Orbital Units - What would you like to see?

I want orbital ion cannons to protect my planet, and to draw smiley faces on it.

I'm just picturing taking an asteroid and turning it into a Craftworld.

For anyone who doesn't know what that is it's from Warhammer 40K, the Eldar built massive world ships that would house their people and carry them through the stars. They could maintain their armies and travel between systems using these massive ships along with their powerful psykers to plot courses and go through the warp.

I would like to be able to use radar or something similar on an asteroid and basically make these Craftworlds covered with weapons and factories for assaulting planets.

The idea of putting asteroids and nukes into orbit for...

...later use...

...sounds really fun. I also think the launchable pods that were shown in the kickstarter trailer should be able to be stored mid-orbit. Maybe with self-propulsion.

Obvious useful orbital units:

• orbital resource (energy) i.e. solar satellite - linked to ground station?
• orbital KEWS satellite (has to be done :mrgreen: )
• orbital surveillance satellite

Useful only for specific circumstances:

• orbital resource collector (mass) for gas planets, either as a dropoff point for harvester craft or as a self-sufficient harvesting platform ("normal" planets would use the standard mass points)
• Unit Transport Engine (UTE) - the re-entry pod containing unit(s) fired from the Orbital Unit Cannon while they are in transit. Not necessary (I also like the idea of kbots landing head first in the mud ) but would allow for controlled landing, and also provide a single set of attributes for anything fired into orbit (speed, hitpoints etc.).

May not even be necessary, depending on the implementation of "orbital":

• orbital defense platform - for shooting at other orbital units, no orbit to ground capability
• orbital offense platform - for shooting at the ground (e.g. OIC)
• modular orbital processing platform - the Victorinox orbital factory style building, in case we need something at the orbit level that can build units. Could be implemented as the unit that creates orbital units, rather than the more realistic ground-based installation that creates and shoots orbital units (satellites) into orbit.
• orbital build platform - the Metal Fatigue analogue, just a big platform that standard ground buildings are built on and ground units trundle around on. TBH I'm not a massive fan of this, as you can just add an Orbital version of any ground building (e.g. solar satellite -> energy, surveillance satellite -> radar) for the same effect, and ground based tanks or towers in space have a pretty small use case vs. dedicated orbital designs. Also you need to apply handwavium to the lack of usable gravity on any orbital construct; tanks won't stick to the platform unless you bolt them on.

A lot depends on how "orbital" actually gets implemented. For square map games (e.g. Metal Fatigue) it's usually just an extra square layer that units hover in, or slowly move around. For a game with actual spherical planets I would argue it would be better (not necessarily simpler) to implement actual orbital mechanics, but that seriously restricts what people can do with orbitals; geostationary only works over the equator, everything else cannot stop moving in relation to the ground, and does not follow an intuitive path over terrain.

It's more intuitive to go for another spherical layer with floating units, however that eschews the engine realism that some people (myself included) feel is integral to an -Annihilation title. It also turns orbital into effectively another aerial layer, but higher up, rather than being a discrete layer with it's own attributes.

It's one reason why orbital hasn't been done "properly" before, it's difficult to balance implementation with expectation, without massive amounts of handwavium (just a high flying layer fitting the expectation) or some cognitive dissonance on the part of the player (a realistic implementation).

I'm quite a fan of space RTS... and seeing water, land, air, space... combined, just waters my mouth.

Obviously the focus here are planets, so we aren't going to have middle space battles.
But maybe you can have small defense fleet orbiting your planet, something the enemy has to destroy before the commander can land.

And how is the commander going to travel between worlds? TA teleportation thing was... kind of cool, but I wish for a classic star transport... properly escorted of course, we are talking about the commander

PS:
MMMhhhh.... spaceships....

sorta in list of cost low to high

1) Solar collector

2) Satellites that provide ground based radar

3) GPS satellites that give better targeting

4) Solar system monitoring satellites (warns of incoming threats)

5) hubble spy satellite (lets you view other planets surface)

6) Anti nuke missile (or laser aka starwars project). An anti anti satellite weapon would be a little op

7) MAC(Mass/Magnetic Accelerator Cannon also called mass driver) satellites, High dmg low acc. Ie can hit incoming asteroids but not rocket, can target stationary land targets and mobile but good luck hitting a moving target that can adjust its course easily.

8) Ion Cannon satellites low but constant dmg till over heat short range land, sub orbital, and low orbit, not incoming space targets.

9) Platforms, like metal fatigue or starcraft. Allows for building ground units in orbit including defence buildings, these would be very good for solar collectors and unit cannons. Also would reduce the costs for rocket launches cause you are in orbit

10) Space elevators, free transit between ground and space station/platform. Also gives your solar satellites a massive boost in energy generation. This is because instead of the solar collectors being connected via wireless they can now be connected to the ground via hardwire. (ie gundam 00) These elevators could also connected to low orbit asteroids

I would also love to see the roid being used as more than space nukes, like mobile fortress used to invade planets from low orbit.

I would love to see some orbital platforms of various sizes that could be used as a front defense for the planet in case there wasn't a moon or asteroid close.

I really feel interaction between air and orbital units should be limited. Orbital to me sounds like it's going to be a layer of its own, as much different as it is from air units as air units are from ground units.

These two layers should not overlap.

Here is a quick representation of how I think layers should be arranged :

Orbital
Orbital
Orbital
nothing
nothing
nothing
Air
Air
Air
Ground

There should be a big space between orbital and air so that they do not interact with each other (apart from units specially designed to do that).

Other than that, I wonder if orbital units are going to be only "support" for ground units or if space will be a critical layer to control.

I think layers are a silly paradigm to begin with, it brings endless troubles with it. It made sense in what was essentially a 2D engine with 3D units, but in full 3D less so.

I am intrigued with the orbital platform idea though. It sounds like a really cool way to have orbital interactions with the ground mechanics.

James bond style

The ability to play across multiple planets will depend almost entirely on how well the orbital layer is set up. Orbital is the direct link between worlds, after all.

How about orbital missiles?


Say a missile is launched into orbit, and it stays there as a "mine" until the enemy launches a rocket to leave the planet, if that rocket is in the area you set the orbital rocket it will trigger and move to intercept.

This would be an expensive unit and it would take 4-5 to destroy a T1 rocket and maybe 10-11 to destroy a T2 rocket, but it could act as a possible defense against the enemy rushing orbital bombardment.

I don't think it should be possible to lock a player out of the orbital layer by just spamming tons of "orbital mines" above their base. Also, random chances to hit/miss are bad. Once you bring random chance into combat resolution strategy goes out the window.

that depends on what you mean by miss chance, Sup com and TA for instance had miss chances on more or less every weapon other than missiles (which technically could still miss but they try their hardest, just don't have a czar over your nuke launcher when you fire it).

But yes, locking a player out of the orbital layer would be silly.

What about an orbital construction unit or an orbital cloak generator? Both of these would make some interesting gameplay. I could see using an orbital construction unit constructing bases on asteroids and then the cloak generator cloaking a group of units.

Well an orbital construction unit could obviously be used to construct orbital structures.