No Endgame with multiple planets

There isn't enough of a way to end the game when people are spread across planets. It usually ends up as a VERY slow attrition race where one side has tons of orbital units and the other side has tons of planet units so neither side can mount a successful landing. The side with the orbital units prevents the construction of teleporters by destroying everything in orbit while the side with land units can destroy any attempted landing but can't clear the orbital units. The game comes down to who gets bored and either throws away their planets in random attempts at commander sniping or just leaves (since there is no surrender option). If one side has a metal planet EVENTUALLY they will win by destroying all the other planets, but it takes HOURS in a decently sized system. We need a way to force a game ending in a reasonable amount of time. We also need a surrender option, so at least one side can declare '**** it' without having a leave on their record.

Nukes? Halleys? Annihilaser? SXX? If that isn't enough, what ideas do you have for endgame other than surrender?

If games are reaching stalemates, try different maps. Annihilasers and asteroids are your game enders.

Dox.

This is why we need asteroid belts! :-D

cptconundrum is right though. If you're gonna play multi-planet matches, you need to build the map properly. Moveable planets are a must and metal planets are important as well.

If there's no moveable planets, then stock up on SXX laser satellites and Avengers.

I did write a big guide on the topic of invading other planets if you're interested: http://forums.pamatches.com/t/guide-invading-an-enemy-occupied-planet/74

Tried it. Used all the movable planets. Anti-nukes everywhere, nothing can get through. Too many orbital units being built too quickly for anyone to invade anywhere (most planets and 10+ orbital yards putting out avenger and SSXs) AND all the free ground on the planets covered in umbrellas. Neither side can get anywhere near the others' planets. You couldn't even see the planets under all the icons. EVENTUALLY the 1 metal planet would have taken the game, but that would have been after a very long time. When you have a bunch of planets left the metal planet laser doesn't exactly go fast. By the time you are in a stalemate situation the issue is that everyone has effectively infinite units and has countered every way of bypassing the unit shields.

I think the main issue is orbital has too little diversity. There is no way to rock-paper-scissor in order to break through a defense when there is only 1 thing (2 if you count umbrellas). Having some kind of cruiser-destroyer-carrier dynamic or something where you have options instead of just numbers would help a lot. Right now numbers are all there is; there isn't a specific solution you can pull out to anything your opponent does, you just have to constantly throw numbers at them and hope you have more (and you can't really tell because everything gets so on top of each other and numerous that counting is impossible). It makes me pine for Experimentals, Vanilla SupCom 1 style.

I was not aware that anti-nukes defend against planets dropping on your base.

I find nuke spam + invasion works pretty well. Rather than try and nuke his main base, assign your nukes to hotkeys 1-9 and then nuke out a 3x3 section:
XXX
XXX
XXX

Then show up and drop a teleporter in the middle.

The timing is tricky because if your orbital units arrive first, they'll either die to the ground junk or get nuked. If they arrive too late, the enemy will have time to figure out what happened and rebuild.

Or just always be sure to include:
* 1 metal planet and no planet smashers, guaranteeing that whoever owns the metal planet can win
or
* Enough planet smashers to smash all the planets

Personally I like metal planets just for this reason. No more stalemates. (Note that if there is a planet smasher, though, you can smash the metal planet and break the catalyst locations rendering it useless as a planet killer.)

Unless you happen to land the smasher on a commander, your base might get smashed up but the game isn't over, and you eventually run out of planets to smash. And smashing does nothing to mitigate semi-infinite units in orbit, so you still can't make a landing in these situations. The fact that this opens a hole in the antinukes isn't much good since there is no longer anything of value in that hole.

Radar satellites are very useful tools when planning a planet smash. You only get one shot, so make it count.

This is why people say the end-game is boring as hell. It is, there is no strategy left, it's just fling massive amounts of units at each other and maybe possibly get lucky and land the final blow on his commander.


Orbital combat is broken / boring atm, and that's a fact. Until it changes, well, use tactics as above. If out of options, resign - it'll be a better use of your time.

we surely need more options that arent´s planettype dependant ... don´t have to be superweapons though ..
hovercrafts, multiunittransports, carriers, crossplanetary fighteraircraft and ... (yea i hate it, too) unitcannon ...
i rather like uber to refrain to add further orbital antigroundunits before that is in and for when it still doesn´t help (which i like to doubt)

Or orbital teleporters!
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/stargate-supergate.65473/#post-1024886

ahem:


https://forums.uberent.com/threads/...lanetary-annihilation-general-gameplay.63990/

Y'know what the game needs?

