Planetary Invasions

Haven't read the whole thread yet, but shooting stuff from earth into space without rockets is a possibility and it's being looked into pretty seriously.
Hydrogen cannons
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-01/cannon-shooting-supplies-space
Rail guns
http://www.westphalianarms.com/Low-Cost_Launch_2.pdf
http://www.westphalianarms.com/ieee.em.pdf

Granted these things would realistically be pretty limited in payload, but we're not shooting for realism are we?

No, we're not shooting for realism. We're shooting for good gameplay first, foremost and above all.

Every time realism is used as an argument it should be laughed out of the room.

The risk to the commander will act as one of the balancing factors I think. Players will focus defences, and specifically their airforce, around the commander to prevent such a move. This encourages, and indeed opens the opportunity for the attacker to land away from that players "heartland" so to speak, and so instead of drops followed by instant commander sniper victories, you encourage beachheads followed by land battles.

And my argument that the Unit Cannon on small celestial bodies is a good thing when there are other ways to invade planets with units.

The Unit Cannon on small celestial bodies only means there's a huge benefit to controlling and moving around moons rather than just smashing them.

Okay but you're contradicting yourself from earlier.

I'm going to drop 25 Levelers on top of your commander. You lose. Game over. I thought you didn't want that?

If you can stop me from landing then we have accomplished nothing. "Defend everywhere" is exceedingly easy on a scale 1 world and still eventually doable on scale 3. I must be allowed to land SOMETHING regardless of how much defense you have.

I'm not contradicting myself. Read ledarsi's post.

Why should you be allowed to land anything anywhere at any time? You shouldn't.

For heavily defended systems you should have to bombard the system before landing. Which, once again, sticks close to the Normandy Invasion example.

You should by no means be able to land anything anywhere at any time. For heavily defended systems you should have to bombard the location before invading.

Just like when you're attacking a hard defensive line on land. You don't just send units forward. You nuke it, or bombard it with artillery before pushing in.

This is your first mistake. Defending everywhere with as much hardware as can be used to attack you is impossible. If you spend 1 million metal on defenses spread across an entire planet, and I spend 1 million metal on an attacking army dropped at one location on your planet, I will crush your defenses. As the amount of land area, and the amount of resources involved increases, the attacker's advantage becomes even more pronounced.

The same principle is true for all war games, regardless of whether those units are in orbit or not. Spreading troops and defenses across an entire coastline to defend it against invasion is extremely inefficient compared to attacking the enemy's coastline at a particular location.

If you are playing against very passive opponents (i.e. weak players) that are also wasting all their resources on idle defenses, you may not notice this fact because you are not actually being attacked.

Yes, but the way to achieve this is with a really large number of drops to overwhelm their defenses in one place, not just one single unit that is impossible to deny. You will suffer casualties when dropping a really large army. That single mega unit is 100% effective until its HP is completely gone, and then your entire massive investment vanishes all at once. It is binary, small-scale, and boring.

This isn'ty m post, its Brians.

Bombard with what?

And once I can effectively bombard you, why land at all?

That's why these solutions are bad. I dunno about you but I don't invade moons anymore -- I nuke them to death since they added inter-orbital nukes. Why invade when bombardment is easier?

And we can't make bombardment too expensive or it won't help us land. Holkins/Catapults aren't that expensive and can be spread around to cover a huge area, so it will take a LOT of bombardment to really clear a landing zone.

This is where a new unit with long range, anti-structure capability would come in handy.

No, it's easy.

Maybe you're talking about a theoretical future with theoretical new units but presently it's EXTREMELY SIMPLE to totally defend a small world against all attacks.

Unless your economy (and willingness to micro) is literally about 10x greater than mine, you can't possibly insert enough orbital junk to kill my ground defenses faster than I can shoot down your lasers and rebuild those defenses. Landing ground troops is just as hard. You'll land and immediately be getting hit by Holkins and Catapults. Since their range is so large, I don't need to build many to have 100% coverage, and not many more to double and triple it up. (I mean you can have 5 catapults defending every spot on a small moon simply by building a grand total of 5 catapults... they can reach all the way around the entire moon.)

A laser platform is 30,000 metal. An umbrella is 21,000 and I guarantee that even trying to drop your platforms directly on top of the umbrellas and getting them to fire the second they arrive will result in you losing them at a pretty high ratio to me losing umbrellas.

I know this because I spend a good deal of time trying it and having someone try to do it to me. The defender has a tremendous advantage right now.

