Planetary Invasions

I agree drop pods would be really good to invade planets. Also I really don't like orbital its way to much micro building all orbital units with orbital engineers. I think all orbital units should be possible to build from the orbital launcher and the possibility to set way points to other planets. The travel time to other planets should be decreased so its more harder for a player to react on incoming orbital units.

Good point. Right now the orbital path changes, apparently depending by the configuration of the planets at the moment of the departure/launch. Sometimes it takes ages, and others it is quite fast.

I'm fascinated by that, and perhaps is a good thing. It just isn't clear to the player.

Currently, (beta version 59607) orbital invastions aren't going that well. Too explain this let's see what we've got.

The weapons to attack other planets:
Interplanetary nukes:
Only usable with Planet vs Moon. If your eco if more then dubble then that of you opponets you can win. 1 nuke is 2 anti nukes. The attacker is losing way more eco then the defender. This can be a stalemate. You should target the anti nukes with 4 nukes a a time and hope their arent more anti-nukes. Result: Possible stalemate, only planet vs moon.

Orbital lasers:
With a Deep space radar you can see it in orbit. You can kill it with the defence turret, the orbital fighter and Umberellas. The Orbital laser doesn't work because it's too slow and is usually countered before it can do anything important. Result: Stalemate

Teleporters:
Teleporters because you can't place them on an other planet. With the use of a Deep space radar, you can see exactly where the orbital fabber is flying in orbit. With just a couple of bombers of bots under the Orbital fabber it can never start building. Result: Stalemate

Moons(asteroids):
Asteroids are the only thing to break a stalemate. It requiers the sacrifice one planet to completely wipe a planet clean. This isn't an invasion but you can invade the planet afterwards. But moons aren't always available or it the only place you have left. Result: Planetary annihilation, incomplete/unballanced.
(Movable Asteroids: If an asteroid is movable it might be possible to use as a stronghold. This will make a shift in the ballance and tactics of Planet vs moon can be used by Planet vs Planet.)


What we don't have yet:
Unit cannon:
From what I have hear it's only Planet vs Moon. Anti-air could be a counter. Result: Unknown, only Planet vs Moon

Transports:
I don't know how this will work. Single or multi transport. On planet delivery of droppod: Result: Unknown


Results / conclusion:
Planets vs moons:
The battles with planets vs moons are alright, but it usually all depends on nukes. If possible you could smash the moon into the planet, but that isn't much of an invasion.
Interplanetary nukes: Possible stalemate, only planet vs moon.
Orbital lasers: Stalemate
Teleporters: Stalemate
Moons(asteroids): Planetary annihilation, incomplete/unballanced.
Unit cannon:Unknown, only Planet vs Moon
Transports: Unknown

Planets vs Planets:
This is a stalemate of epic proportions.
Orbital lasers: Stalemate
Teleporters: Stalemate
Moons(asteroids): Result: Planetary annihilation, incomplete/unballanced.
Transports: Unknown

Conclusion:
The only thing that works really wel is the "Asteroid" but it's more a game ender then an invasion tool. Also it depends on the game that you are playing. If you don't have an Asteroid other planets are impossible to invade. When you want to invade a moon you still have a small chance. But a moon is smaller so it is easier to defend and cover with anti-nukes and umbrellas. Invastions are very very difficult and their is a very high chance of a stalemate.


Solutions:
-Movable asteroids
Movable asteroids makes more tactics availible. But it relies on asteroids.

-Unit cannon
More tactics.

-Large transports of Droppods
I don't know how this will work, but it just might work.

-Dropping the teleporter from orbit.
The current system of building on the surface doesn't work. So I propose dropping it down. It's also possible to make fabbers stealth so the deep space radar tactic doesn't work anymore.

-Changing the orbital laser or making a bombing platform.
Orbital laser is ineffective so it must be improved of a new unit must be made that is effective in late game.

-Orbital anti-nuke / Defence satelite.
Too prevent insta nuking the invading troops.

I finally made my mind that it would be nice to have Dropships, but not Troops Transports. I try to explain why.

At the point we need to invade planets, we have established control on one or more of them. That equals a great amount of resources in the form of metal/power and surface.

We could then build a set of transports, then thousands units, then load them all, and finally head for the enemy line.

That kind of operations would impact on the player (immensly time consuming) and on performance. I don't know you, but I would rather avoid to have to deal with that, I'm not a DHL or TNT chief executive. I want to be a Commander!

On the other hand, if we could include in the game a Dropship capable of building units by itself during the travel from a planet to an other, then we would have fixed lot of issues.

In the first place we would stored a huge amount of metal and power into few power units, just a dozen of Dropships, which would keep performance high and the game fluid. Then we would have the same amount of assault units at the moment of the attack, without having to build them and load them by ourselves. Once the fleet of Dropships reach the enemy orbit we just have to drop those pods, and they will burn in fire together with the enemy defenses. Plenty of destruction and not much impact on the framerate.

Ultimately those Dropships need to be crazily expansive and need to keep consuming metal/energy in order to re-building the assault ground force. They could act as Orbital Factories 'till they get shot down by Umbrellas or Nukes, and in that case they might fall like Zeppelins on the surface of the planet, exploding Commander-like.

You could be afraid to lose one of those ship while on travel. But that would enrich the game giving us a new dimension of play, while once we are on the planet we still have the usual madness with plenty of small units and massive destruction.
--

Carlo. Basically were talking about a flying fat boy, just without the battleship cannons

I'm %100 for that. T3 factories that are simply resource raping production pumping machines would be great. I'm actually starting to lose games because I don't want to be "that guy" who builds 12141258172461827416 tanks and lags the crap out of the battle. Consequently having a big invasion type resource sink would be awesome. T2 eco and control of a planet is virtually limitless production with some absurd results (40 T2 fabs on a nuke launcher). It'd be nice to use those massive amounts of eco for something other then clogging up the bandwidth

Place factories on an asteroid. You now have a mobile factory base.

