[Feature request] Incidental smash warning

Hi Y'all.

I am a reasonably experienced player of PA with noob characteristics. When I say things, it usually comes from the new player/average joe point of view.

I was playing Galactic War, two planet system. Myself and two subs vs 2 AI commanders on Hard. I'm pointing this out, as it's quite enough to keep one's attention occupied with staying alive and fighting a ground war.

In my pre-occupied state, all I see is suddenly a planet in my view, coming very, very, very close to the spawn planet. And they just about touched, wiping out about half the starting planet. My commander was about [------] much away from being killed, but my whole base and one of my subs went out.

Now all I can say is that. IT. WAS. AWESOME.

I totally didn't notice they were on a collision course. And people will come here and say I should've scouted or I should've kept an eye on the planets.

Not the point.

The fact that there is no warning that this can happen in-game at all will catch a new player off-guard. I've known about it as I've been here for ages. But a newbie won't.

What I would like to propose to fix this is just a simple warning that a planet is on a collision course with another. No need to warn about planets with Halleys. Just about the natural collisions that will and could occur.

Edit: Maybe turning the lines that mark the orbits red?

But I do think it's essential to avoid a lot of frustration.

+1

Very much agree with this.

The incidental smash feature is awesome and can be a lot of fun when you plan for it and play around it. But it's a bummer when it happens without warning.

It'd also be great if there was an indicator in the game lobby that the planet has an incidental smash. Bonus points for telling us at what time in the match the smash will happen!

Also, this just occured to me:

Since we have proportional smashing, it'd be lovely to see how big of an area would be affected. Let's say showing a red circle around the cursor when aiming in a halley-smash.

Not sure how this could be done with incidental smashing though. Maybe a bit before the affected section of the planet could be marked in a similar way? Dunno, this option would take someone more clever than I.

Yeah. That was suggested on another thread and I agree with it.

While we're at it, it'd be great to have an indicator for nukes as well.

We have it for area attack nukes, so why not singular nukes?

Yeah, completely true, it's necessary information feedback to help aim the darn thing properly.

I agree that there should be a warning about this. Just this morning I lost a Galactic War game that I had been playing for a while since my commander was at the point where the two planets touched

I think that it is nearly the size of the crater it creates, slightly larger--not that that information helps in-game

I think that it would be difficult for the server to know if there will be a planet smash, seems tough to implement, and simulate to determine.

It doesn't have to be the server that simulates it, but the planet editor (or whatever it's called, I forgot) that would have it pre-simulated before it could used. After that it would be saved as a simple tag along with the approximate amount of time that the crash would take place.

On a side note, when is the "change planet orbit" going to be reimplemented?

What about randomly generated systems? They do occasionally have incidental smashes.

And the sooner the better!

The randomly generated systems do pose a problem with the idea I mentioned, although i first have to ask where the randomly generated systems are found? It's been awhile since I played last(system constraints)

IIRC randomly generated systems still use pre-existing templates, so that could theoretically make things easier.

Also: the answer to every question that starts with "when" is always SOON!

My "when" comment is most rhetorical, as I already know it's:

That was really meant for the person you were quoting. Messed up my formatting.

@Corang attempted to initialize work on a mod to calculate an ETA
It requires a lot of calculation / maths, not sure if it is actively being worked on (and I can understand why)
Would be awesome to have Uber implement it the proper way