cheaper orbital : good or bad???

So you want to big selling point of the game to be pretty much unavailable in the most competitive gamemode?
meh... I guess that's a fine subjective opinion, but I don't agree with it at all.

Not unavailable, just not a gimme. Have you not already beaten a player just to have them jump ship right before their comm becomes a scrap heap??? Regardless if space travel time is made quicker or not you're still dragging on a game that has already been decided........ that's my point on the small game . To me the selling point was massive 40v40 battles with multiple planets and jillions of units with planets being smashed left and right. Not 1v1 oh you've overcome me with superior strategy let me run and hold on to false hopes of I may win........

Making orbital such a quick viable option just kills the t1 unit battle imo. Essentially making every size game an asteroid slingshot contest..

Also the most competitive players at the most competitive level currently play with one planet...... wonder why???? Maybe that whole super extended game created when someone runs even though they have lost......

Yeah, you're making a few mistakes here. As others have pointed out you're working with a "as it stands now" mindset.

Orbital launches are chases because right now, deep in the tree and highly expensive, you can't launch off the planet until the game is decided. This means people launch their comm and either you don't know about it because you're losing and it was irrelevant, or it extends the game while you chase them to another planet and crush them with your superior home economy and it's irrelevant.

And that's the problem, multi-planetary play is irrelevant in games without large numbers of factions because games are decided long before. Only in perfectly balanced stalemate when orbital is hit would leaving the planet provide any meaningful impact beyond lengthening the game, and that assumes that the game remains balanced during the long flight to another planet. It's never going to happen.

By making it cheaper/more accessible, you change orbital launchers from being a pointless irrelevance used to extend games for no good reason, to a risk a player takes to try and win the economic long game through superior expansion at the cost of a drop in firepower during the mid-game. You know, a meaningful strategic decision.

Of course, until better planetary invasion tools exist it won't matter one iota.

What other mind set can one have with very vague hints being dropped about certain things???? Simply raising a discussion people that's all. Stating my thoughts and opinions on the matter as the forum permits and was created for. Hoping you all will provide some scenarios that sway my current train of thought. As I just can't see the light currently........

How does it favor weird turtle play???? The current God turrets support turtle gameplay to the max!!!! Cheaper orbital simply places them in turtles paradise sooner......

They play with only one planet because it runs better. Nobody in their right mind would even think of using lots of orbital in serious 1v1. Not because orbital gameplay is f*** right now (and sure it is, uber knows that as well), but because the game will be decided long before anyone can effort orbital things.
Also the problem of somebody running of to hide somewhere isnt much of an issue when you play a 1v1 with some buddy you know. Only random people are bad enough to run of and hide.

So let's assume that orbital transports are free. What would this result in?
People could expand asap to all planets in the system, fighting over control on all of them (lets ignore the UI problems for this).
So what has that to do with turtles?

Results in small games being slingshot fest.......IMO very lame. While I love the end game weapon of flinging asteroids, when you everyone in a small game can just up and move the smartest move would be to go where no else is and build thrusters on a rock and hope you do it fastest. Sounds extremely boring and time consuming......

Large player matches where there will be a conflict no matter where you go this won't be an issue

contradictory much???? Major selling point removal???At most competitive level????

Yes that's my point the game is already over seems lowering the cost will just drag on already decided games atm....

No because if you lower the costs players will actually be able to use orbital before the game has ended.
The issue with orbital right now is that you cant build orbital until you have so many resources that the game is pretty decided anyway. (Talking about 1v1)

To me it seems that your whole argument is based on that fact that you think that orbital = turtle.
So maybe we should question how orbital can be changed to get away from the thinking.
Orbital should not have anything to do with turtles. It should be about expansion, which is kind of the opposite to turtleing.

Ah yes that logic I can agree with my friend....... hopefully ba planetary invasion units will do that

I think orbital should be cheap.

Your standard game could consist of battling out on one, two, maybe three planets at once. In order to make things an 'end game' your could add 'doomsday' style landers and orbital-to-ground attack craft in the late game so players can 'carry over' their economy into the late game.

My first response to the issue of turtling a planet is to shorten the travel time. When it takes 15 minutes for your forces to even get to the planet. The defender, if paying even the slightest attention can spam orbital fighters and shut you right down. He doesn't even have to plan for it. If he sees you coming he has enough time to develop his Eco and get half a dozen launchers(or more) spamming fighters before you can get there.

