Are Orbital Fighters Over the Top?

Fun fact: All current non-dev matches of PA are online matches. This unit is led to believe that you meant competitive player matches, separate from referencing AI matches that are also technically played online.

Know what I feel like doing right now? Getting some much desired revenge against the AI, by gangbanging it with other players. Would be awefully good to play an AIvs3PLAYERS game right now.

At least a cooperative game versus someone who cant have their feelings hurt is sure to be entertainment without alcohol requirement. Alcohol as a bonus, sure.

Ill bite. Honestly nano, you, knight, and some others have some pretty interesting ideas for PA, and some pretty interesting desire to make those ideas happen in some form. I am still hopeful that they rework every unit on release day just to mix up the game for previous testers. Yet, I am somewhat interested in playing one of those games and hearing your discussion.

Do you play TA modded?

I know this isn't related to orbital fighters, but an anti-nuke satellite that can shoot down missiles at the peak of their trajectory could be interesting. It could be more expensive than a land-based anti-nuke, but have a much longer range.

As for fighters, I do like the idea of them being sub-orbital with a transport required for interplanetary.

Nope. Plain old 3.1, not even got the community patch.

So. Who's up for a combined effort for the Orbital Overhaul Mod?

Hoping to get our cloud / git / version control facilities online in the next week or so.

I think I've come to the conclusion that many balance aspects of this game will necessitate a community mod in order for them to reach their potential. There are so many options now to experiment with balance and the economic and power scaling, and I wish I understood the rational behind a number of design decisions in the game as it stands. If there is some deeper reason behind a number of the directions being taken, then I sure as hell can't see it myself.

Just to be clear, I wasn't passing any judgement on one system or the other - I was however hoping that we could get a working version of 'true' orbital rigged together in very short order after release to allow people to compare the two.

I stand by what I said at the end of the massive Orbital thread that Neutrino started - we should let Uber run with their proposal, and let them flesh it out fully and try their way first. Then we're in a better position to offer an alternative if their finalised vision doesn't quite match up with community expectations.

I have a rough idea of how to hack units into the game that orbit around the equator, but getting the buggering things to orbit on 3 axes will be a wee bit tougher.

Gravity is the coolest thing, especially when you get the tools to play with it like play-dough. I just want Uber to know - if they're reading this - I'm very happy with what's been done thus far. It's a technological marvel and a feat of enthusiasm and independence - but it isn't the game for me. There's too much focus on numbers and management and not enough on emergent tactics and "wait what the **** just happened" type games. Permissably, I've had a few of these kinda of games in PA - one time I forced a Commander to flee into the ocean, where I had around 50 advanced air fabbers and 100 or so basic air fabbers waiting for him. "GG, NO RE," was how that match ended ^w^.

But stuff like that should be happening every game. That's why TA is so awesome. "Haha! You dare send TRANSPORTS at me?! My ENTIRE ARMY consists of SAMPSONS! Your transports are worth NOTHING! NOOOOTHING!" says player 1, to which player 2 responds "Invader Crawling Bombs."

Cue player 1 crying as his entire base explodes. THAT is what makes a strategy game awesome. It's what made games like Deus Ex, Half Life, Civilization and of course, TA awesome.

PA has potential to be one of those games. "You used the tractor beam to send that gas giant where?!" asks one teammate, as a ball of hydrogen goes hurtling towards the star, orbits around, and starts to fly towards the enemy homeworld, ON FIRE. I don't care whether or not that would work scientifically, it would be FUN and EPIC.

By the way @MushrooMars and @YourLocalMadSci - check here. I thought I'd get the ball rolling.

Oh, I understand that, and I wasn't really trying to bring up the whole orbital mechanics debate again. My issue is that there are a number of things about the current orbital set up which are very much less than optimal. The part I don't understand is that some of the steps in the right direction appear to be quite small changes, and yet we just aren't seeing them. For example, community members have brought up time and again that the current orbital set up is almost a straight "T3" system. The power and cost of the present system makes the game progression very linear, and a lot of matches end up playing out very similarly. There are far too many calculation based decisions about when to hit the next tier, and not enough choices about why to do so. Furthermore, many of those calculation based decisions (which are not always bad by themselves) are about global pre-determined optimums rather than local dynamic optimums. For example, if someone is playing competitively, they should pretty much never build orbital, before they build a nuke launcher.

Obviously, orbital still has a lot of work which needs to be done. I'm sure that there are a whole slew of units left to add to this part of the game, which will require many dev-hours to implement. However there is an opportunity to test improvements to this area of the game, which would be much easier to implement, right now.

It has been suggested by a number of people that all that would required to fix this is to drop the power and cost of the existing orbital units to be much more in line with the other theatres of war. It has also been argued that orbital is still too late into the game, especially for games where players may start in different parts of the solar system, meaning it may be better served by moving it to the basic Fabbers' construction lists. So why haven't we seen a test of these ideas? This isn't a case of designing entirely new complex mechanics, like galactic war, or a UI for realistic orbital mechanics. It isn't even a case of adding new units (although that will be needed in time). It's a case of altering some numbers and strings in a .json file (or so I would imagine). Rebalances tend to be the first thing modders learn to do when they start modding because they are quick and easy to implement. They may take time to fine tune, but that's the whole reason why experiments with unit balances should be thrown out to the community for testing. It allows a large amount of feedback to see how such experiments would work. If Uber's build and distribution process is as efficient as I'm lead to believe, why not publish two or three changes a week, each testing different balance configurations to see if some of the community suggestions are useful? Especially when the changes themselves only amount to a few minutes work. And after all, if such suggestions make the game worse, the changes can always be reverted.

We aren't seeing the kind of iterative testing and feedback process that I expected by now. And I don't know why. This leads me to one of the following conclusions:

1. These little changes are surprisingly hard to implement. This has worrying implications for later modding.
2. Uber believes such changes should be investigated later, after other features are implemented. I can understand this, but they seem such little changes that I don't think it would take much time, and the payoffs would be large in terms of helping to direct what areas need more development in the future. Particularly when there needs to be a dedicated period before release where balance and polish must take priority.
3. Uber is satisfied with the current game balance, and thinks that all that is required is more stuff to be added, with no need for existing stuff to be altered. Given how much discussion there has been on these subjects by the community, I do not think that this is a strong argument. I hope that some of the more abrasive discussions have not turned Uber away from community input.
4. My entire premise is flawed, and I have no idea how the development and tuning of these features works. If this is the case, then my views (and many others) are irrelevant.

With this in mind, it appears that such discussions are, more often then not, ignorable or irrelevant. Hence why I think that Orbital, and a number of the other areas of the game, will only reach their true potential several months down the line after a community mod.

I think the orbital attack units are in a need of some balacing. Although they are a good idea, and I like using them, they have quite a lot of problems. I got swarmed by a bunch of orbital lasers which took down my umbrellas, and then 20 orbital fighters blocked my orbital factory. Every time I launched something up into the orbit it was instantly taken down. I could do nothing while my commander was slowly killed by the lasers.

Although I can see the problem, I have no much ideas how to fix it. Maybe an orbital collider which launches a self-sacrificing ship that will smash into a stationary enemy satellite?