Upcoming Update: New player experience and a bit more...

Gymballing can turn the rocket slightly, can't it? I mean of course not near enough to make the complex adjustments that would be made for space travel. (Unless I'm wrong, please excuse my total ignorance on the matter)

Anyway, I agree with you that there could be a more enjoyable system, what sort of implementation would you enjoy?

Gimballing is the act of rotating a rocket engine allowing you to steer the rocket while the engine is firing. It isn't the ability to steer the rocket that is the missing component of PA like trajectories. It's the ability just to keep firing the rocket for long periods of time at high thrust without running out of fuel (more accurately reaction mass).

We could always say that that this is the future, and that the rocket engines are insanely efficient. But if we are making such a rule about the lore of the setting, why do some units need a disposable rocket to be launched into space? Why is a unit cannon even sensible? I don't have a problem with games breaking the laws of physics, but it would be nice if they kept to the "laws" they made up at least.

Of course, one could always play the "it's just a game" or the "rule of cool" card and say that they don't care about such matters. That's fine. But I would still say that a game is universally better when it's mechanics and justification are in sync rather than at odds.

My days of doing grand explanatory posts are at an end. They had negligible impact on the game anyway. Rather than talking about the full system I would have preferred, I will break it down into the kind of features that would need to be implemented

1. A system whereby units can enter a building at a pre-defined entrance, and then be loaded onto a transporting entity. This would presumably borrow parts from the teleporter.
2. A system whereby ammunition can be fired on simple ballistic arcs between arbitrary points on separate planets. Such a system would likely need to be a hybrid of analytical and numerical iterative firing solution solvers, whereby the position of the planets is used to calculate an initial trial solution, and then the currently implemented firing solution solver iterates upon this trial to find the final trajectory. This is complex, but involves mathematical techniques that are routinely used on a daily basis. Such a system may be computationally expensive, but would get away with it because it is only used rarely by the game.
3 A system whereby the ammo staging system can be partially used with ballistic munitions, allowing them to to have different phases of behaviour. Such a system would also allow lots of other cool ammo types, such as cluster munitions.
4. A system by which ammunition can operate as a transporting entity. I believe this is mostly already implemented in the orbital launcher.
5. An improvement to the "anti-entity" system, allowing ammunition to be treated more like a regular unit. For example, allowing an ammunition entity to have a health value, and allowing weapons on anti-entity duty to recognise it as a standard target, and fire upon it as they would a regular unit. This is in contrast to the current system which has a bit of a hack to it where fired anti-entity projectiles do not directly interact with ammunition except for triggering a kill-on-collision flag. Such a system would allow anti-air defences (or indeed any weapon specified) to shoot down incoming pods. It would also be used to revolutionise the nuke/anti-nuke part of the game and add an enormous amount of more depth to it.

With these things there is so much we could do. It would allow us to create truly revolutionary orbital and super-weapon game-play, rather than just tweaking what is already there. I recognise that this is a lot of work for the developers but it is also a natural expansion of things which are already in place. However, with a frantic rush for the Christmas sale, I suspect there won't be time for such things. Perhaps one day.

Yeah like complexity over numpty tank rushing

@jables

The Youtube playlist that the in-game videos tab draws from hasn't been updated in a long time. Has it been forgotten?

Feel free to use ours

Also, any ETA on the long-standing bug where spectating a game in progress means you can't actually see any units? It's 100% reproducible. I ask for 100% tournament casting selfish reasons

@jables - you should post this on Kickstarter, it's especially relevant there

Hopefully they are waiting on a way to delay the game stream a few minutes, otherwise it's much too easy to cheat. Not sure how long the delay should be, maybe 5 minutes?

It only allows people to join as a spectator if you have that enabled anyway?

If I remember correctly, @jables said that the menues are going to be reworked so I am expecting a significant change in the main menu (hopefully )

In the tutorial, be sure to teach them things like the commander having an Uber Cannon alternate fire mode: a lot of existing players don't know about it.

Also be sure to teach them how to use planet-destroying devices, and nukes. Those things - especially the halley and laser - aren't that intuitive.

Finally, be sure to teach them some basic build orders, like opening with 2 factories, then 2 energy plants, and some mass, as well as the importance of economy management in this game: don't waste resources by underutilizing them; the cost of building advanced factories, etc..

Careful with that though, as balance sometimes changes. But in general: Yeah that is important.