Metal worlds & balance

There could be interesting middle ground in-between these two concepts but it does depend on how travelling between planets is permitted. A few ideas off the top of my head.

Every planet is reachable from every other planet: Like BulletMagnet said, space travel is likely to be a point to point movement from what we know, thus we would have to know the planet is there. I am also unsure I the idea of having to build telescopes which amount to a form of scouting buildings. But just because the location of planets is known doesn't mean we have to know what type of planets they are, which is what I think Paws was suggesting. Having to send units to a planet before you know what kind it is.

Not every planet is reachable from every other planet: This I see as being kind of like the way planets work in Sins of a Solar Empire, where it is possible to reach a certain number of planets from each planet, but not all. This could open up a few possibilities, including (but not limited to):

- Not knowing how many planets are in each system: A player could start on their world with the ability to move to worlds within range, once scouted the amount of visible worlds would increase by the number of worlds the scouted planet gives access to. Or not, it could work as the system above suggests with all worlds visible but unidentified.

- Choke point planets: This would make certain worlds very valuable tactically, independent of the resources distributed on them. There may only be a few worlds that give the enemy access to the other players area of the solar system and so these planets would become hotly contested.

There could even be different ranges of rockets/interplanetary transport depending on Tier which would make the linkages between planets more complex. Alternatively it could be that longer range transport between planets necessitate smaller payloads, making it a trade-off between skipping past heavily defended choke point planets for a smaller attack behind enemy lines.

This could be an issue with KEWs, perhaps the number of planets reachable from a given asteroid could vary depending on the amount of resources is put into building/powering the rocket engines. T1 range KEW and T2 range KEWs.

Some great points for consideration. I particularly like this one:

It brings a new aspect to the tactical value of planets that I hadn't considered before now, having not played sins. I find this idea appealing because it would potentially bring important battles to otherwise worthless pieces of rock.

Oh yes, I should have thought to attach a few images for those who haven't played Sins before. Glad you like the idea, I think it would be good to have some differentiation between tactically important planets from a positional as well as resource perspective

http://media1.gameinformer.com/imagefeed/screenshots/SinsofaSolarEmpireRebellion/empire.jpg

http://www.gamingsteve.com/images/2008/02/sins_of_a_solar_empire_3.jpg

PA of course could do better in terms of an interface that looked more like a solar system. Orbits around the star (or stars in binary systems etc) rather than having static planets in random positions in relation to each other; and the arbitrary connections between planets irrespective of distance that Sins sometimes had. Perhaps if each planet when selected had a series of rings in the UI, with any asteroid/planet within each ring made reachable with the tech represented by that ring. T1 rockets can reach anything within the inner ring, and so on.

In addition PA would have to have a UI that is in keeping with its aesthetic, but I think the core mechanics I mentioned from Sins would be a nice addition to solar system level tactics.

Reminds me a bit of the mass relays work in mass effect.

What if those choke planets were destroyed? I like the idea of having a range from planet to planet but in PA planets are not permanent features from what I understand. Unless the planet remains there but players are unable to land on them. This could open up Orbital units more if there isn't any gas giants in the system.

I thought I would point that out as we don't know what will happen to planets if they are destroyed. Or I don't at least I haven't seen a post on it.

This is a very good point. The model would have to be subject to change if planets were wiped out entirely when hit with KEWs

From what I could see from the gameplay visualisation trailer it didnt look like the planet itself was removed entirely by the KEW. This to me would suggest more what you mentioned about orbital units becoming more relevant (a solution I like the sound of) but that is purely speculation.

If planets were removed altogether an alternative solution could be what I suggested regarding varied ranges of interplanetary transport based on invested resources and/or tier level. This admittedly runs into an issue if more interlinking planets were destroyed in addition to the 'choke point' planet. I think this could be balanced in terms of the location of KEW potential asteroids in the procedural map generation and possibly by having a few classes of asteroids.

For instance it could be that KEWs of "planet destruction grade" (rather than the trailer depicted planet wipe grade?) would not be in locations where the potential for cutting off access to areas of the solar system exists. Alternatively this COULD be allowed to happen in some areas of the solarsystem, giving players the option of narrowing down the avenues of access to an area of the solar system by destroying a few of them.

The reasons the player might do this would be to reduce points of attack into their area of space. Alternatively an agressive player might do it to prevent an enemy from expanding into that area except through heavily defended planets.

Again just some ideas for discussion, I have no idea how planet destruction is going to be handled, so this is all subject to change depending on how KEWs are implimented.

