Adjustable asteroid impact speeds

You could always put the asteroid into a counter-orbit, flying around the sun in the opposite direction.

This. I'm not really concerned with how the game calculates it, so long as we don't have to deal with the specifics. Don't get me wrong, I love playing Osmos and Kerbal and all the rest, but this is not that kind of game.

Okay, I just had an idea, as an alternative to this.

Instead of 'Ramming speed' and 'Nudging speed', how about instead, you can either use an asteroid as a kinetic weapon, slamming it into the planet... Or you can turn it into a satellite? Make it go into orbit around the planet, building artillery and launching fussilades down on it, with the option to, in a pinch, turn it into a kinetic weapon again- maybe with less effect- as a sword of damocles thing, with the consequence that you're practically begging the enemy to invade the asteroid?

Being able to put a astroid or moon into orbit around a planet has allredy been confirmed.

That is true, I forgot about that. Would attempting to recover by citing "design goal not promise" as quoted last night be a little disingenuous?

I wonder if that means for the sake of the game all asteroids have uniform density?

Either way, the player would then need to know what kind of "impact" an asteroid of a specific size could have, even before the question of whether we could control it would come into play. If it were too small, then folks wanting more destruction would need to know they need a different asteroid.

Seems like, if nothing else, the UI will already have a heavy task of providing heavily contextual information to the player, so one more layer the player can actually control may not be that bad.

As you said, it may not be a big deal, but the details we'd need to be sure we probably won't have till an alpha or beta when we have some knobs to twiddle and a UI to look at.

My main motivation is that I think if we reduce the opportunity cost of a decision, it becomes a less significant decision, and I think that picking an asteroid should be just as significant as choosing what kind of units to build, or even just which kinds of super weapons to invest in, let alone what size of asteroid.

That said, that may become too much "micro" and too much UI work to support just one weapon type, and people end up avoiding it for "simpler" options that don't have as many knobs to twiddle.

Where once I had a strong opinion, I must now admit foolish ignorance as to the correct course of action.

They could allways keep it simple: You need to judge by eye measurement and experience how much a astroid of a certain size will destroy (Do note that simple is not equal to easy xD).

Yea, unless all the asteroids were a rough sphere, it would be difficult to get a sense for volume just by the shape and size. Here's some photos/renderings/whatever of asteroids to try and illustrate that:






If the asteroids were the same scale, would it be reasonable to expect a layman to adequately estimate and compare the volume of the different shapes?

On top of that, would we treat them as if they were spherical, preventing any "engines off center" from causing the asteroid to just fly in a big arc instead of a straight line? :lol:

I've decided to vote no. This already will be quite a complex game. I would opt for keeping it stupid & simple. Nukes for heavy destruction, asteroids for total planetary anahilation.