Ground based Defense Laser: A way to improve nuke and orbital gameplay both

The two most underdeveloped parts of the game at the moment are nukes and orbitals. At the same time those are the ones with the biggest impact on actual gameplay, as well.
This stems - in both cases - from their effectiveness relative to other means of engagement and their lack of two-way interaction with the rest of the unit roster.
I would like to propose a way of coupling the two in such a way that layer interactivity as a whole is increased and gameplay options are expanded rather than reduced.

This is not a feature request but merely meant to elicit discussion about what I perceive as a way to achieve higher coupling of layers and roles which is in my opinion needed to keep as many units of the roster as possible viable for as long a time as possible.


Here we go:

1. Remove 'Nuke' as a classification, classify nukes as 'Orbital' instead. Grant nukes high health in relation to other orbital units. Get rid of the Avenger in its current form - merge with Peregrine by enabling it to travel between planets but keep it as a pure air unit.
2. Merge the nuke defense and the Umbrella into a Planetary Defense Laser: An anti-orbital ground based defense laser that shoots down incoming orbital units while putting a strain on your energy economy doing so. Large range and damage sufficient to counter exactly one nuke at a time.
3. Merge the solar satellite, the Anchor and SXX into an Energy Relay Satellite: In its basic form a solar array generating energy income.
4. Couple the ERS and PDL: Enable any ERS within a PDL's operational radius to relay the PDL's fire to surface targets and orbital targets within its own radius, effectively turning them into the SXXs and Anchors we currently have.

This accomplishes:

• Nuke defense mechanics differing from nuke mechanics
• Nuke defense unit not being confined to a single role
• Projection of nuke defense capability outside of the nuke defense's actual range, e.g. for army protection
• Orbital warfare tightly coupled with the ground and air layers
• Orbital in general still only loosely coupled with the ground and air layers
• Orbital units with unique roles and functionality
• Orbital threats against ground units locally confined
• Focus shifted from pure orbital to combined arms warfare

And paves the way for:

• Mobile Defense Laser: T2 vehicle able to produce laser fire after deployment - basically a defense and siege unit
• Interplanetary Defense Laser: T2 structure to intercept interplanetary (but not planetary) nukes which would also be able to power ERSs on orbiting planetary bodies thus further extending nuke defense and orbital damage capability to said bodies
• IDLs used for powering the Metal Planet's superweapon

But fails to provide:

• Means of interplanetary invasion aside from 'bring more Peregrines/Avengers'
• Conventional intra-orbital combat, i.e. Air 1.5
• A solution to the T2-as-upgrades philosophy
• Turret and air balance
• Cookies and tea

wow, gotta salute that initiative... YES! more coupling!

However, I disagree with those two points here, hear me out :

Plus all the merging ideas. Reducing the unit roster is the opposite of the solution you're looking for ^^'
If you are left with a these few units your game balance would have to be tweaked a whole lot and you would end up with one playable scenario : the one deemed the fairest. having a small set of units accelerates the game's pace and funnels the top strategies into a single best one.

For the Aestreus, we haven't finished digging the rabbit hole, of course it's dark and spooky down there, but that's what experimenting is all about. We may yet find the diamond. Push it to the opposed extreme to be absolutely certain that there's nothing in it first. With a t2 air transport that's interplanetary capable you're quickening the pace even more. and rendering the orbital branch nigh-on useless.

For both the nuke and transport Uber has toyed with the idea of having two orbital tiers. relative to the distance to travel. I find this idea holds more sway. As for the nuke, before implementing inter-planetary to it they were toying with the idea of a seperate nuke missile, either a seperate missile built from the launcher that is more expensive or a seperate missile built in the orbital launcher. An idea I'm much more sensible to.

currently a system you host with planets that are already in orbit around each other especially if one or several of those are the starting planet leads to nuke wars without fail. It's a sad trait and no amount of price on the nuke will fix it. The inter-planetary nuke needs to have physical limits such as tiers. If you had to (for example build a t1 orbital factory to then build it's engineer to then be able to build a tier two orbital factory and only then be capable of building an interplanetary nuke but the darn thing was still very expensive and long to build.

