KNight's Proposals: Interplanetary Mechanics

Honestly, the only reason I liked knights, is because one day a UI mod will put a power button on the main UI for teleporters, and people will micro it to only use energy when they need it. Really, it should do that by default, not via some pro gamer and their UI mod.

Honestly, I dislike teleporters lol.

This is your thread, I won't muddy it up with my other ideas though.

Actually... I like astraeus launchers in general to just be one way rockets to planets, no commander limitation but any unit can use. Besides that, I like 2 orbital launchers, an orbital fabber that can build any satellite that can't travel planets in-orbit, deep-space radar to detect key structures on other planets and label the planet if it detects one, bigger sized orbital transports, factories that build units in-orbit and drop them on the surface below, and a unit or two from non orbital roster that can interact.

so what's the point of one over the other then?

I don't think we can make it any easier than it already is, at this point it's less about moving Armies around as it is moving your Army around. I don't like that, why having multiple planets if you'll only ever be fighting his large army at one place at any given time?

Isn't that what your supposed to convince me of?

Mike

1 trip Astraeus wouldn't be bad, but in my opinion once the game has gotten to a late enough stage, one should be able to eventually flood the system with an orbital transport that can zip around. Just make it belong in the late game. This will reinforce the whole idea of setting a pace on the orbital game, which I think is needed.
This will allow everyone to Astraeus expand, and give an advantage to those who have made the correct strategic decisions to ramp up their orbital game, and take the advantage they earned (be it from choosing the right planet to expand to, to winning a war on a planet)

Knights charges per unit, yours charges more when units are going through.

PA has lots of fights all over even a single planet?

yup, not sure where this bs of single armies comes from.

I meant, the fixed cost over the per unit cost. If they both allow for the same kind of balance, then who cares which one we have?

The point of my suggestion is to take the advantages from both systems, and by doing so removing most of the disadvantages. One of the main arguments I have seen against the fixed cost teleporter, is the "why don't you just turn it off when you're not using it?" this then supports the cost per unit idea which says "in our system, you only get cost per unit, so turning it off will have no effect". My suggestion does nearly the same thing, except has a baseline running cost while its on.

Indeed we have already few limits to deal with.

1. Human, one single player will soon lose control over many bases scattered around several moons, asteroids and planets. The first few may be viable. The trouble will come later anyway. Unless we are speaking about Teams and a Multiplayer campaign, where perhaps new players will enter middle-game.

2. Resources, there is little we can do to avoid an excess in metal and power. Limits in this sense would simply slow down the game. It will not change the fact that at some point in game a player will have access to virtually unlimited resources - unless we give the player a way to spend those on something astronomical expensive.

3. Computational, our machines and the servers through which we will be playing have a defined computational limit, due to their hardware. If we do not find a way to abstract massive amounts of units into some kind of placeholder (super units?) we will be unable to play decently because endless production will ultimately kill the frame rate.

We can make any possible suggestions. But we can't avoid to deal with the points above.

I think it more of a comment about fighting on a single front-line, as compared to fighting on multiple ones at the same time.

An 'ion particle detector' might be good. The basic idea is you can vaguely detect where units have been from a dissipating cloud of 'whatever' that they leave behind. Dense clouds indicate lots of recent activity, sparse clouds indicate old activity, or low throughput recent activity. Implementation-wise you could have units release particles at a constant rate, each particle having a certain half-life. The particles could be visible in the celestial view.

Might be too powerful if it detects surface activity too, unless it is nerfed somehow (maybe by particles only emitted from moving units, detection strength lessened due to atmosphere, etc).

Uber has said we'll have missiles that can intercept units that are traveling through the orbital layer. (in one of their recent live streams – don't feel like searching)

So that'll make for an interesting twist. Unless we're really early, we'll likely not want to move commanders except through teleporters.

Excellent post knight, and while I have a lot to say I will try and keep this relatively brief instead of writing an essay on each point.

