Asteroid Defense?

I just don't see landing your troops on a guided kinetic missile as an option, and even if you did I don't see troops having what it takes to do anything about it. What are they going to do... attack ground? Armageddon does not look like a feasible option.

Or just, redirect the KEW? By Capturing the Engines/Control Building?

Mike

Hmm perhaps I should have been more clear. I am not proposing that there should be a dedicated Armageddon style interception team. It was more a recognition that if unit cannons or rocket gantries can launch units to nearby celestial bodies, then why not an asteroid?

Of course the odds of a successful interception would be very low, and upon landing one would have to wonder what they could do. If the asteroid hadn't manoeuvred completely onto a collision course I suppose they could destroy the engines and the asteroid would miss...I guess that is more a task for landing units on the asteroid during construction or before the engines had been activated.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if we find out the Unit Cannon doesn't have the range to put units onto an asteroid until its already too close to do anything about. This of course doesn't matter when said asteroid is only being moved into orbit, however that's a different matter.

In the end I think defending an asteroid will either require some long term alertness, as in you realise what your enemy is doing early and, I don't know, nuke it, smash your own asteroid into it or attempt to take it over with rocket launched units. Or quite simply a ton of nukes when the asteroid is charging towards you to at least mitigate some of the damage.

As said earlier it should be hard to defend against a giant ball of rock being thrown across space at you.

Also aren't teleporters confirmed? I believe I saw something about that in one of the confirmed features lists. If so then wouldn't that make it a bit easier to get units onto it beforehand to attempt to stop it being finished? Though I imagine the energy costs will be rather high.

Teleportation is confirmed, exactly how it will be implemented is not.

Mike

imo Teleportation will likely be between set gates, to avoid random units popping into your base

I also think that taking control of engines sounds cool, perhaps waiting for him to finish it, then capturing the asteroid and redirecting it to the enemies base.

I think either this, or destroying it prior to launch would be the best concepts in terms of asteroid defence. Like cjinxed said, it should be hard to defend against, and despite a show of missile defences in the gameplay visualisation, it didn't seem to do much good.

There are multiple directions to go with teleportation. Each one has its ups and downs.

Two-way is your classic "build something at both sides". It doesn't matter if it's a stargate, a quantum gateway, a nydus worm, or a... uhm... "fabber cube". They all function by taking units from point A and dumping them at point B. Obviously, it's hard to build a two-way network in the enemy base. This option will be more useful for logistics or defense.

A one way system does not require a vulnerable beacon at the destination. This is often seen as "blink" abilities for units, such as the Cybran ACU teleport for Supcom1, or the Aeon teleport upgrade in Supcom2. The only structure to really count as a one way network is the Supcom2 Noah Cannon, which tosses units across the map. It was exceptionally powerful and worthy of experimental unit status. An instant travel option would be even more powerful, as its potential range and capacity are unlimited. The Supcom2 Space Temple showed just how crazy free movement can be.

The last option is really not a "teleporter" per se. The Galactic Gate was used in TA as a way to move Commanders across the galaxy. As a 1-way system it could teleport small batches of units locally, or a Commander hundreds of light years away. A similar device can work as a tech wonder in PA, providing victory points for players who build the most Commanders and warp them out to the galaxy.

Ok thanks. In that case I think we'll be looking at planet and or orbital defences or preemptive unit strikes through any long range unit transportation that'll be available to us.

In the end it'll happen how it happens and if that means the odds are more likely that I'll have to evacuate a base then so be it. I'm not good at suffering losses like that in games but then I guess I'll have to adapt! Which I should anyway as I'll probably improve my overall RTS 'skill' when I get better at sacrificing units/bases

Defending against an asteroid? It takes a while for such a big piece of rock to smash into the ground so just evacuate/reclaim the base.

Also shooting nukes at the asteroid isn't really effective as it makes a lot of problems instead of a single one (lot of smaller asteroid smashing into the planet.

In general what you want is to adjust the asteroid trajectory to make it miss the target planet. The quicker you notice it the less force you need to change its trajectory. So I agree with the proposition of landing on the asteroid and taking over it.

IMO the asteroid smashing is this game's anti-turtle mechanic. You have a turtling opponent? Well, send him a lovely present :twisted: .

Shouldn't turtling still be a somewhat viable strategy though? You already won't have shields and it's doubtful that there will be metal fabs, so turtling will be difficult to pull off, and you will have much less metal than your opponent.

"Teh Turtularz R Teh Devil! Burn tem all & leave nO Earth unscorched in your search 4 teh demon Turtulorz!"

Seems to be the prevailing attitude at the moment. I think people are sore over losing to Turtle players when they fended off every attack and nuked them in less than 30 minutes. Though the hatred has become something of a Witch Hunt.

For "viable strategy" I personally believe there's nothing like that. In order to succeed one need to adjust to the ever changing situation. With AIs it is simple but not with humans as they are unpredictable.

So if situation is good for turtling then turtle, if it is good for being agressive be agressive and if it is good for building two new bases at once do that. There's no perfect algorithm for complex strategy games. And asteroids are a great addition to the previously unavailable possibilities.

And BTW there are only few things I would say I hate and none of them are related to gaming. So I apologize if my mildly sarcastic post caused undesired controversy and/or got interpretted as an emotionaly motivated reaction.

If we are having many players in a single game... what happens when there are 3 asteroids headed for the same planet? Is the game going to be sophisticated enough to handle the situation where at least two of their impact trajectories intersect?

Do the asteroids clip each other and continue on their same track, or will they collide and subsequently deflect or destroy (or both) each other based on their relative masses and speeds?

I don't even know if Uber has answered this question, but I would think that something has had to been decided at this point given their stated release target.

I swear.. They stole the metal planets from cybertron.......

Firstly, what does this have to do with asteroid defence?

Secondly, the concept of artificially constructed planets goes back long before the implementation in transformers. I would say that Planetary Annihilation taking the concept of metal planets from its spiritual predecessor Total Annihilation more than it is transformers. There is more references to the Death Star in Star Wars than there are transformers in terms of influences.

Great idea. We should defo try that when we get the alpha for testing. Also lets say you have your own asteroid on standby so why not use it to gently (or perhaps not gently) knock off the enemy asteroid from its trajectory (another scenario for alpha testing).

If asteroids could target a planet, why not another asteroid? Smash them together or just go for the deflect. Now all we need are some planet sized cue sticks.
Depending on how long as asteroid takes to get to the planet, perhaps crazy things like inserting teams to capture and divert the thing would work as well.

I set up a poll, sorry if I forgot your suggestion. Post it again and I'll add it (as long as I can fit it, max of 10 and all).

this thread has wrong poll, there should be as much options as possible, i want everything