Lets get to the point. It's a disaster. 1. It makes the late game worse because the chances are much higher someone secured another planet. It's dirt cheap and makes escaping the planet before even getting t2 a reality. 2. Air units can not pass through the gate making any ground army worthless and shut down by 10 t2 bombers. T1 anti air units are useless. Nukes, artillery, all the typical defenses that shut down land armies are the same threat they ever were. Land armies will never be a threat to an established player without air support. 3. Planet invasion is made that much more difficult because anti orbital cannons are now dirt cheap and easy to clutter the planet surface with. Stargates are useless on a planet the enemy controls as they are shut down immediately or worse feed units into AOE death. You want to help late game with people on different planets? You have 4 choices to improve it. 1. Special nukes that can hit any planet. Unlike the current regular nukes that only hit in same orbit. 2. Transports. Units that can carry a fair chunk of units and drop them DIRECTLY into the enemy base. So they can actually do damage. 3. That unit cannon you talk about. Even then, if it acts like nukes do now it's worthless. 4. allow air forces to go through the gate. Only air can fight another air force and only t2 bombers can wreck structures of a fortified base. Orbital and anti orbital MUST remain very expensive so that the more efficient economy will be able to power through. Radars need to grant planet vision to expose the weaknesses. Stargates are great for logistical support between 2 bases under your control, or colonizing a neutral territory, but they don't help with planet invasions. This last patch turned every game with 2 or more planets without an astroid or sharing an orbit into a complete stalemate that lags out long before either player can come close to damaging his opponents defenses. ******My last game ended up with me securing the smaller planet and the enemy securing a larger planet. My entire planets surface was covered in factories or anti orbital. I had hundreds of orbital fighters patrolling above supported by anti orbital ground. Each attempt he made at taking my orbital control away failed miserably. there was no space left to even try to plant his Stargate. I had 2 gates running pouring troops into his planet. My eventually counter attack took over his orbital space but you can't fight from space. My army was hovering at 1000 t2 leveler tanks. Orbital fabbers building gates as fast as I could. Getting either nukes, bombed to hell by his massive t2 bomber force, or destroyed by rows of holkins and catapults left over from the original conflict on the planet. As fast as I could replace these tanks and gates they were blown to hell making no progress. 500 t2 tanks lost and I killed a few metal mines. 500 more lost and I killed some undefended storage. With no way to get my own air force through the gate the fight was hopeless. He finally quit because the lag was too bad for him to handle. Even my computer was having trouble. /end rant
Most of this comes down to balance and the feature incomplete state of the game. Interplanetary (non-orbit) nukes, transports and unit cannons are confirmed. The real problem at the moment is that there's no way to scout an opponents planet from orbit.
I understand beta and it's not complete. I just didn't want to leave this to chance just in case some one somehow loved it. that's all.
Couldn't you just send over orbital radar with some orbital fighters? I could have sworn the radars you they just show blips, but have their own field of view to the ground. Not sure what the Advanced Orbital radar does though. It would be slow going however.
You sir have not played since the patch. The advanced radar give you less vision than a dox... I just played a game where I swarmed the orbit with 600 avengers and took out all their orbital. My lasers were worthless because they take an hour to fire and I can't even tell what each dot is when I tell them to fire at it. Stargate was worthless because when the anti air bots actually broke through they just nuked the stargates from then on. If the advanced radar was as it use to be I may have been able to end the game. after hours of brutal micro to target structures. It just takes an astraus to pick up the commander. Since they stay in the same space as the air force after picking a unit up he would be impossible to target from space. Yet another game ending with enemy players just giving up rather than dying.
Most of the issues you are talking about seem to be balance related. The map selection by hosts is also atrocious, anyone making a map with a 400 radius stand alone planet should be shot on site. The early game is now extremely important, if you aren't considering orbital at the 5 minute mark you are just shooting yourself in the foot. I get that most people want to just build up their base, but if you aren't contesting people on planets they'll just spam econ on there and then it'll bite you later. Zaph was %100 right with their being no way to scout from orbit, which is a bit of a pain. A T2 orbital unit set, that can be constructed (and not transferred between worlds) would be great. I understand the pain in not being able to move your air units through the teleporter, but it's most likely going to do more harm then good if you could change it. The plus side is unless the player is extremely established on the planet it's pretty hard to prevent people invading. I wouldn't get too upset about the game state, a lot of changes just came in. It's not going to be balanced and we're here to test anyway, so expect the raw, completely unbalanced patches.
