Planet Smashing is strategy, or is it?

There is a distinction between bots, vehicles and air. You get to choose between those, it's strategy.
You can also go and participate in the orbital race, expand your empire and kill others by smashing planets on their head. It's strategy.
Or you could just nuke them to death, laser them from above or just commander rush. Whatever you fancy.

Is that strategy?

"Ofc it is, you get to choose and make plans according to your situation and all that stuff."
Is it really not just about who has more planets in the end? Is there really a choice about what to do?
Doesn't it just turn into a situation, where the question of which planet to smash with which planet decides about everything else? Isn't this game more about having everything, than choosing between something?

In the end you have to have more air than your opponent, you have to have more orbital, more land units or appropriate defenses. You have to have anti-nukes and nukes, a planet with which to smash, preferably more. Satellites and anchors are a must, so are T2 ground/navy/air units.

But all of that doesn't matter anymore, once somebody decides to smash with a planet. Not the nukes, nor the orbital fancy stuff. It just matters what will survive, and what will die when the object hits it's target.

So basically, going for more planets is just mandatory. Nothing else matters besides holding and using those.

I have that situation very often, when my team and me killed everything on the home planet, and there are 5-10 more planets to search for our opponents. There is a constant flow of +1200 metal and some hundred k energy flowing on my account. There is no space anymore. I have to manage waypoints for factories, build more orbital launchers, more nukes, order fabbers to assist those nukes and factories. Tell my orbital fabbers to build satellites, anchors and teleporters on every single planet. Setting new waypoints for my units to use the teleporters properly. Link those teleporters together, "Oh just let me turn off those other factories that I don't need anymore. Oh, my orbital fabbers are on those planets already, what was the name again? Let me check through all of those again."

And all that after having fun for half an hour, I have to micromanage the hell out of everything, because I want to be in space right now. Why must it be so hard? Why does it make everything that happened before so irrelevant? Why doesn't it feel like a natural extension of the core gameplay? Why does it feel like this game makes me play something that I don't want to play, once I'm off to managing multiple planets, space travel and scouting.

Interplanetary battle is the trademark feature of this game. Although I wonder if it has been taken too far, and if there is more importance to it, than there should be.

I was excited when I was watching the kickstarter trailer. It all seemed so easy. You just click once or twice, and you're building halleys on asteroids in an asteroid belt. It all seemed so natural and simple.
And now when I'm playing it, I just want to say "gg" and self destroy, because the pain of playing interplanetary and managing everything at the same time can bore the hell out of me.

My opinion is, that this game desperately needs more simplicity in the space field. Simple tasks, like space travel, building and destroying outposts on other planets, scouting in space and managing your economy should take a few clicks instead of hundreds. As long as this isn't the case, the lategame will feel awkward and discouraging. I don't know what Uber's plans are on this, so my hopes are with the modding scene.

But back to the topic.

Is it really ok to make planet smashing the top priority in every strategy?

Greetings

It's the dedicated game ender, but it needs a LOT of work.

I agree that in the late game everything seems to turn into a numbers game. Planetary invasions are simply: do I have enough nukes to overwhelm their anti-nukes? Do I have enough orbital fighters and lasers to destroy their fighters and umbrellas? Do I have enough orbital fabbers to build a 'porter fast enough, and enough units to rush through?

At these scales, and at these speeds (slow), there is no strategy. I'm not thinking which units to use where, or how best to deploy my forces according to the circumstance or terrain. It's pure numbers.

The way colonising a smasheable planet invalidates all of your, and your opponents', strategic endeavours on the ground has preyed on me for a while, and I've been thinking about making a thread about it for a while, but you've gone to the effort for me.

I prefer thinking about it in context of the game later in development.
Games are expected to become 40 player 10+ planet madhouses.
Once the game is more done, smashing planets won't be a game ender, it'll simply be a means to eradicate one map, one of many.
I like to think that smashing planets will become an almost normalized weapon, rather than a game-ending superweapon.
I guess we'll just have to wait and see in the long run, but I have faith in Uber to balance the game correctly.

depends on your system ... a rockmissile can finish a match or "just" heavily damage your opponents ... but it requiers a buttload of resources and time ... and the fact that the destruction of such rock means that buildspace and possible metal deposids may get lost i wouldnt take the desicion to go rocknuke too lightly ... again depends on the system you fight in and your situation ...

If there are 40 players and 10+ planets the whole situation will only get worse. More planets, more tedious micro management with the only purpose of producing more stuff.
I have to fully agree with the op. Currently lategame is a nightmare. Not to mention how AWESOME performance is once you have to mindlessly produce so much stuff...

´

Funny when i see players start give me reason.

When i say that have + then 2 planets to micro its a desaster to late games.

They showld give attencion to only 1 map (planet) and even just 1 miss lot important things on a rts i feel im play RPG

can someone translate that for me? i´m sry but i just don´t get what you want to say ...

I dont now write english well....
Not all on planet must now write well or speack english ,isnt it.
Iff you not understant the obvius just dont comment kind easy thought no?

Playing more of orbital games I have found that it plays differently. There is deffinetely a planet smashing stage instead of a smashing being the end point but it is ramp up in scale.

It's also good that it is not simple the same on bigger scale. I have found that if it comes to planet sieges a lot of that could be allivietaed with earlier solar system expansion. You need to do it already when you can't secure them for good. There is also a bit of conflict between teching and ecoing up at indiviudal planets and pushing the space frontier.

Switch planets for mexes and you get a statement eveyone agrees with and none finds problematic. Planetray Annihilation revolving around planets would be cool and appropriate in my oppinion.

