[Question/Suggestion] Travel between Celestial Bodies

How will travel between celestial bodies work?

Sins of a Solar Empire has a great idea of how inter-planetary and inter-stellar travel should work. The solar system/s are represented in 2d (this idea works in 3d as well, which seems to be the case with PA) where travel between planets is linear and you must make multiple 'jumps' to get to a desired location (the more tech you have in that tree the quicker and further you can jump). Worm holes are randomly generated in solar systems to allow travel between 2 distant star systems of planetary bodies (these wormholes are no accessible until you have the required tech). To inhibit enemy space craft, planetary satellites can be built in orbit to deter the speed at which an enemy can jump to your planet.

I think travel should be restricted to close planets so you can't 'go conquer Scotland when you are in Ethiopia' and you must have sufficient resources and technology to do so.

Bump

I guess Uber did not make final decisions here. I rather think, they are now focused on single planet features. After that, they have to make the engine handle multiple planets. after that, they can think about how the travel between them will actually take place.

I guess, it will be quite like in the kickstarter trailer.

You get a rocket launch pad, put your units in the rocket, and shoot it to a planet in range. maybe the farther away it is, the more energy cost the rocket has. There also will be teleportation afaik. I guess you can modify this also that the higher the distance, the higher the costs are.

I very much like the concept of having to jump solar systems, either based by radius range or by the Sin's style "node based" jumping. Either sounds good to me.
I think that the methods of travel would be in several categories based on range and game theater type. Let me clarify what I mean;

-Planet to moon/asteroid within planets orbit, via rocket.

-asteroid/moon, to asteroid/moon via orbital or those little rockets that launched from the moon to other asteroids in KS trailer. (so once in space with low gravity, little ships can move within that realm around a planet)

-Planet to Planet would be via traveling asteroid. This is either the classic slamming into it or it is going into orbit to use as a base. Having an interplanetary ship as an orbital unit would be neat but I am pretty sure we have heard plenty of times that is not going to be the case. So I will rest at that point.

-Solar system jumping...
This sounds like a job for an orbital unit. A gate of some kind or those wormholes occasionally as mentioned above. It would be able send a Commander Egg to start a "new game" in that solar system. The player would attempt to drop that Commander on an asteroid, moon, or directly on the planet. The players strategy would be depending on if it is a fresh empty planet to base on or if he has to sneak building his way into defeating the fortified planet. Whether Uber plans on being able to bring large armies across planets is still beyong me, or if it comes down to starting up a new theater of war from scratch per solar system.

I think it is important to consider how many layers of gameplay are going to exist and how they will be presented. I am speculating:
-The Planet and moon will be in one instance, so you can zoom out to the moon like we can in alpha
-If you have tried checking out the planet grid map in alpha (doesnt do much at the moment but its there) then perhaps jumping view and sending units between the moon and asteroids will take place there. You can still see the planet and moon within this instance when in the 3d gameplay view.
This would also be the place where we travel planet to planet via asteroid. The player can also freely click any planet and immediately be in its main ground battle gameplay.
So jumping view planet to planet inside a solar system should all be comfortable as one instance of gameplay where we can scroll right out, skip to another planet and zoom right back in. Might be tough on loading, could potentially need a quick distraction load screen "transmitting data" or what have you.

-Jumping solar systems takes us to the galactic view. Here if zoomed fully out we see the galaxy in its entirety without solar system label. Getting closer we see stars and their solar labels. Clicking a star/solar label we zoom into the solar system map at its largest. Proceeding further loads the instance of combat.

It would be nice if the game remembers perhaps two or three instances of combat so a player can juggle at least 3 solar systems seamlessly. This sounds CPU/RAM intensive to me. Perhaps options can dictate how many the game can remember seamlessly for the player. This way, one can explore the galaxy map a bit without having to reload his current battle situation with players.

I could say more but this is getting long, lets see what other people think.
Cheers.

I also wanted to add that seeing the nature of gas giants, they should have plenty of moons around them for players to make use in conjunction with orbitals when fighting over domination of a gas giant.
With that said, to make gas giants valuable, perhaps they provide a global resource bonus to your empire??? Perhaps required to operate an ancient metal planet? Let the Wizards of Uber decide... :shock: