Planet smash hit the wrong planet (mine) and annihilated both planets

I am not sure if bug or not. Anyway it was kind of cool, but it's also at the same time quite frustrating.

Basically what happened was, I was playing GW, and when the time came to smash the planet with the two remaining baddies on it, the trajectory of my sacrificial planet (which I didn't bother to build any of my mexes on) went *straight through* my home planet.

Now by now i was already very used to the concept of planets tunnelling clear through one another because that's how it always was.

But this time, my kinetic weapon planet and my home planet (which was not set as the target) in fact collided, and I died. The chronocam was also strange because it did not show the usual planet annihilation animation which involves the weapon planet disappearing and the targeted planet staying put but gaining a crater. In this case my home planet also vanished. Chronocam actually popped me out into celestial view! And there were only 2 planets remaining in the UI on the top right, so indeed both planets were removed from the system. So it actually seems like this is a case that was somehow intended.

So..... is this a thing now? Is this how this works now? Like Russian planetary roulette?

I don't mind the actual additional collision detection that appears to have happened. But this also means that we now have no way of controlling how we want it to play out.

BTW I can't even return to the GW game anymore. I died for real. Now I'm pissed. I was gonna unlock a loadout by winning that battle. It was the planet Alenquer.

Yep now if it accidentally hits a planet... well.. Whoops! In fact, planets get destroyed when they run into the sun too now, it's great.

Ouch, that's a downer. Although, I believe there is some ambiguous way to cheat and scan the "GW generation" to see if your destined boss battle lies on a "reward" planet.

Btw, the reason both planets were removed is that uber have also added proportional smashing... In your case the 2 planets must have been similar size, thus annihilating both. If you use a small planet on a large one, it will leave a crater but stuff a way away from the impact zone should survive so picking your target location is very important now.

That said the smashing system really should choose a path that doesn't intersect anything but the target planet and possibly include a preview if that isn't possible.

Well the game's certainly missing a great deal of potentially very awesome celestial mechanics modeling. It's clearly what needs doing in order for the smashing (the core selling point) as well as interplanetary unit transits to not look preposterous.

At the very least they could send smashy weaponplanets on oblique trajectories outside of the plane of the ecliptic.

If this collision detection were to be applied to units as well, then i will want to see my orbital units transiting to slam spectacularly into the planets that it crosses paths with.

To be fair, though, this is a tough nut to crack from a computational perspective.

Hmm. Interesting. So if I had not gotten so unlucky, then maybe the target planet would have also been totally annihilated, and I would have completely won then. I sent a 2-halley planet at a 1-halley target planet. It hit my home base which was also a 1-halley planet.

I don't even mind grinding it out to get all my loadouts. I know theres like a mod to give me new ones as well... I just want an excuse to keep playing GW, really. It's quite fun.

Well I did figure out that now that this behavior is new, it's easy to avoid catastrophe by monitoring the position of the planets in celestial view and just simply pause the smash-progress with the button. You can do stuff like put it as a moon of the target planet (to do some drive by nuke spam for example) or wherever else.

For instance in my case it was going to smash into my home planet which is bad, so i could have stopped it just short and it would have become a moon of my home planet, which could even be convenient as i could very quickly do some last minute shuffling around of orbital units between the planets and then carry on with the smash. Although I do suspect it will cause the trajectory to re-evaluate and send it back at the sun for another pass and I'd have to cross my fingers again.

Just so you know... Nukes no longer have that limitation of moon-to-planet. They can currently go from anywhere to anywhere.

Holy crap, seriously? So the AI has just been holding out on me this whole time.

THREE times i've told a moon to smash into the planet the enemies commanders are on, THREE times the moon smashed into the planet my commander was on, making me lose. is this a bug or just really bad luck?

Have you played on the same map all those games?
It depends on how the planets are positioned when you start the halley I would guess.
So if you recreate a specific situation the same thing probably will happen again.