What does no space combat/spaceships mean? (Orbital combat)

Re: What does no space combat/spaceships mean?

Shouldn't there be a way to assault a monopolized planet that doesn't involve destroying it?[/quote]

The asteroid would not destroy the planet. The impact zone would be altered permanentely on the planet and the shock wave blast would cover say 25 %. This would give you a chance to utterly destroy every defense in a certain area so your invasion force and sub commander could land and have a fair chance to defeat the rest of the planets defense.

Re: What does no space combat/spaceships mean? (Orbital comb

Even so, all a Commander has to do to survive a hundred death stars is to not be there. That's the primary reason galactic gate teleportation took over. Super god ships might be unstoppable, but if they can't reach the target then why bother? It's just a waste of time when the enemy commander is busy sucking up more worlds elsewhere. If an enemy commander refuses to fight, the only alternative is to gate up and chase after him. Gating up means leaving nearly everything behind, putting both comms back at square one.

This one really has to go to gameplay. It's taken for granted that RTS games start all players on an even keel, so some disbelief can be allowed here. It kind of makes sense that commanders would not let each other get a foothold or some kind of extra advantage, and I guess the fluff can help fill it in. But in a nutshell, it happens because gameplay needs it to happen.

Woah woah. The original lore basis behind the Commander's creation is because space-time puts some kind of crazy size limit on gating. The Comm is, by design, built to be the biggest, strongest unit that can ever be gated, so that it has the best chance possible for victory. Anything else about size or scale is pretty arbitrary. The limit can be large, it can be small. No matter what the limit is, one thing is always true. The Commander is special because nothing stronger can go.

I started to answer this, but it erupted into a huge thing. Since it's not on topic, I put the story here:
viewtopic.php?f=61&t=42300
If you're interested, give it a read. I think you'll find the premise... rather familiar.

Re: What does no space combat/spaceships mean? (Orbital comb

Why are you assuming the comm will gate in?

I know the trailer isn't gospel, but at this point we have more evidence to believe that he'll arrive via spacepod: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhEYvOYceNs

Which personally I think is way cooler.

This explanation works.

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A few points for everyone here:

-All of this explains why you won't have massive intersteller capital fleets and start each match with just one unit,
but given the fact that units are (as far as we know) transported from planet to planet within systems by spacecraft, it does not make sense that commanders would not build local spacecraft to aid in a battle.

-There is no sensible lore explanation that can possibly write them off unless the game switches to using teleportation as the only means of transit.

-Besides, I remind you that at this juncture we know nothing about the lore except that the humans are dead and self-replicating robots they left behind continue to battle on without them. TA, FA and PA do not have a shared history or exist in the same universe. You cannot carry lore from one over to the other and expect it to hold up as an argument.

Re: What does no space combat/spaceships mean? (Orbital comb

They do tie together rather nicely though.

Re: What does no space combat/spaceships mean? (Orbital comb

For the TA "backstory" thing:

what if there was no FTL at all? It would make interstellar war 100% obsolete as it really would be too slow.

Re: What does no space combat/spaceships mean? (Orbital comb

Nah it just takes longer. Also relativity is a bitch.

Re: What does no space combat/spaceships mean? (Orbital comb

That will make everything obsolete, including war itself.

Possible lore explanation is very easy. Commanders are automatic war systems. They are designed to battle on hard surface, not in space - that's quite different story. Probably there are different space commanders, but they are different, they got different mechanics and, probably, bigger in size as command of an army of huge complex spaceships in 3d tends to be more computationally hard, so "space ACU" is huge mothership class vessel.

This huge space fleets are very busy with annihilating entire galaxies (and other same fleets). But this process require a hell lot of resources, so they are constantly producing and dropping small land-commanders into systems nearby to suck out the resources. It drops a lot of them, so it just doesn't care to help any. Land commanders that have survived just switch all resource flows to their master fleet and fly to the next solar system using their old simple non-spaceship-alike transportation system.

So, "no spaceships" are just technical issue - commanders are unable to command them in 3d. They are dumb machines with specific purpose. For 3d navigation there are other dumb machines.

Re: What does no space combat/spaceships mean? (Orbital comb

Precisely, that's the point.
But once starfleets are somewhere, the somewhere becomes forbidden zone for a hostile Commander, and the only way to break it is to send more starfleets, which can be abstracted as the 'influence' or 'control' over a sector.
Now, either the Commander can plan the system processing and leave, or he has to stay behind to do it. In which case, the one staying behind will create safe zones and slowly expand, while the one who doesn't won't build anything that can break said safe zones and have to wait for the enemy to jump into his sector to be able to attack. While the defensive one can choose to expand at a ridiculously slow rate but with an unstoppable army.
So the only winning move is to process systems anyway.
And come on, there is a procedural generator, fighting twice in the same system would be boring.

