Orbitals movement mechanics shouldbe reworked

While a toggle is fine, I would almost prefer it be flipped by default at higher elevations. I also feel that the ground icons need to become almost invisible, if not completely. when you have a busy orbital layer above a large base the whole globe is a boggled mush of icons and nothing is usable for any layer. With ground you can get around it by zooming in below the orbital layer, but we need that kind of relief in orbit too.

This idea also plays in with one of my other frustrations. Trying to zoom out enough to see a wide area in the orbital view often results in clipping over to the celestial view. If we had just a slightly longer vision allowance for orbital combined with the top 30% of that zoom being dedicated to orbital I would be much happier.

I think radar satellites could be made to always orbit, and I think it would be a fun addition too. When you move them to another planet, they travel to the nearest point on the equator and just move along the equator endlessly. A simple mechanic, representative of the orbiting nature of orbital, and not detrimental to gameplay.

Everything else though, can't we just pretend they have thrusters to get/keep them where they need to be?

You can also tell them to area patrol the planet and the effect is similar.

Orbital movement inspired by real orbital mechanics has been on my wishlist for a long time. Many moons ago, I suggested a possible way that it could be implemented.

I now look back on that and believe that it is too complex, particularly from a UI perspective. The key problem has always been that an actual orbit is defined by 6 free parameters while a mouse-click on a sphere can only encode two. There are other potential issue in a lot of the "pseudo-orbital" systems that people have proposed (like the one shown in this thread), such as a lack of boundary conditions, degenerate behaviour when micromanaged, or that they do not give players the ability to amass forces before they end up floating over an enemy base.

After much analysis, I believe I have come up with a system which is intuitive, introduces no bizarre unphysical behaviour and requires a minimal amount of new UI features (specifically, the ability to draw lines showing the ground track, and orbital trajectory of a unit). In short, the only two parameters selected by a player are the argument of periapsis, and the inclination, with the other variables being defined by mathematical functions of those two variables (or functions of the unit's previous state). It's difficult to describe what this would look like to anyone unfamiliar with orbital mechanics, but I believe it would create something very intuitive, yet strategicly deep

I'm hoping that it can be modded in with the correct hooks, specifically the ability to specify orbits for selected units from information passed in from the scripting layer. Combined with a little bit of mathematics, and the aforementioned new UI elements, I believe we can get strategy unique from any RTS seen so far. It's just not going to happen for a long time.

Or a short cut that hides the ground icons (toggle on of / hold to hide)

Well, what I suggested is extremely simple.
Hovering is simply replaced with a fixed velocity equal to the planets rotational velocity at that height and you only change a point over the ground that they pass and the inclination. That's it.

Yes. There is absolute no middle ground [/sarcasm]
That's like saying to add guns to Counter Strike, you have to require everyone to buy complex glove periphrials that control your hands to hold the gun, reload by hand, and so on. No, you click the mouse and the game fires the gun. You press r and it reloads.

I said that myself in that post. It's not supposed to be realistic. But it's orbits. It's fun.

And to your point of "if their turning circle is that small, they can hover anyway". Yes, I said that too.
Except the whole limited recharging energy thing.
I wish people read, but I guess I wrote too much. It is still a worser turning radius there than they currently have, at least, on top of being for a limited (rechargin) duration.
Taking many loops around a planet to get in an orbit wouldn't be fun. That isn't going to happen.

I would be happy if moving orbitals basically behaved how they do now, except for not hovering over one spot unless it's on the equator, and some slight acceleration reduction like I noted.
Simulation orbits aren't going to happen. I wouldn't mind if they did, but I'm just as happy with some game-y psuedo orbit stuff and I think most others would be as well except for those people that want hardcore realism despite how tanks and other things are.

Like the orbits of planets and stuff aren't realistic. They're on a flat plane, no inclination. Halley's aren't realistic at all. But they're PLAUSIBLE if you turn your brain off for a second. It's not completely jarring with planets simply sitting there unmoving, and Halleys don't instantly railgun planets into one another. That's the same sort of treatment I want given to Orbitals. Not realistic, but not completely face palmingly jarring.


I don't want it to be modded in. Though some have said it's not currently possible to, anyway. That's like giving us planets floating in space randomly or not moving and all and saying we have to make planets orbit around suns and moons around planets outselves.
This is how the base game should behave. :/

The way Avengers circle a target in orbit is just plain wrong. It hurts me to watch it. The same with Hornets, I hate how they circle and fire missiles instead of having to fire them at range and then go for another run.

I played with it. It was unsatisfactory. It's been months since I tried it, but that the time it was based on the radius of the planet and it was very unreliable.

I'm not sure I really agree, but it definitely needs to be easier to just select units of a type and such.
It's very hard to double click on quickly moving units sometimes. Their selection boxes are weird.

At one point there was a settings in the ui menu that turned off all of the ground icons (except for the commander and orbital launcher) when zoomed out to the orbital shell. I really liked it! I think there was a mid level where all icons still showed which allowed for easy orbital and surface interaction still. Would love for that to be the standard or something. Otherwise this game is just to much of a cluster f***. Lol

I do really hope that a mod or something points out a good way to have orbital reworked. it does seem rather ... boring the way it works now :/ I do think @innociv makes some good points on ways it could be more real and interesting while still being easy to manage and use.

I don't think it's possible to make a mod to.

Someone pointed out an issue where they can't be forced to keep moving. On top of that, you need to create a few special UI things for setting their orbit path and having them automatically correct into that orbit.

Mods at the moment, afaik, just fiddle with a units stats, and can put some available game information onto the UI.