We're really saying the same thing here.

Dropping 1 unit won't work because defenses will kill it.
With enough defenses, maybe dropping 10 units won't work because defense will kill them all either landing or shortly after landing (e.g., multiple Holkins/Catapults).

So maybe you can drop 25 units. Like 25 Levelers. Right near their commander. Which is exactly what I said.

Basically if you just let the Astraeus carry Levelers, I'd win every game this way: bypass all defense and land on his head and kill him in under a second with Levelers.

That's where a new specialty unit would keep the game balanced whereas using Levelers won't. Instead of dropping Levelers, which are excellent at killing everything, including your Commander, I drop some specialty units that are really only good for clearing long-range static defenses and are close to useless for attacking your commander or anything mobile. Once your long range defensive structures are down, though, I stand a much better chance of getting in with Fabricators or Orbital Lasers to start trying to make real headway.

Let's back this discussion up for a moment, because I think a mistake has been made earlier in your analysis that has gone unmentioned.

First of all, dropping a small strike force of units on one spot to eliminate a specific target actually sounds like very good gameplay to me. When you say "well, they could just drop 25 units on your commander and kill it" I don't see that as an issue. I see that as a very fair attack, provided that you paid for the ability to orbitally insert those units.

Consider the kind of investment needed in order to orbitally insert those units. You need a ship that can carry those units to be in orbit above the planet, and drop them. (Orbital assault carrier? Analogous to an amphibious assault carrier?) Then you need to pay for the drop pods which have no combat value. You are paying for deployment, which is also interesting gameplay because those resources could be more troops, or more economy, but instead you are using them to execute a combat mission or expedite transport.

Then there are secondary costs which are created by the fact that the enemy can destroy your orbital assault carrier. A carrier which is likely to be quite expensive, and a highly specialized support ship that needs defenses. That means you need units to defend it, or perhaps you have moved another moon/planet into orbit and have assets on that planet which you are using to protect the orbital assault carrier.

So while you see 25 units killing a commander, I see 25 units as the trigger-pulling spearhead of a large and concerted war machine, which has quite a lot of investment in other types of interesting assets than just tanks with guns. You paid for support, for logistics, for deployment, and for security.

The 25 units that actually perform the mission get all the glory, but they are not at all the whole story in terms of gameplay.

I'm not sure how we'd swing that... maybe if there was a carrier that was:
* Slow
* Strong against umbrella attacks
* Could not be inserted into orbit except at random locations (we have no control over where it comes in)

Like the Astraeus is almost impossible to stop from landing, whether you control orbital or no. There's just no time to stop them because they can be inserted into orbit exactly over the landing spot and then they're out of the space layer almost immediately upon telling them to land. So even though I have 200 Avengers in orbit and umbrellas and missile launchers all over the place, I can't stop you from landing a bunch of units.

Maybe that would be okay if we couldn't control where they came in at.... (and had a good amphibious unit). Then, having NO orbital control means I can land randomly. Having orbital control means I can land anywhere I want.

So I still prefer the megabot solution. It really solves a lot of practical problems. Actually, let's try and restate all of the problems of planetary invasion:

Problem #1:
Every area on the planet is covered by Holkins/Catapults. We need a way to destroy them.
Megabot: Pass. Dropping levelers: Pass. Orbital bombardment: Pass.

Problem #2:
We don't want to simply kill the enemy commander in a snipe.
Megabot: Pass. Dropping levelers: Fail. Orbital bombardment: Pass.

Problem #3:
It's easy to defend against orbital units with Umbrellas.
Megabot: Pass. Dropping levelers: Pass. Orbital bombardment: Fail [barring some new unit]

Problem #4:
We want to actually "invade", not just glass the planet from space.
Megabot: Pass. Dropping levelers: Pass. Orbital bombardment: Fail

Problem #5:
We want the solution to be practical for invasions without ruining single-planet combat.
Megabot: Pass. Dropping levelers: Fail. Orbital bombardment: Fail.

You have a very obvious bias with your analysis of the megabot that ignores many of the issues brought up about the megabot idea.

It also ignores the issue of a single game ending mega unit that the community and uber doesn't want. Uber has said no experimentals and your megabot falls under the realm of experimentals .

Your analysis of problem 2 is inaccurate.

I strongly disagree your analysis of problem 5.

Your megabot is not practical for invasions and does ruin combat. A giant uncounterable unit drops in the middle of a base and destroys the entirety of the base that is within range of the base and nothing can be done to stop it. That is a major fail.

