Building Metal Planets

We already know that there will be randomly generated metal planets you can activate, but what about building your own metal planet. Say have several asteroid bases positioned around where you want it to be and build your own metal planet. You would need to have a very established economy ex: have no ongoing battles to eat up your economy. This would take maybe say, one real hour to construct, but you could have your own mobile death star to take on anything you want.

Damnit! Now I want CAKE PLANETS!!!!!!!! Extra energy gen!

EDIT: in all seriousness though, i think the joy of discovery outweighs the feel of being able to just build em wherever

², Although the idea it self sounds great, but then if you have a good economy, maybe you can just overwhelm and just remove all planets from the galaxy and have nothing left to fight for...

I like the idea of being able to build metal planets only if you could make them into some sort of space station though.

I think the big idea in the end game is to actually lose buildable ground...not be able to fabricate it. Kinda reminds me of mass fabricators: It kind of completely changes the way the system works.

Gotta say no to this one in the actual game. Realistic possibilities of gaining all that metal aside, I don't think it would add to the game very well.

Building a planet..... no.

building metal planets/death stars or generally speaking increasing the playable map size in game might have a negative effect on getting to a conclusion of a game. One of the nice touches of PA is the destruction of planets in the late game that allows for a speed up of the game in the last phases as the map surface is reduced effectively.

the other issue would be, that halfway realistic (in comparison to other buildings/units) resource requirements would be quite astronomical and unpractical.
On a side note, on this the white house agrees:
This Isn't the Petition Response You're Looking For

If anything, I hope someone would put it into a mod.

It could be an aspect of the Galactic War metagame... but it doesn't work out too well in game. Asteroids are a million times cheaper because they use existing space debris.

someone had to build the ones you find, so the Tech should Exist in PA. Any lost tech can be rediscovered (even if it takes reverse engineering an existing example)

this, ZK planetwars has lots of similarly interesting stuff.

They weren't built by the Commanders waging war, they were built by the Progenitors or maybe even an older race.

Mike

so? You think if the government found an alien space ship they wouldn't try to build something similar? (with varying degrees of success). I suppose you could use that excuse to not allow it game play wise but story wise it seems like a cop out to me. I'll always vote for allowing more freedom to players. Bigger is better after all

The commanders are fighting wars that are won in hours, maybe a day or 2 for really big systems, but otherwise the game just doesn't work on a timescale that fits with building a planet from scratch.

Mike

Well that comes down to a matter of preference I guess, or to quote the Dude "That's just like... your opinion, man". You just can't speak for everyone in that regard. I for one will want to push this game to the very limits of size and scope and am prepared for the implications of that, as I'm sure a few others are as well.

It's not really an opinion, it's mostly based on 'fact', look at most games of SupCom/TA, how long do they take? It's even part of the lore and why only the Commanders are sent to battlefields to build armies instead of shipping the armies themselves.

So yeah, it might be Technically possible, Lathes and nanobots are all kinds of cool, but the idea that you can build a planet with them in a time scale that fits your average game is really out there. Add to that the fact that you already have something potentially very similar(and more flexible) in Asteroids, slap on some engines you got a planet killer, slap on some factories and unit cannons and you got an assault carrier, slap on some artillery cannons and you got a great support weapon.

Metal planets so far only destroy planets, and maybe if you find one it would be cheaper than a KEW to use if you find one but not if you need to build one.

Pushing the game is great, and Uber seems commited to really focusing on the game post release, but I get the feeling that will be different than what you're imagining, instead you need to support modders, those are the people that can really push the game.

Mike

I think it's appropriate that you surrounded the word fact in quotes I don't think it's fair to compare the time scale of a supreme commander game to the time scale of a PA game though. The maps will be many magnitudes larger in size and I think they time scale of those games with increase to match. I've played a few supreme commander games into literally the 12th hour on 81 km maps. How many hours would an 80 planet map take if the time increased proportionally?

Also, the time it takes to build a metal planet might not be 1:1 with reality either. Certainly it wont take 365 days for a planet to orbit a star in game. They take some liberties with these things to increase the fun factor which I'm ok with. Chalk metal planet build times up to a future tech

So you're saying the average PA game will take hours and hours? Not likely, if I had to guess I'd the average game will aim to be over about half an hour, maybe up to an hour for larger maps(note this is based on a 1V1) Also keep in mind that even with larger games with 8 players it doesn't mean it will take 4x that of a 1v1. the thin is that it DOESN'T increase proportionally. Think about a 4V4, all the players build up at the same rate, and while there are more targets to attack, there are also more players to attack them with. Yes, a 4V4 will be longer than a 1V1, but it won't be 4x times as long. In the end the time frame just isn't long enough for planet building from scratch.

Hand-waving it away like you suggest has the downfall of severely damaging the player's suspension of disbelief, if they can build an entire planet that quickly then whats the point to building units, and why do they take so long when you compare the size?

Mike

sure RTS games aren't real time - at best continuous time, but they have to stay somewhere inside their own time frame.
if you have a construction which is a few magnitudes larger than your usual units/buildings than you would also expect costs time/resources be somewhere in that order, otherwise it would look more like an arbitrary short cut.

Indeed. As TA-style games progress in technology and economy the game becomes more unstable. It's easy to stalemate in the first few minutes, it's a lot harder to stalemate after 1 hour. Adding more players into the mix usually just catalyzes the rate at which technology and economy progress, that's why even though there's more ACUs to kill the games usually don't take much longer.