How to break planetary defense? And how to do a Comeback?

I am just curious, when we have a intergalactic war with several planets, there will be planets with a defense which seems unbeatable.

So i am wondering, does somebody know which way will be gone to break thous planets?
There can be several possibilities like... u know...

Asteroids: Smashing 1 asteroid into the planet, destroying a part of the defense, landing units there

Unitflood: You are able to send a huuuge army on the enemy planet, and just flooding his defense with t2 tanks until he just falls apart

The needle: This is my personal favorite, making a t3 (huehuehue) engineer/buildable commander, which is able to produce a base like real, real quick, makin it possible to somehow get him on the planet, and producing units somewhere hidden in a very low amount of time.

Another question i got is about comebacks. All the games i had until now were very, very onesidet. There may be a longer battle because of static defenses, but once this is broken and your base goes down, you have no chance of a comeback.
I think this makes the game kind of boring. Once enemy units are in your base, you actually want to die, because u just know that u cannot hide somewhere and rebuild.
Once u get a disadvantage and it is able to snowball only a LITTLE BIT, you hit the point of no return way too fast. It COULD be that this may change once there are multiple planets, but i am just curious if people know if there are ways to come back now already.

Greetings,
Shiny

Re: How to break planetary defense? And how to do a Comeback

If you're down to one base, then you have been beaten.

I mean, who in their right mind would try to conquer the galaxy by putting all your structures in one neat place.

By George, you've got to spread out! Don't worry about losing a base. You should have 13 others to attack from.

Re: How to break planetary defense? And how to do a Comeback

^^^This.

And sniping is a very valid way to "come back."

Re: How to break planetary defense? And how to do a Comeback

Com-sniping is always a good way to mount a comeback. As the game balance evolves, I hope another strategy will be playing defensively in order to trade initiative for efficiency, and work towards claiming an undeveloped part of the solar system will also be a viable approach. In fact there should ideally be a number of ways that a player can stage a comeback.

It is very important that if the game degenerates to a point where it is unwinnable by one side, it should either be clear so they may choose to concede, or it should end quickly after reaching this state. It's bad design in a single player game to get stuck in a position where the player can't progress and has to reload, just as it's bad design (although harder to do well) to leave a player with no option for a route to victory, and yet drag the game out.

As for Fortifiable planets, you will likely find that fortifying a decent size planet to the point of impenetrability will not be common. Planets can be pretty big. Furthermore, thinking about this from a galactic perspective is not the right way to think about it. The "Galactic War" part of the game is a meta-game which links different battles in different solar systems. Not just an extension of the current game to server-melting sizes. The player will not be fighting in more than one solar system at once.

Re: How to break planetary defense? And how to do a Comeback

Yup, building a single base never works. Ever. If making a comeback is too easy, then there's no point in actually playing because you know you can make a comeback.

It's kinda hard right now, with planets being so small, but you can't put all your eggs in one basket. Build expansion bases, build energy generators and defenses at those expansion bases, factories, radar, everything.

Here's the way I think about it; your base is the entire planet. The entire galaxy. There are messy enemy Commanders building in your base, trying to get funky with your units. You don't want your grandunits acting like those punk enemy Commanders, so give them a good thrashing.

Re: How to break planetary defense? And how to do a Comeback

You can keep your "impenetrable" single planet, I'll take the rest of the planets, and moons and ASTEROIDS.

Guess what I'll be doing with all those shiny asteroids.

Mike

Re: How to break planetary defense? And how to do a Comeback

This !

Re: How to break planetary defense? And how to do a Comeback

Moving them into orbit with lots of unit cannons and nukes for an epic planetary invasion?
Atleast thats what i would do

Re: How to break planetary defense? And how to do a Comeback

That's down right pedestrian, start thinking in a "Planetary Annihilation" mindset instead.

Mike

Re: How to break planetary defense? And how to do a Comeback

There are two general ways to make a comeback in gaming:

1) Be better than your opponent
2) Get lucky

Half of the work of keeping an advantage over your opponent is making sure they can't make a comeback.

Re: How to break planetary defense? And how to do a Comeback

How to break planetary defenses?

-local economy:
Making the planetary defenses and shields (i know...) require so much power that the only way to efficiently powering them is to use multiple planets (gas giants could play the role of massive generators), using resource sharing devices to feed them, devices that can be destroyed or hijacked.

This way the attacker have to cut the power supply down first by attacking the generators or the "pipes" to weaken the defenses, making an attack on the main planet possible.

How to do a comeback?

-asteroid as two bladed sword:
Receiving an asteroid also mean receiving a whole lot of "free" resources directly on the heart of our (now destroyed) base, so rebuilding becomes easier.

Re: How to break planetary defense? And how to do a Comeback

Pretty sure an asteroid hit will mean total destruction of the planet.

Re: How to break planetary defense? And how to do a Comeback

It has been stated before that there will be varying degrees of planet damage.

Re: How to break planetary defense? And how to do a Comeback

The asteroid hit showed in the kickstarter trailer was damaged by multiple anti-asteroid nukes.
Even if that was not enough to prevent the ground impact we can easily imagine this have reduced the damages by randomly spread the chunks on a larger surface.
(The asteroid could even make a giant devastating shockwavbe if destroyed in low atmoshpere)

This way even without completely avoiding asteroid impacts, defenses that progressively destroy an asteroid would make it less a game ender.

But i hope it will be possible to completely destroy a planet aswell.

Re: How to break planetary defense? And how to do a Comeback

Why do people always seem to forget about the Death Star?
:roll:

Re: How to break planetary defense? And how to do a Comeback

Because not every map will have one?

Re: How to break planetary defense? And how to do a Comeback

I fail to see why that's a contributing factor to people forgetting that annihilation on a planetary scale is assured in a game called "Planetary Annihilation".

Asteroids don't "tickle" your opponent's planet you know?

Re: How to break planetary defense? And how to do a Comeback

http://youtu.be/qqDSh34VoPY?t=28m47s

Re: How to break planetary defense? And how to do a Comeback

About Deathstars, i think they could be planets with large (capturable) control installations on the surface using some kind of strange ancient technology that can't be replicated because of their complexity; the player who control them could use their capabilities.
Ex: super-fast unit manufacturer, main energy core, engines for moving and positioning the station, warp drive for long travel between planets/systems, uber antiplanetweapon, deflector shields...

In order to use the biggest things like uberweapon, shields or warp drive you need so much energy that you need either control the main reactor (or several smaller) or build (a LOT) advanced pgens on the surface (very difficult to defend them all, low energy output), or use some kind of energy link to use the energy produced by generators on several gas giants at the same time.

But one player don't necessarily control the whole planet, there's always possibility for another player to launch bots by cannon, dropship, whatever to invade some strategic installations and counter an attack, like hijacking the generators to make the weapons/shields useless, activating the self-destruct in the command center, etc.
That's the macro version of special ops.