Is the orbital game too shallow?

One simple suggestion to improve orbital: add a 'enemy unit detected entering planetoid' or 'enemy orbital unit inbound' alerts if you have deep space radar. A big problem with orbital is simply having enough awareness that you don't get totally blindsided by a drop.

I think a celestial minimap would be incredibly useful to have also.

The biggest problem I have is that interplanetary movement is complete trash and most the time, does not work. You try to have orbital units move to a planet only for them to just group in on little spot and sit there. Even when planets are close they do not seem to able to know what the hell to do or how get off planet most the time. Unit canon does everything orbital is supposed to do and it doesn't have a problem with sending units to different planets no matter how far apart they are. Let alone unit canon also has a better varity of units to to fight with.

I have not had this issue.

I actually kind of agree, I find the fact that I can't directly tell, as a quick example, an orbital fabber to start building jigs on a gas giant without giving it the move order first a bit annoying. It's not game breaking or anything but less fluid than I would have thought.

I feel like orbital needs an Aircraft Carrier.

Imagine an Orbital unit thats whole job is to drop off payloads of air units.

Say like, it can load up 20 air units, travel to the planet, then drop of those 20 air units into the atmosphere.

It would make orbital attacks more interesting, Air wouldn't be confined to just the planets you control without having to reset your production, would give more use for orbital vehicles and would be another wise investment into orbital attacks.

We would have done this already if the game engine would allow us to. Currently the engine doesn't support aircraft carriers.

How is this any different than a large Pelican? I understand that going Orbital may make it a challenge, but certainly it can't be that hard?

It's moreso the multi-unit capacity is not possible to do in a nice way...

What he said. Trust me, I will be the 1st one to jump up and down in joy and happiness when we can get carriers into the game.

You can make multi-unit transports, but they'd all only attach to one bone like how the Pelican works, so ideally you'd want to hide them under the model. so at the moment its impossible to make supcom esque transports (and apparently the transports in supcom were actually one of the hardest part or the project, with good reason)

Basically we can make a transport like that of TA's hover transport in that It would just hide units within the model, but at the moment area commands don't understand that the unit can carry more than one unit so you need to load them one at a time. (But they do all drop off at once when you tell them to exit at least.)

Right, so hard to do in a nice way.