Multi solar systems in same battle? (Not binary systems)

Why are you still wasting everyone's time talking about features that are a confirmed no from the developers? This game is never going to be about sending big space ships around the universe, unless by modification. If anything we should be pushing for Uber's vision on multiplayer galactic war, which is a confirmed feature.

I understand the "because it's cool" argument, because, yeah, it would be cool, but I side with the - "it doesn't add anything" camp, as it basically boils down to an extra large solar system with space choke points, funky orbits and an overview map. It also brings to mind space combat, which is not something I think will work within PA.

If anything, I think maybe adding more things like orbiting features around planets that hold strategic value other than being eco mines of planetary annihilators might spice up solar system combat in a similar way, but more fitting within the context of the game.

As philoscience says, I'd be much more keen on a multiplayer Galactic War.

Well, so this is mostly about a new space transport then. Assuming that this transport can, like any other orbital unit, enter and leave the orbital layer on any point (*), you will not gain anything "really new". Just take the big space transport make it's orbital velocity faster than any other orbital unit and add it to the vanilla game, and you have almost the same effect. The only thing I see is would be longer travel times between systems, but you can achieve this by making planet/moon systems and setting planets more apart. I've seen systems where travel times to outsider planets could easily exceed 3 minutes.
This leads me to another point. Adding another layer on top of the game mechanics (ground&air&sea, orbital (intra-system), and now inter-system), you need to differentiate it from the existing orbital (**). This will lead to another entry barrier that your opponent has to take to get to you. We already saw that the orbital barrier caused very often a stalemate. I would assume that we can expect the very same from any inter-system barrier. When currently large games play out at around 1 hour, I would expect multi hour battles for multi system games.
And this is the last point. This is still an RTS game, there is no "strategic view" that would make inter system production, assaults and combat viable. I would expect that an normal player really don't want to manage 50 T2 factories on 6 planets, just to invade another system, where another player has the same amount of factories to defend. Surely, I can imagine this would be really cool, but given the current interface this would be unimaginable cumbersome. It is even hard to manage 3 or 4 planets efficiently in an normal game with one system. If you really want something like this, it should be a special game mode like galactic war, where people know that they will fight for 5 hours or more.


(*): Yes, you can introduce some fancy mechanic where inter-system transports can only travel through "special points" (like e.g. star gates), but this will only force players to heavily fortify those points and effectively lead to really long stalemates, which aren't fun anyways.
(**): There are some ways to do this, two of those I think are bad ideas are travel time and throughput. For travel time, I would say that even travel time between planets in one system is sometimes to long. From my experience, only a few people can cope with assaults on planets that are several minutes of transit time away, without falling into the usual pattern of the "I will send dome units wait for three minutes and when they got destroyed I will send some more units and wait again three minutes, rinse and repeat until it gets to boring" For throughput, I suppose that this would give the defending party to much of an advantage, since you are no longer confronted with the full production capacity of your invader.

Well we kind of have game that does not have features that do not add anything. Result is that PA feels flat and boring like steak without ketchup. IT plays great (sometimes), but 10 years old game is more appealing, well even Zero-K looks better (while it suffers in gameplay from lack of coherent direction).

PA is about to be feature ready, time to add some cool factor to this bland soup.

@philoscience Any chance of a bit of help finding what features are a confirmed no relevant to this thread?
I obviously must have missed something.

But even if that's true, they said the game will be fully moddable and they want to allow as much as possible. This is a possibility that modders in the future will go for even if noone wants it right this second.

@crizmess I never said anything about picking specific points that restrict people from travelling through, for the exact reasons as you gave. Also I 'one' of my examples was moving per solar system using engines on planets, you cant block that just by "fortifying up" any particular point can you?

I guess I fail to see how creating an extra solar system with limited ways to escape/invade would add absolutely nothing. Failing anything else, mp galactic war or custom game with 2+ solar systems would give people a way to expand on black holes and collapsing suns.

failing notice by philoscience I will search per his example for and through the features confirmed/denied list to see where I might be told this kind of thing will never happen by uber devs to the degree they will not even go out of their way to make it easier to implement by modders and see for myself what is true.

Edit:
for @crizmess probably the one thing I can think of would be the suns as a definite point of transfer/entry. So boarding up the sun would certainly be the problem you pointed out?
except even though everything uses the sun as a main point of transport between planets, noone can actually go to the sun and sit arond it like you can every other planet.
Therefore at this stage, the sun can't be fortified and therefore no easy and cheap way to prevent full blown invasion.

@philoscience
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/confirmed-features-list-2-0.44950/
confirmed features list. Please point out to me what features that 'will not be present' you were referring to?

Nope, that's true.

