Does the entire planet still explode if a small moon is halleyed into it?

So I played a few more games today, and one of them was a case example of why the current planet smash is bad.

The team in the lead had conquered the biggest and most metal-rich planet, but were defeated when one of the weakest players snuck away to a tiny size 50 moon, rushed the 1 Halley needed, and launched it at them. Even though the distance between the planets was huge, the leading team couldn't do anything since you can't stop a Halley once it launches. It was all really dumb, so they disconnected.

Of course, rushing a Halley like that should be a valid strategy, but the reward should be proportionate to the risk and effort needed. Getting essentially an unstoppable extra-large nuke is more than good enough to make it worth it. Instantly knocking the leading players out of the game at almost no cost is just ridiculous.

(I know you can't create planets that small anymore without manually editing the map file, but that's just another annoying limitation. Tiny planets are fun, and were locked away for no good reason.)

Deimos (Mars moon) smashing earth causing it to be totally destroyed ?

The state of planet smashing it objectively better than what we used to have.

Yes, I think an even better implementation would be for asteroids to scorch mark and shockwave-wipe the whole surface, while planet v planet is mutual annihilation. Craters sucked, and it's better that they're gone.

If you think about it, yes, mutual annihilation in all cases isn't the perfect implementation, but it's halfway towards the better implementation.

And what's your argument for saying this? Please explain exactly how the new way is "objectively better".

I haven't seen a single even halfway decent argument for this position that isn't about a misguided view on what's "realistic."

The cratering system itself was super janky, and not nice to use. While the system of relative-size-based mutual annihilation was fun in theory, it meant that often the smash relationship between two bodies was vague and hard to figure out. Now we have a hard and fast binary, mutual annihilation or nothing. While i would prefer that asteroids wipe surface but don't actually destroy the planet, a system of rigid classification is far better then some vague scale or relative size, which can be hard to intuit for a lot of players on the fly, it's just simpler, and better from a gameplay perspective.

Additionally, halleys were often on the other end of useless prior to mutual annihilation. a massive moon smashing into a planet killed the heck out of anything directly underneath it, but the frailest of units sitting inches away from the impact point itself were completely unaffected. Not a very satisfying smash system.

basically, dividing planets into cut and dry categories works far better than a scale:

Gas giants = indestructable
Planets & asteroids = destructable

Yes, I'd prefer it to be:

Gas giants = indestructible
Planets = destroyed from planet collision, but not asteroid collision
Asteroids = destroyed in all collisions

But the current implementation is closer to what i think is the best ideal rather than

Planets and asteroids = sometimes smashable, but only if the relative size is right, and when you smash you can't be sure exactly how large the impact will be or what you'll hit, and sometimes you'll get mutual annihilation but you can't know for sure until you actually try it.--- that is a messy implementation.

Thanks for explaining your logic, but turning something dynamic and interesting into something binary and predictable is a recipe for sucking the soul out of a game.

It's the kind of thinking that the people who take Pokemon or Super Smash Bros super seriously do, attempting to turn something chaotic and fun into a strictly regulated sport. Planetary Annihilation will never be an e-sport game, and trying to turn it into one regardless is a terrible idea.

Smashing an asteroid into a planet for localized damage that leaves a crater has been an iconic selling point of the game since it was first revealed. And if it was changed before the game released, it would have been fine. But this feature was in the game FOR A YEAR, and then suddenly removed without warning or asking the players if they wanted it. What kind of developer removes a beloved feature of their game for no reason like that? It's unheard of.

I have a feeling that players who prefer the new way, and Uber's employees, haven't even seen a large-scale game in action in PA. Especially judging by the fact that all of the default systems are extremely bland and small. Have they forgotten what originally grabbed people's interest during the Kickstarter? The promise of massive wars across tons of planets, supposedly with a million units in play. Which was never going to happen, of course, but what we got was more than good enough. But now that kind of game is near unplayable because of instakill Halleys, and removing all small, easily launched planets or requiring a ton of Halleys to launch them would just kill the fun even more.

The old mechanics need to return. Revised if need be. They could easily implement information in the UI on whether or not you will destroy the target planet.

I think a nice idea would be that asteroids and small moons would destroy everything on the planet and change it to a lava planet, craters also come back from these collisions.

That way you still have the same mechanic in play, easy target, total destruction, more dynamic planet smashing.

Are you sure this is accurate? I thought that you could destroy a Halley even while mid flight and stop the planet. No? Also, disconnecting kinda sucked, they got the jump on you, let them have the win.

