Since we have the Enhanced Orbital Units stretchgoal, I've been thinking about what kind of units I'd like to see. One concern some people have raised is the matter of how one might attack a heavily fortified planet (assuming their anti-asteroid defenses are in-order and there are no Metal Planets on the map). These proposals aim to fill various gaps in a game with interplanetary combat - and I made some models in Blender to go with them! Burner Starfighter The Burner is a base-tier space combat unit - best at attacking other spacecraft. Its high speed allows it to rapidly respond to orbital-level threats before they can endanger the ground-situation. It is capable of transitioning to the Sky level, but suffers limited maneuverability there, and its comparatively high energy cost (orbital factories use more energy) make it inefficient at atmospheric combat. Flailer Escort A T2 warship, the Flailer is designed to protect other vessels from starfighter attacks. Its slow speed limits the response capabilities of any vessels it escorts, but its missiles are undeniably effective at their job. Hammerhead Dreadnaught The Hammerhead Dreadnaught is built from a T2 orbital factory, and is the go-to method for orbital bombardment. Its eight siege cannons deal AoE damage to any ground units unfortunate enough to get targeted - though by the time the projectiles arrive, faster units may have moved out of the way. It is equipped with basic guns to protect against other orbital units, but needs additional protection in the event of a concerted attack. Avenger Assault Carrier The Avenger carrier can transition readily between the Orbital and Atmospheric elevations with its four rotating engine mounts - though going down is considerably faster than going up. Once it is in-atmosphere, it can rapidly load and unload dozens of fighters, bombers, and other flying units - quickly securing a beachhead for reinforcements. Sort of like a CZAR, but with space-capability instead of the death-ray. It has several missile mounts capable of repelling orbital and aerial foes, and when in-atmosphere, its two cannons provide a basic level of anti-ground firepower. Angler Assault Transport The Angler is a massive ground transport that can deliver many dozens of ground units directly onto a battlefield. It can transition freely between the Orbital, Atmospheric, and Ground levels, or go directly between Orbital and Ground. When landed, it can rapidly unload troops - and can also act as a combined T1 land and bot factory to reinforce the initial wave. If a target planet has heavy defenses against both air and space, large numbers of Anglers may be the only way to break in. Hope you find some of these concepts interesting!
I like the models, and I also like the idea of orbital transports. However, if the orbital mechanics are somewhat realistic, the starfighter would become less effective, since it would have to take time (and energy) to get close to the target. To make them work, you'd have to deploy a few dozen and spread them out, but at that point, you could just have orbital defenses against incoming transports for a similar effect.
All of these ideas are really legit, and the ideas for transports are awesome. Hopefully if they use your ships/ideas of space ships, I hope they can make it into a GIGANTIC size: The Dreadnought from ME3: http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb2 ... nought.png High Charity from Halo: http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/halo/ ... -scale.gif (Take a look at the Forerunner ship in Halo 3 for size) Infinity from Halo 4: http://halo.bungie.org/halobulletins/20 ... _scale.jpg Now my point is not the design of the ships, because your designs are actually awesome and I dislike copying peoples work. Take point of the sizes of the ships, it would be cool in PA if you can construct massive ships of war, nearly 1/4 of a planet, for the Galactic War. My imagination for a Galactic War/Planetary Invasion for PA, in a ME3 perspective: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sj9A5A3VN60 Hopefully we see something in the future with your designs, I hope you to see if you can make pictures of the ships in mid-combat or deployment on a planet for cool examples of how they would function in your perspective. P.S. It would be such a badass Mod if someone could add the Reapers from ME3 to PA and fight them with your friends in a Galactic War. Watching them harvest your planet and destroy worlds would be amazing.
The problem I have with unit concepts like this is that it basically makes the Orbital Layer a second Air Layer, which is something that I'd rather not see. Mike
Large, spaceworthy ships are not in the scope of PA. The fastest way to build a spaceship is to use existing materials (IE, an asteroid), and hitch a ride. Only this level of quick, ad hoc construction can reach the enemy and deal significant damage before they reach exponential status. Any half decent planetary railgun/cannon/other can rip through solid space ships with far less effort than it takes to build one. A soft, malleable asteroid would take little damage from such a weapon (on top of being really cheap), further justifying their use. It would be great to see some air units capable of reaching high orbit, mostly as a way of easy travel between planets and moons. This would be especially important as a way of fighting across gas giants.
I see the starfighter more of defence type unit needing a space platform to support them and scramble when needed (plus reduce the deathballs in space ) To make it less air units in space they still have to remain in orbit so they can not "hover above your base".
