Asteroid Defense?

In terms of Asteroid defence, I could see the following being pretty decent, but ONLY if you can detect the asteroid early enough to tell that's it's on target for a planet of yours. Then let the mini-game commence!

1) Recruit a rag-tag crew of your best engineer k-bots. These guys don't play by the rules, but they get **** done!

2) Get them into space (hilarious space-orientation/rocky training montage optional)

3) Once on the Asteroid, introduce various phobias and expose problems between the individuals of the crew, culminating in one of them heroically sacrificing his circuit boards for the greater good (not Liv Tyler, sadly. Just you, the commander)

Obviously the idea of smashing asteroids into planets is awesome. However how do you defend against something throwing something so massive and destructive at you?

In both cases it should be hard, hard to turn an asteroid into a weapon and hard to defend against it. True there can be loads of asteroids in a system, firstly though you've got to get a builder unit to them, how long will this even take? My imagining is it will take a long time to this and then a long time to prepare the asteroid and a long time still for it to actually complete a collision course.

This then, I think, makes these an End Game weapon, not something anyone could throw around with ease and cheaply and something that's a long term goal. So as for defending against them?

Defending against something of (potentially) this magnitude is always going to be hard, it should be hard given the time and resources (physical and time) required to even get one of these 'weapons' ready. Nukes are the obvious (and Kickstarter seen) defence, and depending on the size of the asteroid would decide just how many missiles would be needed to even decrease the potential destructive power coming your way.

However given the time I think it would take to get one of these ready I think everyone is going to be nearing the 'End Game' stage with multiple bases and vast forces at their disposal. Meaning that once a player realises where an asteroid is heading they maybe willing to sacrifice a base (or entire planet) and focus on evacuation of as much as possible. Especially the Commander if your enemy got lucky and picked the base where it is currently located!

As for sending forces onto a "charging" asteroid? I like this idea, however it's viability comes down to when you detect or realise the incoming asteroid and the "Point of No Return" in the end, with something of that size it'll take time to reach maximum speed and time still to slow it down or divert it enough to miss a planet. If you realise early then I think it would be good to be able to send a force to attempt to capture it and divert it, or even blow it up. Maybe that they won't be able to completely destroy it but they might be able to do enough damage that your own missiles will be able to finish the job.

What happens when an asteroid is destroyed though? Well my thoughts are that it'll first crack into several smaller, but still quite devastating, bits which in turn need to be destroyed. Best case I think as a player you want to obviously blast the thing into so many small chunks they either burn up on entry and become harmless or are small enough that your AA defences can finish them off.

I think you should always expect damage of some degree from one of these. It wouldn't be a good 'weapon' if it could be easily countered but it should be possible, and extremely costly.

The balancing act with these should be cost and time more than actual physical defences against the asteroid. In the end you are building a super weapon in effect and, while there will no doubt be a good strategy to deal with them, it shouldn't be too easy.

I'm no doubt thinking too much in depth about this but I felt my first post should be an essay

I am seriously considering learning to 3d model so I can can create the "Bruce Willis" asteroid redirection unit and mod it into the game. I don't think it should be standard though

You don't. It's a game ender. You kill him before he can do it.

Or you get the hell outta dodge.

This strategy I can get behind. I always like to have a form of evacuation or back up ready anyway. Sometimes,despite your best efforts, an enemy catches you unawares and you have to get the hell out of there.

As I said I expect these to be End Game occurances so I'd expect myself to have several bases at least spread across a wide area. In the end as long as your Commander survives it can still be game on!

Even for a game ender, if your enemy asteroids your base, why not just use the rest of the planet?

Any sufficiently sized planet will be downright impossible to fully asteroid, and that's considering the idea that you are only on a single planet at the time.

Spreading our is how you counter asteroids, making no single target worth asteroiding, thus making it cost inefficient for your enemy to try and kill you that way.

If I get asteroided and its because I only have one base I think I'll be more annoyed with myself than anything else. If I haven't built multiple bases by the time the asteroids are flying I'm doing something very wrong!

I think that is the best defence though as people say, multiple bases and tactics to quickly evacuate the Commander. However as a more costly defence I think missiles could be an alternative, you'd need a lot but it could still be possible to at least lessen the damage.

Wonder how long it'll take for the 'Asteroid Rush' tactic to be developed

Approximately 5 minutes after the dev team get asteroid engines and asteroid targeting working, and start up a game to test them out :mrgreen:

Like this. Shouldn't be the only one. This would obviously be indirectly doable though, smashing a planet-killing asteroid with a little-slugger asteroid. An asteroid that is 10x smaller does 10x less damage and is 10x easier to project with engines, while the asteroid that is 10x bigger can be killed by the smaller and easier to project asteroid because it is still smaller than the planet which it itself could kill.

