Confirmed features and suggestions

ah ok. thanks mike!

One little thing I would like to see is possibility to freely draw lines and put signs that can be seen by team mates.

I don't know how obvious this really is but I have seen this made only in Spring TA. (Not so much experience from SupCom because I didn't played it ever really.)

Little things that make me happy.

That could be similar to how the co-op worked in Portal 2 with pinging and stuff. Placed a marker so that if you wanted to tell someone where to stick a portal it was much easier.

I'd also be wondering to what level we can assume teammates will be using some sort of external voice-chat?

The ability to draw custom formations is also a nice idea that could be taken from Spring.

On an unrelated note, is there any way to make this forum keep me logged in? -.-

What about invading planets like in the Movie "Battleship" from 2012?

Before you start, you pick ships or units that you might need, next you pick your arrival place and then you come right from the sky.
In the movie they got a Shildship, a communication ship, some battleships.

So you can have maybe 5 minutes shild for setting up the base, after that the shild overloads (or similar, i know shild is off topic).

Also you can have a radar unit along with the commander.

Or you just pick construction units to speed up base construction.

Somehow must the round start. Or do both teams start to the same time like in TA?
If you got a full developed planet to invade, something like that might be useful.

Has anyone considered Dyson Sphere's?

Could be awesome as a high-end resource unit. Staggering time consuming to build, but granting infinite energy etc once constructed. Plus, it'd block out solar energy from reaching anyone else, presumably.

I have a suggestion for the gas planets bases, i already posted this on the kickstarter comments, but i want to see what you guys say about it.

So, instead of having high peaks or land masses on gas planets make an orbital constructor that would build orbital plates where land factories and air factories could be built upon and land units could traverse, the tradeoff for this route is that the plates would require high amounts of energy to be functional, which would only be possible (in the beginning of the game) to the player with access to the gas giant.

In the kickstarter comment i saw another suggestion that would apply this same concept, but to water planets.

Oh and in regards to planet types, I remember the TA metal and crystal worlds.
One or two of those please

Green, Lush, Tropical, Desert, Marine, Mars, Crystal, Metal, Ice, Moon, Lava, Acidic, City, Clouds.

TA had almost every world type covered.

I suggested something like this in the kickstarter comments. Not the plates which you can build bases on (I'm not sure what the point of a whole base on a gas giant be), but just a sort of refinery that could either hover in the atmosphere of the gas giant, or be dangled into the atmosphere by a skyhook.

The idea that I’m trying to bring to the table with bases on gas planet (and water planets) is that it may be viable for the existence of a match in which each player starts on random planet type and can be successful. I know it's very hard to balance, but it could be a very fun mode (not the main type). Imagine if each player had to analyze and change his play style depending on the type of planet he spawns, using the units that are more suitable for that situation.

I don't think the intention was to make Gas Giants(and possibly water planets too) starter planets to begin with, otherwise they'd have to be very similar to Earth-like planet in order for it to be fair.

Think of Gas giants more like the little islands on Finn's Revenge, not the main Battlefield but still valuable to take and hold against your opponent.

Mike

This.

Just like you shouldn't have to start on an asteroid, you shouldn't have to start on a gas giant. It should be for resource gain (for the most part).

or both players would start on a gas giant, should both be possible I think

Speaking of players start spots I want to have a game mode where you can inspect the system and then select a landing point. This isn't a promise just an idea.

mapmaker

http://www.reddit.com/r/planetaryan...ino_confirms_that_a_map_creation_tool/c5xvcpb

This is a great thread, thanks for listing the confirmed stuff. I sent the team suggestions, through Kickstarter, for the stretch goals, and was recommended I come here instead. It's nice to see so many people excited by the project.

Here are the suggestions I made.