Although the designs don't look too bad, they really don't fit with the expressed direction of "NO DEEP SPACE COMBAT". If you have ships and fighters, then the implication is that your space combat is going to be a mixture of naval broadsides and dogfights IN SPAAACE. What's more, you beg the question "If i have these big meaty looking ships, why can't they just fly about wherever, and engage enemy forces in deep space?". So in other-words, air units in space in a rotating frame of reference. Orbits don't work that way. There are a lot of interesting ways to do orbital combat based on genuine emergent mechanics stemming from the physical constraints of the system, whilst making this part of the game play very differently from other theatres. Conventional Sci-Fi ships and fighters don't really play any part in this. There are plenty of ofther games that do the Standard Starship Scuffle, such as SOASE, Homeworld, and any number of 4x games with a tactical component. Here is our chance to create something new, that actually makes use of the interesting aspects of orbital mechanics. I would much rather play THAT form of space combat, then a game I've already played a thousand times before. That's actually a lot closer to the kind of gameplay I'm talking about. I don't know how that would look from an aesthetic style, but having fragile satellites shifting between orbital paths, before sniping each-other at extreme range with missiles and lasers is much closer to an interesting concept than the tired navy/air-force IN SPAAAACE trope.
I figured orbitals would be less another layer of combat and more like defenses and utilities. IE: Blockade stations to keep enemies off your planet/stuck on theirs, Orbital satellites and telescopes to gather vague intel on many planets/precise info on one smaller extraterrestrial area etc etc They stated pretty clearly this isn't a space combat game.
I know the devs have said that there would be no space battles - which I took to mean no fighting in open space. I didn't see that as precluding units in the orbital layer that can fight while in orbit. The question several of these units are meant to address is: what do you do when your opponent has a heavily fortified planet littered with anti-ground and AA emplacements, numerous squadrons of rapid-response aircraft, and with enough nukes to destroy any incoming asteroids? If you don't have a metal planet in your possession, what we've seen so far seems insufficient to breach that level of defense. Hence, I proposed that there be units like the Hammerhead Dreadnought, Avenger Assault Carrier and/or the Angler Assault Transport, to provide late-game players with a way to deliver overwhelming force against heavily fortified enemy worlds. We're looking for *AWESOME* here, and having 20 Avengers burn into the atmosphere and unleash hundreds of fighters at once amidst a hail of antiaircraft fire seems pretty *AWESOME* to me. The Burner and Flailer were just proposed as a way to respond to offensive orbital units. Regarding the risk of orbital combat eclipsing planetary fights, I think the best option would be to make orbital units somewhat less cost-efficient, so you would only use them when you need a way to project force against an enemy-held planet.
See I totally agree with you, but unfortunately I think your idea gets killed by the scale of the game. PA feels quite small to me. Today I was playing PA - and then I swapped to Sup Com. Woah! All the units in PA are huge in compared to the planet. To house even a few fighters your Avengers are going to need to be massive on screen. I know people have said that the planets are going to get lots bigger and maybe if they do (lots), your idea could be viable. Unfortunately I'd be surprised if they get big enough!
And yet, a rushed and poorly implemented version of air/naval combat in space is, to me, the very antithesis of "Awesome". Scathis's quote is one that gets brought out far too often, with far little thought for what it truly means. Awesome isn't just about big guns and pretty explosions. It's about being able to destroy your opponent though use of interesting tools that you understand how to use better than he does. It's about being able to make interesting choices about how and where you fight a battle. It's about interesting and fun mechanics that stem from a well understood vision of the playing field. You still haven't answered how, if these ships are so "awesome" why they can't just fly off and attack things across the whole battlefield. Why would ranges or speeds be arbitrarily limited purely by unit stats, rather than by the interesting properties of orbital mechanics? Do you want your fighters to doge and weave like WW1 dogfighters? If so, why are they going to do that, rather than loosing a missile at long range? Why wouldn't the larger ship just loose a missile, instead of having to carry fighters? There are a whole slew of questions about "ship" based space combat that simply don't make sense in the context of an orbital environment. If the answer is "because it's awesome" then that really consists of a lack of imagination about how much more awesome a system with orbital mechanics would be. I understand that when many people think of "combat in space" the first things that pop into their heads are images of Star-Wars and Star-Trek, because they've seen these things time and time again, on screens big and small. But there can be so much more to it than that. Given what already needs to be in the game for asteroid motion to work, it is far easier and more interesting to go with that, than air/navy in space. And that's something that would be truly awesome.
Right now they're getting up the scale of the game while keeping it stable I'd imagine, sticking with smaller maps. Eventually planets are likely to get much larger (one of the alpha vids showed a huuuuge planet) and there will be several of them in one map.