Basically, a rocket can explode an armored jeep, but a shotgun slug can destroy the rocket even though it cant destroy the jeep. Thus, trophy systems, a device that targets incoming missiles and shoots them with a small slug to destroy the incoming missile. The jeep is too big for the bullet but not for the rocket, yet the rocket isnt too big for the bullet so the bullet beats the rocket even though it can't beat the jeep.

Also, I bet that multiple smaller asteroids landing at different points on an enemy planet can seriously do some harder-to-avoid and wider damage too. So this is a point to remember, multiple small asteroids can beat one big one plus do lots of offensive damage themselves, while being flexible and easy to build one by one. Then again, I am sure nukes can destroy smaller asteroids, so those are in turn easier to defend against.

Last point being, the smaller thing can in fact defend against the bigger thing, so the counter would be to at least be within one offensive tier of the enemy. Then, you can slap his big game ender down with one of your next-smaller-sized one.

I would definitely on the boat that requires asteroid defence to require either:
1) Sending a crack team of veteran k-bots and vehicles to land on and capture the place; and/or
2) Using smaller rocks to deflect, gravitationally or directly, larger ones, where smaller ones would probably be able to be shot down by nukes or the like.
The less hard counters we have for a game like this, the more interesting it becomes.

I have a feeling that newer players (such as myself) are going to have to get used to losing bases in this game.

I think it would be sensible if you have sensors/intelligence in the solar system, you would be able top send off an interplanetary missile to intercept the asteroid EARLY on when it becomes obvious that engines are firing, and the rock is on its way to change orbit. If you have minutes to respond, then all you would need to do is destroy the engines- now the rock is on its way to hurdling in some unstable orbit, or even an escape trajectory out of the solar system.

So build anti-nukes on your Rock bases.

Dunno, I think the best defense would be a good offense against the asteroid-user. If he's dedicating resources to building asteroid thrusters, then those are resources that he won't be using to make defenses or grab territory.

All players. I think the asteroid mechanic means that all players are going to have to get used to losing bases in PA, if they don't have asteroid control

If the explosions are awesome enough I don't think it's going to bother me, either :mrgreen:

When I lose a base, I want it to go up in an awesome explosion. No other end will do them justice!

I expect to lose many bases as I scramble around like a new born against an AI!

Well if players can determine the target location, you could probably just reclaim the base before the strike.

And then try and rebuild in your new crater.

You underestimate the abilities of more skilled players. Losing bases, for example on a map like Finns Revenge in FA is pretty common in high level matches.

You could always use another asteroid to deflect the one coming at you, like in this clip from futurama http://www.comedycentral.com/video-clips/yvmdsc/futurama-making-garbage.

Or blow it up from the inside like Armageddon.

I think that most of the potential ideas have been expressed, but I felt I should put my opinion forward regardless.

I'm for having asteroids being very difficult to effectively defend against. As far as I can tell they are going to have a high resource cost, and be very time consuming to build. That provides defenders with two advantages off the bat. While a player is pouring resources into the asteroid, they wont be able to front as large an army which leaves them more vulnerable to attack, and the asteroid itself is vulnerable until completion.

Upon completion the asteroid owner has to decide if they want those resources to be gone in one burst by throwing it at a planet, or if they want to throw it into orbit around an enemy world as a staging post (of course this hasn't been 100% confirmed but Uber have expressed a desire to have this as a choice). If the asteroid becomes a forward base, then conventional warfare should be sufficient as a defence against it.

Finally if the asteroid is on a collision course it should become damn near impossible at this stage to defend from it. The defending player had several opertunites that they failed to take advantage of, preventing its construction, constructing their own asteroid, or spread far enough across worlds that the loss or severe damage to a planet should not end be the end for them.

This said I am all for being able to send an interception team to the asteroid in an attempt to destroy the asteroid or throw it off course but it should definitely not be an easy thing to achieve. It should take at least as much effort, resources and preparation as the asteroid builder had to put in to hide/defend the asteroid while it was under construction as well as the resources they sunk into it to prepare it.

We have to bear in mind that we actually want to be able to throw asteroids at one another, making it too easy to defend against once the asteroid was in flight would run the risk of making asteroids worthless.

I just don't see landing your troops on a guided kinetic missile as an option, and even if you did I don't see troops having what it takes to do anything about it. What are they going to do... attack ground? Armageddon does not look like a feasible option.