Suggestions for some of the orbital units.

After trying to get my (Some other guys hade the same or simular ideas) suggestion out in viewtopic.php?f=61&t=40198 for a while, i decided to make a new thread. The linked thread has a misleading title and people tend to disgard it becuse of that.

I suggest they add some spaceship like orbital units, let me explain further before you all burn me.

These units would be orbital units, not space units, so they dont add "space combat" to the game, they would move in the orbital layer (on a 2d plane) and not in space, they would however have a ability to move between worlds.

This ability would function in the same way you move other units between worlds (for example the commander rocket in the concept trailer). You would have no control of the unit in space, it wouldent engage anything in space, it would just travel through space between worlds. Offcourse some kind of cooldown, maximum range and powerup timer functionality would be needed to prevent it from becoming overpowered*.

*Cooldown to prevent over use, maximum range to prevent you from funneling every orbital unit to worlds a long way away from were your builing them, powerup timer to prevent them from instantly escape in a bad situation. Etc.

They would just be a cool addition to the game that adds alittle bit of the space armada feel without actually adding any space combat or new functionality (Most, if not all, of the functionality would allredy be there).

Envision a small land army on a planet, envision loading it into air transports, envision loading the transports into a "Carrier" orbital unit (They could have a ability that allows them to move into the orbital layer just for the purpose to be loaded into a carrier), then envision moving this carrier to another world to invade. Another cool idea would be a support orbital spacecraft that can build a small amount of ground units onboard and then launch them as "drop pods".

They could add units that are good at surface bombarment but suck at orbital ship to ship combat, and other that are good at orbital combat but have very little or no cannons that can bombard the surface. I image these units as slow moving but strong (kinda opposite to most aircraft) and with aloot of specials (and very expensive offcourse), however i assume Uber would balance them so that they work without being op.

These units would (as i envision it) just be another option for a player, not a must have for invasions (There should be other options), not a must have for base cracking, nothing else then another option.

Others orbital unit suggestions (Il collect them in this post to keep things easy for any devs checking in):

Edits: Fixed some mistakens and added "(Some other guys hade the same or simular ideas)", since it would be wrong of me to take all the credit.

For some reason, I had taken for granted that some orbital units would be able to move between worlds, pretty much like you describe it. Calling them 'spaceships' may be a good way to differentiate them, as like vehicles, gunships or amphibious, it's simply another type of movement.

I'd love to see something similar to a long range orbital lander for invading a new world with a large army that could be a good way away, such as in another galaxy in larger maps. It doesn't have to add space combat to the game, but seeing a large, continent sized ship drifting towards you through the black void of space would be just awesome. It would also give the defenders time to prepare a valid anti orbital defence before the conflict arrives, and not just scroll back over your empire to find that someone's had to chain build bases on planets to reach you with a few units.

Well I envisioned having satellites that actually orbited the planet and shot down invading troops. The orbital artillery piece would have to be incredibly expensive due to the fact that we don't know how many ground forces would be able to respond to it. That or make each barrage of shots cost metal and energy. I love the idea of interplanetary transport ships but there could be a platform that allows for incredibly fast unit drops that cause damage to other units when they land.

*Bump* (Since people were discussing orbital units again and this thread never got much attention).

Yea well, i'd differentiate between Spacecraft and Orbital units.

Orbital unit: ORBITAL ONLY. IE, sattelites

Spaceship: between planets.

Essentially, i'd like sattelites to be like orbital buildings. basically, they stay in their orbit, and if it's a geosynchronous orbit, it saves you some trouble.

Spacecraft, well don't know about that. I don't really know.

^^ Well the defenition isent realy important. They could call the orbital units that can travel between worlds "spaceships", or they could just be "orbital units". It seems like something that could be changed easily later in development.

The important part of this topic being if you guys like the idea itself or not (the details can be settled by Uber and refined by input in a later stage of the development, say beta, or maybe in alpha. If they decide to add it offcourse xD).

Ohh btw, your offcourse free to debate against the idea too, but i would appreciate it if you post something more then "I dont like it" if you do.

What sort of things can go in orbit? Asteroids? Satellites? Can a moon be considered part of orbit? There could very well be an "island hopping" mechanic if a world has lots of moons, for example. It's kind of important to know these things, because they define the options and overall gameplay.

There's always the "big transport that moves lots of units between worlds". It's a pretty basic thing.

A "planetary probe" will find lots of use. It's basically a scout so that players can get intel on the sector.

Many air units could find themselves capable of limited space travel. These units would be more expensive than average, but the ability to move off world is extremely powerful. For example, a light gunship can find and kill undefended extractors. A flying engineer could take construction off world, which is extremely powerful.

Units might depend on a platform to move between worlds or layers. We know about the unit cannon, which is really nifty. Other things have been proposed like space elevators and asteroids and large rockets.

Orbit might cost extra money. Going back to the gunship, it may take a surge of energy to escape orbit and move to other worlds. This limits how many gunships you can blast off at once, at the very least demanding extra generators for the cause. When they reach the other side they're effectively trapped, lacking further energy for another move. It's a one way trip, so they can't bounce across the cosmos dealing untold destruction.

I think the "Orbital" area could be done, minus space combat, with a few different things

1. Resources: there could be some kind of harvester units that can reclaim parts of asteroids for metal, or they could collect and return to a depot (but a bit too much like SC), and the reclaim mechanic is already very much this genre.

2. Transportation: orbital area can be used to facilitate transport of units between planets. Whether this is just transport lanes of a "space transport", perhaps you would teleport/gate in the units from the ground into an orbital structure and then have the space transport move it to another planet or something.

