With the latest updates, experimental builds, and playtest streams we have finally seen some major pushes on the development of the orbital layer. With immobile anchors that can shoot the ground, orbital factories, and new orbital UI, orbital is beginning to look much more usable than it once was. However orbital still feels kind of... dead. There is almost no variety in it. the combat units are anchors and umbrellas only, we have a builder, some pgens, and we have 2 radar satellites. compare this to the surface layer and orbital is boring. Orbital should really be a nearly separate layer on its own, otherwise when orbital becomes important to a game, such as when we have an interplanetary stalemate, or when we are fighting over gas giants, games will get tiresome. I am not going to recommend inter-planetary combat, but I do hope that orbital combat becomes a lot more interesting. Orbital Units and Structures: This should be fairly clear. Orbital units are mobile, such as avengers, the current build's anchors, orbital fabbers, orbital lasers, and solar arrays. Structures are immobile, such as the experimental anchors, and the orbital factories, which I hope to see soon. If we want to make orbital an independent layer, it needs to have more structures and more units. It needs its own economy, production, defenses, and intel-gathering structures. It will also need more units, combat and support. Orbital Economy: Currently this exists in the form of the orbital solar array, which is a unit. There is no way to get metal with orbital. I propose a new model for orbital economy, orbital-surface interaction for economy. We would remove the solar array as it currently stands, and make it an orbital structure. It could be built on its own, but if you built it over top of one of your power generators it would also give that pgen a boost to power output, making the placement of your orbital power fields somewhat important. We would also get orbital mining lasers, or something of the sort. These could be built over any metal spot, even if claimed by an enemy. However, just like with the power generators, it would give an income boost to the metal extractors under it, as well as providing income on its own. this would make stealing enemy metal spots that are claimed from orbit valuable for you as well, and potentially adding some interesting things to fight over. Orbital Production: This is already on the way with orbital factories, which look pretty dang awesome! Orbital Defenses: This currently includes the anchor, and perhaps the SXX depending on what you are defending yourself from. However, if orbital is going to be more interesting, more orbital-ground and orbital-orbital defenses are going to be needed. It would be very interesting to have a structure in orbit that is immobile, and can only shoot the ground layer, as well as having a counterpart that can only shoot the air layer. Also, perhaps we could get a version of the SXX that is immobile, but can shoot ground and orbital, with a continuous beam type weapon? It is difficult to offer suggestions to a layer that is not nearly as varied as one would like. Orbital Intel-gathering: This aspect of orbital could be very interesting. For starters, the Advanced radar satellite should be immobile, though the basic radar satellite should be able to move as a scout unit. A big change to orbital intel would be a way to deal with the deepspace radar. The deepspace radar would only be able to see units in orbit around the planet it is built on, and units moving between planets. However an orbital structure that detects units in the same orbital shell as itself, would force players to build these satellites on other planets if they want to be able to see the enemies' orbital units. Orbital Units: There simply needs to be more variety here. A "bomber" as I explained in this thread: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/new-orbital-unit-suggestion.58988/#post-918126 would provide a way to deal with orbital structures, but would be destroyed by avengers. An orbital version of the combat fabricator could perhaps build orbital mines as a defensive structure and heal nearby ships. A frigate could provide light anti-ground bombardment and a decent anti-orbital unit attack, but be easily killed by the bombers. Perhaps a mass-transport unit that could pick up ground units, or a transport unit that could pick up orbital structures and move them, in which case we could make the SXX immobile, but be able to drop it to attack zones if needed. Perhaps we could allow the SXX to simply be a sniper satellite, able to hit both orbital and ground at long range for high damage, but with a long cooldown. Other Suggestions: An orbital teleporter that would allow for transport between planets at a much faster speed, and be undetectable by deepspace radar, but very resource-intensive. An orbital hangar bay that scrambles mini-avengers that attack enemy units, as a defensive structure. Orbital mines Anchors only being able to shoot in the orbital layer Orbital bomb-droppers, very slow moving units that can drop bombs to the ground layer, not very tanky and have a very long cooldown on their weapons.
metal is and should always be only directly gathered from surface and no to pgen boosting of any kind
Any particular reason as to why? How do you propose to play on gas giants then, with only the stuff we have now? That sounds incredibly boring...
