Asteroid Defense?

It doesn't have to be efficient. It can be very expensive and have a long build time if necessary. There just needs to be a defense for every offensive strategy.

There is; however some people don't like the answer. The perfect defense against <weapon X> is not to let your opponent build one. If you claim all the asteroids first, your opponent can't fire one at you, so you have already defended against it. Stop them from gaining a foothold on any of them, and you will never be hit by one.

I don't agree that every unit should have (or even can have) a counter unit designed specifically to stop it. Smaller asteroids are viable targets for a counter missile battery, however you just turn a single lump of huge kinetic energy into a seething mass of huge kinetic energy; overall your planet is going to be hit by the same force regardless, it's just either all in one place, or spread out over a larger area.

Take a 12 gauge shotgun. Load it with a solid slug (this is a shotgun bullet, a single lump of lead the size of the barrel just like a pistol bullet). This is like your incoming asteroid in one piece; all the pain goes in one place.

The more missiles you hit the asteroid with, the smaller the equivalent shot size of the round you should be loading; you could end up with asteroid 00 buckshot, or asteroid number 9 birdshot. All of them are going to do a hell of a lot of damage though, and make no mistake, they will still hit the planet. Protip: do not stand in front of a shotgun no matter how small the shot is. 30J of incoming lead is dangerous, you will be in serious trouble.

So in essence, shooting missiles at asteroids is just going to turn it from a giant bomb into a liberal carpet-bombing; you may end up doing more damage to yourself over a wider area than would have happened anyway.

If the asteroid is huge (e.g. upwards of 100km across) then you are doomed, pack your robot bags and move out immediately. Anything that could realistically defend against an asteroid that size is a planet killer weapon in its own right; don't shoot it at the asteroid, shoot it at their planet instead. The impact at Chicxulub made a crater 180km wide, and it it is believed the asteroid that did it was only 10km across. Mass is proportional to the cube of diameter, so the further up the scale you go the worse it gets. Beyond a certain size point your only real choice is to abandon ship and start somewhere else, while you wait for the planetary crust to reform on your original base

The time when this argument between the geeks and the military starts is generally where the movie pulls a rabbit out of it's hat and produces a space craft armed with a nuke to go intercept it via drilling or a hole in the rock and detonate it from the inside or some wiz with numbers that says to nuke it on one side to nudge it off course.
Though in Star Trek, they do produce a giant laser (close enough) instead.

I would be in favour of no 100% effective counter to the asteroid. Mainly because I want to throw some rocks around and would really hate it if they started getting randomly blown up.
The one exception being when someone mods in the Andromeda Nova Bomb and we start blowing up the stars.

Yes. I understand that an asteroid that is large enough would have no defense, but who knows how many asteroids will be in a system? In the Kickstarter video, there was an asteroid belt with hundreds of asteroids that all looked like they could be claimed, so how could you claim them all? Not everything should have a hard counter, but shouldn't the somewhat readily available (don't condemn me for calling it readily available because it seems to be so) super weapon have some kind of counter, be it easy or difficult to make? I don't care if it's the missile idea I have (which I do see the problem with) or something else, but though I am no RTS expert, it seems overpowered if you can can launch some engies to an asteroid, if it's in the game put up a stealth gen, otherwise try to stay stealthy some other way, and send an asteroid at an enemy occupied planet, destroying it and possibly the commander. If nothing else couldn't there be some way to quickly evac a com if an asteroid is coming?

Yes, a counter that isn't 100% effective is something that I would be fine with. (Not that I'm making the game) I just wan't a chance so that when I'm playing a game in the nooby way that I would I actually have a chance to stop the massively better enemy from hitting me with an asteroid.

a) aerial transport on standby, or one of the missiles you use to fire the commander off at a new planet. Either of those should be able to get the commander out of the way; although we don't have any details, it looks like asteroids are being toned down enough that most of them are just going to be making a big crater (see the last livestream, they've got the crater part down pat). Get to the other side of the planet and you should survive fine, and obviously getting to another planet is guaranteed survival.

b) while the physics of big asteroids mean you are stuffed (if you don't have Bruce Willis built yet, anyway), small ones can be exploded out of atmosphere into bits small enough to just burn up. Missile defense is perfectly viable if you can smash it up small enough that atmospheric entry does all the work for you, and turns it into pretty trails and maybe an airburst rock or 2.

So it should be straightforward to implement basic defense against small incursions, while still leaving the possibility of only a few tactically usable asteroids that would be unblockable. This gives you the chance to fight over those, while building defenses to try and whittle down the small ones that might make their way over.

It should also be relatively straightforward (not quick, but straightforward) to define an arbitrary limit in-game for asteroid size that can be defended against (e.g. <5km diameter), and add the option on generation to only add a set amount of undefendable ones to the system. "Doomsday asteroids = 5" or whatever.

I'm guessing that this sort of mechanic is the kind of stuff that's going to be tried and refined over alpha and beta. We know asteroids are going to be in the game, we know it's one of the cores of awesome that Uber are working on, so I'm confident that it'll end up being both usable and balanced before the game hits release.

Yes, that sounds good, I like that idea.

