A Planet's end: Permanent death?

Still if you ask me, the costs of mining station would be enough of disadvantage, but there's no reason to make planets absolutely out of the game. It may be like remote extractors in FA, pretty often lost, but still useful.

This is kinda true
But I do think it would be interesting to uncover resources. I don't think it should be a 'viable' strategy though

Simply put, a destroyed planet should reward with smaller orbital debris that would allow deposits of mining or be turned into KEW's. It's a logical fact. Why would planet debris not be useful in some way or manner? some might be barren (used for KEW's) some might be mineable (long term use).

I think, the best way to set up an asteriod as giant weapon, is to build there a simple station and make it as most as possible independent, so it doesn't effect you too much. It takes slight more time, but you have the weapon still, imo.


I still hope that it would be possible to create asteriods through massive battles or destroyed planets, but I guess its just too much.

To address some points throughout this thread:

- No depletion of resource locations through use
- Planets have a stability value, once hit enough, it triggers the first stability cataclysm and slowly turns the planet into a lava planet giving players some (very little though) time to escape with whatever they have, or adapt if desperate enough

- Lava planets have more metal, less usable area, and are more easily destroyed
- After further impacts, the planet explodes into multiple asteroids
- Destroyed planet asteroids should be much more massive than the largest natural asteroids, so there is at least some purpose behind destroying lava planets.
- Planets should be able to instantly go from normal to exploding if hit with a massive enough asteroid

- Gas planets cannot be 'destroyed', but rather grow in mass with each hit
- After adding a ridiculous amount of mass, a gas planet becomes a star, destroying everything in orbit

Can depleting resources reduce a planet's stability? Are advanced extractors something that can ruin planets, or perhaps benefit from a damaged world?

That's definitely something that could be further explored should they use some sort of stability system for planets.

I think it'd be great to be able to mine a planets core to destabilize it. Does that need a part in this game though, I'm unsure.

The ultimate goal with planet destruction is to progressively reduce the battlefield, forcing players to fight each other over the dwindling amount of usable surface area.

Sabotaging planets by mining their cores could play a role in that.

I still don't think it should deplete the resource, but should at least damage the planet.

For already damaged worlds (lava), the mass deposits would be richer, so there would be an inherent increase in production.

Yeah I am not so hot on the idea of resources depleting on their own. Although I do like the idea of a player being able to blow up someone else's resources.

If resource depletion just happens on it's own then every game has this built in timer where the pace will just grind to a crawl when everyone's mass extractors shut off.

But if resource depletion is a direct result of player action then it becomes a weapon.

And of course the richer the planet&s deposits, the less building space it has. It will both make it less defendable and less available for unit production use. And separating (not entirely, of course, I mean creating production-resources bipolar system) mining stations and production bases will make gameplay richer.

I must admit I'd kinda hope to be able to actually annihilate a planet.

I will freely admit that reality suggests that this would probably require an unfeasable quantity of energy.

I wonder however if I would be able to knock my opponent's planet's orbit off enough to make it destabilize and hurtle into the nearest star\other planet ?

I disagree the shrinking battlefield forces confrontation and gives you that desperation that you get from long games of Starcraft 2 (When your all fighting over the last few expansions) or playing Sins of a Solar Empire really aggressively as Vasari Loyalists (Pretty fun once you start capping and scrapping planets, your fleet can survive but the other teams can't)

If anyone really doesn't think blowing up planets is a great idea then why are you here? "Planetary Annihilation" you don't Annihilate a planet and then think "Yea its ok, i've only demoted it into a lava world derp"

As for all the people doing degrees and such (The guy doing Astrophysics... Damn would love to have had a go at something like that! though I think my brain would melt) the Devs have stated from the get go that they will bend reality for gameplay, No it might not be realistic for a Planetoid to complete break apart a planet, but to put it bluntly, its bloody awesome!

Uhm. Hello? Scattered earth bits, here.


If something is big enough, dense enough, and fast enough, it can totally shatter a world. But the realistic scales are likely far different from what we'll see in game.

Even if something manages to shatter a world, chances are that the fragments will fall upon each-other and form a whole again. In the case of the Moon, the Earth itself was left mostly intact (though completely covered by lava), and almost all the fragments of the planetoid, as well as the bits taken from the Earth either fell on the Earth or agglutinated into the Moon shortly after.
So hitting the Earth with Mars(-like) didn't blow it up, it made it bigger.

For comparison, to blow the Earth up (with the fragments not falling back), you would need the energy of around 1,246,400,000,000 tonnes of antimatter. Or a relativistic projectile of 1,246,400,000,000 tonnes hitting the Earth at 92% of the speed of light (in both cases assuming no energy losses, so in fact you would need more).
However fast your asteroid is going, it will not blow a planet up.

So putting such feature in the game just because, while you could, say, simply turn the planet into a giant unusable blob of magma, would be highly ridiculous, scale or no scale.

But that would be false advertising. I didn't pay for a game of Planetary Glass Parking Lot. In fact, I hardly paid at all! :lol: :dohohoho:

Well, shattering and annihilation aren't the same thing either. So I guess that for it to not be false advertising, Uber would need to add a Dr. Device.

Now that I think about it, was the Implosion Device added in Core Contingency because people sued Total Annihilation for false advertising on the title?

Isn't the D-Gun a Dr. Device?

It would be a bit strange for one d-gun to chain react a planet, and the other one can't. But then again, it's probably just a matter of scale.

Could someone comment on this? So far there has been no discussion about gas planet destruction. I see this as a possibility.

The other options are:
- Indestructible (A big no imo)
- Just explode after multiple hits (perhaps)
- Becomes a solid planet (definitely not)

^ Since there will be no landmass on a gas giant, what exactly is there to destroy? it's ability to produce resources, certainly, but really, nothing else.

As for actually destroying them... well there is the theory of igniting them to make a small star, which might be possible with metal-planet-super-weapons, depending on what they actually do (that is, if they fire a giant heat-ray). This would certainly destroy anything in close-orbit and torch its moons. Might make for an interesting situation if there is a tidally-locked moon, in which case the "dark-side" might be relatively safer.

Finally, the amount of mass added by ramming asteroids, or even earth-sized planets would be minute. Indeed, Jupiter's mass is over 300 times that of Earth, so it wouldn't make a whole lot of difference.

What type of comment are you looking for? I've heard of little detail being given to the topic which means it's to early to tell. Gas giants in RL are relatively indestructible compared to the things that hit them, i.e asteroids. You get a big explosion (at least with comets) it leaves a spot (storm) that in time fades away. The amount of mass you need to add to Jupiter to make it a star is ~75(I thought it was like 6, darn you wiki!) times the mass of Jupiter. And to make it explode away would require dumping a lot of energy into it (you gain some advantage cuz H2 is reactive, but you still likely need planet sized masses).

In terms of other game options, you could let the impact cause a huge explosion, wiping small things out around it, maybe scorching a moons surface if it's close to the impact. I think it's been stated that the star is invulnerable and untouchable, and gas giants are "half" way between rocky planets and stars, so you'd have pretty much the same ability to harm it, at least in my mind.

If a gas giant fails to turn into a star after several billion years of natural asteroid impacts, then it's safe to say that it's pretty stable.

It may be possible to ignite some of the hydrogen in a gas giant's atmosphere. If it's super effective it might chain react, blowing a whole surface layer into space like a bad solar wind. If it works poorly then the reaction will fizzle out. It could still make a nasty storm and generally ruin things for a hundred years, but that doesn't sound very different from a gas giant's natural state.