Then you would have to seriously think between the choices of a direct invasion and a nuke spam, whereas right now, there is no thinking to be had, the choice is already made for you.

My more general point is that as bizarre and unintuitive as the concept might seem it's buffing up the unit roster that fixes these no-go strategical options and unique choice sets.

And I agree with you more coupling between layers, but not between roles. if you combines unit's roles, than it's up to the player to determine what the best unit/strat is an only spam that, or shortcut route: see what other have determined and just do the same as everyone else.

Do we want a starcraft II clone?

And to conclude I have been feeling the same as you .... ...cookies and tea are still missing from the game and we need to discuss so as to find a solution to that!

there are a lot of things i dislike here but i go in detail later as i currently dont have much time to propper explain ...
short answer for now: overall i disagree ...


full explanation later in this post ...

edit:
first my apologies for the late answer but hardwareissues got in my way...

so now to work through op's post

@vyolin

changing nukes like that makes this stuff way harder to ballance
and only gives so much room before nukes get invalidated
giving health to nukes makes it harder to read if your defenses are enough do deal with the thread or not ... that way you are also in danger of wasting resources on too many useless defenses ...
also if your ground defense should be able to deal with one nuke at a time what is the point in nukes having health anyway?
allowing peregrines to act like avangers would make them rediciolously powerfull .... there would be no reason to built t1 air whatsoever as peregrins would be even more mobile as they are now and they are already able to take out like 10 t1 fighters each ...
merging the satalites takes choice away on what you want to focus on eco, information or defense ... what tactical decisions should be available to the player when there are non ... to me that is the most horrible of your suggestions
making the umbrella act like a ground is just gimicki and takes away from what is supposed to do it would also just make it a more expensive unit

imho opinion to what those suggestions may rather lead
is lack of choice and far less room for balancing
this won't make nukes and orbital intresting but monotone

Thank you for your indepth and constructive reply! I am with you of course when it comes to shrinking the unit roster and thus the available options. I just wanted to have those units that interfere with my proposed design out of the way to keep it clear and concise. Sort of. This does not mean that I want those units gone for good but merely see their roles changed. Since that is a topic for a different day I opted to leave them out of the equation entirely.

My aim here was twofold:
First, couple the orbital layer with at least the ground layer and limit it locally. Since orbital is the proverbial barrier of entry when attacking another planet I feel it must be kept in check. The game is not called Orbital Annihilation, after all.
Second, improve the unit that is tasked with nuke defense by expanding its functionality. It is mandatory yet expensive and snores-inducingly boring. You can barely choose to forego it due to the threat that nukes pose but it is still only a glorified wall. It has no active function whatsoever - it is a mere reactionary tool instead. No unit that expensive and that important should be this unengaging.
Thus I tried to come up with a way to grant it a secondary role to give you a reason to build one outside a cold war scenario. Another idea I stated somewhere else already was changing the Catapult to manually firing manually built missiles which could double as a nuke defense - same principle, really, but could be implemented right away with little hassle.

I dunno. Maye the games you've played are a little different and even though I personally am very Achor-spam happy I didn't find the game to be leaning that heavily on orbital IMO.

on the other hand, nukes are having a right party up in PA. I've yet to see a single game that had orbits without nukes.


I think this is where super-supcom-man-bear-thing can come to our aid.

Look at the way the nuke gimmick played out in it : Nukes were essentially exaclty like in PA in that they could reach anyplace. they where even less limited on what they could target than PA! they had unlimited range! (and trust me some maps in supcom are still bigger than anything you can get in PA system-wide)

were nukes op or otherwise unengaging? no. The anti nuke was a simple missile too but it was a lot of fun, as you could always see the tuft of smoke from it's impact through the FOW.

