Planetary Slamjam and countering it

We have aircraft, and we have anti-air
We have navy and we have torpedoes
We have tanks/kbots and we have artillery
We have nukes and we have anti-nukes
We have orbitals and we have Umberella-ella-ellas

And we have Halleys, and we have ...? I watched the kick-starter trailer again because it's awesome and remembered that there were anti-celestial ballistic missiles. ACBMs if you will. We need these to shoot down planets being launched instead of trying to rush to the moon and pulling the classic nuclear deterrent arms race.

I think it should be either 1 ACBM for each Halley needed to launch the planet (to kinetically counter the propulsion...whatever I don't care on the lore of a weapon)
or 2 ACBMs for each Halley of the launched planet if the launcher is around half the size of a Halley(trailer looked like a missile silo about double the size of nuke silo and that's interplanetary!)

They should launch when there's celestial activity detected and you have power, so if your Deep Space Radar is offline, then you deserve a planet in your face. If you're skirmishing with someone on a planet and you both have ACBMs then they shouldn't fire at a planet you launch, only a hostile one.
Their range should cover the whole planet they are on, and not others. With the current nukes you can fire them across the solar system, these should be the same sort of missile but stronger since it has to crack a planet, not wipe the surface (but obviously JUST anti planet, not targetable at people)

Along with the size of the launched planet effecting the explosion radius, we should be able to reduce the damage from a planetary extinction-level event to just a big scattering of moon everywhere. Currently there's no reason not to slam a planet at someone's face. force their commander(s) to a planet and smash the crap out of it for easy win and no counter.

With any luck, this whole post makes sense. I've been up for 15 hours and am quite tired, but I seriously hope this can be a thing. It's kind of annoying having a friend who only slams planets to win (regardless of the fact I can stop them doing so)

Uber has mentioned these. They may or may not end up adding these in.

I'd love to see these added.

I think these would probably be implemented when Uber implements asteroids doing differing amount of damage depending on size. It makes sense to do it then. I think it would be awesome and necessary to have a counter that mitigates damage from a planet smash

Mitigating damage is the most fun way to do it imo, when planets have a health and/or the radius of destruction is dependent on the asteroid.

A silly solution would be to have halleys of your own, to 'run away' from the asteroid to have it impact slower.

Hmm these counters wouldn't need to be a hard counter either once varying damage has been added. They could be softer counters. Anti-Celestial Missiles could just blow off a percentage of mass from the incoming rock. So something would still hit and cause quite a bit of damage but you could reduce the radius down to just 1 large island or 1 large base. This still means that it will kill a commander if it gets dropped directly on them. But then entire world wouldn't have to burn.

If asteroids end up needing as little as 1 Halley to fire at a planet, this could be very useful in stopping those tiny ones completely. At that point the asteroid breaks up and spreads out "heavy bombing" levels of damage across its area, but not enough to kill most hardened units.

OOOH i know!

The missiles should be kind of like "mini-halleys". They would attach to the planet and use the fuel remaining from the flight to push the incoming planet to some other direction.

However,:
-The planet would still seek to impact your planet. The missiles would merely give you time.
-Tiny amount of missiles can be used to give you time to rescue your commander and such if you dont have a escape plan
-Medium amount of missiles can be used to give enough time to move your fabbers and army to some other body and maybe build a building or two before your economy crashes
-Large amount of missiles can be used to give you enough time to successfully attack the halleyed planet, take it over and destroy the halleys (or if this is too easy, maybe you need to build your own halleys and redirect the planet to the enemy o3o)

The missiles would have limited fuel so youd need to keep launching them. This should probably be automated to some extent (ie you could select all missiles, and tell them to slow down the halleyed moon. Theyd then send a missile once in a while as long as theres missiles left in the selection)

Most of the time you would go with the first or second option, it should be very difficult to completely prevent being halleyed unless you have great economical and military advantage.

You counter incoming moons by not letting your opponent take the moon...

With these missiles, that means killing planets would become next to impossible.

i could see a celestial-level missile working. i also believe it neccecary to implement a mechanich where, if the halleys get blown up mid flight, the planet's trajectory is borked, and sort of defaults into an orbit again. or maybe even flies off into oblivion...

that's what we call a proactive/preemptive solution. what we're looking for is a reactive solution.

Make asteroids take time to get to their destination to allow opponents a chance to board and hijack the incoming rock.

And for the same reason I just said, a reactive solution would make it so that killing planets would become impossible. How do you kill off a planet that is fully owned by a player? Do you invade? No. Because you can't. You throw a moon at it. If they can build anti-planetary missiles that stop you from throwing a moon at it, then there is literally no way to end the game.

Reactive solutions are boring and kill gameplay.

I don't think they were mentioned, I know they were in the Kickstarter trailer but I don't recall Uber saying anything about them.

