Does enhanced orbital units mean spaceships ?

:lol: Because spaceships are awesome.

We are sneaking up on the gas giant and orbital stretch goal so I am wondering what kind of orbital units we might get and whether that would include the space equivalents of naval units. Are we going to get orbital battleships?

Would be glad of any insights into Uber thinking on this and wonder what kind of space units would be worth having in the game?

Ideas?

No spaceships in PA.

Think less Spaceships and more Spacestations.

Mike

Think Orbital Planetary defense stations, Orbital platforms mounting Lasers, Maybe even one with a "Rod From God" Tungsten Lance launcher. Production stations that can manufacture K-bots already in the Drop pod, ready for planetside deployment, and Large Solar arrays adding cheap, plentiful power to your economy.

all orbital buildings should be still destroyable, so actually whether there are orbital units or you shoot from the planet.

I actually still hope there will be some kind of orbital fighter, like air units, but just for the space. So that you are able to move from one planet to another.

I would hate it, when you are able to fight from planet to planet, but there is NO connection its just nothing, the space need to be filled too, even if its just with some little space fighter, which are not really worthy.

ps: YES I still want the feature: Big fighter in the space -> big trash mountain -> creates new astriod or even little planet.

I hate everything about this idea.

My problem with it is that if you make even one unit for fighting in "space" than you no longer have a RTS game. you have a 4X game instead. It's a different thing, and suddenly instead of comparing it to TA and Starcraft 2, people are going to be comparing it now to Sins of Solar Empire, and MOO2.

And face it, with everything else PA is trying to do, if you turn it into a 4X game, it's going to be a pathetic 4X game that nobody would ever play.

And the other reason I hate it.

If you look at it rationally, there is no reason any sane individual would ever fight in deep space. There's nothing worth fighting for there. Odds of getting close enough to even know the other guy is there are pretty much zero to begin with. And even if you do notice him, odds of being able to get close enough to shoot at him before he simply flies away and it might as well be zero.

So naturally, battles just don't happen in space. They happen around things that matter.

They happen around planets.

It doesn't matter what you've got, star destroyers, death stars, tie fighters, it is all irrelevant. You're never going to fight the enemy without a planet floating below because your enemy has no reason to stick around long enough for you to shoot at him. Why wouldn't he simply retreat, get more reinforcements, and come back later? The only reason your enemy will ever stand and fight in space, is if he has something worth fighting for. The only reason he's ever going to stay, is if there is a planet below that he cares about enough to fight for.

To add to this I don't think Uber sees the "Orbital Layer" as a Combat layer, more so as a utility layer, so you might not be fighting ON the orbital layer, but instead fighting from it/to it(orbital-planet and/or orbital-moon/asteroid in orbit)

Mike

hm I understand your point and well I agree fighting in space would maybe dregee the game. I just have the feeling that, the idea of trash in the orbit creates a new astroid fits quite good to pa. :/

I could see someone getting blown up in deep space... IF they were on their way to your planet and you have some form of interplanetary artillery/defenses... But that is the only case and I feel helps your point.

On a different more useful point, an orbital fighter would not move your units between planets, a transport would do that, and we know we'll have that. They just wont shoot things.

I like the idea of having units in the orbital layer. However it has to be in the orbital layer. As it was rightly pointed out there is no good reason that anyone would fight in deep space, but it would also be silly if you couldn't attack your enemies orbital assets.

I envision the fight in orbit to be one of vying for control of 'the high ground' in terms of once you have control of orbit you can build weapons platforms there to bombard the planet. Perhaps these could be easily shut down by surface to orbit defence emplacements, but they would afford you a good deal of map control because your opponent can't build surface to orbit emplacements everywhere his army needs to go.

Also without units that can fight in orbit how would you contest gas giants? This makes me think that there will almost certainly be units that can fight in orbit, however I don't imagine you'll get large 'destroyer' style spaceships, more along the lines of fighters, bombers and perhaps frigates.

