Im excited, but also disappointed.

So, let me start off by saying...I havent been this excited by a game title...ever. I grew up playing the original Total Anhialation and then moved on to Supreme Commander 1&2 and they form some of my best gaming memories ever. Imagine my excitement when I hear that some of the people who made those games, were making a game where you fought for control of galaxies right down to the planetary scale. I was, needless to say, stoked.

I have looked over almost every bit of information that I have been able to find, but have been unable to find enough to sate my curiosity. I cant wait for the beta, though, I think everyone that pre-orders should have access to Beta and Alpha, best way to ensure you get as much feedback as possible.

It looks and feels like a very Maxis in its current graphics style and I like that. But, when I started to look over the features list, one thing I saw bothered me. No spaceships.

Now, I know why. It would make the game more complicated. But, that isnt a bad thing. If spaceships were added to the game, it would be a groundbreaking title the likes of which have never been seen before. There would be a level of scope and strategy that would make this and all time great game, that surpasses any existing titles and would set the bar so high, that future game would have to truly innovate in order to surpass it.

Regardless of whether or not spaceship combat will be in it or not, as an extension of the planet based naval system, I will still be buying this game and I am sure I am going to have hours, days, weeks and even years worth of fun with it. Anyway, keep up the good work guys, I will be watching closely.


A Total Annihilation Fan

TL;DR

Mods might be able to implement it, or maybe Uber can do an expansion maybe someday, or finally, they can enable better mod support to allow that kind of thing.

The devs have stated that it would be a major effort to include space combat in an advanced form like in Homeworld 2.
On the other hand, spaceships might make the gameplay simple if they overshadow the other theaters of war, ground, air and sea. Why fight on the ground if the game will be decided in space anyway?
Usually space is referred to the orbital layer. We don't know how combat around gasgiants will work out.
Anyway. I think Uber has a major effort to pull through before they can implement and balance the orbital layer.

lol spaceships

Go play Sins of a solar empire if you want spaceships, this is a TA kind of a game. Spaceships will likely never appear

It wouldn't really be that hard to add spaceships, for the devs OR for us as modders.
It just requires one base features to be in place (which we know WILL be in place), and some creative problem-solving. And a bit of suspending your own disbelief.

1. Rename interceptor / bomber airplane unit to "Space Fighter USS Enterprise"
2. Change weapon to laser, turning radious to very tiny.
3. Duplicate the orbital gas giant mine structure file, rename to "Orbital Shipyard", hook it up to be a factory to build your space fighter.

1. There will be airplanes in the vanilla game. There will be unit modding.
2. There will be lasers in the game. There will be unit speed etc settings to mod.
3. There will be factory models that could be used in orbit, presumably by just replacing the gas giant mine model / requirements.
4. There will be a way to send units between planets, at the very least constructors. Copy that code / entry from the constructor file, paste to the space fighter unit.

I mean, what's complicated about it?
It can essentially just be another airplane but with the same capability to travel other planets that other units have, and with no restrictions on what planet type they can fly around. With no fuel restriction, and no landing when being idle.
If the only way to send units between planets will be like the unit cannon, then just allow us to load up the planes in the unit cannon, woila. Will still look the same, space planes will fly from one planet to the other, and remain airborne (at such high altitudes that the player percieves them as being in "orbit").

There's no need to have fancy zero-g physics developed specifically for one type of unit.
Just use the airplane stuff, rename it, remove restrictions, never have them land.
Done.

As for having space combat BETWEEN planets... Why would you want that?
It's annoying in pretty much every strategy game that did that. It was annoying in GalCiv 2 to chase down individual ships all over empty space, it was annoying in Star Ruler too.
It's far better to use the gravity wells (planets/moons/asteroids) as hotspots for combat. The space in between is pointless anyway.
Sure you could set up a defensive patrol between two planets. But why not just set up the patrol ON a planet instead? Same effect, different location.

At what point do you reach too many features?

