I haven't played for many years, but decided to come back and actually got some friends interested as well. I remember that asteroid impacts used to leave craters if the planets were of different sizes. I did some googling and found that there was a patch to just blow up planets instead. I assume there's still no plans to revert that change in any way? Personally, I have no interest in playing competitively, and that feature just made the game more fun because it added an extra layer of options. I imagine that there was a good reason to remove it (in terms of competitive play)... but is there any chance of making it a settable option for game hosts (so it can stay out of competitive matches)? Or did it create complex issues for the game engine?
Mid-game impact craters caused buggy pathfinding; on their initial implementation they had no impact on the pathfinding, resulting in units and buildings just floating over them. Later it was made so that the crater itself was a permanent killfield for anything that walked over them, but that just meant you couldn't do a planet-wide command on worlds with craters; I believe they remained this way until their removal in July 2015. This means that for the whole of PA's primary development phase Uber was unable to work out a good way to recalculate the nav-mesh on the fly after a planetary impact; unless PA Inc. can do so now (which I doubt they're even going to invest the time into), then they won't be returning.
Oh ok, that's unfortunate (in my opinion). Well I'm hoping PA Inc. will do whatever they feel will make the game better, and I hope figuring out this issue is one of them. Actually if they can get this working, I'd like to suggest another feature that could work depending on how (and again - if) they fix this: assuming that the nav-mesh can be dynamically rebuilt for the destroyed area, that would lead well into being able to create units/buildings that can create craters or just specialize in planet reformation. I think that could also lead into several uses for a planetary core (harvest it, stop it, dilute it, etc).
