A Planet's end: Permanent death?

This is something i haven't seen on the forums yet.

I've seen that asteroid ram the planet about two dozen times now, and i keep wondering:

does the planet permanently die or not?

"not permanently dead" being, the planet gets transformed into a Lava planet. It still has resources, but it would be much harder to settle (lava), and probably becomes contested territory.

"Permanently dead" means the planet either shatters or becomes an inhospitable husk of earth and is useless in the rest of the game.

I wonder what people's thoughts are? is the asteroid an eraser or a big nuke?

This should be in the General Discussion Forum.

Anyways, based on prior statements alluding to causing varying degrees of damage with KEWs(how wasn't specified but I'd assume size and/or number of engines(or speed) to be the main factors) so one can then assume there would be varying levels of planet "damage" as well.

Mike

Whether or not the planet is completely decimated will, much like OrangeKnight said, be dependent on the object hitting it, much like the various craters we have here on earth. Did they completely decimate our planet? Not really, but they did make it unlivable for various creatures. Now, given the fact that we'll be fighting with robots will eliminate that portion from the results of an asteroid impact, it will be interesting to see what sort of game mechanic will be implemented - if any - for asteroids that are not big enough, or going fast enough to crack the planet in two, seeing as how atmospheric changes can't affect robots*. Ignoring direct contact with units from the impact, or the radial blast, which would most likely kill the unit(s).


*Unless we're talking about some CRAZY acid rain or something.

The guys at Uber stated that the idea for planet annihilation is to speed up end game. With less viable terrain things should finish up quicker when any number of players have the overall economics to build asteroid propulsion. The idea here is that players will be forced to engage for the available areas, pushing players into each other and drying up the economy. They also stated very clearly that not all asteroid impacts will total the planet. The area of the planet affected by such kinetic bombardment will probably be considered an entire new biome, different from lava or any other natural occurring biomes, that will be completely useless.

Actually what i meant was if the resources would still be useable.

I understand that bigger asteroid = bigger crater, but you get to the point where the entire surface is plowed. The next step (the full destruction of the planet itself) requires orders of magnitude greater rocks to be thrown. In between "big crater" and "planet annihilation" is a wide range of scenarios where much of the surface survives, and not only old resources will be accessible but entire new deposits can be found.

I think even a destroyed planet should have its orbital stations like in Empire at War. It would still have enough gravity after all.
And I would be really, really glad if the destroyed planet would become a resource mine with export to other planets(with vulnerable supply lines). That way it wouldn't just become useless but would become useful for enemy. Which would make a war more dynamic in choices between capture and destruction.

I think on the largest-level of impact, the planet should be entirely decimated: no solid ground, just a non-habitable ball of magma. The atmosphere is torched, air units come toppling down, the oceans vaporize, the epitome of Planetary Annihilation. That's really the only way to ensure the end-game plays out as has been described (something I'm very much looking forward to).

Medium impacts could make the immediate-to-intermediate area a sea of magma, and torch the rest of the planet, evaporating water and scorching plains on most, if not all the surface.

Small impacts glass the immediate area, with little to no portions of the planet becoming uninhabitable, and only the immediate impact area becoming lava biome.

Which still doesn't eliminate the possibility of resource mining from uninhabitable planet, on which no base can be established. So these planets will still have their purpose but the main focus will shift to owning the habitable territory over time.

^I'll make myself clearer: at the highest level of destruction, I think it should eliminate the possibility of gathering resources/building bases/doing anything useful with the planet in question. The planet is a ball of magma-pudding; building on the surface is impossible as there is no solid ground, and anything that might be used from orbit would itself melt before any extraction could be accomplished. If an entirely ruined body is still a viable resource there is no down side to slamming the nearest rock into an enemy planet, or preemptively destroying your own moons to deny the enemy possible staging zones.

Complete decimation of a planet should be a strategic decision: you're balancing destroying the enemy on that planet, with removing it from the game, resources and all. Orbiting bodies would still be viable, but the main planet would be a null entity. It's the price to pay for ensuring 100% destruction.

Just my opinion, mind you.

Well, I thought than a lack of space to produce units when an enemy is ready to destroy your base just because you destroyed your own usable surface would be a disadvantage enough to reconsider it twice.
And I meant orbital station for collection and protection only. So no orbital production on the wasteland, only metal. And we all know that production space(or outposts for regrouping and attacking) means much more that just metal.

If you eliminate ALL resources the game could end up a stalemate. It's an absurdly unlikely scenario, perhaps, but the income could slow down too much as terrain dies. A small array of invincible resources (such as from dead planet wreckage) might help with keeping resources high while terrain continues to shrink.

Another option is to have metal makers. They're one solution if a player insists on eliminating every resource point. But generally, it's expected that you're blowing an obscene amount of resources to destroy the terrain. Probably not the best strategy.

Realistically, to totally eradicate a planet you'd need a lump of rock of similar size to said planet. Regardless of gameplay effects, I definitely want to be able to cover a whole planet in engines and use it as a weapon if I so desire. Probably wouldn't be very practical, but would it be awesome? I think so.

