Black holes as a 'sudden death' mechanic?

Fixed.

Also, you seem to confuse realism and believability. Take Star Wars, for example. No realism there, move along. But the story can still be believable, if it is coherent, if the characters are believable enough...
Same thing here. The big red laser of the Monkeylord is fine, because other units use lasers, it is arguably balanced with the rest of the gameplay...
But a black hole who, for no reason, suck everything around and breaks the laws of orbital motion and gravity that this game will have to have, that's not believable. (Nor awesome.)

For Supernova, I'd go both ways : one mode where it's not realy a supernova but a destabilized red giant who is expanding uncontrolably, and another mode with a pre-nova star who will blow up and near-instantly burn the planets.
In both cases, you can have the "Armageddon counter" gameplay with devices slowing or fastening it.

A way to kill everyone playing, rather not have it.

I wont care if I loss, ill build it every time, so please don't.

I wouldn't mind having either black holes or supernova stars. I don't care if black holes aren't believable. A certain quote in the trailer should've reminded you about that...

However, if we do get super-nova stars, I don't see much reason we should have black holes (or vice versa). They achieve the same thing, gameplay wise. I do prefer supernova stars a little more, though. It would be interesting if the star pulsed in massive solar flares, and only actually went full nova at the end of the game, gradually taking out one planet then another until each player is forced out to the outer-most smaller planets to fight in an epic battle.

I can't believe people get so butt-hurt over a guy trying to suggest a cool way to add a game timer XD

Literally he asked for "sudden death black hole" which makes perfect in game sense. If you don't want it, don't turn it on/set a game timer. Otherwise I think it's a great idea. If you don't like black hole then the supernova sounded nice as well, and with multiple planetary bodies it would still work (if you're closer to the sun and it starts to go, you get the heck over to your opponents base and start hammerin asap cause you only got 5 minutes till all your base are boom)

Why the heck bring physics into this? This is NOT a simulator, it's an RTS Strategy game with a ton of super unrealistic awesomeness. There's no reason the star couldn't magically become a black hole, or magically explode. It's a game and that makes a pretty awesome sudden death game timer, which again you could simply turn off if you really hate it that much.

oh no you angered the physicists

Yes you could do black holes but please no sucking. PA doesnt do suck right?!

Its more awesome to use your imagination a little and design gameplay to fit what every kid who can google already knows about astrophysics.

An induced black hole would blow everything out of the system rather than pull it in. And even after the explosion which creates it or results from its creation, the high rate of spin would still tend to push everything outwards not inwards.

If you wanted to make a blackhole a player gambit then you are really talking about a supernova and to win the player would need a supernova generator and a supernova bunker, ie a diamond reinforced metal asteroid with superconducting lattice or something like that, something very dense and hard to move and resistant to friction and heating from the expanding layers of the star.

When the star exploded it would destroy all the inner planets, all exposed structures and commanders. Only commanders inside bunkers would survive and they would emerge to find a black hole surrounded by an inner ring of glowing hot gas, an outer ring of metal rich asteroids (remains of planet cores with high fissile content) and perhaps a few of the largest gas giants would move out a bit but leave very dense metallic remnant cores intact like uber metal planets, plus a lot of asteroids on chaotic orbits. It would completely change the map but could still be playable and believable and therefore doubly awesome.

Survivors would only have such economy as survived in the bunker and they would have to go from there to build more on the remains of the system. I could see that being of interest in team games. If your side is losing ground, you all dig into a bunker or several bunkers and then destroy the system and reset the game. If the other team is too slow to build bunkers they lose commanders maybe even the game... bit like nuke / anti-nuke but this can only be done once per game.

Fixed.

Supernovas are cool.
Black holes of DOOM!! are lame.
Why would anyone choose an inconsistent, boring, stupid thing like a black hole of DOOM!! over the awesomeness of a freaking exploding star is beyond me.

I would love to see a hulk, jumping from one planet to another and attack every robot as suddendeath

I was merely suggesting a 'sudden death' mechanic, not that it had to be a black hole. I just assumed a supernova would be too quick or not destroy the entire system.

I know that an induced black hole would actually push stuff away, but I skipped over that for the purpose of gameplay.

But if the supernova expands slowly, then sure.

Timer is a nice idea so when I had another idea about this along timer lines about how an artificial supernova has a count down I thought I must add it to the discussion.

How do you initiate a black hole?

OK no idea but scifi lore suggests either graviton beam to intersect the gravity well of a star or a dark/red matter projector to cause a massive increase in gravitation.

In both cases there are two ways to deliver, either a beam or cannon from a distance or as a generator or bomb which has to be delivered.

Either type would initiate black hole formation at the surface of the star because this is where gravity is strongest, eg a kind of whirlpool eating the surface like the red matter collapse of Vulcan in the reimagined Star Trek film. Once the artificial black hole is formed it would sink and start feeding on the star, slowly shrinking the star at the core, only when the entire gravity of the core was in so small a volume that it compressed the outside of the star and caused intense runaway fusion and intense gravitational energy release would it cause a supernova.

All this would take time hence the timer, once you plant the gravity bomb the timer starts and you or your team are in an end game to find and destroy the enemy bunker while preserving your own bunker, or in the case of galactic campaign, escape the system entirely. Meanwhile the enemy are building their bunker and looking for yours.

You would see the timer ticking in the way the star would slowly shrink and get brighter and brighter and throw off huge flares until .... whaboom vadooosh kerrakkk!!! obliteration, hope you got your commander tucked up safe and snug in a bunker.

That's why I suggested a runaway red giant earlier. It would slowly expand and eat/scorch inner planets, and its artificial origin would allow for "Armageddon counter" gameplays, where you can build things to slow or fasten its growth.
But I also suggested that being in addition to the near-instant supernova with similar "Armageddon counter" gameplay. Why limit game modes, after all?

More game modes, the better. But only if there is appropriate time for them.

...aaaaaaaand..

Thank you thorneel, that sums up my opinion.

I'd like to know what you imagine physics has to do with awesome?

It's a cartoon game with cartoon planets and cartoon black hole vacuums.

Unless I somehow missed someone bringing it up, I'm surprised that no one brought up the gamma ray beam that occurs at the axes of black holes (please correct me if I am wrong.) I would think that such a beam would be interesting, especially if the beam crossed paths with the orbit of planet.

Personally I think that those jets are significantly more interesting than just an all absorbing black hole.

No don't worry- you're absolutely right. Considering there's matter falling into the black hole, you will have relativistic jets.
Hahah.. If a poor planet happened to cross paths with that thing, it'd be fried pretty quickly.

Any planet in near orbit of a star during its transformation in to a black hole would likely of been obliterated by the preceding super nova (or engulfed by the star's expansion even prior to that).

When our own sun dies it's expected that the earth will be engulfed by the sun's expansion or at least the surface baked to a crisp, and the sun doesn't even have enough mass to cause a super nova (or a black hole). Instead it'll just eject most of it's mass and shrink down to a white dwarf.


But that's fine because all life on earth will likely have been killed off by an inevitable coronal mass ejection sometime in the billions of years between now and when our sun become a red giant.

Whoa Ben way to be positive :lol:

But seriously I do like the idea, having lots of game modes will most definitely be a good thing but then again it takes time and money to create them and nobody wants to create a game mode that nobody will want to play.

It's a tricky thing since Uber isn't a multi-billion dollar company with 500 employees that can create stuff in days. Hopefully by next summer the game will be loaded with awesome features and Uber with moneys :mrgreen:

If you want a planet annihilating event it would be more practical to look to the star going super-nova than collapsing to a black hole. That would also probably be easier to implement in game, and look a lot more flashy.