As far as I am aware, planets may be devastated by KEWs but never destroyed, in effect you would scorch half the world, and the other half would be fine.

Building in the devastated zone would be impossible, but traversing it might be probable.

In the end, you may have no extra attack asteroids in a system, leaving a few planets with half the surface left.

In terms of metal worlds, was Core Prime from TA a gigantic death star esque space station, or was it a planet completely built over over thousands of years of urbanisation? I would say it would be the latter, considering the existence of oceans and whatnot. The metal layer would be pretty thick though to allow it to be farmed by metal mines.

In terms of balance, metal worlds in PA would probably be of the space station type, and obviously not be dense enough to directly mine for materials. However, such space stations would have power cores and likely mass/metal makers to keep running. Such resources should be accessible, possibly by certain types of specialised engineering or loyalty buildings as opposed to just being resource points. Add the possibility that they have enormous weapons systems, and these worlds would be pretty damn awesome to control.

Add reclaimables, and a few metal/mass points, and it would be perfectly acceptable for a player to start on one of these worlds. Obviously, the engineering or loyalty building/s required to take control of space station internal subsystems would be high tier and fairly expensive to limit their usage until mid to late game, depending on how powerful the subsystems would be.

As for planet 'networks', Sins had a jump system that went between one 'beacon' and another. This could be simulated somewhat if realistic orbital mechanics were added. Wherein engines of a higher tier could reach a target via a shorter trajectory and thus take less time. Low tier engines would only realistically be able to reach nearby planets without taking enormous amounts of time and resources for the correct orbit. Though it remains to be seen whether they do plan to implement actual orbital mechanics - they made a rookie error with the KEW engines in the trailer, which were still firing on final approach towards the target planet.

Pretty much what I suggested above, but I like your description of a potential PA visual representation of a Sins like system. It describes better than I did what I wanted to get across in terms of the visualisation of the connectivity between planets.

I dont see how the engines firing on final approach would be considered a "rookie mistake", we are talking newtonian motion without any friction acting upon the asteroid so presumably any extra speed on final approach would be a good thing. Sure any speed gain post gravity slingshot would be negligable, but it certainly it isnt more or less realistic to have the engines off on approach to the target rather than on.

It's a typical SF genre mistake that you need to keep your engines running in space to keep up your speed. And I do agree that there's nothing particularly wrong with doing an engine burn on final approach to gain some extra velocity, but it is extremely expensive in terms of fuel cost when you don't need any extra velocity after the initial burn to knock the asteroid out of its orbit and the slingshot. Of course, it could be that fuel is very cheap in-universe. I just worry that they did fall into the aforementioned pitfall that a lot of SF writers fall into when doing spaceships.

And as for what I said about interplanetary travel mechanics, I didn't mean to suggest a network system of travel at all. I just mean we could have almost the same effect and force people to go from planet to planet, possibly using slingshots if the time taken to directly go from one planet to another increases exponentially with the distance. It would give the player options, and we all love options, don't we?

Nah it's because the engines are powered by nuclear awesomesauce fuel and its actually better to just keep the engines on idle than to actually turn them off as it takes ages to turn the reactor on again.

I agree that it is a typical mistake made in Scifi, and I certainly wouldn’t want PA to follow in that Hollywood tradition. I guess I didn’t find that particular example necessarily jarring, as the intent of a KEW is as much speed as possible. If all the materials and fuel were located on the asteroid that you are committing to destruction, why not leave the engines going for a bit of extra speed? What I would find jarring is if a space fairing craft were to slow down upon turning off its engines.

I should have read your comment more carefully. After re reading your comment I noticed the time aspect which changes the context of what you were suggesting. My suggestion had limits on what celestial bodies could be reached based on resources invested and/or tier of tech, I referenced Sins through my experience with that game but I want to implement such a system without the arbitrary ‘lanes’ that Sins depicted, favouring a more realistic depiction of planets in orbits (even if planets don’t wind up moving in orbits the visual depiction of planets orbiting a star makes more sense to me than just a web of planets around a start).

Your concept by contrast uses the same visual depiction that I was trying to explain (perhaps badly) but rather than imposing limits makes every planet reachable, with a diminishing rate of usefulness over large distances due to the time debt (correct me if I am wrong).

Your concept does leave scope for more options, the choke point planets and so on could still be an aspect of the solar system level of strategy as it would certainly be preferable to make short hops between nearby. However your system also allows the player to make attack or colonising attempts across long distance if they are willing to wait for their units to cross the distance.