I think the idea of making the Astraeus commander-only might be taking the Astraues in the wrong direction. It seems to me that the smallest, lightest, cheapest access to orbital should not be able to transport the commander, but instead would transport a constructor.

This isn't to say that it should not be possible to transport the commander, but only that it should not be the first thing you have access to in terms of orbital transport. I think it makes more sense to have the Astraues be a single-use, minimalist transport for sending one constructor at the lowest possible price. Bigger transports, such as for moving the commander, and which might be reusable would be more expensive.

To standardize and simplify orbital transportation, PA could implement the concept of a "pod" which stores a unit. Different delivery methods would all pay the same resource cost for the same pod, regardless of whether it is a unit cannon, orbital insertion from a ship, or a single-use Astraeus-like unit. A transport aircraft, or dropship, would be the exception, and you wouldn't need to pay metal for pods using dropships. However, dropships would be transport units, which would be more expensive and much easier to shoot down with anti-air. The same dropship unit could easily serve as both the surface air transport and the orbital "tender" craft to carry units up to large interplanetary transports.


I agree completely that teleporters would be more flexible and user-friendly with a per-unit cost instead of manually opening/closing them with an energy drain to keep them open. And the reason why the teleporter should cost a lot of energy to utilize is because it lowers the upfront cost of the teleporter, and gives players an incentive to transition to local production which would save those teleport energy costs, so a base might spring up around a teleporter on the destination world instead of the teleporter replacing the need for a local base.

whoops sorry guys, work is a drag and all that.

My system has that in the form of Asteroid bases and Teleporters(particularly in the late game).

It is currently based on some assumptions because of the current state of the game, but why split your army up so it can be defeating piece by piece by an opponent who can move his army all around the system "instantly" and economically? The Teleporter would require drastic changes(I don't think just tweaking balance levers can solve the problem, just off-set when it happens) not unlike what I've suggested here because the current implementation is just flat out broken in contrast to the gameplay was initially described and what we have in the current game state.

Thus why my system puts some pretty solid limits on what you can do in terms of expansion early game. Because it ramps up much more slowly, and because of Force Allocation and assuming good scouting options you can focus on specific areas more than that having to manage all of everything all the time.

You assume a lot here, as Above, limiting the ramp up also effects your economy and it's hard to say have resources will be balanced from this point forward, it is closely tied to expansion for obvious reasons but you make some faulty assumptions.

This doesn't really have any relation here, the point is not that my system allows for bigger games, frankly in terms of "basic" 1v1 play it encourages smaller systems, more players mean bigger systems because functional while still working pretty well in smaller systems for more intense games. Also you miss my point about Force Allocation, teh point of my system is that you won't always have everything producing unless you have the means to move it around which isn't accounted for until the late game.

My initial was basically just something that doesn't specify ANYTHING about the nature of the activity, only that there IS activity. To me then it's fine if it works in Orbit, Air or Surface because although it detects all that, it never specifies. My detector" is mostly a "First Step" when it comes to interplanetary scouting. It could also be useful super late game if a commander decides to run if you have detectors aiming at several planets you have a chance to give chase instead of blindly running around hoping you run into them.

I don't like this right alongside interplanetary Nuck weapons. Frankly the only reason I think people like it is because of the side effects of the Astraeus' implementation, if you take those issues away, suddenly you don't really need it anymore.

The issue I have with that is that while it's different from the current implementation, it has a very similar end result, super fast expansion and insane ramp up of things going on. I said earlier there might need to be some non-Astraeus/Asteroid expansion for the mid-late but the changes I propose for the Astraeus are primarily mean to address issues I see in the early game.

Mike

There's yet another balance lever: Energy.

An astreus that uses energy would remain cheap but require some heavy baseline infrastructures to get started. If energy was tied to gravity wells (it's literally the single best mechanic to settle all interplanetary balance issues) then a barren world could be reached but not escaped.