But we don't even know if that is going to be a problem yet, it's all just theory crafting. Neutrino has mentioned a few times the idea that Asteroids and maybe Moons can be moved between planets and either used as a KEW(Kaboom!) or placed into orbit. On it's own it doesn't sound like much, but theres a lot you might be able to do from an orbiting Moon/Asteroid, we've seen in the Visualization that Unit Cannons work from Orbit to Surface, and that's not an unreasonable delivery method for an army, sure it's only as fast as the number of unit cannons and the size of your army, but then again your opponent has limits too. For example, if Air units are likely to be the first units that can arrive to you drop zone, and can get there in time to start shooting down say the last 20% of your dropping units(IF they can even do that) you can do the tricky thing of launching your AA units first, they'll get to the ground before the air units arrive giving you time to organize them and letting them shoot down a bunch of air units to the point where maybe they only kill off 5-10% of your units. Of course, that's based on a lot of assumptions, just like the basis for your suggestion. ;p There is also the possibility to large artillery weapons working from Moons and Asteroids, and given the lack of shields(at least maybe initially as Jon keeps remind us) Orbital Artillery could certainly do some damage. And of course, if we assume parity between players, for every tank or plane he builds, you should be able to build some as well, or build something more useful in a particular circumstance you find yourself in. So far judging by Dev comments there doesn't seem to be an easy way to get an Army off a planet, seems like the basic idea is more so getting Fabbers out and building factories with those instead so if you're opponent has a huge army on a planet, you start laughing maniacally and do something to take advantage of that, we also don't know how Anti-KEW will work, we say in the Visualization that even thought the KEW was 'shattered by what MIGHT have been Nucks, the base and the planet didn't see to fair so well either, so who knows, and of course, if he's developed a planet so heavily that its covered in stuff such that there is no clear area to stage from, it's possible that for the same cost you can get a few KEWs boosting to the planet...... There is too many unknowns to say that Ship based Orbital combat is needed yet. It's not your fault, this is what marketing is all about, but it's all a lie. If Awesome was the only requirement for ideas to get implemented, the game would heavily feature(see what I did there?) 'Feature-Creep' to the point it'd likely implode and create a Black hole. So basically you're solution cause a problem and needed a solution, not exactly the most elegant design, maybe it's the only way it could be done, maybe not, depends on a lot of context that as I already pointed out, we don't know yet. As kinda already said, scale is relative, according to Devs the current planet is actually small, they argue too small for regular 4 player games(better suited to 2 players) but given the Alpha nature and the goal of testing they felt if offers a good environment for that. Second the game is in Alpha, nothing is final and everything can (and prolly will) change. For example right now the maps feel small not because of the actual size of the planets, but because of the way the 'terrain' features are somewhat evenly spread out, it's hard to build within and unit movement paths are all over the place, obviously in time things like needing to build Extractors on Metal spots along with optimization of the Planet Generation and diversification of terrain features will change things up a lot. Not to mention that with the current unit/structure selection there are some holes like the lack of land based T2 AA of any kind. Neutrino has also mentioned that they plan to zero in of the Core surface based gameplay on a single planet before they move on to dealing with Orbitals and Multiple planets. I feel this is a smart choice because even within that 'Core' gameplay you have 4 layers of stuff to deal with, Air, Land, Sea and Submerged. and given the need to have fully fleshed out Naval options for base building for Water Planets, this creates new possibilities even for mostly land based planets with sufficient Water areas. I also feel this is the case because I think Uber plans for Orbitals to play more of a Support role rather than being a fully 'independent' layer like Land or Sea. There is still plenty that can be done from the Orbital As Support perspective and the 1960 Satellites with 4060 Tech is a really good baseline for it. It's unique not only to the other layers in the game, but also unique in terms of other games available which is what makes it so interesting to me. Mike
cool ideas, but I'd prefer orbital layers to rely upon .. yknow ... orbits So instead of "ships" it would be "platforms". A bombardment platform, and Orbital Drop Shock trooper platform, a laser platform, etc
Thanks for the compliment! Regarding some of the other posters, (thanks knight for your considerable analysis), I agree that with the game in its current state, it's too early to consider whether offensive orbital units are absolutely necessary/ideal as an endgame fortification buster, it just seemed that the two options we've seen so far (asteroid strike and unit-cannon bombardment) might be too few to keep a diverse endgame. To elaborate, regarding asteroid strikes, there would need to be some reasonable counter, else anything past the early game would devolve into an "asteroid rush". Yet, if a counter exists, then an endgame player could most likely stockpile enough to make such an option useless (much like nukes in SupCom unless you had the Seraphim Experimental version) - though it may be possible to balance the cost of such defense so that such a turtler would leave themselves vulnerable to the unit cannon. On the subject of the unit cannon, it does allow for more diverse tactics by letting you choose which units to send, and is harder to turtle against due to its ability to deploy your forces anywhere on the planet. Assuming the unit cannons can fire near-continuously, they could at least maintain a steady stream of reinforcements to try and clear a beachhead. Yet, such units would still be streaming in piecemeal, and you might end up facing the problem of sending in mobile flak 40 units at a time against 200 gunships - the gunships could respond to any strike in a considerable area, and would keep wiping out each wave before the next arrived, with comparatively low casualties due to their locally superior numbers. Large planets would necessitate more gunship-response groups, but would also have more resources with which to build those groups. And yes, this is all theorycraft, but I just wanted to illustrate that it's possible that more methods of planetary assault are needed. In the interest of diversity, I proposed three possibilities - orbital bombardment, interplanetary carriers, and interplanetary transports. The game may benefit from all of them, or none of them. At any rate, the ideas are now out there, and I appreciate you all contributing your thoughts.