Sure, the point is to make lore consistent with gameplay, and this kind of fluff costs basically nothing. If you have an arrival animation, making it look like a teleportation shouldn't be more expensive than making it a hot-drop.

Unless their galaxies are also smaller like their systems, with less distance between stars. It would be the same than giving them very slow FTL.

Re: What does no space combat/spaceships mean? (Orbital comb

I still have some hope for something like this:

viewtopic.php?f=61&t=40426

Re: What does no space combat/spaceships mean? (Orbital comb

There's no reason for both options to be mutually exclusive. Look at it this way:

You have one option that is expensive, high tech, and basically serves as the core plot device. It can even fit into gameplay as a late game tool.

You have another option that is cheap, low tech, and looks cool. Everyone loves rockets. They can move much heavier payloads than the physically limited gate, so rockets never get old.

Now put them together. A commander might be able to gate directly to worlds within his theatre of war. Okay, that's nice. But to jump beyond a certain range might be... risky. Get the destination wrong, or jump into a solid surface, or near a local star, and the commander is DOA. Looking at the sky will only give you data that's thousands of years obsolete, after all. So the Commander gates deliberately into the void, where the risk is minimal. He then builds himself a rocket pod, and blasts down to the nearest world. By sheer coincidence, everyone else does this for the exact same place at the exact same time. Heh, clones. So predictable. Game start.

Eh. Still not sold. Starships might be really effective. But when they get past a certain scale they become like miniature worlds, right? Just throw a bunch of rocks at them. It's cheaper, and the big ships can't avoid them. Gate your commander some arbitrary distance that lets him build this asteroid fleet in safety, launch them, and gate away again. What can the fleet do?

Sure, you might try to grow the fleet beyond the ability for a single commander to fight. Well. Now you're on the hit list of every damn commander in the sector. They may not agree, they may not be allies, but they are definitely sure that their survival depends on taking down the one big guy. Now you have a super large, slow *** moving fleet, being hit from all sides by lightning raids from a dozen untouchable Commanders. Do you maintain cohesion? That means suffering lots of damage for no gain. Do you split and chase down the dozens of different enemies? That means your fleet is now in manageable chunks. Plus, all it takes is one wise guy to start gating bombs directly into your massive super ships. At that point it's just a matter of time before one lucky hit ends it all.

While a doom fleet sounds great on paper, there is so much that can go wrong, and so little that can go right. It is quite possible to say that such ships simply aren't practical for this type of war.

Re: What does no space combat/spaceships mean? (Orbital comb

One can just build a ship and send himself into deep void with some asteroids or nebula. Using resources from said asteroids or nebula he can build a huge army (in safety) and return back, crushing everything along the way, as all other commanders will waste their armies during constant fight.

So, hideos doom fleet of KEWs is actually good idea.
Solution is simple - commanders are dumb, they don't know the words "hide into deep void", they more like "Target: spotted, decision: annihilate".

You see, the most obvious explanation for missing spacefleets are "It's just other game and Uber don't want to have it". I've given more lore-ish explanation "There is fleets and we are actually consuming worlds to support their operations, but our commanders are just incapable of doing space battles". That's simple projection of "No proper UI" to lore plane =).

Re: What does no space combat/spaceships mean? (Orbital comb

I really do not know why you keep insisting commanders are dumb.

Re: What does no space combat/spaceships mean? (Orbital comb

I don't really see why a less believable explanation (the 'by sheer coincidence') and slightly more expensive to make (two anims instead of one) should be favoured there. Unless there is a gameplay point into using those rockets?
Otherwise, we should have plenty of rockets in the game itself.

Not necessarily, that's why I talk about starfleets. But i'd expect any self-respecting starfleet of Doom being able to either avoid, destroy or assimilate dumb incoming rocks. I'd expect them to destroy and/or assimilate entire systems once they get there, actually.

Destroy whatever the Commander send to them. Unless it's another starfleet of Doom, but then the Commander simply captured a system to produce it.

I don't see lightning raid working well against those. They represent the mass of entire star systems, are probably able to eat nearby systems to repair or reproduce, and the only thing that can seriously threaten them is starfleets of the same magnitude or it would be like raiding battleships with a handgun.
So if the Commanders want to seriously damage said fleet, they have to do the same and build their own.
Of course, if someone grows a bigger starfleet than anyone else, anyone else may attack it simultaneously, but that's the rules of a FFA.
Also, I don't expect bomb-gating to work. If it did, why wouldn't they use it directly against enemy Commanders? This is precisely why the only way to make Commanders coherent is by saying that their gating capability is special to them, not just to the gate.

Frankly, I don't see how this can be anything but the dominant strategy given even the skeleton of lore (and gameplay) we saw. At least without using the 'Commanders are dumb' card.
And it fits nicely with the procedural generation and each battle being unique as well as a straightforward localized 'influence' system.

Re: What does no space combat/spaceships mean? (Orbital comb

It could be argued that it's because he plays as one.

Re: What does no space combat/spaceships mean? (Orbital comb

Anything sufficiently fast is not something that's easily avoided. These ships are planetary scale, right? That's a pretty easy target to hit.

Monolithic vessels suffer from a real world limitation known as the square-cube law. Internal resources increase by volume, while external skin only increases by area. A large enough vessel must dispose of waste heat unless it finds itself melting, and the most basic of TotalA units start with a toasty fusion engine. That places a rather harsh limit on how big any ship can be, or at least on how long it can function on internal heat stores. After that it must dispose of the heat physically, or spend a rather long time for natural cooling to take its course.

There is no limit to how big a cold dead asteroid can be. In fact any cold matter is an asset, as it can be used as a gigantic heatsink to run stronger and hotter systems than any space ship could reasonably sustain (such as huge engines or mega fusion plants). That overheated dead mass becomes yet another asset to the asteroid, as blowing one up merely leaves a shotgun spray of high velocity, superheated plasma. I don't know how you design your space ships, but that sounds like a pretty damn bad day for anyone.

That's "easy". Create a Nova. Stars may not be easy to blow up, but it's a lot more feasible than having a fleet of the same scale. All a Commander has to do is get the ball rolling and get out. There is yet to be a space fleet so massive that it can survive a sun blowing up in its face (although Star Ruler certainly allows a few). If the fleet captain doesn't want to risk a full commitment, he is once again dividing his forces into more easily defeated chunks.

This argument can go into serious levels of ridiculous abstraction. One thing that will always be consistent, that has been true since the dawn of warfare, is that the faster, more mobile party gets to pick and choose his battles. A supergiant, slow fleet will be seen coming in advance, giving any amount of time for the defender to figure something out or escape.

But you don't have to destroy enemy the fleet. You only have to destroy the commander. The little guy might have a million in 1 shot, granted. But he also has a million chances to make it work. He has numerous potential allies with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. And he has an enemy target that is running an enormous number of encrypted entangled command uplinks, well beyond a single Commander's ability to use or maintain, perilously beyond their expiration date, and the failure of any one them can potentially end the Commander's life in an instant.

Trust me. They'll figure something out. It doesn't have to involve blowing everything up to the last man.

Re: What does no space combat/spaceships mean? (Orbital comb

Cause it was said that much within the trailer intro? "Brutal machines of war" isn't something that capable of writing poems in my book. Even they are sentient, the should be pretty dumb to support that endless war for many ages.

Planetary-scale ships should have planetary-scale weapons. They don't need to avoid asteroids. They are vaporising whole star-systems out of boredom.

Ok, not just out of boredom. To dispose heat as well. Really, in the world where mass and energy could be transfered over deep void without any carrier, overheating is most crucial problem.

So, you presume that creating a nova is an easy thing, but vaporising the whole star-systems from a few light-years aside is a hard thing.

Actually, you don't need huge fleet of doom-star-alike ships. You need one huge doom-star-alike factory, moving from one system to other, sucking out resources (maybe via land commanders) and a fleet of recon probes. Find the enemy, build-up a ACU-sized nuke, transfer it over gate to enemy position - kaboom! Teleportation warfare made easy!

Re: What does no space combat/spaceships mean? (Orbital comb

Orrrrrrrr maybe they're just not programmed to start an Organic Farm? They're programmed to fight and presumably if they're been doing it for "many ages" without one side winning I'd say they're programmed very well.

Mike

Re: What does no space combat/spaceships mean? (Orbital comb

Nord your lack of insight is so dull to argue against.

Re: What does no space combat/spaceships mean? (Orbital comb

On my earlier "no FTL" statement...

What if teleportation IS the only method of FTL? What if the power for teleportation increases cubically with size? You don't want to send massive warships because it's gonna take a planet's worth of power. In fact, the entire premise of TotalA (or was it Supcom?)is "production has evolved to the point where entire armies can be made on the fly".

The mass-energy economy means moving armies between planets.

Also, as a commander in Supcom takes quite a while to summon, it's likely that sending armies between planets would be a massive, slow, powerhogging event.


NOTE:

Commanders in TA are not stupid. The "brute" part isn't "they're dumb", its "they are machines of war". The entire idea of TA was that machines had been perfecting war itself and couldn't do anything but wage war, and had no victory condition other than, gasp, Total Annihilation.

Re: What does no space combat/spaceships mean? (Orbital comb

That's pretty much exactly the canon lore for both TA and SupCom, thought I think for SupCom there was the caveat that it mostly only applied to gating to a new location, going between 2 gates was cheaper(and safer I think?), but not to the point of using it to move armies around, it was still more economical to build them on site.

Mike