Everything is too easily attainable and the game is too limited to what you can do.

Interplanetary nukes!!!

Plus you should be fighting for control of those asteroids.

Wait so having several ways to use the map you play on as weapons and leaving whole systems in shambles is too limited? This game is too complex if anything.

Also it seems you need to up your orbital play so you can invade planets, there are several ways to do this. Use the orbital stuff to gain leverage on the surface of the planet.

I would agree with you if you were on the same planet, I was pointing out for multi planet battles though. Tier 1's are useful if you are playing on the same planet of course but with PA you are likely playing with multiple planets and won't find each other until you get to tier 2 which means most tier 1's are unused.

The death star takes resources to build and therefore you are going to have less resources to build other things. This leaves you open for attack and if you aren't being contested then that means you are playing against noobs. It doesn't mean the game is unbalanced.

Would you try to do that if you had the option just to blow up the planet though? thats the problem wasting time into making a ground invasion that has a good chance to fail is never going to be as easy to do as just using a asteroid or a death star.

You can build an orbital launcher with Tier 1 and portals. And if you are going to turtle on your starting planet then you deserve to get hit with a planet or laser in the face.

Sending a small orbital force of a few fighters, a radar and a fabber so you can build a teleporter is very much simpler and cheaper than building halleys on a moon or completing an annihilaser. I do it as soon as i can.

So you think its easier to attempt a ground assault when the opponent has orbital fighter and air support on a planet that he owns rather then just getting a death star up? If you just spam units on your home world which I do, you won't need to worry about ground attacks because you will always beat them before they have the chance to even attack. Hence why death star or asteroid is a lot easier and less time consuming. Try building lots of ground units and then try building enough orbital transports to take them to another planet which would likely be heavily guarded by the enemy. I never have a problem with resources to worry about it draining and compromising my production line as I pretty much have resource dominance on the planet I own as I have no real threat of a ground attack.

The oppenent who some how manage to let you make a gateway mustn't be good player to see it getting built in its early stages. radar and bomber s would smash it in a flash.

The trick is to do it early and somewhere the opponent won't notice. Just like in any regular land-army fight, scouting, flanking and feints are great tools. People can't be everywhere at once.

That's why you deserve a planet smash to the face. If you want to turtle on your planet, then that's what you are going to get. This game isn't about just massing up the biggest armies. And if you own a whole planet, why haven't you tried to invade another planet? And a planet smash isn't an instant game winner, because you should spread out your commanders, and don't put all your eggs in one basket. You're looking at the game all wrong. The amount of options you have in this game is endless. No game is ever the same.

Watch this epic match!

Basically OP, it sounds like you only have experience of playing large orbital games against noobs. This is obvious to even a mediocre player reading your posts.

Join a clan, or even just drop into our Teamspeak (linked in my sig) or that of realm, burning, VoW, whatever for a few games and I think you'll quickly see that many of your complaints are ungrounded.

Economical damage to enemy metal extractors and energy plants is more effective than it may seem. You will notice that their production is much slower and you can win a war of attrition.

Gates *can* work very well. As with all things it depends on the circumstances. Things that can help: Once the gate is built, set the orbital fabbers to *assist it* and they will keep repairing it. Makes the gate almost impervious to T1 bombers / light units. Obviously you need to send orbital fighters to protect your fabbers- although once you can get it open it's less important as you can bring ground based support through.

You can rally units to a teleporter on your planet and they will rush through *as soon* as it opens which is handy. Also remember if you're invading, keep the target location open in the PIP window so you can activate the gate as soon as it opens (timing is *everything* when invading). Another trick I've learned is to draw your opponents orbital away from your gate zone by sending in a small force of avengers to the other side of the planet just before you send the fabbers in. Your opponent will move forces to the fighters *assuming that's where the fabbers are going*

As for the speed of the game, well it is faster paced than TA, however the various balance mods available do change that significantly so I highly recommend you give them a go. To get started go to the 'mods' sub forum and to the 'released mods' section. Download and install PA Mod Manager (PAMM) and run it- from there you can download and auto install all kinds of mods including Statera which is a very nice rebalance of the game by Stuart and Squishy (+ friends) that increases the number of units and makes the whole thing feel more 'TA' like as it's a bit slower paced.

yak9ut, sorry but i think you are a newbie, everything what you said is GOOD against noobs, when you play against a skilled player, you can't reach T2 in the early game... i played a match when i tried to go to T2 around 20-25 min, because we harass each other a lot. First try to learn basics, after something new, and faster gamestyle.

I loved TA too, but don't be a fanboy, that game is old, and gives you a lot of good memorie, but not as great as you think, this is a newgame, still evolving. I think UBER will work on this game a lot more.

You must be playing agaisnt AI or "each one planet PvP" mostly. If you try to rush for T2 in a PvP game you will get wiped on the ground game with T1 units.
Flame tanks are the best T1 commander + base killers. T1 Destroyer needs more micro, but can do the same on the sea. If you lack the masses to stop them you will be a mushroom cloud before you know what hit you.