The problem isn't with being able to build units. The problem is when you have a lot of transport options, they can be used for both attack AND defense. If the defensive bias becomes too strong, why would anyone ever attack? The enemy already has his stuff and can move it around freely, while you are stuck trying to break ground. Like it or not, PA needs transports with some kind of inherent bias towards aggression.

Teleporters are nice but they favor the player who already has them (I.E. the defender). Forward bases are cute but once again the bias is towards the defender. Unit cannons are biased towards aggression. They create juicy targets that are hard to defend, and launch defense-breaching attacks one way. Transports are kind of aggressive if you like mass drops, but their support capacity helps the side with stronger air control (like the defender). Drop pods definitely do, because they smash down anywhere you please, can deal bonus damage which makes it a stupid idea to drop on your own stuff, and are utterly helpless orbital targets when left in reserve. All these biases mean that you would want to attack, immediately and relentlessly with an orbital drop pod.

I'm loath to say we need "super units", but we desperately need late game money sinks and better ways to invade planets. Heavy transports/carriers/dropships/mobile orbital factories/ orbital cruisers/ etc would fill both niches well.

Thankfully, I'm not too worried about Uber implementing it because most of the blueprint features we need are already there and even if Uber added 20 heavy spaceships the mod community is going to add 100 more.

Even if nothing new was added to the blueprints we could make some cool ships, and I have the suspicion that some of the new features mentioned in the last live stream will open up even more opportunities to get space battles going, such as nuking a unit in transit or changing the orbit of planets. It's very likely these same behaviors can be used to get ships that can can orbit the sun and intercept other ships in deep space.

I'm thinking what we need more than Uber making these units is to make a detailed wishlist of behaviors we want our ships to do and petition Uber to support these behaviors and properties for units. With the right hooks we can expand the gameplay dramatically. Celestial would be another "layer" and not just a void for hiding commanders.

Specifically I'm looking for these abilities:

Assign a ship an orbit in the celestial view.
Intercept or match another ships orbit.
Support formations for my ships once they match orbit.
Allowing formations of ships to move together as a fleet.
Battle Formations when two fleets match orbit.
Tell my ships descend/ascend the atmosphere. This will be important for Aircraft carriers.
Support for an indefinite number of different weapons on a single ship.
Dock and launch commands so we can load and unload our aircraft and avengers.
Support for several visible docking bones, so we can see our avengers lined up on the spine of a torch ship.
Support for invisible docking, so I can load a carrier with 9.99 *10^50 fighters.
Units that deploy into structures.
Units to behave as mobile factories.
Factories that can store what they build and then deploy them using the load/unload commands.

There might be a thread for begging for blueprint behaviors... if there isn't, we should start one.

Id like raiding satellites who can shoot air aircraft.

That might help with a landing force (Hoping for one shot rocket transports) from unit cannons or landing to build Stargates.

But I will note that a nuclear defence making invasions impossible is not a problem with the landing forces, its a problem with nukes.

If we had more flexible anti-nuke options it wouldn't matter as much. A mobile anti-nuke, either as an interplanetary satellite or a defense Star cruiser, would be able to travel with your invasion and protect it while you start your assault. They might still be able to overwhelm your nuke defense by spamming more missiles than you can counter, but I think that's completely fair. Nukes aren't cheap.

Indeed.

Personally I am of the opinion that we treat nukes like units, possibly like really tanky aircraft or orbital.

But it might not be the best path to go.

Similar thinking, but I would make a whole class of weapons/units/structures that target missiles and make nukes tougher than the average missile.

If you treat nukes like units, it doesn't mean that SMD no longer exists. It means that nuke play is more than the sum of two structures, which can only be good.

DAMN STRAIGHT!

Aircraft are kind of like missiles, right? They're fragile, high flying, fast, and almost certainly filled with explosives. It doesn't really take a whole new class of weaponry when you can use existing weapons for the job.

This one is kind of tricky. The big problem right now is that for some god forsaken reason, the best defense against air is to have more air. The devs seem hell bent on this philosophy, and not even a well deserved Gibbs slap will fix it.

Nukes would make excellent anti air weapons, as is sometimes practiced IRL. Air shockwaves are harmless against good armor, but a unit that depends on clear skies would not be happy about it.

Well i know this is straight from SupComm, but shields would really help with stalemates and planet invasions, Beachheads are to easially destroyed before they can be effective when occupying space on a planet thats already pumping units.

many games ive played a teleporter just isnt enough even tho im flowing construction bots and 2000 units threw them. been in 4 stalemate games which are really boring because of how easily it is to lock down a planet from ever being invaded currently.

I had an idea, sorry if it already has been suggested. What I would like to see in the future is some sort of mothership. It would be build by the orbital fabber and is able to build units while it's either flying through space or in orbit. This way you'll be able to attack planets which have already been conquered easier.

Awesome idea! Also because I had the same idea myself. Shameless link below.
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/planetary-invasions.54449/page-14#post-856597

Here what I was speaking about. What I'm gonna do with all those power and metal? And that was just a mere Moon. Imagine when you have few Planets or Systems.



In fact there I was building dozens of Energy Storages 'cos I had ~250 Air Fabbers assisting my 20 Nuke Launchers. I was having fun saturation bombing the planet below with endless waves of nukes

Moments like that are why I've been asking for a persistent nuke attack command. Oooh.. maybe the Patrol order for a nuke launcher could make it repeat fire every time it's ready and see's a target in the kill zone.

That sounds badass!