You can destroy a Halley mid-flight, but only if you send stuff there before it launches. And in a huge game with lots of stuff going on, it can often be easy to rush a single Halley before anyone can react appropriately. Pretty sure people did send a couple of nukes and orbital units at the Halley in that game, but those were shot down, and by the time that happened and people realized they would need to send more stuff, it was already launched.

Also, the suggestion about scorching the planet without destroying it, I would like that a lot better than the current mechanics because it would make some of my systems playable again, but from a balance perspective it's not much better, because it still means a single small asteroid can destroy an entire planet's worth of structures and units. Local destruction for collisions with small asteroids/planets is still clearly the best way to do it.

The destruction should definitely spread further than how it used to be though - it was a bit silly that anything right outside the crater radius would be unharmed.

Want to kill everything on an asteroid? Sounds like a perfect application for the Manhattan Helios combo!

edit: Nvm, you can't jump to an orbit of a moving object? Was it always that way?

More OT, I like the idea of the crater system, but the execution was just super-janky.

I am 100% with you, takfloyd. I don't understand why the devs though the new change was a good idea. There's no point in having a Halley-able moon if there's an asteroid that only takes 1 Halley to destroy a planet. It seems like that's how every game ends now, and the games aren't even going on for long enough for titans to be built; some ******* just smashes an asteroid into the planet and wins 10 minutes into the game.

IIRC, you used to be able to jump into the orbit of a moving body, not anymore though. But you could just launch a nuke at the Halley and hope it gets there in time.

Tried that as well, first one missed and I wasn't able to fire a seconds nuke. Made a thread here in general discussions, apparently hallys are invincible a soon as their engines fired. Only stuff that was send before has a chance to arrive.

Don't really like that. Destroying a planet is imo fine, but you should be able to stop it.

This have been already discussed on PA but nothing happened...

I think the proper effect should be like in the kickstarter trailer where le planet was melting at the impact... But it hasn't been done due to CPU overload ans would have blown up the requiered config... Even if it had been awesome...

Or just give us back our unrealistic cratter for asteroids shock!!! (I loved the effect... )
(It would be awesome to add a dust cloud becoming a belt where the asteroid hit the planet or, because I know they will never come back, add this where the planet explode with wasted small units and pieces of large units, building, commander and titans hulk which were on the planets obliterated and not shrinking rocks animation, which is a lot better than the nothingness of the non-existant old effect of magically vanishing planets effect)

The moving object should be targettable , which is not the case right now, and when you succeed in destroying the halleys that planet just go straight (I know it's inaccurate but it's quite faire)... Destroying it isn't thinkable for a planet (unless you have the annihilaser), but an asteroid with enough fire power like many nukes could make it...

I know I'm whining about details but this game diserve MORE AWESOMENESS!!!!!!!!!!!!! JUST MORE!!!!!
MOAR!!!! (caplock powa engage )

Uber should write the lore of how halley actually work.

It's a really really big rocket.

So i'm one of the original kickstarters, and was around since the very first alpha build went up. I can assure you, the cratering system was the least fun of the implementations so far.

The first pass of implementation was a shockwave, where the entire surface got wiped, this was super fun, but also super rare, because we didn't have control over how many halleys a planet needed at that point, and the minimum was 3, some planets needed as many as 25 or more to move.

Cratering was something people were excited for initially, but after the build where the cratering mechanic was introduced, people started to realise that planet smashing had lost a lot of it's epicness. the shockwaves were gone, and now we had this theoretically cool, but practically janky and un-fun, and buggy as hell system.

What we have now works. It's not the best posible, but it's damn good. if you have a spare million dollars on hand, maybe you can fund development of the game to do the raw hours of dev time it would take to create a workable crater system, but that is so far off the cards at this point. And the first shot at implementation wasn't very fun anyway.

bring back shockwaves for asteroids instead of full annihilation, and I promise, you won't care at all about those dumb craters.

The fact that we can't intercept halleys after they're launched wasn't always the case. we used to be able to send things to deal with them mid-flight. I don't know why sending things to bodies in motion is now a no-no, but fixing that would also go a long way toward making halleys feel less silly.

Thank you captain obvious.

maybe halley work by accelerate a celestial object to near light speed towards the target.

Heh, why would they need to go to near light speed?

Even very small asteroids screw up planets something bad.

you could destroy Earth with an object the size of a small car if it was traveling near-lightspeed at impact.