3. warfare: with out being space combat there are still lots of orbital area weapon ideas: satellites such as "star wars" system to take out interplanetary missiles, or even missiles like nukes on the same planet. All kinds of units used for taking over planets/moons/asteroids in terms of throwing them at other planets or moving them around. There could certainly be orbital based structures that are the platforms for nukes/other kinds of missiles esque platforms. Instead of making an interplanetary nuke on your planet, that goes to another planet, perhaps a space based platform for this will be harder to kill and faster to fire?

This is pretty much exactly what I want to see. I'm really happy to see so many voices in agreement over this. I guess there are just a few people who are adamantly against it, the majority seems to be for.

This is similar the space elevator I was discussing here: viewtopic.php?p=636733#p636733
Glad other people have similar ideas!

I've been thinking about the best way to do it and I think it would be to have just one structure in orbit that would create a beacon on the ground directly below it. Units rallied to the beacon would be beamed up when a transport docked with the structure. The structure wouldn't store units so the units would wait on the ground until a transport came.

I think that's the simplest way.

http://www.dark-circuit.com/random/...31&sessionid=3e9d4b8dd9cc486f847a6365a5bb735c

= Win....

Just throwing it in there...

Unless this thing actually takes a few hours to deploy and recharge, so enemy may just build a couple of ICBMs for that thing.

for orbital certainly space laser named an Ion Cannon comes up but boy it makes the Cliche overused "cool" super-weapon nerve hype up and make me think really? a space laser? like we haven't seen a hundred of those. Personally i perfer the Star Wars (Empire at War and Empire Strikes Back) and Earth 2150 iteration of what an ion cannon is, a weapon that is devastating to shields and disables electronics like an EMP gun.

i would certainly like to see a Space radar and/or telescope as orbitals, sure you can build them on the planet but its view is distorted and won't get the range or clarity of vision.

i like the idea of normal aircraft needing orbital transports to move through space with but i have an issue, what about airless rocks like the moon. should aircraft be able to fly over them? do aircraft use anti-grav or propulsion that relies on air. and for that matter should orbital units use anti-grav as well.

I would also like to see Asteroids and rocks along a planet ring be modifiable into orbital units, think intead of limited to hitting a planet with the asteroid you can just bombard the planet with cannons placed on an asteroid, or along planet rings.

I was thinking about aircraft on planets without atmospheres. At first I thought it would work because a) the aircraft are all probably going to be VTOL anyway, so there's your lift b) they're all robots so no life support is needed c) it would be easy enough to say that they're powered by some sort of thruster that doesn't require oxygen.

But the problem I realized is that in an airless environment the flight paths of such craft (the way they turn) would be completely different. Instead of turning in swooping arcs they would more likely just pivot and start thrusting the other way (if you've ever played asteroids or spacewar you know what I mean). This means you would need two different movement algorithms for aircraft and it would be a huge pain for the devs.

Maybe you could cheat the problem by giving them all lateral thrusters so they can still turn in an arc. I suppose that might work.

To solve the problem with aircraft on worlds without much atmosphere, you could simply limit them so that they cant unload from the orbital transport when its on those worlds.

Assuming that you can easily see if a world has atmosphere or not and if they add a little warning window telling you that aircraft cant be deployed on worlds without atmosphere, i belive that such a solution wouldent be too complicated or hard to understand for a new player.

They could also include some aircraft units that can be used on such worlds, etc (changing their movement on such world perhaps, to make it more realistic). This would make things more complicated, but they could most likely pull it off regardless (me myself dont mind complicated mechanics in games, but i know that theres valid arguments against such mechanics, since it tends to scare away newcomers).

Theres aloot of possiblities for Uber to explore when it comes to interaction between different layers and different kind of worlds.

Being able to move astroids and moons into orbit around a planet has been confirmed (so mobile bases on moons are in), i (and everyone else) assume that there will be artillery or some other kind of weapon that can fire from orbit down to surface.

So most likely you wish has allredy been fulfilled.

That . . . actually sounds like a reasonable way to do business. It reinforces the "high ground" concept of making it easier to move from A to B once you're up there without overly complicating things by adding an entirely new theater of operation. And yes, I'm one of the more vocal flamers for anti-ship. This however, sounds like a good place to draw the line.

Most modern VTOL still require pushing air. Anti-grav propulsion as well as rocket propulsion seem the main methods i can think of that don't require pushing against air, though a rocket plane may seem silly in PA's time, still i must consider the North American X-15 rocket plane managed to propel itself into the exosphere (where the air stops), perhaps we could have some rocket propulsion interceptors (very fast high damage, but low fuel and 0 loiter)

Anti-gravity doesn't require air to push, it requires pushing against mass allowing it to fly through airless rocks as easily as air-filled environments, and typically may not even need to fly differently in the 2 environments as it utilizes the quality found in both. But considering the airless rock theoretically it would be possible for orbital units to fly at the height of aircraft without an atmosphere that would burn it up, conversely a Anti-grav aircraft could also potentially fly at the height normally taken by orbital units.

food for thought

Interesting point about atmosphere. It seems that planetary conditions are once again affecting the viability of units not only on the ground, but above it as well. In this case, the lack of atmosphere is changing how airplane units work (while gunship types likely wouldn't care).

I wonder if orbital conditions can change how orbital units work, as well.

I'm thinking that too, about orbital altitude. There might be spacecraft that can target ground units from the low orbit of a moon but not from the high orbit of a planet.

Well, I was thinking more along the lines of planet rings and dirty/hostile orbits.