I think having buildings that can effectively shut down orbital attack would add an interesting layer to strategy and base design also. For example, imagine your opponent had an anti-orbital cannon protecting a base and you didn't have a large enough ground force to kill the base out-right; you could launch a surgical strike to destroy the anti-orbital platform and let artillery from orbit take out the rest of the base.

An interesting thing with orbital layer is while many units may not be able to shoot back at them, those who can may have far greater range than against, say, planes. After all, they are blocked by the curvature of the planet, and for the same angle, they can cover a bigger proportion of the far higher orbital layer.
Also, long-range artilleries should be able to shoot at space stations.

Realistically, surface-orbital missile should work better against orbital stuff than against anything else. Orbital stuff has only space behind it, which is the worst thing you can hide behind. Even atmosphere is better.
Realism has little to do here, but it could be interesting to use that for balance : having devastating long-range surface-orbital missiles, against very strong orbital bombers/unit drops.

Also, should stuff in the orbital layer actually orbit? On one hand, it would add something unique to the orbital layer. On the other hand, it may complicate things a lot for the player, and with their kind of tech, it's not as if they couldn't just hover up there.

Beyond the issue of orbital unit has sensor coverage and weapons coverage limited only by the curvature of the planet, as others have mentioned, I'd think that planetary assaults become less plausible because orbital units can engage transports approaching the planet and because any ground weapons that can hit orbital units would also have no difficulty hitting transports that are landing, a la the missiles hitting the incoming asteroid in the trailer video.

From what I understand Uber is not planning to include actual fights in deep space. Not because they do not want to, but because it is almost impossible to implement into the normal orbiting camera system (while still intuitive) It would also require a total new part of engine support to have units not-flying/moving-around-a-body, which is beyond the scope of the game.

BUT...

I think that doesn't mean they are scrapping spaceships altogether. Fights in orbit would be way easier to implement into the engine, as it is "just" a layer very similar tot the lower airspace layer, which the engine needs to support anyways. And the units still behave like units moving around a body.

When invading as well as defending my orbit, I would love to have an armada in orbit, either to engage invading ships, or to clear the way for my landing craft when I am invading myself. Also on planets without moons, I would like to be able to give fire support from high above in some alternative way.

I am curious about what Uber is planning for this, as we are hitting 1.3 Mill pretty soon.

All other ideas aside, I really love the idea of having a space station in orbit that gets destroyed, and the resulting debris falls to the planet and does secondary damage when it impacts. Little stuff could burn up in the atmosphere, really big things should crash into the ground and leave a crater (and a reclaimable wreck)


Always loved it when planes crashed and left wrecks behind in FA.

Im looking forward to somthing like the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome, where if enough units or other are destroyed in orbit it would cause havoc to any missiles or unprotected units requiring shields or defence lasers.

This is a good point actually.

It's something I've talked about before with friends. Denying an enemy the ability to put satellites in orbit is actually quite cheap to do if you don't mind denying yourself the ability to place satellites too. All you need is debris. Lots and lots of debris. Dumping trash into space isn't hard. Some cheap rockets made by the lowest bidder will do the job. Who cares if some of them blow up in the atmosphere. Oh darn. Not like anybody was on board.

It would be amusing to me if PA decides to include something like this.

It also raises another interesting question. Given that we are talking about advanced high tech machine intelligences that have been waging war for a very very long time it is safe to assume they would have an answer for this tactic.

So how do advanced machines fix a cluttered planetary orbit? Ideas people?

They shoot at it. It would still be a hinder, because everything would have to be either armed or escorted by armed units, and it would indirectly cover your own attacking units, as they would have to divert fire to the debris.

I actually approve of this. This makes the layer not be a 90% copy of air but with structures.

well that would make it still possible... the feature xP... when a big orbital station got destroyed, that an astroid is getting formed.

Orbital debris should work just like normal debris except it damages orbital units. So you either shoot it or make an orbital engineer recycle it.