Maybe units/unit transport mechanisms could have a limited amount of acceleration potential? That way units/transports could more or less accelerate the whole way over ‘short’ distances whilst long distance travel would accelerate for the same period of time and then drift the rest of the distance to the endpoint.

This raises another question, and that is how will players monitor movements of enemy forces across a solar system? A large attack force travelling long distance to strike behind the line worlds would be a great and worthwhile exercise if the attacking player was exploiting the failure of the other player to have effective scouting or sensor coverage across the intervening space and didn't see it coming.

I believe we will be able to zoom out to solar system scale and watch real time. Assumedly, these transports would have to be big enough to be noticed, or have icons which do that. Personally I plan to hook up a large tv to my computer as a second monitor and zoom it out to full galactic scale so i can watch everything at once, while focusing on one thing at a time with my main monitor

I think you misinterpreted my meaning here, I realise that we have strategic zoom as an option and there certainly be icon representations at solar system wide view distances. I was more referring to what a player is able to see in terms of fog of war and their enemies movements.

What I was pondering was whether a time debt invested in an attack force's long trip across a solar system could be a viable strategy, resulting in a successful surprise attack on a world behind enemy lines. Or if such a scenario would be unlikely and most often such an action would be met with a more readied defence in the time it took for the attack force to traverse the long distance.

In relation to this I was thinking about what systems would exist for a player to implement sensor coverage over areas of a solar system to monitor enemy activity and how they may work in relation to the mechanic lordq suggested.

Ah, thanks for the clarification. Yes, I did misunderstand you,

Maybe satellite radars? Or, the ability to build radar installations in space that aren't affected by local gravity (stationary in relation to planets, as it is unknown if there will be galactic rotation and whatnot)?

I am assuming that in fact they were not maintaining speed but accelerating constantly for impact. Why wouldn't you want to do be doing the maximum possible speed upon impact to inflict the most damage possible?

I think the sentiment behind Consili's post was that it could possibly work in a similar manner, not necessarily identically to that of sins or mass effect for example. How the system would appear is relatively unimportant compared to the mechanics of it all. I don't see any reason why something would have to be put in place to 'explain how it works'. I think it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that everything needs to have an explanation sometimes. There are a lot of things that have no more explanation than 'that's just how it is'. All we need is an interface that clearly shows what is accessible by the current selected unit(s) from it's current situation, regardless of how it works.

EDITED: 2nd paragraph for clarity after I realised I hadn't said what I was referring to.

I don't think I said anything that wasn't mechanics, hehe. However, appearance is very much necessary for the player to understand how it works. In any case, that's just an idea that I got from considering actual orbital mechanics and using it to expand the network system in Sins. Uber has their own system that they're working on that I hope to see soon.

In any case, has there been any sort of confirmation or otherwise as to whether solar systems will be dynamic? As in, will planets orbit the system sun with periods related to their distance from the system sun? The other possibility would be simply what we have for Sins, with planets remaining stationary with respect to one another.

The problem with dynamic systems is that it throws out all conventional tactics concerning war, which as we know it has pretty much only been done on static battlefields. Alpha and beta testing would be a bitch, as would keeping up with the constantly changing conditions for the player. I... don't want to go any further into this before I start getting a headache.

However, one thing I would like to see that would add an interesting dimension is gravity being prevalent from large bodies to distances that would obviously vary with their size. The main thing with this would be that stars would have gravitational wells the size of an entire system, as should be the case. This would add an extra dimension to inter-planetary movement in that it would be easier to reach planets that are closer to the system sun than planets that are further away. So planets in higher orbits literally have an uphill advantage.

Well technically, even if you destroyed a planet the mass of molten rock would still remain, save for the addition of the asteroid's mass - which should be negligible. Unless you really hit it hard the mass would be pretty much in the same place and that's what I would expect based on what I've seen on the kickstarter video at least.

Agreed, I’m also just throwing ideas out there, after all it is all conjecture at this point. I look forward to seeing what Uber have in mind!

The official word the last I saw in other threads was that Uber were going to try things like day/night cycles and planets moving in orbits and see how it worked from a gameplay/balance perspective. Which sounds fine by me I am glad that they are considering the concepts, and I’d trust them to make the right decisions from a game perspective.

I would too, I don’t think it would be too hard to work in. It wouldn’t even need to be a simulation of real gravity, just classes of gravity wells to escape from (Asteroid, Moon, Planet, Gas Giant) which impact what options classes of rockets have in terms of time travelled and destination options. In saying this It is ultimately a question of the level of complexity this introduces from a gameplay perspective, but just a thought : )