First a general request:
- I only ask that all weapons be at least minimally atomic in nature once a certain technology is reached. That technology is antimatter collection, or antimatter production. The methods are listed below, in the Gas Giant section. I'm not asking for pure antimatter weapons, and engines, at least at first, instead I ask for antimatter triggered fusion devices. It allows for the proverbial nuclear hand grenade at a lower cost than pure antimatter weapons.

Water World:

• Ocean resource extractor: filtering water for minerals is a real thing
• Super-cavitating ships
• Super-cavitating submarines
• Super-cavitating, antimatter triggered fusion, torpedoes
• Railgun launched, hypersonic, antimatter fueled, fusion missiles
• Railgun launched, hypersonic, controlled glide, antimatter triggered, fusion shell
• Gun and missile launched, anti-sub, super-cavitating torpedoes.
• Arsenal ship: carries nothing but different types of missiles for ground, air, and sea attack.
• Destroyer: defends fleet from air and sub-serface threats, using missiles, guns, and lasers.
• Amphibious Super-cavitating Frigate: armed with guns and missiles, and capable of going on land.
• Ground effect transport. "Ekronoplane".
• Ekronoplane missile ships.
• Since terraforming might be in, how about being able to coat an ice asteroid, swinging it near a sun to melt it, and then dropping the giant water balloon on a planet. The balloon pops when it encounters atmospheric friction, which drops the load of water on the planet more safely than dropping an ice asteroid.

Gas Giant:

• Artificial satellites collect antimatter from the Van Allen belt (a real phenomena) of Earth like worlds, and Gas Giants, by maintaining polar orbit. A larger version can be built on an asteroid placed in orbit of either world type.
• Alternate, particle collider ring, antimatter factory, both planet bound and orbitally planet girding.
• End game tech which allows initiating stable fusion within a gas giant, turning it into a small sun.
• A technology which allows controlled, focused, and directed initiation of coronal mass ejection in natural and artificial suns.
• Another, which allows the initiation of uncontrolled fusion in a gas gaint, turning it into a giant fusion bomb.
• Gas Giant engine which floats in the atmosphere, and feeds off the fusion fuel just floating around. Much greater thrust, and investment than the conventional planet engines
• No "mountain tops": instead, gas giant structures are mobile units comprised of heavier and lighter than air ships of spectacular size, using rockets, wings, gas bags, and vacuum bubbles. Some of these vehicles are applicable on Earth like worlds.
• Flying Air Miners, which filter air on atmospheric worlds for resource collection, and can dive deep into gas giants for faster collection.
• Hypersonic, sub-orbit, fighters and bombers. Gas giants are huge, and require extremely fast means of getting around. The ships can navigate gas giants, and other worlds with atmospheres, in extremely short periods, by briefly leaving a planetary atmosphere in a sub-orbital trajectory, in addition to extremely rapid in-atmosphere, engine driven, flight. These ships are incapable of crossing interplanetary deep space, nor can they establish stable orbit; not without being fired from a ground to space gun or launched by a rocket.
• Hypersonic Interceptor: an aerospace ship carrying naval guns, lasers, and missiles for the engagement of other aircraft, missile interception, ground attack, and ground suppression. As with the fighters and bombers, it is incapable of unaided traversing of deep space. - Based on Project Pluto
• Space mirrors: these are cheap, easy to mass produce mirrors sent into orbit around a sun. They focus their light on an orbital lens which can focus the light for extremely destructive purposes. The more mirrors, the more powerful the lens beam. Multiple lenses can be situated around a solar system, to use the same mirror array, but only one lens can be used at once, unless the array's light is divided, thus dividing power.
• Using the space mirror and lens, with a little preparation of an appropriate iron asteroid, it is possible to heat and inflate it into a space fortress: a ten mile wide sphere, which can be mined from the inside out, with mile thick hull, and protected built in solar lens.
• Lens upgrades increase beam focus, increasing damage, and asteroid inflation rate.
• Sufficient mirrors, and strong enough lenses, eventually lead to an interstellar, sun driven, space transport.
• Controlled solar mechanics eventually allows induced nova on certain stars, which can be used to kill everything in the system, as well as propel specially designed solar sail transports.
• Enough collected antimatter, and inflated asteroids eventually allows the construction of a fast train: a transport which never stops, but which drops off populated asteroids as it passes systems.