As for assaulting planets, there are several ways. Currently Planetary invasions are the least favorable one, but they are at least doable (if there is a game without Nukes, SXX, Ani-laser and haleyabel stuff). The goal is to only kil lthe commander (take the enemies king). For wich you have the following options interplanetary:

SXX snipe. Counterable by keeping the commadner mobile or umbrella. If 5 SXX drop into orbit preciesly on top of the commander, no amount of Umbrella's and Fighters is going to prevent them from shooting and killing the commander in 1 Salvo. And then just fleeing up into interplanetary space again.

Nuclear duel. The one wich hard more time to prepare (was left alone for longer by his enemies) will have the better orbital game, better scouting, better anti-nukes, better nukes and better eco and win.

Hit them with a Planet. Can be cheaper then rushing to nukes, but players are smart enough to counter with a preemtive nuke strike so you need at least some anti nukes there.

Hit them with the Ani-laser. If the enemy let you take it, it is his own fault. It might see some balancing later on, but currently it is a intentional game ender.

Planetary invasions:
They are possible (if you have comparable eco). Non-spawn planets often have weaker eco. It requires three superiorities in a small area:
Orbital Superiority
Air superiority
Ground Superiority (to get the transporter going).

Fighters are the main way to get orbtial Sup. Anchors are not that good in the orbit, but they do wonders agianst airspace. And somewhat against ground. Hence thier name, they "anchor" your foothold on an enemy planet.
The anchors will give you a decent "no fly/heavy AA" zone for step 2+3.
You need 1-2 SXX to counter any umbrella he might try to build near your beachhead.

In a dircet interpretation you can just drop a bunch of AA units via Astreyus. But if the enemy a ungaurded lake, how about taking beachhead more literal? Naval units are very powerfull to control a air&ground space and actually have T2 Anti Air ship. Enough to give you room to build your teleporter on a nearby beach.

Getting the teleport up is the hardest part. Naturally you should do that on the side of the planet opposite to the enemy base. Longer walking way for him = better for you.
T2 Bot Defense fabbers are the fastest Teleporter builder and can be used to build basic defenses around it. They and thier T1 cousins can easily keep it alive despite artillery fire (if you got the metal to spare). Also, why only build on when you can build 5 next to another?

Of course all of that is moot the enemy jsut fires a defensive nuke against you.
Nobody ever said this game is finished just because of launch and a total of about 100 units is planned, with no Sup Com experimentals and no exo-orbit battles.

You know what these advanced units get you?

Nothing. They have way too high single shot damage to be viable against T1 swam. Plus, there is an efficient T1 counter for every one of these.

Try playing not only vs the AI, but vs real players. They won't let you expand that easily at all. And contrary to the AI, real players will not let a single weakness in your defenses go unpunished.

Of course, steam rolling your enemy with a wagon load of T2 units may seem effective. But it isn't like this at all.

I like e.g. striking with Boombots, T1 bombers and Dox in a rapid succession while carefully watching the enemy and always attacking with the unit type he has currently no defenses against. When he tries to switch defense / unit types, just do so yourself, just keep some units in spare. While a teammate keeps him occupied on a different front. In my last 2vs2vs2vs2 match, that killed 5 coms in a row, even though most of them went T2 long before my team did. (Only one nasty bugger escaped to a gas planet and used the eco to turtle on smash-able mini planet )

Don't no what tell you other than you are doing it wrong, soz.

Teleporting units onto other planets is a fun and perfectly viable way to win a match. The problems this game has in regards to orbital warfare stem from 3 main areas:

Unflexible Transporting - There are only two ways to transport units to other planets, astraeus and teleporter, the astraeus is flimsy and can only carry one unit making it pretty unreliable, and the teleporter requires energy which can make it a bit of a pain when you are stalling on power. That's it. Teleporters are the best way to move units but are a bit fiddly and make demands on your eco.

In my humble opinion the inclusion of the unit cannon and a military grade multi-unit transport (one that's designed to plop units down and escape to safety even under fire) would give you more options and prevent stalemates occurring quite so frequently. (And this would NEED a ferry system, it's one of supcoms most useful features, steal it.)

Overpowered Game-enders - The annihilazer is super unbalanced, planet smashes actually are a lot better now they don't destroy the entire planet, also you have plenty of time to intercept such smashes now that you can nuke away their engines or route, the lazer on the other hand can't be stopped once the catalysts are in place, you are dead.

IMHO the Annihilazer needs to scale it's damage to a charge rate, keep the "can instantly fire, as many times as you want" design, but make the damage scale to the charging period between shots. So after the catalysts are built and between each discharge the destructive power of the lazer slowly builds up from Nuke power, to crater inducing power to utter devestation power.

Awkward Scouting - Scouting in the orbital layer is a joke, radar satellites travel far too slowly, require far too much power and reveal far too little visibility to be used as scouts. They are best used for supporting combat units providing radar coverage of planets where you don't have a base but do have armies. The only way to truly scout a planet is to transport scouts to the planet and as well all know air scouts (the best kind) can't use teleporters. Making scouting a planet a very awkward process.

IMHO we need a dedicated fast moving scout for the orbital layer, you could use avengers for this purpose if their speed was increased and they revealed a small portion of the planet directly underneath them.