End-Game Mega Units

I don't think you understand. If you get 2 crappy players, of course they will screw up and someone will eventually win. That's irrelevant.

These are two planets, separated by massive layers of void. Anything player 1 can do, player 2 can see coming a million miles away. Anything player 2 can attack, his support chain is a million miles away. How do you deal with that? Can you deal with that? This game has a reclaim mechanic, which makes things even more difficult. If the attacker fails, his opponent gets a huge lead. Anything that isn't a kill shot can end up losing. Is it even worth attacking anymore?

When things are neck and neck, every single advantage counts. There are always some implicit advantages for the attacker. Attacker gets to choose where and when, for example. But at such staggering distances, it may not be enough.

You do know that asteroid belts, unit cannons and better ways for interplanetary transportation are coming?
Sorry, but to me your argument doesn't make sense. Because you could use it for every aspect of the game.

What if both players are only on one planet, they are both equally skilled. Following your logic, games between those two players would drag on forever, because anything player 1 can do, player 2 can see coming and react accordingly.

So why is it, that in theory those games should end in stalemates, but in practice they don't?
Again: Interplanetary warfare is not nearly complete and I expect there to be much more easy ways to attack somebody in the future. I also expect a speed buff for travelling between planets.

Let's just be patient and wait for planets to be able to shift between orbits and for the unit cannon.
But apart from that, I'm a strong advocate for interplanetary spearhead units myself

Megabot: The Archangel

A combination of big robot and rocket, unable to use teleporters (because it's just too big) but able to activate the rockets below it's "feet" and travel to other planets, or to another part of the same planet.
Primary role: Acting as a spearhead unit for interplanetary combat.

Strenght:
-Mobility
-Good against structures
-Anti-Air capabilities

Weaknesses:
-Firepower
-Not so many hitpoints

It has above average movement speed when on the ground. About as quick as doxes, maybe a tad bit slower.
Low hp, even lower than the Megabot: Shogun Warrior I posted a few pages earlier. It is not ment for frontal assaults, but rather to exploit undefended spots in the solar system.

Weapons: One bolt shot on every arm. Around one second cooldown for each. Able to attack different targets with each. Medium damage, a bit of aoe. Imagine it like the bigger version of what doxes are shooting atm.

Target-aquiring anti-air missiles on it's back. To be able to defend itself versus bomber strikes.

A sweeping laser on it's head. Very low aoe (almost none). Bad against units, very effective against structures. Needs to stop moving to use it. High damage.


Due to the agility it should be able to avoid fighting ground units head-on, but at the same time be able to harass enemy structures and find weak spots. It should be good against laser towers, having higher range than them. But really vulnerable to artillery. Has a little bit of defenses against bomber strikes, but too many bombers will also kill it rather easily. Low hp, which in turn forces you to use it as a harassing, raiding unit instead of a combat unit. Very expensive, like all mega-units should be. But it's able to travel to other planets by turning into a rocket. It needs enough hp to be able to act as a spearhead unit, but few enough to lose most ground vs ground combat situations.

That's the second of three Megabots I had in mind.

Greetings

Edit: Maybe it should even act as a bot factory, so that you can stage your invasion from there by building bot fabs and setting up a teleporter. Or maybe the Megabot itself should be able to deploy a teleporter.

Yes there is a lot of stuff that I am not directly explaining, but I prefer to assume a well versed audience. Basically it all boils down to defender's advantage. Yes,

because it really applies to every aspect of the game.

What tools does a player have to attack? What tools can be used to defend? I will not repeat this discussion as it has happened many times before. I will only say that as is, the best invasion tools depend on exactly two things:
1) Having access to an asteroid.
2) Being on a moon that is already directly in orbit.

If you have one of those two things, the current and planned unit roster will do the job. Unit cannons and teles and asteroids are exactly what the doctor ordered for a good invasion.

If you do not have one of those two things, there are no tools to overcome it. More importantly, there are no tools planned to overcome it. You simply have two separate worlds with no realistic way to invade, secure the ground, and push the attack. Could a superior player beat an inferior one given enough time? Proooobably. Will it be a horrible grindstone with no particular side gaining any ground, if they even opt to attack at all? Oh yeah. Could a nuke fest solve it? In time, but you choose to abandon the robot game entirely. Abandoning the game's core is pretty bad.

I guess this is where I differ on the matter. While some are content with sitting back and expecting things to eventually work, I am more interested in making sure these problems get found and fixed.

And I agree with you, that's why I'm thinking about more variation in that regard.
Interplanetary invasions should not be purely dependant on whether or not you have an asteroid at your disposal.
But I agree that asteroids should be the major focus of interplanetary invasions, just not the only form of it.

