Planetary invasion

I've looked around some, and haven't seen any threads dedicated to the discussion of invading other planets. Ever since hearing of multi-planet warfare being a big part of this game, I've been getting really curious and excited about what kinds of strategies and options there might be available for invasion. And the reasons to do so.

Firstly, yes I know this is "Planetary Annihilation" and not "Planetary Requisition" >_<
There are several reasons I can imagine to conquer a planet rather than destroy it. Metal Planet doom lasers or Asteroids with "GG" spelled out with rocket boosters might lead to a decreased playable field, possibly inhibiting both players from expansion. As awesome and fun as they are...
But consider:
What if your planet doesn't have the resources to build interstellar weapons as fast as they can?
What if your planet is smaller, and you are running out of room to place said interstellar missile silos?
What if their planet looks nicer and they don't deserve that nice planet as much as you do?

Sure eliminating and entire planet controlled by the enemy surly cripples them, but what if that is one of several planets they control? Blowing up planets can't be the only solution, and we don't want artillery spam to extend into space do we?

We want options right?

So then....how does one land on and take over a highly developed, entrenched, and overly defended world covered in Anti-nukes and laser towers?

Option one?
Concentrate interstellar weapons on one area, overwhelming their defenses. Thus clearing a moderate sized area free of defenses to land your forces.
If so, and you landed a rather large army on that planet. What happens if they too, have a rather large army? Not only that, but they probably have tons of factories pumping out units left and right plus ARTILLERY EVERYWHERE. Your army would lose a war of attrition. Your only hope in that case is to take out as much as you can before your forces are overwhelmed. But in that same scenario, possibly by the time you land your second wave, they could have rebuilt a large percentage of their base. Doesn't seem that efficient...

Obviously you'd want to land builders too, to build factories and replenish your forces. But then your desperately trying to protect them as they attempt to build up factories, as well as going back to your main planet trying to que up more landers and missiles and whatnot. You're attention might be too divided to launch a successful assault....

Option two?
Something similar, but taking over a moon orbiting their planet first instead. From there you can easily sustain an invasion force via unit cannon. Moons probably won't be able to fit as much of a defense on them due to their much smaller size. Much easier to accomplish I imagine!

Option three?
Build a army capable of over running any defense and land them on their planet all at once, everywhere at once. Time consuming, resources could be better utilized on other projects... at that point you also might not even NEED another planet.

But what if...
Their planet is made up entirely of water? It could still be resource rich, feeding their growing army, and defended via boat loads of boats. How would you invade a pure water planet?
Heck, what if they simply aren't watching their shores? Why not be able to invade via landing where they likely won't have a base, in the middle of an ocean.

My current ideas!:

---I'm not sure if orbital constructors are a planned thing, but for filling the purpose of getting factories on an enemy planet fast. What if there were bot, tank, air and boat factories that are constructed in orbit, with the capability to be sent to other planets as a deployable buildings. I imagine it would be a single time deployment with no way to get it back into space once landed. (Main force get there via landers, then factories land to sustain the invasion, builder can then focus on building offensive and defensive structures.)

---Interstellar landers being able to load naval units? Never have I seen an RTS game have unit transports load battle ships...but I can't think of another way to invade water planets...And it might be pretty dang cool to see a large ship drop off two leviathans.

---in addition to unit cannons....what about unit missiles? The difference being unit missiles reaching other planets besides moons, however with a large cost, and slower construction time, while needing to build que the rocket itself as well as the units being loaded. And the difference from landers being.....well...missiles would....never mind.



That's all I've got at the moment, and these are all rather plain ideas. What are your thoughts on the purpose of attempting to invade a planet, or if it should even be a thing that is strongly incorporated or considered in game play?
I hope you guys post some other creative options to invade a planet.

Honestly, I dont think Uber is going to tell us anything about Planetary until beta comes out, and we'll just find out for ourselves.

But you do raise many points, and im sure people will develop strategies and (hopefully) post them here.

Yes, your probably right, at this point it's all speculation and theory on this end and it might be awhile before this will become relevant. But that's what they want right? A discussion on what might make game play fun and interesting in the future?

My main goal is to discuss the concept of planet vs planet warfare, as it is meant to be a big part of the game. I haven't seen many threads that have really gone into detail on what that might entail other than throw an asteroid at it. (I'd be thankful if someone were to link me to the thread if I missed it)
The game play discussions I have read through have focused mainly with the context of one or two planets with moons, and possible asteroids around them. But I the impression I gather is that there will be numerous planets in system. I believe the implications would change in that context, and how games might play out.

