Hello everybody! I was wondering if the physics engine will be large enough so different game play strategies can be employed. Everyone knows the smashing astriods into each other, but what about destroying the base of mountains with cannons to collapse it thus making the foundations of buildings on top collapse. Or even making a mountain fall onto an army, or drilling a hole to the other side of the planet. Drilling a tunnel through a mountain. Shifting the orbit of huge planets to change the orbit around the sun to change the temperature. What are your thoughts? (sorry this is one of my first forum posts ever)
Personally I do not want to complex physics that makes difficult and heavier. I know that Battle Realms and Earth 2160 had similar feature but it was not that significant in most case of the game. Also, I believe that it can harm the game balance since we know that the map will be randomly generated.
Yea I can see where you are coming from that it will change game balance, especialy with the mountains. I was wondering if the physics engine would allow for some sort of creative game play where there are strategies that have not been though of yet. Like are the engines used to move astroids only used for astriod strikes? or can they shift entire planets? and will the land be "terraformable" by cannons. Can you level a moutain in the way of your path to the enemy? Can you send a planet crashing into the sun? Things like that. Do the astroid engines have other uses, and will terraforming be a useful stratagy?
It would no more harm balance than uneven metal spot placement or build space, both of which can be resulted by random planet generation.
There won't be "real" physics, sorry. It has already been confirmed that the engine will support complex arcs for projectiles and possibly terrain deformation, but that is totally different from a real physics engine. So it is very unlikely to have avalanches (or other collapsing structures), rolling stones (like in Battle Realms). Using thrusters to push not only meteors but also full sized planets out of orbit MIGHT be possible, but that also implies that the game would have to use a very limited gravitational model for "movable" planets since you will run into an n-body-simulation which is troublesome because it's chaotic and hardly deterministic. There is only one way to avoid such situation: A celestial body may either have a "real" gravitational field OR it may move in the gravitational field of a different body. E.g.: If a moon has a gravitational field of it's own, then it may not use the gravitation of other celestial bodies to calculate it's orbit or you will get chaotic interactions. Instead every body with a "real" gravitational field must use a fixed orbit. Terra-forming by canons and explosive weapons should be possible, though you shouldn't expect to much. After all a planet does not consist only of the terrain, but also tons of entities like rocks, trees, etc. Not all of the would react well if you just modified the terrain underneath them. You might also break path finding when you accidentally put a crater in the only passage. That means, that although Terra-forming would be possible, it should be only used as a part of mechanisms which ensure that it won't break the world. Like creating a rift in the terrain as the result of a meteor impact, but also use an erosion algorithm to create ramps and new entities along the changed terrain to make it usable again. Accessibility of metal spots shouldn't be much of a problem. It's easy to put a navigational mesh on top of the terrain and make sure, that metal spots only get placed in reachable, suitable areas. If you have inaccessible metal spots, that only means that the world generator has failed, but that's not a problem which couldn't be solved.
It was a response to ucsgolan's post, which stated destructible hills and terrain could harm game balance due to random planet generation. i.e., someone starting near more mountains which have the opportunity collapse onto their base. It was just a particular detail I wanted to point out as being insignificant to further the debate. Other than that, I'm not really invested in whether or not such a function gets implemented. Although, I do remember the forest fires of Total Annihilation being able to wreak havoc in bases.
What will the extent be of engine use? is it only for pre defined astroids? or is it for any entity, but the number of engines and resources needed to move this planet are harder to obtain. Will you be able to say, use the engines to move an astroid, but not destroy it. And use it as a transport. Like move around the solar system on a little astroid and launch your attack from it. Or will things only be able to collide?
I'm sure i've read somewhere that Uber want to allow asteroids to be used as orbital gun platforms. But because I A, Have no evidence to back it up & B, Can't be arsed to go looking for it right now as i'm supposed to be working lol don't take this is fact.
Having asteroids as gigantic spaceships bristling with guns isn't exactly hard to imagine. If you build guns on them, and if you can build engines on them, you're set.
