Orbital is unfun and super cheesy

So I played my first PvP match today with orbital and the whole game was just who got to a planet first and who put a million umbrellas on there first. Then the game just became a case of patience and waiting for nukes or halleys.

How did anyone ever think orbital is fine how it is?

I'd really appreciate some input on this. I'm pretty frustrated as to how anyone can think orbital units are good in their current status.

gib unit cannons pls

/rant

Unit Cannon is not a magical fix, and won't address many of the various issues with Orbital. What if there's only two or four planets that don't share orbits?

Asteroid belts would be the biggest fix.

Drop Pods would also be a nice fix, but not as nice as Asteroid Belts. Although, drop pods would be a lot cheaper to implement than the Unit Cannon or Asteroid Belts.

Orbital aircraft/unit carriers maybe? I wasn't saying the unit cannon would be a magical fix I wasn't saying anything about it actually. It'd just be nice to have. Moons wouldn't be nearly impossible to take without having to make radar deathsponges and it'd definitely help with invading. I really feel like asteroid belts would bring the same problem as small moons with options for halleys though. All you have to do is make umbrellas/avengers/aircraft to counter any invasion and if there's a ton of asteroids the game will just devolve to asteroid spam. Unless there was a counter for the asteroids I honestly think it'd be a dumb idea. Orbital is broken and needs a fix. Orbital are only good because of the meta players have developed and even then orbital units are super cheesy and ridiculously bad and unfun. SXX are only good for ACU sniping. Avengers are fine. I'd really like to have more options for invasion. It's ridiculous. I'm not saying I have all the options but I'd really appreciate it if there was some kind of legitimate discussion about this instead of people saying it's totally fine just because they can do super cheesy workarounds; e.g. sxx snipes, radars as bullet sponges, etc. This game won't ever get any better if people seem to think that orbital is totally okay just because they can abuse certain traits of the units in a way they weren't even intended to be used.

I'm a lot more mad than I should be but I really feel like people are using the meta as an excuse to make orbital seem fine when in reality it's totally broken and unfun.

orbital brokd pls fix

Yes, orbital is an odd puppy. Consider that in the ground game, defensive units are decisively outmatched by offensive ones, it seems a little strange that the balance of orbital seems to strongly favor the defender.

*shrug* it's like Naval. It sucks a bunch, but sort of works, so we live with it. The two main solutions to a planetary turtle are Haley and Annihilaser, and screw you if you don't play on a map where either are possible.

Grump about it aside, if they added one time use, heavily armored multi-unit dropships with area-pickup commands, that would be amazing.

I don't get why people don't find orbital drop units to be a good idea. All I hear from people is "workaround it" when it comes to issues with the orbital. I shouldn't have to learn how to abuse a system just to actually do decent with the game. That shows how broken this garbage is. Halo wars had the same issue. There were so many issues with the game like cobra stacking and grizzlies being underpowered to tech 3 scorpions but the competitive community just worked around them and had no issue with it. That seems to be the road this game is going down. It's disappointing and lazy.

Honestly for now the orbital aspect of this game is so bad that I'm never playing on a system with multiple planets until they do something to buff orbital's invasion capabilities. I'm awfully disappointed with how terrrible the balance is. It's sad that the main feature of the game, interplanetary combat, is completely garbage. I wanted to enjoy that aspect of the game and I bought into it expecting it to be good. Turns out it isn't fun at all. I'm just going to go back to FA and start playing Starcraft. Time for me to add something special to my signature too.

Well other then asking or modding the changes, what is it that you expect us to do?

Actually have a decent conversation about it and bringing things to light with the devs instead of everyone just working around it and pretending the problems don't exist.

We have, on many occasions.

Like there is little discussion we haven't had on PA to be honest.

Nothing will change until the devs start playing their own game again.

You noticed how they were suddenly willing to change balancing after PAX, when they finally had some time to actually play their own game?

So yeah, unless one of the devs (and @BradNicholson doesn't count) is experiencing these issues first hand, nothing is going to change. Technical issues are currently higher prioritized.

We had about every discussion possible, on every topic imaginable, and more often than not, the discussions predicted future features rather well, but don't think that discussions are going to have any real influence.

Not that fixing technical issues is bad of course.

Communication is key.

