I find that taking a small planetary body and smashing it into another player's planet to win the game to be too strong for several reasons. 1. The speed at which the planetary travels to reach its destination is too great, this leaves very little time for your opponent to react. 2. There are really no countermeasures, but I also believe giving a player the means to completely destroy an incoming planet to be too strong and takes away from the mechanic. So after some thought, I believe I have a simple solution. Greatly decrease the travel speed to something a bit faster than an orbiting body, this gives a player significant time to react, and allow players to be able to stop an approaching planetary body by destroying the engines. If the number of engines on the planet falls below the necessary number required to move the planet it falls into the orbit of the current gravitational pull. This does several things, it forces the attacking player to consider building more than the necessary number of engines and to make sure they are properly defended while it's on course. It also allows the defending player various options for taking countermeasures. I feel this still leaves a sense of urgency and keeps the game intense without taking anything away from the mechanic.
This is the only way I've been OK with for countering asteroid smashes. +1 from me, none of that anti-asteroid missile stuff.
I would take this over what some have suggested, which is making asteroids not strong enough to wipe out the whole planet which I think is total madness. Its a freaking asteroid! its not gonna do the damage of a hand grenade. People can't get over the fact that they lost. I do agree with you on this statement though, slowing them down would be a good solution but I would not like to see them too slow.
The reason they were sped up (launching one at a non-orbiting body used to take forever) was because of two reasons: First, there were some bugs and glitches that would drastically slow down the speed at which the planet was launched, or prevented it's launch altogether. Second, It's comparable to a nuke. Upon launch, it doesn't take more than a minute to reach its target, no matter the location. The same idea was applied to halleys, because of their expense and importance. Hopefully with the application of engine mechanics, this will be possible.
I'd love to see variable damage, hit a big planet with a tiny moon and maybe you only destroy half the planet (and only the units on the side you hit) It seems pretty silly right now that you have to select a spot on the planet, but any impact kills every unit on the planet and in orbit.
That is a dev goal and I'm sure they've stated it multiple times. Destroying a planet is EASY because all you have to do is hit the delete key. Crippling a planet is much harder because it requires changing the entire surface(which is a LOT of data to modify) and updating all the pathing, mapping and such. If a planet gets irrevocably damaged is it even possible to transmit that much info through the networking stream? I dunno. It'll definitely take a while to figure out.
Yeah I know it's a dev goal. What I don't remember is if they've ever gone into depth of how granular the variable damage would be. Ideally, if we get planetary bodies that get anywhere near as small as the asteroids in the kickstarter video, we could see impacts that range from a bit bigger than a nuke, all the way up to total annihilation of the whole planet.
I don't think its silly. To put in prospective, the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs was the size of Mt. Everest. Thats really small compared to this planet. Now when you throw something like the moon or even half the side of the moon on earth, it would be completely devastating.
getting to a point where your opponent is building his third halley (since no one goes for 5 halley planets to smash) is pretty extreme. You should get some sort of orbital presence on each planet in the meta-game so you can see halleys being built. Then the next step is quite easy actually. Halleys are so freaking huge that defending each 1 with anti-nukes, umbrellas, ect... is pretty difficult, just nuke 1 halley or get orbital lasers in and take them out. You really need to see it before it happens.
Eventually planet smashing won't destroy an entire planet. If a small moon smashes a big planet, only part of the big planet will be destroyed. That's gonna be the biggest balance to planet smashing and it'll drastically improve gameplay. Uber is also tossing around the idea of putting in anti-astroid missiles, like from the Kickstarter trailer. Those (likely) wouldn't completely negate the planet smash, but they will mitigate the damage.
You know what else might be interesting? I played a game last night where I teleported a huge force of bots onto a moon, intending to take it from the current owner who was building halleys on it. He ended up launching the moon before my bots could reach the halleys. However it was a large system and so the moon didn't reach it's destination before I was able to take them out. What if in this senario the moon instead of reaching it's target, ended up flying off into space, (essentially destroyed), or crashing into the sun, or something other than being able to reach it's destination with no engines.
The key to planet smashing not being overpowered is that you should have multiple planets, so losing one may not take you out of the game completely, but it will completely change the game you have left to play.
I think that it would be great to had notification for halley's activation as well as slowing down planet travel time so it's at least as fast as other orbital units or bit slower.
im acaully okay with the planetsmashing aslong as im doing the smashing im perfecly fin with the way it is! And dude! u cant smashe a planet like this( im kidding) Edit: if anyone was wonder this post was a joke im sure they will balance it maybe they have done it allrdy
Eventually if a Halley is destroyed while the planet is in transit, it won't make it to it's intended destination.
That's not how gravity works. Assuming it's already on a collision course and the engines aren't firing, you can destroy the engines as much as you like but that won't change the course of the planet.
Because Uber are committed to realism in this war in the future between soulless gaspumps, eh @Geers?
I'm not saying it's a good idea to replicate reality but it would look really silly if the planet on a course for ultimate destruction suddenly just stopped as if someone leaned onto the parking brake.
Meet halfway then. Why not have it continue to move into a captured orbit? There's no reason to overly punish a player that manages to do something cool (like assaulting a collision-course asteroid half-way and managing to destroy the engines successfully). Otherwise, what's the point in trying to do anything about an asteroid that's close to being hurled at you? Players should be rewarded for doing cool things ingame in my opinion, not ignored.
This is a game where you can build your engines on opposite sides of the planet, but still manage to change it's course, I don't think it needs to be that realistic. On that note, what if there were engine spots (like metal spots) where you could build the engines, that way it would 1 Give you something (extra) to fight over on movable bodies. 2 The engine spots could be lined up in such a way so you didn't have engines visibly working against each other.