How about looking at other game-ending systems?
Nukes for example:
We have nukes (big explosion) and it can be countered by an Anti-Nuke, a similar rocket, but smaller and less powerful.

Now let's bring asteroids in this perspective. Obviously the asteroid can wreak more havoc than a nuke, so these are basically tiers of mass-destruction:
Tier 1: Anti-Nuke, works against nukes
Tier 2: Nukes, wreak havoc
Tier 3: Asteroids, wreak even greater havoc

Now what I suppose Uber should do is add the defensive property of the Anti-Nuke to the Nuke. Nukes would then be used to stop incoming asteroids (or tear them apart so they do less damage). Obviously we don't want one nuke to block an asteroid, so let's take 5 nukes for example. Building 5 nukes would destroy an asteroid, thus saving your base.

So in this warfare, you would probably first build Anti-Nukes, then switch to Nukes. When the game gets to the point where there are much more Anti-Nukes than Nukes, people will start switching to Asteroids, and thus not using the small amount of Nukes they already have. Asteroids would then require more Nukes to be built, and more Nukes means more Anti-Nukes, thus increasing the overal amount of game-enders.

Any thoughts?

Well, there's one obvious way to stop an asteroid, even if it's fully prepared to launch (Not sure if it would work anymore after being directed, but who knows). You can always just engage in a massive war with the enemy, and attempt to drain them of enough energy that to launch the asteroid would basically be shutting down thier entire base and letting you roll on with the punches. This would also, theoretically, put the asteroid out of commission unless the person was seriously enough of a dumb-butt to use literally all of thier energy on it.

If they do succeed with the asteroid, then you can just blow some of your resources to relocate the commander somewhere safe, and the aforementioned army will kill off the remaining enemy base.

Your enemy is building a huge asteroid bomb...? No problem! Build a smaller one and smash it into the asteroid..win/win

So the Death is a planet that can move and fight...

The game is getting quite Orky with it's Roks and Hulks.

To be honest I am having a hard time picturing the space combat planet to planet even after the kickstarter, although the rocket and the engineers jumping around asteroids is genius.

I have a very hard time visualizing the Death Star in TA.

I guess the Deathstar will be some kind of fancy asteroid with fancy guns and engines.

I am imagining firing my unit cannon at the Deathstar to deliver payloads of troops to disarm the thing. Mean while, my planet that is getting scorched and drilled by a massive exterminatus beam. I am very curious how fighters and bombers will be able to travel from planet to planet, because I will surely want to bomb the enemy reactor core.

Whether that core consists of a group of nuclear reactors or an actual special structure just for the Deathstar is unknown.

In the extreme, crossing from one planet to the next needs to be possible and meaningful.

Also, I imagine that I will be firing Long Ranged Bertha Cannons from the surface of one planet to the surface of the next which is kind of wild and will certainly depend on the physics of the two planets and the velocity of my shells.

Just in general, the Deathstar is kind of this crazy awesome goal that necessitates the functionality of everything else in between to perform successfully to make it fun. I don't think we want the Deathstar to be a win button, because the only thing more fun than having a Deathstar is destroying a Deathstar.

I would like to know if Neutrino has fully visualized the outcome yet or if he is kind of excited to see what his team comes up with.

From the video we know that you can fire unit cannons down to the planet, but can you fire them up to the moon?

From the video we know that you can fire nuclear missiles at asteroids. We didn't see Bertha's fired across planets though.

The video did not show any planet to planet combat, and I think this is where we are all baffled and curious together.

The best method of stopping an enemy asteroid: you block with your own asteroid sending both off course through space. Think marbles. I mean, that's my expectation anyway.

People might be able to destroy asteroids with nukes, but I may have anti-nukes on my asteroids. :twisted:

I would like to imagine that any combat in-between planets will be players fighting on moving asteroids.

Very much like your Roks and space hulks.

I would love to see astroids with engines not only as a planetdestroyer

I would like to be able to equip a asteroid with engines factorys ect and get it into orbit of the enemy planet and using it as a jumpoint for my invasion

I can just imagine a hard battle for an asteroid, forces on both sides of it fighting to gain control. They both build thrusters to try and push the asteroid, battle and all into eachothers planets. The asteroid wonks and slams into the sun.

Another day in PA.

Also, pretty sure asteroid defences could be enacted by ramming it with a bigger asteroid.

:lol:

Excellent description :mrgreen:

Neutrino has mentioned this capability on several occasions, not quite confirmed, but might be safe to say it's planned at least. In theory the only change that is needed is the ability to choose between a KEW Collision Course and entering an Orbit around the Target Planet instead.

Mike

it would suck a lot if there was no meaningul defense againest a giant rock from space hitting your base, especialy if you consider the fact that they can turn palents into lava planets!his would be my facial expresstion if an asteriod hit my base. :?: :?: :!: :!: :evil:

i just realized that any defence would be kinda useless considering someone could send a small decoy asteriod for all the missles and then normal-huge sized one for the real attack! :lol:

Are you thinking of it as a teleporter or ma drop off point?

Kinda off topic but, when an asteroid slams into a planet and if the planet "shatters" is there going to be subsequent rocks flying through space and potentially crashing into other planets?