Planetary Assault. How will it work?

I just discovered this game today. So I didn't have a chance to support it in Kickstart but plan on pre-ordering soon. I loved TA, SubCom and SubCom2 so I'm going to love this game regardless. But given that there is different planets, I wonder how assaulting other planets will work.

From the video it is obvious there will be options like the canon to launch your troops at another planet, also you can send your commander (or a smaller builder) to another planet and build from scratch. Or (of course) you can launch another planet at it.

My thinking is that what if the enemy has the planet, and has fortified it to the point that you can't send just one unit to build from scratch? Will the only option be launching units out of a cannon?

I assume since the gas giants are essentially going to be where we fight "space battles" or battles where there is no land so it is all in the atmosphere/orbit of the planet, that there should be larger air/spacecraft. And while we might not be able to fight in the middle of deep space, will we be able to load a flotila of ships at our moon outpost and send them to an enemy stronghold (assuming some ships would be more like cruisers/destroyers or maybe fighters and others would be more of a dropship.

If you can only go from one planet to the one that is closest then it probably wont matter as much, but if we can (as I'm hoping) attack any planet from any other planet, then being able to send a large fleet would be awesome.

I know the details are still sparse, and I wasn't able to find another post like this, so I was wondering what everyone is thinking will happen and what everyone is hoping will happen?

Hey lordofadmirals, welcome!

It's my understanding that there's no space combat in the game, with fleets of ships zooming around, and I'm pretty happy with that because that would be a completely different game. It's all about the land battles, so to assault another planet you'd launch your units somehow (I'm certain there's more than cannons for this) and land in concert.

The gas giant thing will be like the sky maps in TA, if you remember those--tall platforms sticking up from the clouds so we have places to build up and land/launch to/from.

Besides kinematic transportation, there will probably be a more expensive but faster version, like stargates. I'd think it'd cost a certain amount of energy every time a unit goes through one, so you couldn't use it for everything, and it'd be hard to plant one fast enough for an invasion... or maybe the gate is installed in a giant airship, so units go through a land one and come out falling from the ship That'd be interesting!

Lots of possibilities, so share your ideas!

I was under the impression that gas giants were simply going to be oribtal unit battles, so everything we built would be in the orbital layer. And to the OP to check that I'm on the same level with you, you're stating that you want some kind of interplanetary space transport that dosn't fight but simply moves X ammount of units from point A to point B? If so then I agree that would allow alot more dynamic gameplay as opposed to a rather obvious moon being required to fire units into a planets atmosphere.

We've had a few threads on this pop up;

Planetary Assaults and Interstellar Transportation

Multiple Uses for Rocket Gantry

Satellites.

You should give them a read.

Mike

Here's an interesting thought. In TA, the Krogoth was a much more powerful "experimental" unit than the experimentals in FA, in comparison to the other units in the game. However, it was impractical to build because for all the resources and time you spent on making the thing, you could have been throwing cheap tanks at your enemy and eventually overwhelmed them that way. As a result, higher level multiplayer games tended to avoid using the Krogoth (or really, any of the super-heavy Core units) in favor of a cheaper, more effective approach.

But in PA, there are times where you'll have to invade a heavily defended enemy planet and try to establish a presence. In this case, the invader would be at a severe disadvantage if they just tried to stream in tanks, especially if they couldn't establish a proper landing/teleportation point. Now a unit like the Krogoth has a much more effective role as the vanguard of a planetary assault. With the amount of armor and firepower it provides, it can establish a safe zone for a further incursion, especially considering its nuclear death.

The Krogoth was certainly an expensive unit. But it had some pretty awful firepower for its size. It was not difficult to overwhelm a Krogoth with even modest numbers of very cheap units. As a walking super unit, it was terrible.

As a walking bomb, the Krogoth was hilarious. Despite its limited firepower you had no choice but to engage the unit, because when it blew up it did a TON of damage. It couldn't be intercepted by SMD, was difficult to engage with artillery, and had high endurance for breaking through defense lines. Any units you used to stop a Krogoth were pretty much guaranteed to die or take terrible damage, so any victory was a Pyrrhic one at best.

More importantly, the death explosion made it difficult to use large numbers of Krogoths as a viable attack. Pack a dozen Krogoths together, and they'd begin to chain react after one fell.

Such a system could be a very good way to balance assault experimentals. The armaments are secondary to the explosive core, which is the primary weapon to rip apart defense lines. Basically, it's a walking nuke.

That is exactly what I mean christopher. It just seems that invading another planet shouldn't be limited to shooting units out of a giant gun. What if that does not work well? We need other approaches. I believe gunships or dropships are needed. If Aerial units can travel from planet to planet they can act as cover for the dropships while they deploy units.

