Planet-Smashing Animation (Confusion) & The Shock Wave Effect! GAMMA.

When a planet hits a planet, the two basically merge. When an asteroid hits a planet, anything between a small city being wiped off the map to all life being reset are in the cards.

The only problem I have with that is the fact that an asteroid will only take one or two halleys, to completely destroy a planet. This might be the most realistic, but with 20-40 asteroids it will ruin the gameplay for sure. We have a problem with rush-for-orbital at the moment, so I'm wondering if we should make that even worse

There's a very simple and eloquent solution to this.

BLOW IT UP.

Oh well, I totaly forgot about the anti-asteroid-launchers from the trailer. Can't wait for those.

Why would an enemy smash an asteroid on a planet you are not on? Even if your commander is not on that planet, the majority of your forces will be, else there is no reason to smash it.

So you are trying to justify wonky gameplay because of the name of the game?
How about another interpretation:
Planetary Annihilation - as in "you are annihilating stuff ON planets".
You can go running around names all you want, but that does not make anything better or worse.

Those are most certainly not gonna happen as those were the old nuke launchers.

i think the game still need smaller asteroids that doesn't blow up the entire planet (like asteroid belts) , but when you crash something very large like a moon in a planet, it should clearly destroy everything on it.

for now everything just dies instantly, but i hope we will soon have an awesome shock wave that destroys everything on its path, and then the planet would turn to a burning ball of lava that would cool down with time to be usable again

i don't like saying "the game's not finished, just wait" because not talking about a problem is the best way of not solving it, but in this case, i'm pretty sure planetary impacts are not in their final form.

and i think uber said that there's no plan of having anti-asteroid defenses, you can only run or do a preventive attack.

actually, halleys are a bit bugging me, you can toss a moon with 3 halleys, but what maneuverability can you hope to have with just this ? okay, i know everything is merely a matter of orbital speed relative to the sun, but it doesn't feel like turning an asteroid into a rocket.

i think it would be better if we had to put a lot more halleys, and maybe make them a bit smaller and cheaper to compensate. giving them orientable thrusters could be great too, but that's just a matter of design.

Well maybe they think you're there even if you aren't.

Planetary Annihilation most certainly means annihilating planets because otherwise it wouldn't really be any different from SupCom. Planet-smashing is the figuehead. It's the "thing" this game has.

The odd thing with the UI at the moment is it asks you where you want to impact site to be on the target planet. Even though it makes no difference to the end result.

And in terms of it only being a game ender if you're on the planet - this is exactly why I generally keep my commander next to a teleporter

Let's have the planet hit the other planet, and then have a slow/fast fiery wall, envelope the planet killing everything as it hits it

Good point, Excelle, I thought that was weird about the UI also..... Pizalover3000, you got the idea I'm thinking of. Even if everything doesn't die at the exact moment the wall hits the units, it would still look very badass. The grand finale!

Slow? I'm pretty sure it would be supersonic.

Supersonic is still pretty slow on a planetary scale. For example, the Concorde took 3.5 hours to fly from Paris to New York (5851 km). That was at Mach 2.02. Since the circumference of Earth is about 40000 km, that means a Mach 2 shock wave would take just under 7 hours to travel the 20000 km needed. That doesn't sound very fast to me! (Math! )

Really, you need to start thinking less about what is physically plausible and more about what would be awesome.

How is a supersonic wave of fire not awesome?

Well it is awesome, but if we are talking about real world sizes and speeds, a supersonic wave would barely be visible on small to medium sized planets.
Anyway: Such a wave would be awesome, just don't make it too fast

If anyone is interested in blast waves.

it's slow. But I think it would be decently fast but not SUPER fast. Like... 10 seconds to kill a planet?

Which might just be enough to evacuate your commander if he was standing next to a teleporter at the other side. Awesome

Which begs the question: Partial teleportation?

If you guys all agree with my suggestion, we should spread the idea around, so the Devs will be more likely to see it and/or respond with their own input, if they don't already have this feature coming down the pipes in the near future.

I appreciate all the feedback; this post is on fire!