Big Berthas.

Great big, interplanetary artillery. Highly inaccurate, big splash damage, and can hit orbital as well as the ground. Balanced to be like the Big Bertha's of TA, where one was just a little annoying but 5 really began to tear your base apart. Even cooler if we could have it fire shells that come in on a random trajectory, instead of straight down.

You could also give it variable energy cost based on distance to the next planet, to sort of simulate range limitations.

It would help resolve the stalemates and add in a factor we've totally been missing from TA.

That tends to be frowned upon in this community for some reason that i'm not aware of.

That's kinda like the unit canon anyway, except explosions.

Well, I was just thinking about how it went in TA when you both porced up and couldn't break through the front lines.. the big guns at the back would start firing, and you'd start taking out his eco.. and it'd become a desperate scramble to take out his guns before they took out yours....

And that part of it is completely missing from PA at the moment

There are definitely ways of breaking planets that people think are 'safe'. Most of them involve the element of surprise, though. The orbital game plays best with most planets in a system tightly orbiting a gas giant or other planet: this keeps travel times between planets short, and places the orbital game on a much-needed hair-trigger.

A tactic I'm currently working on is the idea of the 'scout nuke'. You use a T2 radar satellite to scout the locations of the enemy antinukes, plus chronocam where necessary (chronocam is huuuuge in allowing you to check what you've scouted in these situations). Then use a T2 fabber to check their ranges/overlaps by pretending you want the fabber to build antinukes on top of their antinukes. This should allow you to find an area of minimum antinuke coverage. Lastly, you use the land point of the scout nuke to determine where you can hit the planet as well (you don't want your nukes to travel for a long time across the planet's surface - you want them to arrive in the air layer and detonate as fast as possible so there are fewer antinukes between them and their target).

Then you throw nukes at that spot until you get hits, as Slamz suggests; you should be able to work out how many you'll need to within 1 or 2 nukes. Make sure you time the orbital travel between planets with a test fabber, and likewise the nuke travel time with a 'scout nuke'. Then make sure your orbital units arrive in a big blob right behind the nuke explosion, get the teleporters down (best to have more than 1 for speed of invasion) and assuming you've done your planning properly (enough spinners to shoot down the enemy air units? Enough vanguards to give your beachhead some early hp?) you should have an invasion on your hands.

Your first priorities will be to fan your units out quickly from the invasion point. Kill off umbrellas first to open up more room for your teleport-builders; they might use a defensive nuke on you and you will need to be able to resume the invasion quickly. But it is possible, even on small planets, and since many people believe stalemate breaking is impossible atm, you can give people nasty surprises by knowing what you are doing. You need a big eco advantage, not to mention care and patience. It would be nice if stalemates were a bit easier to break...

One thing that drives me nuts - though it's a legitimate tactic - is adv. air fabbers building Umbrellas directly underneath your offensive Anchors/SSX in response to an orbital invasion. I'd advocate some kind of cost increase, be it build time, energy usage, or something, but I'm not sure it'd really help.

The Unit Cannon and/or chunky dropship units would help a TON. But black box dropships wouldn't fit Uber's vision for WYSIWYG... even though a teleporter is effectively a "black box" in that you can only assume "something bad" will come out if you let it live.

unlike orbital artillery i wouldn't mind groundbased crossplanety artilery .. to me that is a different scenario ..
i think however that there are some dificulties with that which might be the same reasons we dont have the unitcannon yet ..

reason1: direct line of fire ...
which would be quite inaccurate especialy considering that we are not using a annilasor kind of weapon that just blows up the entire planet but we want to hit a very specific targetarea ... and here comes the problem with planet distances, planetrotations and blocking planets ... so the artillery wouldn't ever be able to consistently bombard the targetarea ... let alone being precize

reason2: orbital transferroutes ....
for the unitcanon that launches jetpods maybe or nukes as we already have ... but for such artilery? just waaaay to silly ... i mean screw realism in videogames but that would look just way too unbelieveable there needs to be at least some form of authentisity ..