A Fetid, Malodorous, and Noxiously Petulant Exploit that needs Fixing: The Astraeus Fetish

A fetish is defined as an inexorable feeling of attachment towards an object, to the point of idolization, lionization and even divination in the most extreme circumstances. This attachment may or may not necessarily be sexual or masochistic in nature, and may just simply imply a simple fixation or affection/liking towards an object, which brings us to the topic of the Astraeus Fetish.


Above: An illustration of a Darth Vader fetish, in which the person adorning the costume becomes one with the costume, thus completing the conquest of the dark side over the maudlin and sentimental aspects of the subject.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I was playing against a certain player, and towards the end of the game, when my team was about to decimate him, he executed some form of strategy (exploit?) which involved moving his commander non-stop between 2 planets.

The system which we were playing on had secondary orbits; it had 2 main planets, with several satellites each, and I noticed that he was sending his commander on an Astraeus between 2 satellites of 2 of the main planets. It was performed with such incredibility rapidity, that the moment the commander entered the orbit, it left orbit in just 0.01 seconds; too fast for any anti-orbital or Avenger to shoot it down. According to Sigmund Freud's theory of psychoanalysis, this obsession with the desire "to be one with the Astraeus" constitutes a highly maladaptive form of fixation where the user attempts to purge feelings of inferiority arising from being defeated by substituting the need for a mother in the proverbial psychoanalytic deficit in the Elektra Complex by using an Astraeus to cope with inadequacies arising from the early stages of infant development.

In the end, my entire team quit the game as it lasted very long, and of course, the opposing team won as there was no way to shoot the commander out of thin air, even though we left hundreds of Avengers to guard the exact point where the commander would appear.

I believe that this exploit has to be addressed before game release, as it is imbalanced, and also constitutes a highly degrading form of Astraeus Fetishism that may be highly insalubrious towards players: Imagine the psychological damage that can be dealt to people if they are addicted to this mindless fetish.

Yeah, it's a very cheap "tactic" played by d-bags who can't accept a loss.
The only way to fix it would be to make astraeii 1-way.

But who would want that?

just make it so the transport need to wait for 30 sec when you enter a planet before it can leave again.
Then you can camp that place and kill him fast enought.

Yupp. This has been around for a while.

The Astraeus desperately needs to be 1-way.

Both this and the SXX insta-death could be fixed by having a cool down time where units take a few seconds to be able to do stuff when moving into orbit.

Many orbital units have a compact form when being launched; some (notably the solar panel, where it is clearly part of the design) are no longer used. Perhaps they have to fold up for interplanetary travel, and then unfold on arrival.

wow wow 30 sec ? seriously? 5 or 10 at best ...
i dont think making austreuses one way would help too much, concidering multiunittransports may also come post release and eventualy work similar i imagine this issue will remain ... because why would you arbitrarily limit them to not transport the comander when they could theoretically carry multiple vanguards ... no i think either a cooldown or buildupbar might help for when the austreus can leave an orbit ... making austreuses oneway may mess with small army transitions .. i personaly want them to assist factories and use ferrysystems in the future

Units wishing to move from their parent orbit into a new one should have to dock with a booster.

The equivalent of a teleporter for space units? A big one way catapult?

totaly disagree with that

Feel free, but I really dislike the total disregard for gravity this game shows. Zipping back and forth between planets is not supposed to be easy; that's supposed to be why the Halley and Orbital launcher exist (and why the unit-cannon should exist)

It is cheap, but can be dealt with. Basically what he did was load commander up. Move to orbital layer. Then issued a move command to another planet, then queued moves back and forth between planets. If you are using the camara save functions this is trivial to do. (shift-1 saves, alt-1 recalls) If he really wanted to make it difficult he would pick different points each time.

The way to combat this is to just watch where he shows up and put a Crab load of umbrella's under that point or have a ton of orbital fighters or anchors. He hits the planets orbit and is insta killed. Astraeus has very low health. it doesn't take but one / two hits to take it out.

To perfect this exploit, don't use just 2 points. Use tons of random empty spaces on both planets, appear randomly in different places each hop.

Nah, just make the astraeus not "linger" in orbit.

Make it an air unit, until you designate a point for it to move. If on planet it goes up, then there, then down. If off planet it goes up, then to planet, then must go down to land level the second it arrives at the destination.

You definitely have a window to shoot it down then, that is basically what the AI already currently does with astraeus.

Or a turnaround time... Not a huge fan of arbitrary cooldowns upon arrival as some have suggested, but it seems odd that units can go from a full stop to instantly out of orbit the moment you move them.

Accelerating to leave a gravity well should be a thing, a process during which they remain in orbital firing range.

A real simple solution is just kinda like Starcraft. If you have no economy coming in for x amount of minutes a count down timer starts and its game over.

That will solve the commander float problem.

my personal beef with ideas like that is that for unittransition it comes again down to building structures or requiring more and longer setups ...
what the game needs imho is flexibility ... unittransitionwise while limited the austreus is the most flexible we currently have ... throwing in boosters sounds rather like a limitation and doesnt realy add any strategy or tactic but would merely lower pace in an needlessly complicated way ... the austreus by itself is already the booster for your tank ... yo dawg?

Definitely agree with this - this could be shown visually by either having a deployment animation, or by having them appear in the orbital layer at a higher elevation, and have them drop down to the normal orbital level before they can do anything.

i am rather for giving orbital units an exitimer
and the sxx and any similar futureunit not being instafire on entry but needing to load first

Alternately you could just give orbital fighters the ability to follow and attack units moving in-between planets.

Not true. We could add in an animation upon entering or exiting the orbital layer for the celestial layer, so that the units couldn't just leave instantly.

They already have this ability....they just cannot shoot the units till they reach orbit