Maybe I didn't get my point across (I often fail to do so): I could imagine that this ideas would play out totally awesome in a game! But there are two possibilities to do this:
* You get this full blown thing with players battling over systems with really huge armies. This would really add new aspects to the game. But this will need a new user interface and other ways to control your units. I said it in another thread, if you control a system with 4 or 6 planets, the importance where you place your stuff will decline, and the whole thing will slowly turn more and more into a number game. To do this in an RTS interface is cumbersome beyond imagination, so you need other means to control your army. Controls we currently don't have in this game, and it will cost a lot of developers time to make this happen. And I believe that it will cost too much developer time to do so. (*)
* The other possibility is add a bit of this: Maybe two systems, not so many planets, no strategic points between systems. Basically limit the multi system play so that you will never come to the point where you have 50 T2 factories you need to manage. But this game will not differ so much from a current game with a system that has 10 planets in it. Granted, there may be some differences, but I wouldn't expect that it would be so much different from what we currently have.

(*): THIS would be really cool. It basically boils down to a "trade" simulation where you can seamlessly zoom in to see production capacity placed on bases across a system. The emphasis here is seamlessly: If you want, you can do all the things on the RTS level. If this gets to cumbersome, you can switch to an more "abstract" view, but every action you make in one of the views will be represented in the other. I am not aware of any game that did something like this.

Just search the forums, the Devs have stated many times there will not be interplanetary ships or similar mechanics in vanilla.

The multi planet UI would need to be significantly improved if more than one solar system is going to be feasible.

@philoscience
It seems like you've attributed a meaning to my words that I don't remember giving?

All I said was restrictions on transport between solar systems, and make the only ones who can go really big expensive ones.
If you've seen the orbital overhaul mod, you already know there are ships that have been designed, and more things to be designed. Simply picture a bigger one and then introduce a mechanic that says something like "allow transport between solar systems"
Then have it enabled on planets with engines, and big ships, and have it turned off for everything else. At the very least something like that should be easy to do.

As long as you're using the suns as a slingshot, or you're putting engines on moons/planets and using them to leave their orbit (Which they can do anyway) there's no need to talk about having ships perpetually and independently leave the gravity well of a planet and stay out of any gravity well of any planet and moon. So from the start you were talking about denying something I never proposed.

The whole negativity thing and unpleasantness makes me feel bad, but I can't help pointing out your obvious lack of attentiveness.

Edit: @crizmess I didn't read your post till just now and I accept it. I hadn't thought that far and I thank you for taking the time to point out flaws rather than simply try to shut down the possibility and say "more solar systems add nothing this is pointless".
I'm reminded of the Uber original kickstarter video, how when they zoomed out to do the kinetic bombardment bit, launching planets with engines against other planets.
They've obviously made it tonnes easier with the simple button on the planet list.
What I'm getting at though, is they originally had it in their minds to create an extra layer of user interface. This extra layer would also serve to benefit larger gameplay if people wanted something bigger than 1 solar system, but smaller than a whole galaxy of 50 of them in MP galactic war.

imagine 40 player match over 9 solar systems, and the 9th sun is a larger annihilaser surrounded by planet annihilasers, and if you fire all the planet annihilasers into the larger one, it can shoot at any of the other suns and make it explode

Well yeah, obviously restrictions would be made on firing the annihilaser at other solar systems.
I thought I originally put that in. Maybe not.

Yup. I think I remember that bases had names in the KS trailer. They surly put some thoughts in the possibilities to make large scale orbital warfare easier. My guess is that this isn't as trivial as people think it is.

nah my thread is about both.

It'd be awesome if different systems could have strategic resources not available elsewhere. Like you had to travel to the other system and gather Uranium in order to build nukes. I don't know how you could achieve the same thing within the current game. Maybe the second system has a gas giant and the first doesn't?

Actually, travelling to other solar systems was the way I pictured the game in the kickstarter. I understand that the current server load would be unbearable but nonetheless, I'd like to see this implemented for several reasons:

- If you play with many, many players (up to 40 as I've read here and there) you need some space, multiple systems would be a great thing
- Higher level of strategy, because the larger scale and planning that need to go into an attack (You'll see it coming further away and can adjust to that by sending units to the assaulted planet; to prevent attrition warfare Uber could implement a t2 unit which is stealthed to orbital radar while in transit with very low strenght (maybe slightly stronger as a dox, but much more expensive).
- Because system power will scale, and PA scaling with it would do absolute wonders for replayability. Thanks to the artwork of PA this game will still be gorgeous in 10 years, when processing power is a hundred times our current power.

Uber has worked hard on this game and came far. The recent unit cannon update makes the game a lot of fun and modding is picking up. I think replayability and futureproofing will make this game a polished gem in the Uber portfolio for many years to come.

This sounds great for a more classic rts on the PA engine, though I must admit that the power of PA as a game lies in the strategic options with little resource management. As a new game founded on the PA engine though... Empire Earth/Rise of Nations on a interplanetary scale sounds pretty awesome for a future project.

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It would work if the space ships were like mini planets that generated a finite amount of power and store metal, orbiting the sun or other bodies, to allow for solarsystem invasion boats. also be smashed into the surface for kamakazies.