Planets affected by the sun?

Heya all,

How about that the Temperature could burn trees down and make some damage on some buildings? All that would depend on how far away the sun is and how big the planet is(each planet has its own ozone thickness).Of course you wouldn't get any trouble if you're in the shadow.
And well , a small UV-upgrade for every unit to get protected 100%.

What's Your opinion about that?



Vollatze aka. Prince
EDIT: Share also your ideas

I think it probably just makes more sense to not have plants on a planet that close to the star... and I would be against 'research upgrades' in general.

I would support 'weather' and climate affecting units however, e.g., how acid planets ate up unit health in TA, similar stuff could happen on an oven-planet. Maybe if the unit goes into the light from the shadows it begins to heat up before melting/blowing-up. Maybe special covers / underground tunnels/structures would have to be constructed to enable effective building on such planets.

Collecting solar power when your sun is dead would be difficult. So would seeing anything on the planet.

A creative idea, but it doesn't really add anything to the game.

I think that the space scale of the game may give us yet another option: building a solar powerplant at the orbit of the sun in a way that a planet is partially/fully shaded from the sun.
Nuclear winters, solar power shutdown... yeah. This seems pretty awesome.

Sounds great.Well I just wanted to bring the sun in the game,I mean ..planets?..universe?..asteroid with rocket propulsion So why should we just ignore the sun.

Would be interesting to see a planet like Crematoria from the Chronicles of Riddick.

Be wary about creating imbalances. For example even the mechanic 'solar cells need sun' has problems. It would give a large and predictable advantage to the player who has the most illuminated base in the early game. Sure you could place the players vertically but I think that is far too restrictive on map layout.

closest i want to this:

Take a planet, but 1 BAJILLIOn (or thereabouts) engines on it, slow it down so it falls into a closer orbit of the sun, plants burn, oceans boil... bots probobly unaffected (mabet light units burn, not heavy ones)

idea 2: smash large astroid/small moon into the sun.. massive solar flare jets out, roasts sizeable portion of the map, light units die, plants burn, oceans boil, bases get "empd" (temp shutdown due to overheating), T1/2's fry, T3s operate at 1/2 speed temporarily,

Basicly, try to time a solar flare and Artillary to hit at same time, so enemy base is weaker!

unless the devs balance this with other energy plants, like windplants(which would generate a much lower constant amount for instance)... this way a play could gamble with focusing on solar plants, but then gets a dip in production in the night. it the player fails his first attack. and the other player retaliates just before dawn, destroying the majority of the solar plants, resulting a very hard blow to that player.

on the other hand, if the player with the solar panels would succeed, that could be considered as a rushing strategy. Since neutrino mentioned (did not confirm) that players could possibly pick their own landing spots. this could enhance that strategy at play.

The only way to balance this with other energy structures is to make solars strictly worse than something else. The options available to the night player area a subset of those available to the day one. I'd like a way around this problem because predictable variable solar would be awesome, there would be an advantage to spreading energy around for a more stable income.

Players picking their own landing spots is an interesting solution. Although if they are restricted to one planet there the chance of them spawning on each other is a bit too high.

Possibly one of the reasons why they weren't sure about that yet. Commander faceoffs could be problem when landing very close.

Also my last post was under the assumptions of day/night cycles.

i hope that there are both day/night cycles as the planet rotates, and "years" (though not seasons) as the planets rotate around the sun

I'd say that's still unfair.

It gives player 1 two options, while leaving player 2 with one.

not when the players can choose where to build their bases themselves

From the very start?

ooo, I support that idea. Though, I'd be worried about 3-4 different players grabbing the same longitude for an early game advantage.

Trees growing on a planet close enough to the sun to burn trees makes no sense at all m8.

On the other hand, I do like the idea of a wider variety of planetary environments. Some of them, should naturally be on the hostile side. Requiring a research upgrade so that your robots don't melt on mercury sounds like a reasonable kind of thing to me.

Why would robots ever bother with terraforming. Screw terraforming, planet is too hot? We make robots with heat shielding. Planet has a vicious metal eating atmosphere? No problem, we build robots with anti-corrosive plating.

Who needs Terraforming?

You raise two excellent points. A functional day night cycle that affects solar power would be very nice to see. Not only would I love to see the graphics for a day night cycle, you give a practical reason to not rely so heavily on solar power.

Also there is the question of balance. As I recall in TA, it was painfully common to simply spam solar panels if for no other reason than they were cheap. Other power was better, but it was also annoyingly expensive, so in many cases you saw people using exclusively solar power for the entire game. I hope they come up with some better answers to discourage this behavior in PA.

This is quite true, solars did give too much power for their cost in TA.

They should still be cheap, but should be more of a supplemental power source instead of a main power source. More like wind, but with more predictable on/off times.

If maps/games have three game-modes, that should be addressed:

Symmetric - Exact equal starting positions for all players
Balanced - 'Approximately equal'
Random - Randomized