Do we need more than one planet?

I like playing on a single, medium sized planet with 2-3 small moons. This leaves the option for moon smashing and interplanetary nukes, while also keeping all the travel times reasonably short.

For instance, and then I shut up

It took to me almost 90 hours of play to understand that a single planet offers such a better game play. I may be dull, but still, it can be a common problem.

I think that the default planet configuration should be what we used in the last tournament.
The system configuration in the tournament had 2 planets and 1 asteroid that could be moved with Halleys and stalemates are very unlikely in this setup.
If you control 1 planet and the asteroid, you can launch the asteroid on the enemy planet to wipe out everything on that planet. If you control both the planets while the enemy controls the asteroid you should be able to win by overwhelming the asteroid with your superior economy from the 2 planets.

This actually seems like a good idea-- to at least temporarily change the default system to only include a single planet with orbiting moons. If that were to happen, a lot more people would use the default random (oxymoron?) configurations rather than simple two moon custom ones. It sure would clean up our system managers quite a bit!

I think the hardest part about explaining this is that we keep referring to planets, moons, and asteroids (if we can even say that we have asteroids right now) interchangeably. It really doesn't help that the "interplanetary" nukes aren't actually interplanetary, and can only be fired within a local planetary system. We almost have to come up with some new terminology for some of these things (like renaming the moon biome to barren, or something similar).

This is a good point. Anything involving a moon could almost be called "Orbital+" because you've never really broken orbit of the planet, but you are firing into higher level orbits. We also have a special condition for the unit cannon, "Orbital-" because it can only fire down into a parent gravity well and not into it's own or other peer level orbits.

Yeah, the Moon biome definitely needs to be renamed to avoid confusion.
Otherwise you could define it as:
Asteroid, can be moved by Halleys.
Moon, orbiting another planet. An asteroid can be a moon as well.
Planet, orbiting the sun.

Only confusion left is moons with moons but it's not so confusing IMO. It's not like moonception.

I agree with Pendaelose that it should be easier to fire from a orbiting body to the planet "below" as moons can be seen as gravitational highground.

The rough thing with having games with huge maps is the lag. Games wouldn't go by that slowly if the game performed as it does right in the beginning. If the lag was gone players would be more effective at being able to flat out do things in it. That's my experience with huge late late games.

One thing that could help with interplanetary invasions is a mothership that can build T1 and T2 units while flying to another planet, so that it's ready to start teleporting/cannoning them to the surface as soon as it reaches orbit.

You mean an asteroid with three halleys, a teleporter, and a unit cannon, right?

If the halleys just put the thing in orbit, it's similar, but the development time of an asteroid with three halleys is WAY longer than what I'd think of a mothership, plus currently the teleporter mechanism still requires a beachhead, so you'd be unit cannoning a section of a planet once you're in orbit, then building a teleporter on the surface to finally finish teleporting your main forces you were building on the home planet. I don't wanna build more stuff on the surface just to send an army there, I wanna get to conquering! Scorched earth first, rebuild later. Or something like that.

I want moar, more asteroids, and planets.
Ie I want to bee able to play against a few AI's for several hours, on multiple planets and asteroids.
The game currently needs an auto asteroid belt generation option

I'm hoping for asteroids (not just small moons) that can be snagged and moved with one or two Halley's. It should still be usable as a KEW, but wouldn't be planet ending, maybe similar to a nuke detonation. Build a teleporter on it to move your army from your main manufacturing area to the asteroid, unit cannons to launch them to the planet below, anti-nukes for defense against launches from the ground or other nearby moons, and nuke launchers to help secure a landing zone. They wouldn't even need to have metal deposits on them.

Moon = dust .. so dust biome

And no to motherships

C'mon, you can't deny Mama ships to an Italian

Having orbital armytransports and aircraftcarriers (nonbuilding and unarmed)
Would do the job as well ... i have no interest in mobile proxy factories they are such a cheap way of getting your army to another planet ... almost brainless .... you want to produce armies on enemy ground? Then you have to deserve it by succesfully establishing a beachhead with stationary factories ....
Your planets are your main armyproducing bases so get those armies there to the front .... people ask for d-day -esk /starshiptrooperesk experiences which is having a limited landing party no matter its size trying to push through enemy defenses ...
What you ask. For is a imo lazy and rather boring way to spam the enemy with units from orbit
I want to get those transports and carriers to the ground or air with a high risk of them being shot down ... i dont want it to be easy

Not necessarily. It all depends how Dropships would be implemented.

If uber would and manage to implement them as i imagine then i'm almost certain they will .... even though we are working with a bigger scale here
I dont see that big a difference of how carriers and transports were in supcom and would be here ... the main difference would simply be both of them would have to traverse the orbitallayer before they get into their layer again ... that it is possible has been shown by the austreus already
I actualy have no doubts about it ... it is also rather simple ... build your transports have them escorted with avengers punch a hole into the enemies orbital defenses and get your troops down which would be first your aircraftcarriers then your trooptransports filled with fabbers antiair/antimissile- and antiground units ... the advantage is you are able to spread your units over the landing zone and if stuff like ferrysystems
Is implemented as well you could establish an orbital bridge for further reinforcements until you can open the actual floodgates ...
... ... oh boy the glory of that ... just thinking about it ... sssssssoooooo delicious!!!

Having a ferrysystem or transport factory assist in this game just makes soooo much sense ... i consider it almost mandatory ....

Yes, clearly it sounds grandiose.

I have some incertitude regarding the whole process to have to build units, load them into transports, and all the blah blah blah, and what the whole process would mean for the player, if that wouldn't ultimately end up in a failure due to an overload of micro tasks and practical inefficiency. For the time you're on the invasion site, so many things could go wrong, you may not ever be able to invade using this very methodology. It might require the invader a much higher capacity/production than the defendant. Which will bring most of the games to a stalemate anyway.

But sure it would be fun to do it.

Also, I'm concerned about how much all those movements of units will ultimately impact on the performance.

So, you see, it's not that I'm promoting anything for the sake of laziness.

There are UI designs that could sharply reduce the micro involved in using transports for invasions. The user should never have to manually assign troops to transports for load/unload orders. Manual control barely works in Starcraft if you have more than a couple dozen units, it definitely wouldn't work with 5000 Dox in PA. However, a SupCom style ferry location would work moderately well, and I'm certain with the right interface we could make it even simpler to use and more robust for a very simple fully automated load/ferry/unload.


edit: btw, I'm still completely on board with the idea of a mothership being a potential factory, but I think that should be a secondary role and balanced in such a way that ground based factories are still a better strategy.