If you add spaceships, you should add infantry, underground structures, wormholes, and a whole bunch of other things too. If "it'd be groundbreaking" is a justifiable reason for one, then it's equally justifiable for the others.

And that's the damn problem.

Once you say "hold on a minute, we've gone too far" then you have pick and choose which. And without any objective method for picking and choosing, someone has to rely on values and personal preference.

That someone is Uber Entertainment.

You just happen to have differing values to the developers. There's nothing wrong with not seeing eye-to-eye with them, but there is something wrong with not understanding that people have differing opinions on this.

OP: you don't fight across galaxies, galaxies are an out-of-game map for multiplayer campaigns. Think the clan wars map in Shogun Total War.

You can fight across a solar system.

There have been countless threads about this.

There will be no "space combat", that has been confirmed.

The reson being that the devs feel like they would have to make another game within the game to make real space combat and they arent (at this time) willing to do that (Dont have the time/budget). Space combat being complicated was not the reason.

However, i still have hope for space combat like orbital combat (There are plenty of ways to make this work without making it real space combat), we will have to wait and see.

I prefer having no spaceships. Relying just on orbital units and such seems more, dare I say, realistic. Spaceships floating through space as if they were an airplane, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, or other sci-fi examples is really quite silly and impossible. For spaceflight to work (even theoretical battleships in space) you need to abide entirely by orbital dynamics. You are always orbiting something, even if it is a star. Most sci-fi examples have spacecraft that 'fly' though space such as an airplane from point A to point B, which makes no sense.

So I hope spaceships are not in, but of course available as a modding possibility. As much as I think it is silly in the 'vanilla' game I love seeing nearly limitless possibilities by creating mods.

Your explanation of this feature's implementation is the reason it's not going to be implemented.
What's the point of making Airplanes Innn Spaaace when we already have airplanes? It doesn't add anything interesting to the game, if air and orbital are so similar. Same applies to Naval Innn Spaaace. Feature shouldn't be added just for checkbox. It should be added to bring something interesting to the gameplay. And if the best way to make this feature is co copy-paste existing feature, then you shouldn't do it at all.

Well.. I like what EVE did with Dust, 2 games 1 playfield. Space stuff would be a nice expansion. For now I want a good RTS game without space combat then a decent RTS with space combat.

I'd be interested in that too. But you really need persistence (levelling, loot, and stuff like that) to keep it interesting. Find a good way to do that in an RTS, and you'll be a rich rich man.

You are gonna eat those words, trust me. Weather its an expansion, a mod or something else. It will happen. There's just too many people who want this for it not to.

He wasn't excluding mods. He was referring to it being in the first release or in an official expansion.

If Sins had planet surface combat, who would play PA? Seriously just because people want space combat doesn't mean there is another game that fills the galactic conquest niche better than PA will currently. PA won't be perfect, and there are identifiable ways to improve it (ie. Space combat) but until a competitor comes out with the full package (or a closer facsimile) it's not wrong to want to fit PA into that role (weather it's Uber or the mod community that does it).

For example, when SWTOR was announced I dreamed of a game that had ground combat like Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy with space combat like X-Wing Vs Tie fighter. What we got was more like WOW + Starfox, which is admittedly still a solid game (if not what I was hoping for) and fills the time until a Jedi Knight / X-wing game comes out (if ever) but if or when it does I'll drop SWTOR like a sack of bricks without a second thought (even if fond memories of the times i had in that game remain) because it more closely fits what I'm looking for in a Star wars game.

More features do not inherently lead to a better game.
Also, we have yet to see orbital layer. Maybe it will be pretty interesting.

Anybody remember GPG Garage? People were begging for Supcom to have space battles in addition to land battles. This obviously didn't happen, and yet when we play Supcom, somehow we don't miss it. There are plenty of other things to do in the game without it.

