Gas giants, and the expanded orbital unit set.

So with regards to the gas planets stretch goal, the developers have stated that there will be an 'expanded set of orbital recon units, space platforms and other types of orbital units based on your ideas will be added as well.' So lets have some discussion around that.

They also mentioned that there may be 'tall mountains' on gas planets, but personally I think that would take away a lot of the emphasis from orbital warfare, and would undermine the idea of 'space platforms,' which I think could be an interesting twist.

Ignoring that, my one idea would be to have orbital construction workers which can be deployed to any planet really. There they could make large orbital structures - not unlike the international space stations - to extract benefits from gas giants. Obviously there then has to be some combat mechanic around that.

For a very high price, you could make large orbital ships. These ships would have the capability, perhaps, to travel between planets, but asides from that their movement and actions would be entirely limited to the orbital level of planets - remember, the devs do not want space combat. They could have one of three functions: to attack other orbital units and structures, to transport land and air units (they could fire units out in drop pods in much the same way the planetary cannon does (obviously they wouldn't fire out air units)), and of course, to bombard the planets below.

They could thus be used as end-game platforms for invading other planets. Like sea units, while they can transport land units and provide them with some degree of artillery support, their functionality is limited, and they cannot be build instead of land units. i.e. there will never be a stage of the game where you stop building land structures and units so that you can focus on producing orbital units, and, like sea, there may even be games where you simply never build them. See the space ships from halo for an idea of what I am talking about. Now perhaps make them slightly smaller and restrict their functionalty to the orbital level.

As for defenses against orbital craft, you could make large, land-based planetary defense guns. They would be unable to shoot down satellites, which would prove to be too fast and small for the guns, but they would be a strong defense against any orbital units. Indeed, the only viable way to invade planets that are protected by these guns, would be to use the unit cannon, or T2 space centers.

Personally, I would really love to see this second idea, with the orbital ships.

So, let me know what you think, and post your own ideas!

I'd like to see solar panels for efficient but fragile energy gathering.

Space Elevator as a form of unit transport.

Bit of a pipe dream would be an orbital vehicle and/or bot and/or air unit factory, just because it's cool.

I think the idea of tall mountains for gas giants was simply to have land mass, rather than interferring with the orbital layer.

Mavor mentioned in a recent livestream that he basically wasn't going to add "mountains" to gas giants and will keep everything orbital. This was due to the method of mining the gasses from the giant changing from a ground-based building to what amounts to a giant vacuum cleaner with a giant hose that sucks up the HE3 from an orbital platform.

What I'm most interested in is how defensive such platforms might be made... Will a Gas Giant be a high-risk (large investment), high-reward (excessive power generation) or can this be made defensible in any major way. Honestly there's not enough information from Mavor or Uber Ent yet about what kinds of orbitals they wish to implement.

Will we have?:

• Low cost swarm defence (drones)?
• Medium cost "space planes" (fighters/bombers)?
• High cost capital ships able to strike at the planet?
• 'Static' defences... Orbital platforms that Point Defence can be built upon... and if so what kind of point defence?
• Orbital Construction Fabbers or Fire-and-Forget Orbitals built on the ground and fired into orbit?
• All of the above without the restrictions for this or that? a more everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach?

Wish-listing isn't really my strong suit. I'd prefer at least some preliminary information from the Devs before getting my hopes up over units that will never see the light of day.

Please Devs, is there anything you're willing to disclose at this point, just to give us a spring board to start giving any input at all?

Thanks Nanolathe, I actually didn't know Mavor had said he wasn't going to add 'mountains' but I am glad to hear it.

I think all of your suggestions are viable, but as you say, it would be nice to get some discussion going on around this with the Devs, so that we can focus our suggestions.

In this last livestream though, they inferred that they hadn't sorted out the ideas for orbital units yet, so perhaps our initial suggestions will help with that.

Good post.

I'd love to see capital ships in this format, it'd be great when playing with a friend who thinks he's beaten me to suddenly see a fleet of capital ships dropping engineers on the moon for a fall-back base and then continuing to the planet to drop the rest of the army and rain death upon anything he sends their way.

What will happen if the game STARTS on a gas giant? If you can answer this in a satisfactory way, then you have a good game on gas giants.