Your point about invading all-water planets is a good one. I don't know how many units in PA are amphibious, but I guess those would be needed then.
An alternative would be to have interstellar aircraft-carriers, so that you can assault an all-water planets with an air-force containing airborne engineers.
Another alternative would be teleporters of some kind.

I think it would be quite funny to have a spaceship carrying normal ships so that the spaceship lands on the surface and deploys a fleet of ordinary sea ships .

Would it be possible to guide an asteroid to a planet, but then approach really slow, so that it crashes gently and your units on the asteroid survive and can hop onto the planet surface. I can't think of a more epic way to start a Blitzkrieg then to softly launch an asteroid into the enemy base and swarm the survivors with units coming from that same asteroid.

Ha! Or even sillier, orbital drop Ships, (see what I did thar ) Naval ships outfitted with rocket boosters to slow their decent from orbit. I imagine drop pod style entry with rockets detaching upon water landing XD

Oh oh oh! That reminds me of a thread I just found while searching! Similar idea, cept without the crashing!
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/asteroids.51301/

Yeah, the asteriod type idea is kind of what I thought would be good, although again, no crashing. A medium sized asteroid with a couple rocket boosters, some bot factories, and a unit canon would more or less be a "ghetto star destroyer." Maybe have a nuke silo on there as well, so you could blow a hole in the middle of their base, and then fire dozens upon dozens of K-bots down onto the planet. If things weren't going very well, and you didn't really "need" the planet, you could just crash the asteroid into it.

Im sorry, i couldnt think of anything else when I read this.


The problem with brainstorming ideas, is that we dont know what kind of units they're going to give to us for inter-planetary travel. While its all good and fun, we have no idea how its actually going to work in-game.

Well then lets brainstorm speculations and theory! One of the goals of the forum is to discuss ideas to make the game the best it can be right?...right? D:>

Issue is, that the next feedback is probably going to be Beta release. And they might already have come up with some drop mechanic at that point, so the feedback comes a little late.

Droppods make a lot of sense though. Not only because the avionics of an average unit suck, but also to protect the unit during travel and to hide it, so your enemy can't peek to see what he is about to deal with.

The shell is manufactured by the dropship during pickup.

Don't wanna experience the SupCom issue again, where flaks could shoot down the transported unit independently from the transport.

Isn't that more of a case of "Don't Fly your transports right over enemy AA?" ;p

Mike

^^^^

He's got a point guys.
Its kind of a moot point to just flying your transports right over AA turrets.

If that's the case I hope they have more than one way to land on a controlled planet. Drop pods are definitely really cool, but doing the drive by with a asteroid loaded with unit cannons is pretty BA as well.

I kinda think that could actually be an interesting game mechanic, especially if transports units had a ton of health in comparison to the units they held. You could risk focusing fire on the transport, potentially killing all units. Or if time and lack of firepower does not permit that, you could then at the very least decrease the threat level of the drop before it gets there.

I dunno, generally a bad idea, but if the reward is worth the risk...fly some other cheaper aircraft right in front of the transports for some redirection, some dummy empty transports along with that. Then you've got a boat load of unit's right where they didn't want them.

Good argument pro shells / closed hangar doors. Even with visual, this shouldn't be possible for an enemy to distinguish. Otherwise you would never risk to transport your commander that way

Then we can just have the Supcom2 transports! yay! /s

It's not like everything was done wrong on SupCom 2
It also avoided ghetto gunships.

Or one way to assault the enemy planet would be to put your asteroid with factories, nukes/artillery and unit cannon(s) orbiting their planet. Heck, send several!

The way I understood was that interplanetary transport via rockets was expensive and inefficient (one unit with one rocket) so that you really wouldn't be using this method to get to a planet that is well defended. At least if there are asteroids in your playing system.

My 400 hours on steam would be proof of that.

Leaving the gravity well of a large planet is what is so expensive. Moving between planets from orbit and taking off from moons and asteroids isnt.

You need a rocket to leave the planet, but once up there, cheaper methods of transportation become available.

That is true, however the point of one unit per one lander still stands. If you want to move in an army that actually can make a difference on a defended planet, you are going to need a lot of landers.

And if landers don't need rockets to move fast in space when launched from a low-gravity astralbody and into their large(resource) planet, it' still going to be a one way trip for them. I don't think landers are going to be very cheap, even without interplanetary rockets. Sure with a strong enough economy this strategy becomes viable.

However I can still imagine an asteroid based assault will be more cost efficient and awesome.