Asteroids are currently VERY expensive. They are one of the most expensive things in the game, if not the very top. It's kind of hard to use them as a basis of invasion, at least if you want to stage an invasion in less than 20 minutes.

The current teleporter is pretty absurdly cheap. For a single asteroid attempt you can make what... twenty? Fifty Teleporter attempts? It'll probably work if you slam it hard enough.

I wouldn't worry too much about balance atm. It will be much better at release, and continueing to improve from there. I'm rather worried about some design choices.

Yeah, with the way the economy and buildspeeds work right now, any sort of interplanetary travel time longer than 2 or 3 minutes can shift the balance WAY in the favor of the defender. With a fairly sewn up planet you can make hundreds and hundreds of units in that transit time, hell, you could probably see a transit coming to your planet and powerbuild a nuke launcher and a nuke in the time it takes for them to reach you. There's just such an enormous time lag it would be extremely difficult to make any impact.

Landing a portal cuts down the time lag and allows for interplanetary assaults, but right now it's simple to see it coming and nuke/bomb it into oblivion. I think trying to directly transport units is ultimately pointless, unless hundreds could be done in an efficient manner, because of the magnitude of the defender's advantage.

It'd be interesting to see what would happen if the orbital nuke launcher would be mobile. That could make it possible to assault a planet. Some kind of landing craft with a portal in it would also work. Last, an asteroid that doesn't cost as much/has less impact on a planet, a sort of supernuke, could clear a space for a portal.

There's a definite gap in gameplay when it comes to invasion, an issue that can't be solved with the current spread of units and mechanics, at least not in an engaging way. That much has been thrashed out.
Now, we can close the gap by squeezing the things easier side of it in; making gates more useful, orbital lasers more powerful or movable bodies more plentiful. But these solutions have knock on consequences.

Expanding the utility of gates by making them harder to impede or quicker to build is a potentially quick solution, but it doesn't help much. Firstly, overcoming an issue like this by simply overpowering a unit is messy, and secondly, it shifts the focus of the gate from logistics to assault, which doesn't sit well with its general concept in my opinion. It should be what you build for reinforcement once a beachhead is already established, not your opening move to establish that beachhead.

Making orbital lasers more powerful only makes the grind of attack from orbit as it stands a little quicker while also disrupting the balance of planetary combat. This risks making orbital the primary battleground, and orbital units dominating ground. That would, I think we can agree, be bad.

So how about making asteroids more common? This one is more complicated, and the knock on effects are even more fundamental, extending well beyond close-focus unit balance. If we simply make maps have a lot more moons like those we currently have, the attention of the player will either be fractured more, or bigger teams would be required, because the available battlefield is being increased. The amount of metal would also go up. More of the game would play out on these bodies. Not in itself an awful thing, but in trying to find a way to better seize planets, we have rendered them less valuable. Why should I fight over that planet when I can have this assortment of moons with more resources?

However, if we reduce or remove resources on some of these moons, we also reduce or remove the value choice in any potential planet-smashing. In the current build, with KEWs players must choose to sacrifice the resources of a moon to gain those of a planet. If the KEW-bodies have no worth other than value a , there is no choice; put in simple terms, they will be spammed. While the coming unit cannon may increase the worth and utility of small bodies, it won't be used much if there's no downside to simply obliterating your enemies by ramming a near-valueless rock into them. So how about smaller asteroids? Well, this could work. But choices have to be made. Do they require fewer Halleys? Do they have the same destructive potential? Such a concept is viable, perhaps even offering an option for invading the current moon siezed bodies, but it's difficult to balance against nukes, it's harder to design ground combat on such bodies, and it gives us something that could, again, essentially have no other real value other than as a weapon.

At the moment, a handful of moons means a handful of chances at obliterating your foe's hold on a fortress world. Disrupt that balance, and big worlds are either going to be pummelled constantly, or won't be worth pummelling at all.

In summary, the only possibilities for expanding or reworking current tools for invasion are either too limited, or they would change gameplay significantly.

So, to me, it seems a better solution is closing the gap by adding something as yet unseen in this game; Transports to form an initial assault, and orbital-layer or flat pack deployable-from-orbit factories to top up that force until it's safe to build, and rely on, a gate. As Xagar sets out well in the post above, a defender can see an assault coming and amass a vast force. But if you could bring the means of production with you, alongside , in a way that was less economical but less vulnerable than a gate then maybe an invasion can be a viable, if expensive thing. Importantly, smaller bodies can be fought over in an engaging way, enabling further, planet-smashing and planet-movey gameplay.

The implementation of asteroid(s)(belts) and planet-smashing will have a huge impact (pun intended) on the game, and I think it's quite hard to answer these questions without a word from Uber about how they see it.

Yes, that's why we should just you know....wait for the mechanics/units that are missing? Namely the unit cannon and Asteroids Bases?