Expanding the Orbital Construction Units build set might help, for example if it could build an anti nuke platform to protect the gate from instant death. It could be an orbital based facility or just for now allow it to build the ground version. I think the orbital fabber could also do with being able to fall back on earlier tech trees somehow much like the advanced fabbers can build tech1 factory's to get back to a point where they have access to the whole tree again.
i has quite the same situation yesterday, except i was playing against an AI but i disagree on the "orbital needs to be expensive" : a satellite is certainly more complicated than a tank, but way less massive, there's no reason for a dumb radar satellite to cost one million metal. what is lacking is structures to guild in orbit, the orbital launcher should build small stuff on land and then launch them like before, but there still should be orbital fabbers that built large stuff directly in space. for exemple, have the orbital fabber build orbital stargates on your planet's orbit and when it's complete you send it in orbit on the opposing planet and toss your billions tanks through it from the sky (they'll need parachutes i guess, but whatever) also, that could allow to teleport nukes between two distant planet : nuke on planet A -> orbital stargate around planet A -> orbital stargate around planet B -> target on planet B the orbital launcher is fine being T1, but a real orbital T2 content is necessary. it's probably a lot of programming to allow that, but that would be great
I think the current system where you can throw up stargates on the ground from orbit works well, you send a decent amount of orbital fabbers with fighter support, the defender will have a hard time locking you down if you are building multiple stargates at once, and once you've got the first one up, your units can start flooding through.
i'm not sure, usually trying to build something at the same time you're attacked doesn't work well, bringing a ready-to-use stargate feels a better solution to my mind. plus i don't like these small crappy laser platform and orbital fighter that much, even more now that it's a pain in the *** to build them also, i still dream of the day where the astreus will work in a way that makes sense (ie : why bother sending it in space with an orbital launcher if it can just go up and down on its own ?)
I agree there are issues, but this patch has moved things in the right direction. First off, Planetary expansion should be a primary goal in a game called Planetary Annihilation, so complaining about the fact that somebody else has "claimed" a planet simply means there isn't enough annihilation going on yet. These stalemates could be resolved without infinitely ranged nuke spam and anti-nuke spam; if both players have an enormous economy, the option of building many Halleys and altering your planet's orbit should be on the table so that you can (in later builds) move your production and Unit Cannons to the enemy, rather than spamming hundreds of Orbital Fighters. Air is still an issue, I concede. This might be alternatively resolved by having non-air planets (there was recently a dedicated thread for this discussion). However, it would truly suck *** if somebody built a Teleporter on your world, sent 50 T2 Bombers through and sniped your Commander on a suicide run. Orbital Fighters remain the main method of warfare currently in securing enemy planets; once orbital falls, you're in trouble. The Anchor has gone some way to solving this issue, however the counter is (as always) spamming. Orbital should not all be extremely expensive. Planetary Expansion is necessary in order to have enough planets to annihilate. I do not believe that allowing the player with the largest economy to have complete vision of a planet is a good idea. They're already at an advantage. Stealth should be an option, and being able to pin-point a commander with an Orbital Radar from your base so that you can snipe him does away with any need for Land/Naval warfare. Uber made the right move here - Recon that can't be hit by ordinary ground or air or naval units shouldn't have global vision. That said the line of sight circumference could be extended a bit. I agree with you that Planetary Invasion is currently a pain. I quit a game in frustration because both worlds were simply spamming Orbital Fighters. Fighters make building Teleporters difficult, but Nukes, Arty and Air make it impossible. I had my army nuked upon arrival. I agree some sort of Transport might be useful, or the Unit Cannon if larger worlds were movable. Some ways to nerf the effects of Nukes/Air/Orbital: Unit Caps on Air/Orbital per planet. Deeply unpopular in this macro game, even if it were to be tied to planet size/"housing"-type infrastructure. whitespace isn't white. Alternatively, extending Radar's role as Control Towers with an AOE in which Air and Orbital function and cannot exceed, thus limiting their roaming capability and making it more difficult to make invasion a purely orbital affair. At the very least, orbital invasions would require Orbital Radar to go with them in a supportive capacity, thus giving an opponent with a slight economic disadvantage a chance of disabling Orbital Fighter if they destroyed the Radar(s). This would also work for air as the current range of Advanced Radar is typically enough to paint an enemy's base and thus retain air as an offensive option. However it would mean that invading or defending forces could create "black spots" on established worlds covered by Radar, in which air could not simply annihilate arriving armies, giving invading land forces a chance to get a foothold, and do something more to overlapped T2 Bomber swarms than shooting rockets at them, or praying for a giant swarm of laggy fighters. This would give Ground/Naval and existing orbital the possibility of defence. Scouts could be the exception - rule it up to combat requiring more processing power than a flight path; Scouts are mobile radars anyway. Unit Caps could be used in conjunction with this; a Radar could only process the actions of so many units. This would prevent quite as much spam, or at least mean that large bomber swarms preventing a land assault could be reduced if you managed to disable a portion of their Radars (overlapping Radar allowing for more Air/Orbital activity in their AOE). whitespace isn't white. Mobile Anti-Nukes... And or Smaller Nuke AOE. But a Nuke is a Nuke, so you kind of expect some bang for your buck. Besides, we already have Catapults.