Stretch Goal #3:

• atomic pulse engine, deep space, spacebattleship - based on Project Orion.

I know, no spaceships. Having read the list of confirmed items, I suggest the Orion inspired ship as a heavily armed "transport". *wink* It uses nukes to fly, so launching it will destroy everything around it, and the nukes will cause tremendous planet wide EMP's, so anything not turned off for safety is probably going to be fried or frazzled.

Now I'll expand on certain topics. Solar and wind are in, and boring, but you have to start somewhere.

Power Generation:

• Nuclear fission
• Nuclear fusion: more energy for the same amount of resources.
• Orbital solar array, beaming energy by microwave to ground station. Also capable as a microwave weapon. This fits with the massive orbit mirror swarm mentioned in the Gas Giant portion. So, the more solar arrays, the more microwave beams which can be focused on one target. Consumes resources in one shot.
• The microwave receiver has to be a large dish, and can only take so much input. Maybe ten to one?
• Space mirrors (mentioned under Gas Giants) can be used to amplify the amount of light hitting the solar arrays, in addition to being weapons and space construction tools.
• Antimatter: this one is hard, because unless there is a third resource, antimatter is just a battery, not a fuel. If antimatter gets added as a third resource, then antimatter factory particle accelerators will work, even though they'll draw on energy. They would make up for it by greatly amplifying combat effectiveness. You pump energy into it in order to have high peak energy release later.
  
  The only way to get antimatter in a way which increases your total stock of energy is to collect naturally occurring, sun generated, Van Allen belt captured, orbital antimatter. This works with and without there being a third resource, but, if there is no third resource then only the collection method makes sense. Unless you get a magic antimatter switch, which turns matter into antimatter at no cost.

Construction:

• I suggested this elsewhere. My idea is that you can save entire army formations, and instead of having to order the construction of individual units, you order the entire army, designed in an army designer inside, and outside, the main game. As units get killed off, your factories automatically generate replacements and deliver them to the field using which ever means of transport is most timely.
• Unit Grouping: Instead of traditional unit grouping, where you box select a gaggle of geese, and hot key it to #1, and all those individual vehicles are still individually selectable; instead you group those vehicles, and they hence forth work, and select, as a single unit. That unit is then box selectable into a hot key-able group. This effectively steps unit selection up an entire level, allowing Total War like tactics, which don't involve the frenetic clicking of Star Craft.

Command

• Automatic transport: I hate micromanagement, and would love for all forms of enhanced transport to be automatically used by combat units, and to be assignable to armies. Unassigned transports could simply aid which ever formation needs them most. Armies could have priority markers, so players can make sure certain armies get the most help.
• Automated Special powers: I love the science vessel from Star Craft, but I hate it, too. If there is any sort of special power in this game, I would hope it gets automatically used at the appropriate times.

New features added by me:

Amphibious water transports
Strategic Whiteboard
Radar/Jamming fill cirlce
Homeworld-style unit selection summary
Bind button to mouselook

This could yield really interesting and challenging early game strategies, because you can't know how far your opponent is away. (he could have spawned right on top of you!) Risk mitigation will become an important factor in early game.

Choosing a spot where the outcome is most predictable and benificial to your style of play could become an art form.

I like it.


At all those others posting sections of veritable design docs with lists of weapon names, etc: Come on, make your own game, kids. Ideas are a dime a dozen, execution is what counts.

Sweet! I know it's not the same, but it calls to mind the start of games of Alpha centauri, seeing your capsule land on the surface. It's a nice touch to start the game. Sup Com did this well too (in TA you were just "there" already).