I really think orbital should be purely tactical. It provides an intelligence advantage and anti orbital weaponry should be ground based. Orbital fighters as they stand can easily lock all other players out of the orbital layer and that is broken. Orbital fighters are the planes that cannot be shot down. One orbital fighter parked directly above an opponents orbital launcher will lock them down with no further investment.

Currently, games generate two planets unless specified, and you know how many when you join a game in the top right corner. Fair enough. That's only 2 possible planets a turtle can hide on, and the hardest part is if he fortifies the one you aren't on because of the difficulty in mass unit transport.

If orbital was cheaper, you would have a useable support tier early on. If anything, this would help you against turtlers, the smaller their base the better.

If they turtled in orbit like they do now, cheaper orbital makes your chase after them even faster.

Honestly, with cheaper orbital, they should probably nerf orbital altogether, and the cheaper stuff should be amazing because of it's price and use alone, and should in and of itself do nothing overgodly.

I always thought the idea was t1 orbital was cheap, did a very small thing very weakly, like small area of radar maybe smaller than average ground unit's vision area, weak orbital defence platform (defends orbital vs orbital, moves real slow), and individual one way travel of cheap units to it's orbiting bodies (needs balance test). The idea of t2 orbital was more direct use for more cost. Maybe make the radar have a large radar range for it's ridiculous cost, make another orbital unit which gives you legitimate field of view in the range of the t1 orbital radar area-size (because field of view is in itself super strong), make orbital laser, orbital fighter, and make a few non-orbital units able to somewhat interact on an orbital level like currently but a little more buffed so there is a system for defending against orbital with deepspace radars and umbrellas and maybe additional orbital attacking units, as well as multi-unit and large-unit (commander) transports and orbital fabricators (to build orbitals in orbit or travel to planets or repair other orbitals) and non-orbital methods of orbital travel (gates and unit cannons).

The point of all these things, isn't to encourage turtling and fleeing across space, it is to discourage it. It won't be an effective flee, because chasing on large scale would become effortless.

My opinion on travel time is still to normalize it. By which I mean the time it takes to travel to a moon or orbiting body around your own is fine, but traveling to a distant planet around the same sun is really really long. It should take the same time to transfer orbit to a moon with an additional linear travel time afterwards for any orbital travel. FOR INSTANCE, travelling to the moon takes setting up a single orbit of your own planet and then the slingshot, traveling to another planet around the sun takes a single orbit of your own planet and then a slingshot with constant speed and more speed around the sun into the other planet (instead of another orbit around the sun and a slower slingshot), and a transfer from a moon to a planet to a sun to a planet to a moon should take one orbit around the starting body followed by a slingshot at constant speed around the planet the sun and the next planet and ending into the moons orbit. THIS would make all orbital travel take a steady time-to-distance instead of multiplying the travel time by every single body.

Asteroids aren't end game????

perhaps orbital radar jammer is in the works.....

I think cheaper would at least bring interplanetary combat into the core portion of the game rather than the last thing that happens before a commander pops. Our opinions and experience with the matter is skewed by incomplete features. So not ready for a full debate. Chances are, our opinions will change once the roster is more full.

I say it's perfectly normal if orbital doesn't intervene in T1. Rewatch the stream, Mavor agrees with this idea as well, he says cetain things should only intervene at a certain time. and if you're going to play a 20min 1v1 match in a game that offers 2-week long games (that are supposed to be entertaining as well) then it's only reasonable to admit you'll only experience a portion of the game's content, no?

added to that is : where is empowerment in building a certain thing in PA if it can be achieved in a 20 min game as a "standart" thing?

people liked the "Can" because it was hard to get.

I don't get this bs.

The same people who ask for cheaper faster orbital are also the ones to come back and drop a note saying "by the way, in light of this, the orbital needs to be nerfed all round".


well of course you're going to want a nerfed into the ground orbital if it's supposed to be in play by the first ten minutes!

then what's the point?

are you going to relish that orbital?

will you bother building it?

why would you? it's just a stadart unit. Back to the storage case: do you want a shiny storage building or more tanks that could win you the game?

For once we have a few agreements here tat XD but more units will make it a much more debatable subject.......

That's my main point though is that I like it where its at currently I believe it's fine. When multiple planet starts become available those who are dying for orbital will have their game then.