I heard a while ago that the missiles were in the Kickstarter Trailer to show how pointless it is to try to stop a planet from smacking into another or something.

actually, yes, there kind of IS. it's a little concept known as the saturation point. this only really works due to the fact that you can have unlimited anything. (and for the record, fully owned i.e. mexes and factories everywhere, is a far cry different than fully armed (umbys/A-N's/ Anchors everywhere))

mainly due to the fact that unless every inch of a planet is basted, wall to wall, with anti-orbital and anti nuke, it can be overrun. this is especially prevalent with anti-nuke. a single anti nuke can only knock back 3 missiles, and only when fully armed. a 4th missile comes, and its GG for the anti nuke. so if the planet has, say, 12 anti nukes across the planet, it can knock back 36 missiles. and that's IF all those anti nukes are in one place, which they are likely not. so throwing 4-5 nukes at a single location, the chance of a nuke reaching ground 0 is very high. now i am aware that nukes enter the planet at random points. so now we must take all 12 into account anyways. so:

12 A-N x 3 a-n-m's = 36 - this is that defense line's saturation point

so, any number of nukes above 36 WILL hit something.

and as far as anti-celestial missiles, i don't think its as much about prevention, as it is about damage control. in reality, that missile would have to be pretty frickin' powerful to stop an entire moon. but you should certainly be allowed to chip away at it, and offset the damage done to a minimum.

Like how the kickstarter showed, three missiles only damaged the incoming body. They did not destroy it, meaning you may lose that base and an area around it, but it wouldn't be a planet killer, and that is something I'd like to see these missiles do.

They obviously can't defend against an entire planet, especially some bigger ones, but asteroids should be able to be defended against in some way. Our land defenses : laser turrets, pelter / holkins, catapault.. they don't stop ground attacks in their place, do they? No. Neither do AA turrets stop a bombing run nor flak shut down a gunship throwdown if there's enough force to be overtaken.

Just as the above defenses simply mitigate and deter an attacking force instead of directly denying it, I believe anti-celestial missiles should do exactly the same. Defensively lessen the damage from complete annihilation to an area denial and proactively deter small bodies from taking out an entire planet, and smaller ones from taking out a large base.. Which is exactly what they're supposed to do.

I'm not exactly sure how other people see anti-celestial missiles in terms of gameplay, but it seems to me like they're seen as an end-all-be-all for anti-smash, and that's simply not the case.

Planet smashing is like the end-all way to win a game or destroy an opponent. This would just create the 4 hour orbital stalls again, having to send thousands of avengers and orbital engineers over to even touch the enemy. And, all of this with a side of .000000001 FPS server lag! Even nukes can be countered easily, so let's have something that cannot be completely countered.

Like bgrmystr2 said, i would love to see something like that. It would cripple the enemy, leaving room for an orbital sweep or nukes to finish the job. Excited to see what Uber does with this.

This is the one thing in the game that needs to be unbalanced. It gives advantage to the players who have more map control (you lose less if you have more planets to rebuild on), which is a last resort to turtling. Halleys are expensive, large, and take out a large amount of your metal income.

Nukes, you have to make them, for about ~50,000 metal. That includes both the silo and the nuke. A halley will take out a large portion your metal income, permanently. If somebody were to just shoot down your planet, they lose metal, yet you lose both metal and metal income.

If they were to add this in, nobody would use halleys. Games would go on for hours, with planets being deflected into the voids of space, nukes being shot down, beachheads being annihilated as soon as they arrive, and so on.

Taking down a nuke by screwing with its electronics is one thing, but deflecting a planet...

EDIT:

How is that a good thing?

Instead of requiring strategy to take control of the moon before your opponent, you just need to wait for your numbers to be high enough so that you can build a structure. A structure that does nothing but negate the bonus of having a moon to fling at somebody.

If anything, that'll just cause people to not use halleys. Sacrifice metal and metal income so that your opponent can just shoot down your planet, at a much lower cost?

If the cost is raised, nobody will build ACBMs. In their current form, nobody will use halleys, and people will spam ACBMs.

I'd like a counter to asteroids, but it shouldn't be ground-based missiles. That's too close to what we already have for nukes, and not flashy enough to be a proper counter to the game's namesake tactic. Instead, have the counter to planet-smashes be other asteroids. Turn on your Halleys, brace for impact, and smash it into the incoming space rock of imminent doom, and send it into a harmless new orbit. This provides yet another use for Halley'd bodies besides planetsmashing and orbital death bases, and keeps true to the spirit of annihilating planets while doing so in a suitably epic fashion. Of course, the asteroids would be completely sterilized or even reduced to unusable shards of rock, but that's the price you pay for deflecting the ultimate weapon.

if you had paid attention to the conversation beyond that, i did in fact go on to say, that i did not support outright denial, but mitigation. sure, an anti-celestial missile should be able to wipe out smaller bodies (asteroids and lower-end moons) but bigger ones should require multiple missiles to bring them down to size.

as far as cost, if you're going to need to stop an entire planet, it should indeed require at least a whole other planet's resources. not to mention the potential needed real-estate.

How is that a good thing?

Instead of requiring strategy to take control of the moon before your opponent, you just need to wait for your numbers to be high enough so that you can build a structure. A structure that does nothing but negate the bonus of having a moon to fling at somebody.

If anything, that'll just cause people to not use halleys. Sacrifice metal and metal income so that your opponent can just shoot down your planet, at a much lower cost?

If the cost is raised, nobody will build ACBMs. If the cost is lowered,

Does it really matter?

You just need to channel more resources to achieve the same effect.

There is no reasonable cost that could equal the income of an entire planet.

Five metal spots might be equal to 500,000 metal, but any more than 10 can't be given a solid value. Considering most planets have 25 to 100, the only solution would be to make ACBMs cost more than ten million metal each, which is stupidly expensive and can't emulate the resources gained over time from metal deposits.