It's ridiculous how a game built around interplanetary combat executes that feature so poorly. I enjoy the ground combat but that's only half the experience. This game was innovative, yes, but it failed to innovate in the

So I'm going to assume the devs just don't have the resources or care about the topic at all. Why should I support a developer that doesn't give a damn and doesn't find the time to fix something that's so absurdly broken. They might fix this in the future or are already working on it and I'm just being impatient but if you're going to "launch" the game actually put effort into balancing the one part of this game that makes it different from the others.

I, and so many others, were sold on the fact that this game had something different, something innovative, and they failed so hard on it that I really don't think this game has a future at all. This is about as doomed to fail as Halo Wars was. Don't get me wrong I love this game and everything it stands for I just don't see anything good coming out of it if the community continues to act the way they do and if the devs continue to remain quiet on the matter of orbital units and other broken things about this game.

I don't want this to be the next Halo Wars.

I love you PA but you can't be doing this come on

If the devs didn't have us they wouldn't have a game. Pandering to the community is something a developer should always do otherwise they wouldn't get our support in the long run. Now I use pandering lightly because I've seen what that kind of stuff can do to a game.

Technical issues are important as well but if a game isn't fun even when it runs properly why should I even play it?

What would asteroid belts fix? You can still smother your planets with defenses to protect them from every other form of attack. It's just a race to the annihila...er...asteroids.

You're not necessarily right or wrong about orbital, but the experience can be vastly different between different maps and depending on who you're playing with, so I don't think you can judge well from a single game against other players. If you've reached the point where a whole planet is covered in umbrellas you can still push in with a few methods. SSX is one way, mass orbital fabs is another. My favorite would be a mass Astraeus drop with T2 vehicles loaded - umbrellas can't shoot them all down if you have enough.

If you haven't read all my posts then don't respond at all. "work arounds" are not good input, it never will be. A mechanic is still a broken mechanic regardless of work arounds.

Besides my obvious ranting, Ast' drops can be countered by fighters, and so SXX are too expensive to be used in a way where they're basically one use suicide units unless you snipe their ACU and even then a good player can go around that too. Deep space radar gives you a lot of time and intel to prepare for these sorts of things. You'll see them coming. Orbital fabs might be effective but you shouldn't have to build 30 orbital fabricators just to successfully launch an attack on a planet. That's retarded.

There are some mods looking specifically at improving orbital so you might want to take a look (they add additional units and tweak the balance).

Also the interplanetary aspect really works well when you play shared army mode with multi planet spawns. That basically side steps orbital and you end up with gates linking the planets together with the conflict shifting between them.

I'm not suggesting either of these excuse the problems with the main orbital mechanic, just thought you might like to try these. I think orbital mods are especially important as that way we can show the devs a solution (which is where we need testers). The balance of ground and air is very good now imo so uber are getting there. Naval and orbital just need a bit more love now.

I don't really like the idea of avoiding the problem with mods but the shared army thing might work. I just don't like shared armies. I feel like they handicap you if you don't have a team mate that knows how to macro properly.

Yeah shared army requires a good team mate + communication. Team speak is very helpful. When it works it's by far the best game mode, sadly that is rarely the case with random players though. You'd be welcome on the promethean ts server if you wanted to try it with people who know a Halley from an energy storage

I just had a random thought, what if you could launch your commander to any planet in the same way it arrives to starting planet? Heavily armored drop pod, that explodes upon impact clearing area around destroying all the cheap stuff around (not expensive stuff). Unlike astreus, drop pod can survive anti-orbital and anti-air attacks, and unlike astreus, drop pod won't take you back.
Idea is, it should be ultra high risk and moderate reward tool (probably expensive one too), which puts your commander into danger, but at the same time, commander is guaranteed to land, area around will be clear, so you will be able to drop a teleporter and evacuate ASAP, while pushing your units through the other end. And there should be a surprise element - deep space radars don't detect drop pods.

Ok, this sounded better in my head before I wrote it. If we are speaking about truly fortified planets, this will result in instant death probably. Bombers will be there in no time.

I think that the solution should be adding new orbital units to make more incisive and fun, I have two in mind:
- An interplanetary assault transport, a massive unarmed spaceship that can carry many air and sea/land units and that can resist most of the anti-orbital fire and its only role is to break into the planet and land to deploy its troops. I really like this one, mostly because I love to see large fleets of transport attacking an heavily fortified position and few of them surviving, epic. Also it would give players a reason to build in lategame land and air defenses not only unbrellas.
- Battleship, a combat spaceship armed white some light anti-orbital turrets and ventral cannons to target the surface. It has the ventral section reinfourced with extra armour so it is more vulnerable to the orbital fighters fire than to the umbrella.