In terms of gameplay balance I would rather that the shattered husks of planets still produce some resources, just in case the game goes on a very long time and basically all bodies, be they planets or asteroids or whatever, have been bombarded to within an inch of their life, and then recolonised to some extent. An extreme situation, but potentially possible.

No planet should ever be truly 'destroyed', but merely changed.

From Earth like planets to desert planets, to lava, and at extreme damage levels, into asteroids.

All appropriately resourced for there current state.

In fact, breaking a planet up should release a couple of large super rich, super dense asteroids that used to be the planets core, which is where 99.999% of all the metals sank to during the planet's formation.

nearly all of what we mine today, all the iron, aluminum, germanium, etc. comes from ancient asteroid impacts.

That would take a lot of planning, and pin-point accuracy in KEW deployment, not only on where the point of impact is, but in effect of impact, otherwise you're going to wipe out all the viable land (which inherently means someone's already won).

Besides, traditionally, commanders generate a small amount of both energy and metal, so there would never be a total stalemate, just dragging everything to an absolute crawl (assuming there is no energy->metal conversion, which isn't a bet I'd be willing to take). Honestly though, if the player(s) allow this to happen, they have it coming: you'd have to let the other guy slow-drop asteroids onto your planet until all the resources are gone but not destroy it entirely, and knock out all the resource-viable asteroids, all the while doing that exact thing yourself to their planet, plus any other extra celestial bodies available. It's not going to happen by accident, if at all.

I think I smell an achievement though... "Back to the stone age!".

Energy = 1/2 mass*velocity^2. Size is actually far less important than velocity. Plus, shattering a planet into pieces is nearly impossible; gravity holds it together pretty well. In fact the prevailing theory of our moon's creation was an impact of a Mars-sized object into Earth. Such an event might churn up the core and expose new resource-rich deposits, but only after it cooled, which takes millions of years; a time span I don't think is worth considering for the game.

On the other side of the balance coin, I'll mention again: if you can continue to harvest resources from a planet after destroying it, why would you ever hesitate to do precisely that? Especially if it allows you to gather more resources? Why take the time to deploy units onto a planet, build a base, deploy extractors etc. when you could make it resource-soup and collect from orbit hassle-free?

Ah... thank you for allowing me to expel a wall of text, and waste time that might have been wasted actually doing my job.

Because bases give you much more advantage with ability of production and defence?
I agree about not getting more resources, though. But it can compensated by cost of orbital station.

Using asteroids to uncover planetary resources:
IMO a viable strategy. You probably have to build a good base on an asteroid to give it engines. You also assume the enemy never attacks. Your asteroid goes toward a planet to uncover resources. Your enemy's asteroid goes to your base to wipe you out.


Secondly: it probably takes some doing to mine a lava planet (a decimated planet just has variable leves of lava), so i would image T2 planetary miners would not be easy to just drop there, let alone defend.

Thirdly: we do not know ANYTHING about the orbital layer, so how this plays out is anyone's guess. Orbital layers should always be accesible.

This I know (I'm just finishing my Astrophysics degree). But I was purely talking about destroying a planet, and that's an entirely different matter to breaking a chunk off. The gravitational binding energy of a planet is colossal, and overcoming it at velocities you're likely to be able to attain would require large bodies. I quickly worked out the speed you'd need to get the moon to in order to break apart the Earth: it's about 2.7 times the speed that the Earth is orbiting the sun at (~29800km/s). I doubt you'd be able to reach that in the game, so adjusting the orbit of another planet seems more feasible as a solution. By that I mean either de-orbiting it and allowing solar gravity to accelerate it in (wouldn't necessarily have to get rid of all angular speed, just slow the orbit somewhat). Would still require lots of energy. If there is a planet orbiting counter to the direction of the other though only a very minor (relatively) change would be required, though that's not an enormously likely scenario.

As regards balance, I only ever said some resources, not more resources, by which I meant substantially less than you would otherwise receive, while still allowing for some gameplay (and this only in case of substantial surface change but not destruction). Collecting from orbit does makes some sense actually, but as has been said you'd lose options.

The reduction on economy flux will make you choose: Either you keep building KEWs or conventional units to finish off the enemy. There will be a point of economic stall that KEWs will not be viable. If both players go past that point and keep building KEWs they deserve a stalemate. One of them should have noticed that such strategy is not optimal and assaulted the enemy with conventional tactics.

Although this depends on the situation, simulation and it's parameters etc, a certain percentage of asteroid and planet is lost to space in chucks that can not be mined.

in theory, the rest is mineable.

I think that the challenges of mining from such a planet are much greater than at a regular planet, so the potential gain of resources is offset by their more difficult mineability. Worse: we don't know what the orbital situation will be, and it could be that it is really difficult to invade AND difficult to defend, making it essentially area denial.

If I have enough resources to turn my asteroid into a giant weapon I think I'm pretty much set resource wise