Just played a 4 way FFA where i was forced offworld early, I grabbed up a moon and started cranking out orbital fighters and Laser platforms. My hopes were to swamp the skies of my lost homeworld with orbital fighters and once the way was clear, neatralise all enemies with overwhelming numbers of Laser platforms. I just thought I would share some of the issues i encountered. 1st: Orbital fighters dont work very well. Not sure if its a rate of fire issue or targeting problems, but two of them couldn't kill a solar power satellite inside of 5 minues at least. I kept looking back and they were just staring at it. Eventually the Solar array had sustained 75% damage, but after so long it no longered mattered. 2nd: On my first trip offworld my commanders icon vanished. I thought he was lost in space. No tragectory was visible either. Eventually he turned up after arriving. 3rd: Tragectories handle more than a handful of units poorly. I cant embed a pic because this is my first post, but if you want to see look here: http: //oi40.tinypic.com/24pxypv.jpg 4th: On my next interplanetary voyage my commander got stuck chasing a moon. He never ever landed. It was a very small moon very close to the sun. That's all i guess. Looking forward to the next patch guys, thanks a lot, im a huge fan!
The community is very much aware that the current interplanetary gameplay is basically broken Ina fundamental level. The problem is that we're missing some key capabilities that aim to form the core of the interplanetary gameplay, namely the teleporter, unit cannon and the ability to put asteroids in orbit around planets instead of just smashing. Between that and the orbital revamp Uber has stated to be working on we just have to wait and see at this stage. Mike
Regarding your 4th point - a moon within a certain distance of the main body can only be accessed via orbital from the main body. So dont place stuff close to the sun. Also, just forget about orbital swarming unless its your only option. It is faster, if not cheaper, to go for nukes or halleys. And more fun.
By moon i actually meant small planet, imagine flying from here to Mercury but you just get stuck chasing it. So you are saying that you cant land on certain bodies that are orbiting too close to the sun and you cant travel from one of a planets moons to the other if they are too close to the planet? As for orbital swarming, it WAS my only choice. I thought without gates or transports there was no way to kill the other guy. There was, I just had to win the orbit war. It was an odd game and it was broken as hell, but that's what beta testing is all about right? This odd situation exposed some issues and i wanted to share.
Thank you Mike, as a part of that same community i too am well aware of this. My post wasn't to outline the difficulty of invading between planets in the current state of the game, it was to point out bugs and other issues that will still need to be fixed, no matter how many other options get introduced in the near future.
Thank you for doing so. Really, we do appreciate folks speaking up and participating in the community forums. Also, KNight is our official balance hound. He goes around sniffing out balance ideas that will unbalance the game and kills their threads by posting logical reasons why they are wrong. Please forgive him if he comes off a little strongly Back to the point at hand: If you attempt to enter a moon who has a close in orbit, your unit will go into an infinite loop because the nav engine cannot curve the unit to the orbit. However, if you launch from the body the moon is orbiting around, you CAN land, because the nav system sends them straight to the body, instead of looping around the main body. Any route that causes them to loop around the main planet/sun will send them into an infinite loop.
Fascinating. I guess since it is known, this will be fixed at some point. It does lead me to ask one other relating question though: In transit you cant be attacked currently, and since Mavor has basically vetoed interstellar units, how are you not invincible by hopping from body to body with your commander? Surely a way to snipe a space traveling commander needs to be implemented. We can't be expected to fill the skies of every single planet with orbital fighters in the hopes one is near enough to the enemies transport for the 5 seconds its in orbit before it leaves again....
Correct, if it is known it will be fixed. Maybe they will let people send things to orbit around the sun, and that will be like a "gas giant". Very speculative, been spreading that idea since the beginning, doubt it will ever happen. More than likely, the game will either not let you generate planets closer to the sun than the orbit can intercept, or adjust the orbit to in-loop to handle this instead of the "pathing" needing to be a loop outwards.
The root problem lies withe the Lander itself, currently it's completely self contained, it can freely travel to and from any planet, moon or asteroid it was at no cost. If you look at the PreVisualization again you see that the commander was loaded I to the lander before it was launched, which suggests that originally it might have been Uber's intent to have it be "difficult" to jump from planet to planet in rapid succession unless you already had that infastrucure present at each "stop" you made along with an additional cost for each "jump". Considering the lander hasn't fundamentally changed since its initial implementation it's hard to say if its still just a holdover from the current system or the new intent. Mike
To the point about avengers not working, I've discovered how the bug works. They can only fire while moving. As soon as they come to a halt, they stop shooting.
That sucks if you get there and find you have reached a dead end. Orbital transfer takes a LONG time. Current Astreaus is fine for implementation. Hunter killer orbital fighters are a good method to solve that. Or you know, just black list players like that that aren't playing to win. Orbital fighters currently don't move into range to attack units. It's a range issue, they appear to take distance based off planetary surface, not orbital shell. Commander icons are constantly bugged. Eventually Uber will change the way that UI stuff is displayed
Blacklist players? im not sure that should come into gameplay discussions, prevention is the best cure. People were hiding their commanders in TA and FA. They will do it here too. Interplanetary space is the new underwater, except there is nothing you can do to kill them there, an Astraeus can leave orbit seconds after arriving - there is no knowing where it will appear on the planet so fighter will not be any kind of solution.
If you come to a point where the only reason they haven't lost is because they are hiding, and you have won anyway, it's kind of a foregone conclusion. Just a matter of time. May as well just call the game and play another. No point drawing the game on overly long. I believe there is etiquette to this regard in Sins multiplayer. May as well bring it here too. I was thinking actually fighters can just chase stuff around a system. Given a distance of 5 orbits around the sun at a certain radius they are guaranteed to reach their target. Gives a unit time to get wherever it's going under normal gameplay, but not enough time to keep going indefinitely because fighters will simply chase it down.
According to the devs the spaces inbewtween will not be a battlefield. No units will be able to fight there. I think the best way to handle it is for commanders to be movable only by one way rockets from the orbital launcher OR have units be moved by interplanetary carrier ships that crash on arrival (but can be repaired in a few minutes). This allows the owner of a planet time to react to the arrival of an astraeus or whatever before it can leave.
Units aren't able to fight there. Just the orbital fighters are ever so slightly faster than an Astraeus, so eventually they both reach the same destination together
Well yeah it does suck if you reach a dead end.....that's kinda the point! Obviously you don't want to constrain Interplanetary movement too much but I'd say the current implementation is clearly has too few constraints. Also it is worth noting that they are still playing to win by hiding, but it's a meta-game play rather than a "proper" gameplay. By allowing such "Meta-Plays" to easily happen and encouraging players to simply "Leave" the game once they've "won" and adding them to blacklists is a very poor way of doing things, not only is it encouraging those to preform those Meta-Plays because the game still see it as a win, and it just encourages him and others to continue doing it. Adding them after the fact to a blacklist is honestly a really "selfish" solution, sure you might not have to deal with that particular player again, but he will still have tens of thousands of players left to play with, and without any proper methods to discourage that kind of Meta-Play others will do it as well. Mike