Formations is a potential way to reduce load by binding units together at certain times, bandwidth could be saved although it may be complex. Taken to the logical extreme, each 'unit' could actually be composed of up to 10 (100?) units. You can tell 'units' of the same type to combine. They either maximise one 'unit' (merging fully if combined count is less than threshold), or split unit count evenly. Unit count corresponds to hp, but not one-to-one (all but possibly one tank is at full health). Bandwidth and unit movement/firing calculations is reduced by orders of magnitude in a simple way.

On the negative side, computational load is increased client side, which has to deal with making it look realistic (the server has told the client that unit a fired at unit b and did 7 damage, the client has to translate that into 10 units in a fired at 8 units in b, killing 2, then showing that on screen). That still doesn't solve clients having to draw a million units, but maybe not every client has to:

• Client a with basically a supercomputer can draw a million units
• Client b with a mid-range computer can draw 100,000 units (drawn bigger than client a's units)
• Client c with a low-end computer can draw 10,000 units (drawn bigger than client b's units)
• They can compete no problem, just what they see is different
• Client a sees 100 tanks as a 'unit', with up to 10 health each
• Client b sees 10 tanks as a 'unit' with up to 100 health each
• Client c sees 1 tank as a 'unit' with up to 1000 health

I feel like the writing is on the wall for the unit cannon, Uber seemed so happy about how the teleporter turned out and have been kinda hinting that it solved the problem of moving troops between planets pretty well.. we'll see.

Now that teleports are working as well as they are, there is no reason that the astraeus needs to be able to pick up the commander.

Ok, well, so basically what you propose is to slow down the game, avoiding the unavoidable for a bit longer.

But at some point, despite the pace of the game, we will encounter those troubles. Human players will be unable to cope with the expansion. Resources will increase to the point to be virtually infinite. Our Computers will be unable to cope with that as well, due to limitation of the hardware.

Turn it as you like, but those thresholds are gonna be reach, no matter the limits we put to the game. Unless we implement a switch in the scale of the game. And that can be done with Super Units. I miss the imagination to see otherwise. I try to explain better.

So or you will slow down the game too much and it will risk to be boring. Or you will slow down the game just a little, and it will not matter.

So far a planet allows players to build dozen thousands of units. Perhaps more. Therefore as soon as the player obtains control of entire planets and moon, the threshold over which we encounter the three issues of above will be reached immediately. You can change the *when*, not the *if*.

On the other hand, implementing few Super Units (Dropship, Carriers, Vessels, Transports, or what so ever) that require a planet income to produce or start producing, we will enable the player to change the scale of the game. There will no longer been produced hundred thousands of small units, but few placeholders for them - the Super Units.

Of course one could turtle up on its planet and produce ten dozen of Dropships. However that would require a conspicuous amount of time during which the opponent will be able to regenerate and develop an appropriate strategy for counter attack - well, I hope so.

Or the player who has the upper hand will attack as soon as possible.

In this case, a Dropship that is a factory as well will have the ability to recreate what Planetary Annihilation excels in: battles with thousands small units. We will be able to enjoy it, 'cos there will be no huge amounts of parked units elsewhere killing the frame rate, or demanding our attention with micro managements.

Player who will manage to get the upper hand will be able to gather resources far from the battlefield, moving the production on site. The opponent will likely lose, but still retaining a good margin to react. Interplanetary conflicts will be interesting again, more than now with endlessly clicks on ten dozen factories, multiplied Teleporters, and having continuously to swicth view from planet to planet to keep everything under control.

You can flip it as you like, but keeping an eye on performance and frame rate is very fundamental in any video game. As well as saving the player for some kind of overload, like clicking fests, or having to keep an eye on too many locations (planets, moon, asteroids, etc).

And there is also the Intel aspect of the game that we want it to be everything but trivial.

Those three factors should be the starting point of any suggestion for improving the game play. There are unavoidable.

Not quite, because if I understood correctly different clients will render different battles. How will you deal with that?

Beside, PA at the current state goes down with few thousands units. I start from what I see. Optimization will likely improve performance. But it isn't going be a miracle.