I cannot properly express how awesome an idea this is. Like. My god. 10 out of freaking 10. I like the other stuff too, although I'm confused by the lack of orbital anti-air. EDIT: Oh, wait, nevermind. Somehow skipped that
I would like to see changes to the Stingray (T2 missile ship) and the catapult to allow them to fire their missiles into orbit. However, when fired into orbit, the missile costs twice as much energy as normal (thereby giving it half the normal ROF) and also prevents it from firing missiles at surface units at the same time. That way you can kill anchors from the surface without spamming avengers or rapidly building an umbrella under them.
@emraldis simply i dont want any additions that make orbital any more important as said before the focus is and should stay on planetsurefaces with the likely exception of gasgiants ... but even then you have a well ammount for orbital warfare already ... anchors are pretty much orbital defenses ... avangers are orbital superiority fighters .... as basic as those seem to be they are enough to have orbital battles ... ssx for orbit to surface assasination ...why do we need that much more ?... do you realy want ant sheller and spinner equivalents in orbit? i dont think that much of variety is that helpfull in fact i am concerned that stuff like orbital bombardmentweapons will be too exploitable i realy fear that your proposals shift the focus of gameplay too much torwards orbital which should not be ... to me there is no point in turning orbital into full naval 2.0 and it would rather damage overall gameplay... also gasgiants will get orbital gasminers purely for energyadvantages ... but again why do we need that variety in orbit for when we have it for surface already that is meant to be the mainfocus of gameplay anyway? i dont want startrek armada nor conflict frontier wars to be in this game ... orbital is meant to support surface in logistics eco and intel and not become another fullfleged warlayer ... at least in my opinion
This is why I suggested Stingrays/Catapults as anti-orbital weapons. If you're going to add more orbital units, you need more surface counters to them.
It doesn't harm the ground combat if you make orbital-ground interactions important, if anything it adds more variety to the ground layer. Although I will agree that structures that spam orbit-to-surface fire aren't a good idea (like the experimental anchor), some form of inter-layer combat would keep the attention on the ground layer as well as the orbital layer. It wouldn't be like SINS or star trek armada, because you're not fighting in between planets, and orbital would still be a mainly supportive layer because you would need to kill the comm, who is on the ground. If there are enough units that can fire between the orbital shell and the surface layer, then the focus won't shift so much that ground combat is forgotten.
The point would be to have more orbit-ground interaction, otherwise orbital is just kind of stale... Having ground units that can take out orbital structures and units, and having orbital structures that can take out ground structures and units would do a lot for the current orbital stalemates that happen, without shifting the view to only orbital as you suggest would happen.
It's essentially the same thing as geosynchronous orbit. It is a balance thing in this situation, because if anchors could move, there would be no point in making avengers, as we see in the current builds...
An idea for the orbital teleporter: It would be a slow moving orbital unit in the shape of the teleporter frame (possibly some supporting structure.) Ground based teleporters can link to it, but it cannot link to other orbital teleporters. It would be one way: Units from ground level enter it, and exit at high velocities from orbit, landing on a planet in a large circular area. It can also deploy air units. (Perhaps air units can enter ground teleporters linked to an orbital teleporter. Great thread BTW
or you could add new units, as I suggested, which adds more variety and makes orbital more interesting...
Hell yeah! I think the problem with the unit cannon was that it is hard to convert multiple units into one and back again, so this was my solution to that problem.
Not saying it's not, i'm just saying we don't need to re-purpose the avenger for that. It would make orbital more interesting to have more variety.
The umbrella is a high dmg/high rof pure anti-orbital structure. The Stingray/catapult have other uses and would be less effective against orbital because of this, but it would make it harder to completely shut down all your anti-orbital. Currently its very easy to do, just kill all the umbrellas. There need to be more units that interact with the orbital layer so that orbital bombardment isn't as powerful (and therefore you can make more units capable of it) and so that it is more difficult to totally shut your opponent out of orbital. There are lots of ground units that can shoot at air units, and there are lots of air units that can shoot at ground. Therefore, there can be a lot of interesting/complex interactions between ground and air. The idea is to do the same thing with orbital. Make more units able to shoot up, and more able to shoot down, AND most importantly you need to re-purpose units that already have other uses, so that even if you're not focusing on orbital, you'll still have units that can interact with that layer. Thus the suggestion for Catapults/Stingrays. If you make more units that are specifically anti-orbital with no other role, then it just becomes a boring game of "Who has the right hard counter?". TA was fun because everything shot everything. Even if you built the wrong unit for the job, it would still do its best to use its weapon to kill the enemy. It's no fun being the guy that brought a knife to the gunfight.