With drop pods, they are counterable. With a proper amount of defenses, the drop pods can be mitigated.

In short. Megabots have already been analyzed in a 20 something thread on the backer's forum. They have been shot down. They're a single large unit that is uncounterable and over powered.

The more I think of a UberBot idea the more I think it should be a siege weapon designed to target defensive structures. Launch-able once only, land and destroy anti-nukes, nukes, umbrellas and artillery pathing the way for units to be sent in by Unit cannon, teleporter or transport.

To keep it situational have it use such a huge amount of energy that keeping it active will reduce production significantly.

Im not wanting a game ending super unit, I just want something that looks more awesome than nukes.

But energy is very easy to obtain. When a player controls an entire planet,

Did you know a Kerbal can ride outside his ship in a chair through reentry into the atmosphere?

Him being able to walk on excrutiating gravity wells is also a question. Would you enjoy KSP any more greatly if you COULDN'T walk on them?

I would say you're obviously biased against it because you can't think outside of the idea that it's "Krogoth" or otherwise like a SupCom experimental unit, which were mostly meant to walk in and wreck everything.

You have to think outside the box a little bit. We don't need or want Krogoth, Spiderbots or Sacred Assault Bots. Those are meant to be whiz-bang, kills-everything super-units. But you can't let that blind you to the entire concept of a specialized unit that happens to make the most sense when it's very expensive. (Whether you make it giant or not is aesthetics.)

And again, that's not what we're talking about in this thread.

Please read my posts before responding. I said that last time, too, but I guess you didn't read it. I assume you won't read this either. I just like typing.

And again, you are still not reading anything I'm posting.

It takes damage just like anything else. Bomb it. Send Levelers after it. Have your commander walk in circles around it and shoot it to death. Making it fire non-guided weapons is a tremendous weakness.


Your drop pod idea is going to be a failure because either we can defend against it, in which case it's useless, or we can't, in which case I will drop on your commander and kill him with Levelers, which excel at doing so.

The key to making it work is to drop something that's very expensive and only good at killing structures. Call it what you want, but that's the unit we need.

@Slamz

i would think that instead of using a single megabot
you use a drop of percivals/bricks/cans like units ... something that can hit well tank good damage but is not too fast
but still expensive to build ... but yet no experimental itself but something that can rival them and still be
destroyable with good effort ... not too easy but not too difficult
basicly a directfire siegeunit with slow projektilespeed low firerate and hardhiting

As i have mentioned here: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/unit-cannon-discussion.54786/#post-838943

I think the unit cannon and interplanetary nukes should have a range defined after how heavy the planetary body they are build on are, heavier body = smaller range, light body = larger range.

That means you can build a unit cannon on your main planet which is able to reach the planets moon, on the moon you can build a new unit cannon there can reach an asteroid belt, from one of the asteroids you can build a third cannon there might be able to reach the enemy planet.

The same goes for nuke launchers, they might not be able to reach the enemy planet from the main planet, but if build on the asteroid, they will get a bigger range because there is no atmosphere nor gravity and might be able to hit the enemy planet

PS
I'm sorry if this has already been proposed, i haven't read the whole thread

It's been talked about some. But having someone post in agreement is helpful.

I imagine this has already been metioned, Feel free to scream at me if it has.
My suggestion is orbital drop-ships, Which would be intensely end-game Units and cost a ton of Resources.
The concept in my head arose when they mentioned something of Orbital Fabs. that would construct "Techier" and bigger orbital units.
So my concept for Orbital Drop-Ships is this:
First the dropships have to been constructed in orbit.
Then to load them, a smaller transport goes to the surface and picks up 1-5 units and brings them up to the Drop-Ship *OR!* if they implement some type(s) of air Transport unit(s) they(air transports) have a unique functionality to go into orbit to transport units to the ship. Air transports can not go into orbit on any other occasions.
The Ship could hold 100-500 units, t2 Should take up double the room so whatever the holding space(100-500) T2s would consume 2x the space of norm units.
They can travel inter-planetary, on travel an escort of avengers Would probably be the norm.
On arrival to a planet one could deploy all the units nearly simultaneously Creating a chaotic storm of tanks and bots. I would suggest a "BIG RED BUTTON" on the right Clicking it would deploy all the units.
Let there be rains of Tanks!
I can already think of some difficulties and problems with this concept, if you think of any Feel free to share