Here's what differed IMO : the nuke was much MUCH less accessible, running it was expensive as hell and so was building it, and it was tier 3.5. the nuke defense in comparison was a much better option as if you aimed for it you were pretty much guaranteed to have an anti nuke in time and the area a single one covered was equivalent to a VERY heafty base.
It was MUCH cheaper than the nuke laucher, consumed MUCH less and built it's missiles MUCH faster.
hence anti nuke was a cherished unit and an absolute must have.

It was weak on the perimeter of it's range as in this scenario the simulated projectiles started to kick in prtty heavilly but it could make up for a miss by firering again quickly : it could store seven anti-nukes!

Of course you could out-spam the anti nuke, but this required a considerably bigger eco investment that could backfire as the other layers suffered for it.

considering both the nuke and anti nuke were on auto-build by default and that assisting them was very heavily nerfed all you had to do was leave it running and you would be confident you were safe.

One thing though : if you did want defense (or a nuke) stalling on a resource or both was absolutely prohibited. if you did, you may as well consider your nuke launchers and nuke defenses were on pause. and that's one think you do not want in the nuke race. so it added complexity to the mechanic because at a late stage of the game you were more easily prone to big economy stalls.

So there were a big set of rules, yet this configuration paid off tremendously. Nukes weren't a dominant playstyle but were a consistent and valid one. It turned the nuke defense into a more vital target than a nuke launcher and people had to pull strategies out of their hats to come up with ways to destroy a well-defended nuke launcher (often with the use of drops, teleportation).

It turned this part of Supcom into a fun and interesting gimmick.

So I plead that Supcom does not have the solution to everything. But at least on this one mechanic I do find we have a lot to draw from it's experience.

It seems obvious to me that the nuke defense has fallen victim to a heavy nerf on Uber's part because they didn't want their nuke's launch to be anti-climactic. I think it's a childish way of tackling the subject. It wasn't like they never got through in supcom. but as a result the anti-nuke they have is so bad that the community's reaction to it is to boycott it entirely and attempt to win the nuke race as that's their best shot.

I think the anti-nuke / nuke fight should be a fair one, so as to reintroduce the level of play and depth we had in nukes in supcom.

I do like the idea of converting the Peregrine into an interplanetary fighter - it would certainly beat its current status as a "better" air-to-air fighter and give air cover for planetary invasions.

With regards to nukes, I like the idea of making nuke defense cheaper and more accessible in the way you described - I just think it should be coupled by making nukes cheaper as well to compensate. Think the other mergers are unnecessary - each of those units has a working role, though some may be in need of stat adjustments.

Overall, several good ideas in there.

I disagree with the idea entirely. You basically want a single unit that would do everything there is to in terms of fighting in orbit, a nuke being a suicide bomber/tanking unit and an a fighter that would only be able to harass orbital and be useless vs. air. This would make orbital a simple "spam more to win" place.

If you use a laser to destroy nukes you essentially nerf nukes to hell. A player could just shut down all factories and fabbers and win easily. You could compensate by increasing the nukes' HP but this would break orbital even more.

All of this would reduce orbital to: 1 defensive structure, 1 unit that can go in and out of the layer, 1 unit for fighting within the layer and a suicide unit with lots of HP.

Making a game isn't about having as little units as possible to do everything. It's about making a fun experience and making a whole layer monotonous is definitely not the way to do it.

The whole idea of a fighter that can go into space and out again would require a LOT more work than you guys realize. You see an anchor: go to the air layer, you see an AA turret: go to the orbital layer. Masses of micro and a complete lack of defensive options.

It seems you understood neither the content nor the intent of my post. This is not a request to change anything. It is meant to explore the possibilities of increasing layer interaction and layer coupling. I chose an example that came naturally to me. To keep said example clear I chose to keep it as minimal as possible and thus opted to reduce the unit roster for that very end. That does not mean I want those units to be removed from the game I simply wanted them to not influence my example.
See tatsujb's posts for a more thoughtful version of your response.