Shields from SupComm played a big roll in buffering damage from bombers nukes etc... i would like to see them somehow implemented, dropping a portal and then 4 large shield generators from orbit would protect the portal and vise versa hiding you commander under heavy shields could prevent any sniping forcing a land based solution.
Shields tend to make turtling a pain in the butt and kinda need megabots to bash through. Both have been discounted but will likely be modded. Adding more means more to balance, it can be better to refine what you have.
Shields subtract damage from a conflict, creating a baseline where smaller battles are not possible. They also follow an asymptotic power curve. That's bad.
@burrito : i don't think that would be a good anwser, it asks people to destroy one particular little thingy in all the mess of an entire army, seems a pain in the ***. i really think the issue of planetary invasion is due to the lack of orbital T2, which role would be especially planetary invasions. orbital launcher should build and send small units and orbital fabbers in orbit, and there they should build orbital factories that would make and store sh*loads of units before you send them on the planet you plan to invade. having orbital fabbers build units in orbit is just wrong: units are supposed to be made by factories, not fabbers.
I concede for Orbital it would be less viable, though for Air, Ground Radar would be fixed and more easy to target. I think Uber is hesitant about factories in Orbit because it's one small step from that to a space-warfare game. Personally I prefer the sacrificial "Collision" idea where you can use one orbital unit to smash into another. This would look awesome, and keep focus where it should be - with your Commander, base and armies. I really dislike Orbital Fighters as they're somewhere between Air and a Spaceship, and we already have enough air-spam - the decisive combat should be on the planet, not above it.
sacrificial collision is fun, but if you allow it for orbital fighters, then why not for regular planes ? and then the easiest way to take out a commander becomes to rush a few T1 fighters and crash them on the enemy commander. regarding orbital factories, i think it should be tried at least. as long as people are not allowed to station troops in the void between planets, it will be limited to orbital. the problem is that bombarding stuff from orbit needs to be forbidden, or at least be rendered largely inefficient otherwise you will have no reason to send a ground army, that's a lot of work.
They should get air transports (basic) in asap, and then move the teleporters to T2, but leave them on the orbital fabber. The transports should definitely pick up multiple units. It would make sense in technology right? Transports -> interplanetary transports -> unit cannon <-> teleporters about orbital... Like lapantoufle said, the orbital launcher should build the small stuff and the fabber should build the big stuff. The fighter should be part of the small stuff, but only if there is some bigger orbital fighter, more like a frigate. But indeed make orbital bombardment inefficient (even though it sounds cool), so you need a ground force to take out the enemy on the planet. The ground force is your army. The orbital is a support for your army. After you conquer orbit, conquer ground. That's how space war works.
There wouldn't be Orbital Fighters, there would just be Econ/Recon units which you would choose to sacrifice to deny your opponent an edge. You don't need to apply to Air what you do to Orbital. They are too similar as it is, and this mentality where everything must be applied game-wide ignores the fact a that a structure in n Orbit behaves differently to a fast-moving, manoeuvrable Aeroplane. There may well be sacrificial/kamikaze units in future regardless. What is the point of turning Ground Units into units which can be dropped anywhere on planet at the click of a button from something in Orbit? It just makes invasion that bit more impossible because anybody with an established planet will load up an army into an Orbital Transport, and drop it on any invading force. It also goes against what Ground Units manifestly are. Walking across a map should be a viable tactic. I agree - Lasers were painful in SupCom and they're a pain here. They're only really used for sniping high-value targets like Commanders/Arty/Nukes/Anti-Nukes to allow for a quick finish, or deny one. However, Orbital would still remain the deciding Economic/Recon layer in games; lose Orbital and your Econ/Recon is severely reduced. What chance does a bot stand against a spaceship?
