Asteroid field idea/discussion thread

That's also been my observation - the limitation seems to be the total land area, not the total number of orbital bodies. Asteroids don't have terribly much land area so that seems to be a negligible performance hit.

Another item to address - no air units around asteroids, right? =P

I hate this discusion. They are sentient robots, the probably have an advance thruster system, or some form of anti gravity. "Air" on asteroids. This is also proven, because half of the air hovers.

You are doing very similar suggestion. You are dealing with MANY orbital bodies, regardless of specifc implementations.

And the idea of the planets in astroid belts having environmental effects (in the example metoer showers), was that it obvious those sort of this would happen when you have a planet in something like a metoer belt. It would be weird if a planet didn't have some sort of collision with objects when it existed in a meteor belt.

Also it would be an event, so you didn't have to calculate hundreds of individual objects in the solar system then coliding with a planet.

I think the "megaweapon" tier should go something like this: tactical nuke (I know, they don't exist; just my unfulfilled desire), ICBM (nuke), small asteroid, big asteroid, moon. This gives you a lot of options depending upon the amount of eco you have, and how your opponent is distributed/protected. I will leave the nukes out, but for smashables:

Small asteroid: 20-30 across, and only be able to have a halley built on it. Smash into planet to do about double nuke damage, and leave a nice big crater like the current moon smash damage crater (maybe a little smaller).

Large asteroid: size 100, may have some mex, and you can build a smaaaaall base on it. Move it around with a couple halleys to use as an annoying nuke platform, or smash it into a planet to destroy about half of it, and leave a huge crater.

Moon: size 200, should catastrophically and awesomely dismember an entire planet with a ton of halleys on it, in spectacular Uber fashion.

I don't like the idea of random asteroid collisions as an environmental effect; it's always a cool idea until your commander randomly gets blown up and you lose for no reason.

I'm suggesting between one and two dozen small bodies with very small radii. There's less geometry to render in a few asteroids than in a platoon of bots

I'll buy that, I suppose. I brought it up re: other discussions about how to break orbital stalemates. Most agree that even if you gain an orbital foothold on an enemy world, a light frosting of air patrols makes any kind of landing more or less impossible. Preventing that from happening on asteroids would be nice.

The idea that air units are counter-gravitic opens a different door, though - it takes a lot less thrust to escape something as light as an asteroid, so maybe air units could S-Move away from asteroids to another orbital. If their destination is a moon or planet they'll be stuck in its gravity well when they arrive, and air units already on moons and planets wouldn't have the option to leave.

In this way asteroids gain a viable use as carrier ships and even dropships (load up land units onto air transports and send them on their way). So we'd have a way to drop an army onto an enemy world 1) without it being a unit cannon, which is still being worked on, 2) without having to try to build a teleporter, and 3) without it being foolproof and unstoppable.

@Polaris, I'm cool with that breakdown. But I think the absolute bare minimum of metal should exist on asteroids - like maybe 3-5 point on a large rock, maximum. It should be quite impossible to sustain a winning economy without access to a planet.

Asteroids do not concern me, igncom1. I want that commander, not excuses.

I swear I'm not stalking you, but HOLY F***, the quote, I... just... how??? It's like you just gave my inner nerd a life-threatening priapism.

You just made me google that word...

And you can't ungoogle it.

Ctrl+H, del.

Apparently everyone wants dozens of asteroids in a system. Well I don't. I want asteroid belts with mostly useless blocks of spacerock, only have 1-8 that can be colonized (depending on the size of the system/ number of players). Those are the big, huge asteroids. I don't want things smaller than 100 radius. A halley wouldn't fit on something smaller anyways.

I still want the awesome look of many halleys on an asteroid like in KS video, just cuz, Awesomeness.
So make them smaller, cheaper and more of them required for planets. Or just have a separate small version.

Asteroids aren't flat (spheres), I hope they will respect that, have irregular blocky rocks with flat surfaces, again like in the KS video.

Not sure if I want to agree with having nearly no metal on asteroids, that doesn't make sense realistically. (shut up, PA is not realistic!) But, what if metal spots can be depleted over time? Have asteroids be big metal rocks, but with limited amounts (er..what?). I mean have them be a big boost to metal, but for a short time. So you can't survive forever on an asteroid.

I do fully agree with nukes damaging and eventually destroying asteroids, that seems a good counter.

Respawning? Not sure. I rather don't have it. I just don't want unlimited asteroids, so it' at least a challenge to try it out, not having infinite tries available. There will be other ways of destroying planets, I don't want it to end with 90% asteroidsmashing because there's an infinite amount of them.

Air units? Come on, don't start this again. Also why I don't want tiny asteroids, then you would indeed not want air, but that's just stupid.

Commanders? why not, again if there aren't millions of asteroids to search them on.

Why do you say "mostly useless blocks of spacerock" but later acknowledge the plentiful metal deposits asteroids have?

By useless I believe he means too small to land on (I think - I'll let him confirm that). So that most of it would be aesthetic / just a hazard.

Yes, exactly for aesthetic purposes. Hazards? Not sure, but I won't disagree.