Maybe you want to skip a planet and invade another, can the kinetic gun do this? or can it only reach the next planet, this takes away the possibility of a island hopping strategy.

All I want is more options. I want each and every game to be unpredictable. I don't even want the transports to be armed, I want you to have to defend them as the invasion happens, maybe backing it up with a kinetic gun even while you build a teleport. But you have to have a way of getting a beachhead going.

500 views and 6 posts :s

This topic will have to be addressed at some point. Which it has not been properly yet. Everyone was too hyped about the asteroid smashing into the planet to think of the core gameplay.
If you have a planet defended all over with turrets and units its gonna be impossible to invade it with a handful of units.

Tactical attacks need to be made available for many ways of taking a planet. Just seems a bit cheap to drop a few units from a dropship/gun/portal.

lordofadmirals

Much of the game is not yet "set in stone" and can change at any time.

Plenty of suggestions on how plantetary assault could work has been going around the forum and the devs have said that they have ideas too.

But we dont know for sure how it will work yet, i dont think even the devs knows it for sure yet.

Btw there may (big M on may xD) be space combat in the orbital layer similar to the Starwars Empire at war's space combat (the space units move in a 2d plane). Or it might just be satellites, we dont realy know yet, aloot of suggestions have been mayd.

But they have said 100% no to true 3d space combat for obvious reasons (it would basicly require them to make two games in one and they are trying to keep costs down).

I can see why you would be against space combat as u may as well go make a space combat game.

Yea good luck with the ideas, i think this ones gonna be a real game breaker.

I hope it works out for you guys, however sometimes i wish i was just getting a new TA without the planet stuff.

And this brings me back to my initial response about tech levels. (i like the idea of more than 2 levels) but if ur world is safe at the start of the game why bother building any t1 as there will be no early game rush? Everyone will just use T2 units for the whole game?

I hope that element of early game rush is still viable and that it wont take 20 mins just to get off the first planet..

I am referring to 1v1 games and remember you talked about multiplayer games with commanders starting on the same planet.

Multi-map invasion hasn't been really explored in many games. So we really have no idea how to start space invasion, or what can/can't work.

A few fundamental things have to be addressed straight up. The most important thing is to make invasion attacker friendly. Vulnerable weak points make it easier to attack from high ground. The easier it is to attack from high ground, the less effective defenses can be. Less effective defenses punish turtle strategies, creating a vicious cycle of poorly defended, easy to attack worlds. That's good. It keeps the game moving.

Another way to make invasions attacker friendly, is to have a very small selection of orbital tools. The primary purpose of orbital is to get units from point A to point B, not to wage space warfare. Having a huge defense sat network would just ruin that. Units may include cheap probes(scouts), space gantries (for small/large ground units), invasion transports, orbital platforms(asteroids) or meaty ion cannons(long range artillery). There should be very few (or zero) standard, straight up, weapons.

Tier 2 are planned to be specialised units (for example amphibious tanks), not more powerfull versions of the tier 1 units.

So you would still use tier 1 units, if it works as planned.

That would be great even without experimental level. A suicidal unit was never implemented is SupCom good enough(both Fireflower and Mercy had their own problems and were inefficient), even though it would be great.

So it sounds more like ur getting rid of tech leveled units altogether. Sounds more like starcraft that TA.

And another thing, people have thought of ideas for attacking with ground but what about the air? Or is air only gonna be for defending?

Hello everyone,
This may seem a bit ridiculous, but I think it would be cool to use an entire planet as an "airfield" where you could focus on producing assault and landing craft in order to support your ground forces. Imagine building fighter hangars on the rings of a planet you control, and using that as a launch point for aerial support? Just a thought.

What if the unit cannon didn't disperse its units upon its projectiles hitting an atmosphere? Rather, its unit-carrying projectiles could do kinetic damage upon striking the ground, and then it would release the units.

Could be OP, but I think that could be a way to attack a planet someone has armed to the teeth.

Like in Section 8? That would be AWESOME. There would be even 2 mode.
Disperse on - units land slower, slowing in he atmosphere/on the low altitude.
Disperse off - units deal and take kinetical damage upon landing. The heavier unit, the more damage it deals AND takes(First law of Newton's mechanics).

It sounds great, but it depends on planting your units on top of enemy units. That's a recipe for clipping issues.

On the other hand, launching one unit on top of another may be inevitable. Directly killing units gets them out of the way, doesn't it?

I have a question that is sort of relevant to this thread. In terms of launching commanders/engineers at moons/planets consider this scenario:
>I want to secretly land an engineer on a largely hostile planet and make a small base
>I send some sort of scouts
>Discover there is a sizable blank spot where enemy forces have not expanded into on the planet
>I choose this location to launch my engineer

Will the game be able to calculate when to launch based on the orbitals of the planet to hit the spot I target? Seems like an interesting challenge.