorry. but it's 1am and I can't remember the other reasons.

Smashing a planet into a sun is like trying to take down a house with a basketball.

Or rather driving a bike into a truck. You ain't gonna dent the truck but that's not the point.

If your goal is to just destroy the planet then some sort of doomsday implosion device would be infinitely more awesome.

There is absolutely no reason not to smash a planet into the sun.

Why would you want to deny the option?

Because it's a bad option to move a really large planet.

Why do you want to make poor gameplay choices?

It's also more development and bug testing that the devs have to do for something that does not benefit gameplay. Including the added difficulty of what happens when you move a big planet that has a bunch of moons orbiting it.

It just doesn't contribute much to gameplay and not worth the developer's time right now.

Well, I agree with some of the things, but I still do not understand why it would unbalance the game to have any planet movable.

From my point of view, Halleys are the "ultimate weapon" of the game and it would make sense that they could be build and used on any planet with the appropriate number.
Even if on some planet the number of required Halley would be barely achievable because of needed space or time, you would always find a fun game where somebody would be able to do it because you would not expect it.
So poor strategy or not, it is still an additional strategy that might be better than what you think in some given circumstances

Furthermore, the game is not only multiplayer (even though it is the most interesting part for a lot of players, me included), but single player game vs AI where you can experiment the most stupid strategies ever could be very fun (and sometimes you think it is a stupid strategy until you use it and start to like it...)!

Finally about that topic, it just makes sense to me that if you can move a planet with Halleys, then you can move any planet with the appropriate number of Halley.
Also, regarding the development, clearly it needs some time to be spent on it (and finding on how to take care of some special cases like planets with orbiting moons), but the majority of the code (smashing a planet into another) is already done.

Going back to smashing planet into the sun, yes clearly the goal would be to sacrifice the planet.
But sacrifice is sometimes a good strategy move. For example, in a 2 planets game, even if your opponent is not on the planet you smash into the sun, if most of his energy and metal production is on it (or at least more than yours). Smashing that planet into the sun might still be a valuable option.

And if we go a bit farther than that, we could add a special effect when you smash a planet into the sun : a huge solar EMP that would disable (actually destroy and just leave the reclaimable wreckage) any unit in the solar system except commanders.
That could lead to more possibilities and strategies, which according to me is more fun.

It's not so much about balance as it is playability. Gameplay with "plentiful" smaller asteroids is better than Gameplay with bigger things to move.

Big planets logically require more Halleys, which slows the game down and wrecks the pacing.

Mike

Yes, I understand that, but I was not thinking about replacing the small asteroids by big movable planets, I thought that having the possibility to move the big planets as well could be also a nice feature (actually moving any planet you can build on).

For sure, players who only play to win would go for the small asteroid and the most efficient victory.
Some other players might enjoy moving their big home planet around.

What really needs to happen is they need to let us build engines on the sun and smash the sun into planets. Yes or yes?

They just released an update that changed the way Halley requirements were handled such that you can define the number of engines needed to move a planet (or define it as non-movable) in the map editor, rather than it being automatically determined based on the planet's radius. Doesn't necessarily mean all planets are always movable, but that they can be, at the map creator's discretion.

new gameplay mode, protect the halleys! one attacker, one protector. one is trying to push the planet into the sun, the other is trying to stop him. if one guy ends up with no halleys, the other wins.

attacker win= planet smashes into sun

defender wins=enemy commander is forced to retreat/ is blown to bits.

But it isn't a "Nice Feature", it's damaging to the game as I said.

If you want to play a different game than being designed that's what mods are for.

Mike