Mike

Yes, but asteroids are not an endless ressource. We need something that makes invading planets possible without having to have an asteroid at your disposal. I can see the Astreus doing that job, but maybe there should be more possibilities than that.

The way I imagined the unit cannon to work is that players can intercept units shot by it while they're passing through the orbital and air layer. Just because it would make sense imo, and create more engaging gameplay than if they just landed on the ground without anything that you can do about it. The same could be true with the Astreus, in that you can intercept them before they're able to unload their units. In which case a more expensive, armored transport as an alternative would make much sense.

But that's just pure speculation on my part. The devs could also just design asteroid belts in a way that asteroids become an infinite ressource. Though I don't know how well that would go with the concept of having the battlefield become smaller and smaller with each asteroid used for smashing, like Mavor has mentioned multiple times.

The asteroid belts in kickstarter where pretty expansive.

I'm seeing issues with that. Games could not possibly become that big without turning the process of killing a commander into a hide-and-seek game. It looks nice in theory, but I don't know how games would be playable with that many asteroids.

That looks like I'd need a hundred hotkeys just for camera positions.

Or multiple monitor/viewport support and improvements to the GUI in terms of planet selection, most of which we know is in the works

How can you be sure? Neutrino has often talked about asteroid belts, and even for the Pre-Viz "match" with only a single planet and Moon still had an asteroid belt. Asteroids are quite central to the game, being the tools to perform PA's Namesake and all the more reason to assume they'll be more numerous than many seem to think they are based on the current implementation.

Mike

But how do we fight over those asteroids? Making them so plentiful as to not be worth fighting over isn't a perfect solution. And if they hold resources, then why fight over the planets? If they're barren, then they'll be overused as KEWs. They can't be too plentiful. And there has to be another way of fighting over them than nuking everything on them. If unit cannons can fire between asteroids, and I don't see why they won't, then that's one avenue of invasion. But the unit cannon has it's own characteristics; it fires units in a stream, against an army that is present in full force.

It just feels like the options for invasion as outlined so far are very simple choices. There's only one way of sending units for an assault, and it gives the defender a big advantage. There aren't many risk or value judgements involved on either side. The possibility of losing an asteroid you send as a forward base versus the certainty of losing it as a KEW is good, but there can be more conundrums like this and more options. I don't see the harm in discussing it.

I do think that asteroids can fill in as the 'mega units' people want to see, but only if there is a greater spread of 'mega' structures to build on these rocks with which you can harass your enemies, diversely deploy and meaningfully support units. And if they are going to take this role, we still need better ways of fighting for these bodies. That is where some of the suggestions in this thread could fit in.

Having asteroids available doesn't mean they are freely used as KEWS, you still to build the engines on them and get them going. Also for resources, it could go both ways, frankly I imagine once asteroids are more than small moon planet types they'll have the option of being tweaked differently from moons so we just have to wait and see on that one.

Mike

So there's the implication that asteroids might be differently handled than "normal" planets. So if we're playing with an asteroid that's small enough so that it's smashable in the current version of the game, for you is that an "asteroid" like in "asteroid belt" or is that a normal planet?

It must be an asteroid (like in asteroid belt), because if we'd introduce even smaller celestial bodies for asteroid belts, then there'd be no space on them to even build unit cannons, factories or a teleporter. I think this is as small as we can go. Because asteroids are going to be used as forward outposts, by flying them into an orbit.

Though introducing smaller celestial bodies for asteroid belts would have some advantages to it. You could give them different mechanics, in that fights on them are completely automated based on sheer calculations. Also they could only be used for smashing planets, and not as forward bases, because there'd simply be not enough space on them to build anything but halleys. It could be so that the process of building halleys and mexes on those tiny asteroids could be automated, and looking much more like in the kickstarter. They'd be used for "small" planet smashes, that only partially destroy a planet's surface. But they'd basically be an unlimited ressource that you can gather in asteroid belts.

Then there'd be the "big" asteroids. Those that we're playing with at the moment by taking a moon template, making it small enough and calling it an asteroid. Those would be limited and the only ones that could be used as forward orbital bases. Smashing them would result in the "big" planet smash, which would (nearly) destroy the entire surface of a planet.

Because having lots of "big" asteroids as an asteroid belt would create severe management problems, and be nearly unplayable, unless you automate gameplay on them completely, like I suggested for "small" asteroids.
But I don't know if that would be a good idea. Building unit cannons and factories is something I wanted to do myself.

I really would want to see asteroid belt like this with tiny bases on it, or digging for metal or something like that.
Glad that they said that they are thinking about reworking orbital, at least changing.
Orbital is still a bit underdeveloped, now there are working on it, like teleporters etc, but it's still work to do, so waiting