The devs are saying "no space battles but space units" and they also said "we aren't shooting for realism, we are shooting for awesome". Remember the battle of endor in star wars and remember how awesome that was. WE WANT AWESOME! P.S. don't tell me that you haven't seen a star wars movie because that is plain terrible.
Go have a read of the explanations of why the developers aren't doing space battles. There's actually some good reasons put forward by Uber.
"Space battles" would essentially require developing an entirely different game in tandem with the current game. New unit models, either a different game engine or a lot of changes made to the current engine to handle 3D movement, tons more balancing, and just massive, massive work across the entire game. Honestly, anybody who keeps requesting space battles has zero appreciation for just HOW MUCH of an additional workload it would be. At this point in development, it's like asking for RPG sidequests or something, it's just silly how audacious of a request it is.
Even if there are no space battles in PA, I'm sure some enterprising soul WILL create a space battles mod for PA (not that I'm in favor of unrestricted modding, per se). It's also interesting to note that Uber said that there IS a chance that PA could possibly evolve to include space combat in the future. Possibly. Personally, I think space combat would be great to have as a precursor to a planetary invasion. However, I can live without it as well (for the time being, at least).
Someone needs to come along with a really good next-gen large-scale space RTS anyways, but UBER aren't the ones to do it right now.
Judging by this, it's not even the direction the original Homeworld Developers/Artists are thinking about either. Not all of the previous Devs work for BlackBird Interactive... but it looks like the heavy hitters do.
Didn't know about that game. Could have easily guessed it was from the makers of homeworld though - everything from the music to the UI & aircraft trails is the same.
Glad to spread the word of it at least. Whether it's any good come release is another matter entirely. Homeworld really was a lightning storm captured in a bottle, and all the voice-overs and contrails in the world can't recapture the magic for me. ... Damn ... I really miss Homeworld.
I still maintain that if I don't get a homeworld 3, I might shank some one, and if it's a bad game I may up it to several someones, oooor trolling the internet, depends on how malicious I feel that day
I actually hope not, for me at least, I want to see something different from PA than from homeworld-type game. Also a part of the appeal of a homeworld game is the story, which PA wont itch, but that's not what I'm trying to get from PA
just to add my two cent at how a war with planets and space could look like (obviously there is stuff in that´s already available and some also may already figured out a similar concept but just to give a good picture of the whole idea) your standart aray of groundstructures and units that do aswell consist of antiair with additional hovercraftunits against water .. waterstructures and units with a browd aray from subs to antiaircruisers to battleships to watercarriers and special water sturctures such as resourcegatherers and powergenerators especialy usefull for pure waterplanets with only few islands for ground or non at all.. then space units which ALSO serve as airunits and structures that are either on land or around orbit of a planet .. how should spaceunits work?: interceptors attack every flying space/airunit (they do function as both) bombers antispace/antiground/anitnavystructures and slow naval or space units (except submerged subs) but with strong weapons torpedobombers are special antiship which shall not attack any ground units or structures but just space and naval gunships generally good for all but not excelling anywhere because of rather moderate to low damage output and slower then other flyers.. cruisers are your general antispaceunitsupport for your spacedropships and spacecarriers .. (yeah i can see some problems) the basic idea is any spaceships that wants to battle or support planetsite has to enter air on a planet bigger spaceships should´t be able to attack ground or water imo..this is what your bombers torpedobombers and gunships are for..treating spaceunits like air allows ground and water to still be able to fight back so they don´t get redundant, you are still able to have spacefights and you also would have a way to transport ground and amphibious units to other planets.. the general problem is to not add units/structures that make the concept uneccesary too complex or broken..and of course to balance the air/space aspect of the concept since it is the easiest to brake it.. so aside from this eventualy being repeated (as by the ammount of threads and posts that possibly has happened already) and knowing uber won´t do any spacebattles cause off the difficulty to add 2d or 3d spacebattles into the planetary system they have..at least i think that.. what do you think about this concept? any complains? anything you might want to add? or wanna put the heretic on tar and feathers?
This is why people keep getting hung up on space battles, I think. Any kind of orbital combat is, by definition, a space battle, even if it's just a guided drone intercepting and kinetic-killing a satellite. Once you implement orbital infrastructure or intelligence units, you're going to need to implement orbital (or sub-orbital) weapons to destroy those units, then orbital defenses to counter the weapons, and so forth. Thanks to Star Wars and other mainstream soft sci fi, most people read "orbital combat" and assume that this must involve space dreadnaughts motoring around in the space ocean, blasting each other with space cannons. In reality it would end up as more of a tactical missile-spam vs. counter-missile-spam tug of war, which could be very interesting if the orbital ecosystem is diverse enough. We're not going to get Homeworld battles, but depending on how the devs choose to populate orbital space, we could end up with some of the most hard/realistic space combat ever seen in a video game.