I'm under the impression that a lot of people just don't comprehend the amount of strategic depth that PA presents to us with only the features revealed. I see threads about big, singular features that actually sound pretty darn boring to me, about experimentals, space station carriers, branching chrono-cam instances, etc. All gimmicky "wouldn't it be cool" ideas, that really don't do much to aid the core of the game.

Think about what we know so far. PA has the best features of TA and Supcom combined, while cutting out the stuff that was unnecessary. If that were the whole of it, you would have quite a bit of game with quite a bit of things to do in it. (TA lasted us for over a decade and we still play it.)
But then you add in the new stuff, like multiple planets, and the concept of a changing battlefield (through the destruction of said planets), and suddenly the possibilities climb.

Even something as simple as orbital units adds a huge number of possibilities. Recall that Neutrino said the orbital layer wouldn't just be aircraft at a higher altitude. It seems to me more likely that orbital units will be defined by the huge advantages they get from their higher ground, while being restricted in the form of movement. (For example, a spy satellite, which has a large area of vision, but is restricted to a specific orbit.)

So now you throw in this complex new concept of space-battles? Suddenly the elegant simplicity of the game is thrown out the window, and the player ends up losing all the depth that was previously added because they just can't focus on a specific thing to appreciate it.

You end up with a game like Spore, which tries to cross too many gameplay elements. Alone, each portion of the game has a huge amount of gameplay possibilities and would make amazing games on their own. The Cell stage could be something like Osmos, or flOw. The Creature stage could be similar to Don't Starve, or some other survival game. The tribal and civilization stages could be represented by the RTS and 4X genres. But combine it all together, and you get a big stew of blandness that only exists as a speedbump while you try to get to the sandbox planet phase.

Why do the same with PA? If you're making a land-based RTS, make it a freaking awesome land-based RTS. If you're making a space-based RTS, make it a freaking awesome space-based RTS. But don't mix the two and end up with a bland game, where all the potential depth of land/space-based combat is washed away in favor of balancing the combination.

Spore isent one game, its a bunch of mini games.

They obviously took on more then they could chew in spore (the concept sounded awsome) so i do understand your worry.

But making a combo of a strategy game with a space strategy game would hardely be the same thing spore did and not nessesarly end up with a bland mix like that (But i do agree that the risk exist, but the same argument can be used against multiple playing fields, if you dont take risks whats the point? Everything would just be clones and games would never evolve).

I would still like space combat in a expansion or something, i have long looked for a game that has ground combat and space combat.

Yes "Starwars: Empire at war" is one example, but the ground combat sucks in that one (And i would like better space combat like in homeworld, but plane space combat is fine too).

My dream/hope/vision is a game that has good ground combat and good space combat and good interaction between these two theatres of war (Wouldent mind if they were two separate games linked togheter like EVE & Dust 514, but EVE is a bit to slow a game for me and neither title is strategy games).

Honestly: I dont realy know if such a game would be fun or not to play, theres allways a risk that it would turn out bland as you describe, since no one have ever made a realy good one (No one has realy tryed either).

But the concept sure as hell feels awsome, so i hoping that someone embrace the risk and make it so that i could try it (and hopefully love it).

While aloot of you may say "Leave PA alone, its not that kind of game", it does have the potential to be, if they focus on the TA feel for the orginal game i cant realy see any reason for complaint if they would make a expansion expanding into space later (Expanding into unknown territory is one of the reason i love smaller gaming companies, they say "hell no" to the ordinary and take risks to further the science/art of making games).

Allow me to pull out my dagger and stab directly at the core issue.

Space combat in not in the game because it does not enhance the core gameplay, it distracts from it.

If Uber though that it added actual fun to the game they would put it in there in a heartbeat. The reason they do not is because it distracts from the gameplay they enjoy which is on the planets surface which it what Uber enjoys and envisions for the game. Neut himself made it very clear that the game is done when there is nothing else to take away from it! Space combat was nixed early on because it would take away from the gameplay that they enjoy, It does not enhance the original goal it adds another theater of focus that takes away from it.