At this point, planet smashing is very powerful. However, it's been stated that, eventually, this will have an extreme energy cost associated with it, not to mention the fact that it's already burning 50+ metal spots to end one base.

a LOT ? the whole orbital thing needs an UBER ammount of work..........

I think it'd help to both give more warning about incoming moons, weaken the Halley performance (or make them use a LOT more power), and most of all finally implement the unit cannon so we can assault a moon's engines via drop pods without having to establish orbital supremacy first. Please?

(I'd go so far as to allow launching units from planets (albeit at an absuuurd energy cost). "But won't that make orbit irrelevant?" Yeah, so? It'll lead to a more rapidly widening battlefield, where you can actually contest somebody's claim to another planet without total orbital dominance)

Giving warning about smashed planets is a good idea. The amount of times I have been surprise smashed is sad.

There is simple solution: play on systems that do not have small bodies. And wait for when we have interplanetary invasions implemented.

It only proves that you cannot please everybody. We have planet smashing because lack of it would make even more complaining than current lack of uber cannon. Just calm down and wait a bit more.

No. I don't think so.

If the game is about massive armies, it should have massive armies. Always.

The game should not rely on having to smash a planet to end it. I can't think of many RTS's where you finish the game by using one weapon. Superweapons are often alternates to large numbers of units, and in my opinion the best games are the ones where you use large numbers of units and superweapons in tandem.

I.e. instead of building halleys, I prefer out of principal to nuke a beachhead and build a teleporter, regardless of how impractical that could be.


When I think about interplanetary battles, I think about ODST. I think about drop pod rain. I think about the landing at Geonosis (I'm sure part of the movie had it live action, but here's a bit from the cartoon)



I think of Halo's glassing, I think of KoToR's bombing of Taris.

I really just don't care for planet smashing. It should be the absolute last resort. Not the thing you're running to because it's going to be the only practical way.

The main thing is that planet smashing won't instantly destroy an entire planet.

Planet smashing with a small astroid won't destroy everything on the main planet.

When that happens, the game is going to change so drastically.

Uber's goal is to have planet smashing be common and happen multiple times a match.

Actually it's been stated that all planets will eventually be smashable.

Um.

Viability as a strategy may vary but:

• Age of Empires 1, 2, 3, etc by building a Wonder and waiting X amount of time
• A lot of C&C games have near game ending super weapons (not all)
• Submarine Titans full screen doomsday devices of any of the races
• Any building game when played with a "Build X" condition
• Age of Mythology with it's Titans
• Any game with a unitcap where you build MAX units for the unitcap (eg. starcraft1 with out expantion Massive Carrier/Battlecruiser ball)

I'm fairly sure there are others. Just replace RTS with "Strategy Game" and you get a lot more in there.

Ok, so the issue is that lategame is all about mass destruction and you forget about your army almost completly.

It is almost impossible to invade a planet that is fully covered with avengers and orbital turret things or the ground is all covered so you cant build a teleporter.

You HAVE to atleast use nukes to clear the ground which nobody does because it is easier to just nuke the base.

Now, if you had some sort of tier 2 teleporter that creates a portal and you can send over a bunch of units at the same time instead of 1 by 1 which is so slow and not even all of them gets through.
I dont know how they will do that but it is an idea that could work making it a viable strategy to invade a planet with units.

I dont know if it makes sense to add a "black hole" looking portal that is open temporarily or just a HUGE teleporter? But something like this would make it more viable. The problem with a huge teleporter would be that you have to build it on the other planet aswell and it would most likely take more time since its a tier 2 teleporter so. If you could build a huge portal on the ground and when you move units in the hole they get dropped down on the other planet instantly. Now, the problem with this is that it would be very overpowered so to counter that it would have to take A LOT of time to build. More time than a nuke because this is a end game strategy and not something that could be rushed.
EDIT: To make it not autowin when you drop it over the enemy commander. The portal that sends units out gets slowly built like 1 minute before the army gets dropped out. But the portal cannot be destroyed once it has started building unless it is destroyed on the other planet where units go in.

If not only that but a tier 2 transport ship that can carry multiple units instead of just 1. It could be built from a tier 2 orbital launcher.

But right now it just seems like they havent finished adding content to orbital and multiple planets because it seems very simple compared to the ground stage of the game.
They could for example add more type of orbital fighters instead of just having 1, you could have 1-2 other fighters that could counter each other making more depth to the orbital combat. But thats another whole topic.

TLDR: Adding tier 2 portal as an end game option that is powerful enough to invade a defended planet.

I don't think the main issue here is the viability of planetary invasion. I don't want to seem overly arrogant and controlling, but I'd rather not use this as another planetary invasion thread. We have enough of those already.

The real issue I see (and what I think arachnis was addressing) is that if your opponent escapes to another planet, it invalidates everything you've achieved on the ground.

I might fight over one planet for 30 minutes and best my opponent through superior strategy, but if they've got off world (worse if I've been lax and haven't spotted which planet they've gone to in a multi-planet system, it's easy to miss) then I've incurred, at best, a minor advantage over them. In fact, if the main planet requires 15 Halleys and the one they've escaped to requires, say, 7 they actually have a direct advantage over me.

I don't know, at the moment I feel like NOT rushing to orbital and taking the planet with the fewest required Halleys is just a dumb move every single time.

EDIT: actually now I think about it this issue is directly linked to planetary invasion, if it were easier to use ground forces to invade then I wouldn't feel so cheated by having built 500 units that are now useless to me.

Sorry for the wall of text