I am more intrigued by the actual interplanetary fighting aspect and I have been playing on a map that tries to promote orbital play. The map is 4 inner planets with radius 200 with 3 halley requirement and a decent gravity well and 4 outer planets with also 200 radius and 1 halley requirement with no significant gravity well. You start on a inner planet, inner planets when multi-planetary spawns are enabled. Most commonly I play 5v5 shared teams, althought I have do non-share 10 FFA. Some players remark that you would need more space for 10 players. I tend to think it's very playable at this scale also. This thread contains text. Readers are reminded of their power to choose with which texts they engage with. How it plays The initial phase consist in drawing lines around the starting planet often securing a few more metal spots that can be immiedtly capped. a very common sigth is placing a turret and walls facing each other sometimes just outside each other firing range sometime inside it. Pushing your own line too forward gets you a bigger density of commanders and turrets making life significantly harder. Occasionally doxes can snip some eco structures and pelters go up (but often they seem to bug out). Usually one of two things happens with each side, they either hold their ground and start going orbital or they focus on the battle on the ground. Usually if only one goes orbital the other loses a lot of ground and eventually the starting planet. Bases are usually covered by turret on all sides but a focusing of firepower can break through the defences if the defenders don't in turn concentrate their mobile units. Then comes the actual orbital phase. The planetary expansion looks quite differnet from normal expansion. You usually start with an engineer or a commander brought by an astralus. You usually go build a factory on infinite build of engineers a radar (one sufficent to cover the whole planetoid) and give usually a planetary extractor build order, if you are feeling cautious or don't build radar you build 6-7 doxes put on planetary patrol. When arriving you are a little suspicious whether there is enemy there but if a deep space radar was properly prioritized on the previous stage you should have a pretty good guess of the distibution of commanders between planets. Usually when given a choice you will choose an empty planetoid instead of going to an occupied one. Usually the starting planet doesn't have much room to spam T2 energy and getting a good growth curve is important. All invasions are given amble warning and usually can be deterred if just noticed in time. Beside the eco powering multiple orbital factories are built and orbital units of all kinds built. Multiple factories on the surface are pumping out engineers going to assist either the eco ramp up or the orbital factories. Problems with wastage can be big and good blobs of storage is included in the eco ramp up. However missing from the surface are turrets, pelters and ground units. The planetary defence is actually started at umbrellas either having hotspots over the landing site or just plainly cover the whole planetoid with them with a catapult or two thrown into the mix. In actual orbital wars it is very wave based. The umbrella covering of a planetoid forms a timelimit on what can be accomplished. The planetary invasion is done in either two fashions: you either enter the planets orbit right on top the enemy planetary forces to catch them with your fighter so they don't have any chance to disrupt your fabbers or you try to go to a unbuilt location to be able to put down a teleporter before the enemy /notices has time to move the orbital units there. In this fighting the anchor imbalances are clear. One anchor is equivalent to about 15 to 20 orbital fighters and they seem to build much faster than the fighters. SXXes are great way to avoid wastage needs but require a substantial orbital fabber production. SSx can try to go toe-to-toe with umbreallas with the siege happening at a window of maybe 30 seconds or so. When building teleporters usually backup is started immidietly after and fabbers brought along will try to get some seconds of teleporter standing that a force can be tried to be flooded in. Usually if any even lowish amounts of ground units are getting in they pretty much slaughter everything they encounter. Planetary patrolling aircraft and catapults can however dimish the effect a lot. Usually this combat is not between ground units. Orbital comabt is very group-drives-into group or planetary patrol orders can be given even under umbrealla fire (or especially beacuse of it then quickly geting out after clearing the orbit) especioally when in greater numbers. Then there is the option of building halleys. Usually the game can go on even if a bombardment happens. Planetoids equipped with nukes intended to enter target orbit and rain down fire were also tested in practise when they were possible (deathstars). Comms are usually divided to different planetoids and getting intel on which planetoid a com is can mark a planetoid for bombardment. Too bad that annihilations seem to be somewhat buggy and the game of often crashes at this stage. In a team game knowing which planet will be a weapon planet allows it's energy production to be made in the form of satellites able to be evacauted before use. During all this game I have found that making simple team messages makes for pretty cool communication scheme. You always announce when you order a builder go to a empty planetoid. You always note in team chat where a hostile commander is headed when you happen to get a glimpse it. You announce when a enemy is detected in a friendly planet. You announce when the last enemy is killed on a planet. You always note when you change the planetoid of your commander. You always announce any annihilations you see (hectic EVACUATE! spamming optional). You say when you start building halleys on a planet. You announce when you start a siege to a planet. Especially when in shared control you announce getting a teleport link to a hostile planet. How it is to be messed with Now that was description of a kind of gameplay I play with Planetary Annihilation. Now some balance concerns. - Enable usage of friendly but not owned teleporters - Seriously tune the orbital fighter/ anchor balance - It seems that astralus is pretty bad for shuffling around combat units - the teleporter