Gas giants tend to have lots of moons. Those moons represent a ton of little islands in the sky. Wouldn't most of the fighting happen between moons?

There may be huge energy requirements to move units between moons. It could be from teleporters, a special transport feature, or unit cannons. It could simply be the cost of using weapons to attack between orbital bodies. If that is the case, players will need a LOT of energy to get things going. Fighting over energy could be just as important as grabbing metal deposits on such a map.

I think the most logical thing to do would have players each start on their own moon orbiting a gas giant so they each start off on fairly equal footing while orbiting a goldmine of energy which will be the focus of their earlier battles.

Well we already know there will not be space ships, so you can strike those off your list!

You're wrong: the only thing we know is that there will be no space battles like Homeworld or Sins of a Solar Empire, which is to say, outside of planets' orbits, with massive and varied fleets.

That is not to say there will be no ships on an orbital level at all.

We do know that there will be some kind of orbital warfare.

I want inter-lunar artillery.

I want the whole screen to blink red and sirens to go off whenever my moon orbits to be within artillery range of an enemy.

Scoop-ships would be nice, a scram-jet style high speed aircraft that can skim the upper layers of a gas-giants atmosphere, harvest and separate gases for transport back to a processing hub.

I think that the whole "orbital battle" thing should be refined first. AFAIK, no one ever did a game with orbital warfare before. Space battles - sure, lots of them. Mostly 2D "flat" space with the same mechanics as normal ground combat, which makes it normal ground combat, only in "space". Sometimes it's 3D space with "max speed" and friction, which makes it just like regular aerial combat, only in "space".

So, if you don't want to copy the already-existing layer of battle (ground or aerial), you need to come up with something new. Being a physicist myself, I respect the Kepler's laws of planetary motion, and I personally think that Kepler's mechanic is not a bad one for the game. Calculating the orbits for satellites in order to get a constant coverage over some area of the globe could be fun, but on the other hand it could be extremely difficult. The hollywood already taught us how the space works, so it won't be easy to explane to some average people, that satellite can't just hover over an arbitrary point of the globe, or travel freely in any direction.

So if uber already came up with some ideas about "how space works", I definetely would like to hear about it.

What i wanna know is, what's on a gas giant planet that would make anyone care?

Like, the suggestion is that we can build huge power generators of awesomeness.
Cool.
What do we have that requires vast power?

I mean, moons and planets have value in that they're land to build on and have metal/mass/whatever.

If we can build platforms or lots of ther cool stuff there, then they may have similar value.
Especially if we can build orbital fabs, then orbital and vast power = Metal.

Or you could have hydrocarbon eddies, which could act as mass deposits, and be mineable by an orbital extractor, or harvester ship (You've all played Dune, you know how it works)

I really like the idea of orbit war over gass giants.
And i like the idea of them being tactiallly and strategically different in how you handle them.
In the same way that a water planet is going to be quite different.

we could handle it by being able to build big blank slabs of platform and build buildings and stuff on top.

but i like the idea of big, slow, orbit unique structures.
like naval stuff.
usually a bit more high risk/high reward, genrally slower and more serious.

HE3 super generators for powering huge, orbit-only mass fabbers.
orbit-only mass fabbers.
mass extractors that siphon up hydrocarbons/water/lava depending what you put them over the top of.
orbital manufacturing platforms for building orbital fighters/bombers/whatever.
it could be interesting if the only way to transport to another planet in meaningful numbers was to build an orbital transport OR a unit cannon.
be nice to plan for an invasion.

I could also see 3 different players in a system specializing in land/sea/orbital and taking over different parts of a system. and then trying to find creative ways to crack each other's defenses.

This is gonna be fun!

Skirmish map with a gas giant as a centerpiece and the battles hopping between the orbiting moons.

You know you want it.

Neutrino said to "Watch out for missiles!" regarding your orbital satellites, so I guess that's the format for anti-satellite weaponry =P

I wonder how land units will do on a gas giant planet.

Probably not at all.

Fall screaming through hundred of kilometers of atmosphere, to either get crushed by the intense atmospheric pressure or eventually go splat onto a small, hyperdense core?

Depends how realistic you want to be, of course

Actually both can be true. It depends how well said unit can withstand pressure.


But yea, the purpose of a Water planet is having an option for navy-only without *forcing* it through modifiers. The purpose of air planet is air-only combat.