For Backers Only: One Moon, No Waiting

Its about the mass, you make moons by having the moon have a lower mass then the planet.

I just can't wait to have a game where two people chase each other around the galaxy on jet powered moons.

You can shoot from high gravity worlds to low gravity worlds, but there's a limit to that. As there is a limit to shooting from a low gravity world to a high gravity world, its just easier and you can get farther.

Well, soon enough we will be able to see how Uber intents to implement this feature...

Just what I tried to describe in my earlier, confusing post

über epic

Looks awesome, can't wait until smashing everything will be a thing. Personally I quite like the flaps, especially because you could then do some cool stuff with the rockets smashing themselves apart as they fly towards another planet, with flaps, pieces of metal etc flying off as they accelerate. Not only would this be awesome but it'd also mean you could maybe launch a moon from ages away from a planet, and have to repair the rockets continuously as it moves otherwise they'd blow themselves up.

Rockets so powerful they break themselves! Bwar har har!

There you go!

Actually, having seen the beta trailer, I'm kind of on the fence about which direction the engines should point. I liked the randomly placed, outward facing engines in the beta trailer, but then I got to thinking. In the original kickstarter trailer, the asteroid had many other structures placed on it, mainly extractors and power gens. I think if the asteroid had extractors and power plants on it, it would look kinda weird with all the buildings pointing outward like a sea urchin. Almost like a tiny planet more than an asteroid. This is probably the way they're going to do it though.

I guess that gets into the discussion of how interplanetary economics is going to work too. Will metal and energy produced on one planet transfer to moons and asteroids? Or will they be their own separate economy? It would be nice to send some engineers with one of those space eggs so you have some spending money, and the ability to start building tier 2 extractors and power plants immediately. Maybe once the two planets are established, you can bridge their economies.

Asteroids can be stony or metallic, and the metallic ones are like, solid metal, so extractors could be placed anywhere, but I definitely think you should have to build up an asteroid before you can build engines on it. Also, the asteroid looked really round, maybe increasing the lumpiness of it will make it look more like an asteroid.

Since the Economy is completely 'universal', and you can somehow beam your entire economical might onto an asteroid anywhere in the system...

Uber nipped that idea in the bud. Unlikely to happen outside of mods.

It'll be one of the first things I work on, I assure you.

O would like an optional non-automatic targeting system, this way is up to the player to crash the asteroid on a planet.

Explain.

The Current system isn't automatic and still requires player input.

Mike

That would be pretty sweet. Like you could steer it right onto the enemy commander, lol.

Have you guys heard of a game called Machines: Wired for War? It's spiritually similar to PA, minus the planets. In it you could take control of individual units and drive them around, might be a cool feature feature for the Commander, or Megabot, for precision control during raids/escapes.

Bless you, bless your soul!

I mean, I'm not totally against the idea of sharing resources between planets, but having access to all of them as soon as you land seems a little weird. Maybe a structure will allow you to transfer resources between planets, or metal/energy storage will slowly fill up from metal/energy produced on other planets.

No it wouldn't, it's a gimmick and not a good one at that, we've already done a few threads on it.

Mike

I don't know the actual system (I'm backer but without beta access), from videos I see that it's just a point & click command (select asteroid with enough engines, click on planet to land the asteroid there).
I refer to be able to adjust the thrust of each asteroid engine. That gives some way to steer the asteroid, and of course of accelerating it.
The hard thing would be to crash the moon of planet A on planet B, probably using gravitational forces of other celestial bodies and having a fine tuning of Halley engines. You need to calculate orbital movements, your asteroid speed, etc...
It would be hard to achieve that, but if you manage to land it, it would be awesome!

Sounds like you'd rather be playing Kerbal Space program to be honest.

Mike

I think that you don't understand how difficult it is to smash an asteroid into a planet. It's the "hit a bullet with a bulet" type of gameplay. Which is super-awesome for Kerbal Space Program. However, if you actually play KSP (like i did) you'll know that this will absolutely suck for PA.

Or PA with steerable asteroids.

It's not gimmicky on a fundamental level, the fine tune controlling of asteroids. There should definitely be more to it than crashing asteroids into planets, maybe putting asteroids and moons into close orbits around planets, or flying off with them. Remember that first video showing the system editor where one of the devs adjusted the orbit distance and eccentricity of a planet? It was similar to KSP, except with a large celestial body. That level of control is probably what we should expect in later versions of the game, I'd be surprised if they left it out.

Planetary collisions should be done automatically, of course, but I'd like the option to move an asteroid wherever I want.

I don't see the point, you'll never steer it better than the system, you might be able to get as good with practice, but the attention you'll have to invest just isn't worth it. So why go through all the trouble implementing it in the first place?

Mike

Not manually, but the way the guy steered it in that dev video (adjusting the orbital distance and eccentricity).

The purpose would be to move asteroids and moons into specific orbits for tactical purposes, not just crash them together.