beats it by a clear margin. Usually it's almost better to send a fabricator to teleport than any number of astraluses - Make umbrella fire more visible - Make it possible to change orbital insertion point midtransfer (make it possible to select units midtransfer) - seriously slow down the transfer time of annihilating planetoids (make a system of ramping it down by additional halleys?) - Make an audible alert of annihilations It also seems that planetary harassing in the eco ramp phase is a thing people don't do insticntively, that people should do and that would change the meta to a healthier direction. There is also the issue that global economy means instant transfer of matter over the solar system as long it's in the bank account form. This is in tension with very clear big transfer times of the orbit mechanics. The linkage and non-linkage of teleporters is also very binary. If you have a connection you get very much stuff across but if you can't it's very hard to nible at a foreign planet. I could see it funner that by default different camp on different planets would not be fully to reinforce each other but there would be a (more) finite tranfer rate. Now it can feel it's all one base despite in different planets. Also the planets and their positions and what is a moon of what don't that much impact the gameplay (just nukes and that doesn't make that much sense). Orbital invasions also lack a means of adressing defensive air units. I have heard it be said that this is ground combat game first and orbital isn't a priority. However that kind of game play intrigues me more because that's something that is not available in other games. What makes me excited is ground combat enabled by orbital mechanic ie a planet invasion started by an orbital beachhead. However how that situation is created currently is questionable atleast. I am also bit disappointed that the orbital units don't really orbit their planets but that it works as an another air layer. Please leave the modding door on that front open. It's also currently a bit shame that bombarding always consumes the whole planetoid. The crates created are a bit small compared to the impactor size (and the units don't respect the crates existence anyway). I could see that there be half elastic collision made. The impactor and the impactee would both receive a crater and a destruction zone centered around it but the impactor could still live on with a more elliptical orbit than the impactee. Currently the amount of rock lost is just disturbing. I am also assuming limited destruction impacts are going to be in the game. I think the ranked ladders should include an "orbit map" or atleast moons in some of them. It has been a bit of a concern that orbital has been a second class citizen. At the very least when multiplanet spawns are in orbital game play needs to start work and the orbital mechanics need to successfully interact with ground war. I do hope that T1 interaction with an opponent is still inplay with multi-planet spawns and that the game doesn't immidetly go to ramping to past T2 economies and planet sieges. I also hope that mid annihilation planetoids could be redirected with hostile halleys. Now it seems like a pretty atomic action.
Well I see my deicison didn't really attract replies. With multiplanet spawns introducted a lot more planet smashing action has been seen. The focus is how to get early enough off system. The astralus build time seems very long. There is very long delay after you land an engineer and can spitout an astralus at that planet.
Also some balance oddities. Metal is plentiful and you have more metal spots that you can cap. You actually might want to not cap metal in order to have space to place structures how you like. Almost always you hit a energy stall /near stall in the start game and a big wastage occurs in the late game (build power stall). It's not unsual to be +1200 metal wasting with a +2000 income even when you stabilise storages with 20-30 storage buildings. Usually in the mid game the simple act of macroing on the home systems and on the colonies is surprisingly tasking a control mission. Usually a couple of colonies get forgotten and don't develop. Anyways being on wastage usually means that colonies just need to build factories. It's also very hard to get serious orbital production going. 5-6 orbital factories assisted only spewing out orbital fabbers is a pretty common sight on a planet. A small standby T2 army ready to do telereinforcements is good to have handy. Also teleinvasions happen and almost none builds turrets before units are already on a planet (it's totally sufficient to build them right out of the air).
I would also like to play more multi-planet games in 1v1 but it has been left aside for 1 planet gameplay as multi-planet systems have gotten a bad reputation for being slow and laggy where it also easy to end up in a stalemate as it is hard to perform orbital invasions on small planets. Small asteroids have way too much metal IMHO and I find it hard to actually spend all that metal on orbital units. Once metal sliders are in I think that asteroids should be almost devoid of resources as being able to use them for planetary annihilation is already good enough and ensures that the game doesn't end up in a stalemate on the main planets.
Yeah, even having a few thousand units in play can severely drop the level of enjoyment in the game. Id love to play games with my friends where we can all have upwards of 50 factory's, but as it stands they can't when I do. Turtle tech willys, they always go straight to T2.
Something really change happened in one game. Witha bunch of enginners I plotted down umbreallas only after detecting an orbital invasions. I didn't include SXX in the first wave but still the situation was kinda surreal as the planet went from no defence to heavy orbital fortification in the manner on minutes.
If you have excess halleyd up planets when you are clearly winning expect some heavy friendly fire. Oddly it doesn't bother me that much. I also had an ocasion when a planet was annhilated just before it started it's own engines. The resulting empty moon hurling through space was a little unsettling. There is an odd balance on securing those planets that are small so as they can't be smashed by that many bodies. It's also stnadard practise to send a recolonization team at the same time as the smashing halley.
