Larger planets in rotation, please

I love the new planets (apart from the spawns) and the variety they bring, but one thing appears to be missing: large planets, like radius 800.

I'm assuming this is is an effort to keep performance up? The problem is it kills diversity of play. A lot of the tank rushes happening right now are because all the default planets are small, so you spam hard and early. With a larger planet you get a bit more of an opportunity to breathe and a wider variety of approaches to gameplay open up.

I'm just hoping we'll see a bit more of a diversity in planet size in rotation.

indeed it's a way to keep permanence up. I can barely play on planets bigger then 800.

I usually solo a single planet of 1300 radius.

I decrease the amount of mex's however.

They make for some really awesome games of map control.

Speaking of diversity of play based on planet size...

Played a 5v5 on a 1000+ the other day vs Relentless AIs. The entire game was Air play, basically using T1/T2 Bombers to snipe.

Something needs to be done there, like increasing all Air costs by 2-3x but increasing their speed so they don't die so easily.
Air spam is making a comeback, and the AI knows it.

Also increasing Land move-speed/making Air Transports cheap T1 and slowing them based on their cargo, would allow us to move a Land army across the map.

Also... Nerfing Vanguards... Why am I not just posting in the Balance Forum as post 9001 on these topics...

Air spam will always be the only way to play on a map that size. 800-900 seems really fun for good 1v1 play. I'm not sure about bigger games though.

Or building teleporters with air fab spam, but snipes work too.

I usually dont play on larger than 800, Because its just a t2 turtle fest, they tech up to t2, you cannot get any ground units in t1 there in time, and t2 atm is just unstoppable as in a but a hand ful like 20-30 can kill UNLIMITED t1 units. thats certainly no fun.

I prefer action all the time. not really a turtle guy, attacking should be rewarded. sure you have gateways but they are so easily killed and sniped and you generally need quite a bit of them to flood out enough t1 units fast enough and then again they just get annihilated by t2.

Yet to fight against t2 in the PTE. Hopefully they have been nerfed hard one can dream.

Please no. Please keep all planets at or below radius 500; preferably below 300.

See? I can make subjective suggestions too! Wait sorry I'm being a douche aren't I....

Well, I think you can have planets too small and you can have them too big. Big planets (old scale 4 and high scale 3) were too large, and it was a turtle-fest. Not my idea of fun. Another problem with bigger planets is that there is more metal, making the game altogether harder to manage.

Too small of a planet and it becomes commander rushes or CONSTANT battle where you just don't have time to consolidate anything. I think radius ~400-500 is about a good size then, to where you have some space to call your own and contact expansions between you and your opponent.

But on this topic, I do hope Uber puts a hard-cap on system and planet size to improve performance for everyone. As I have said in another thread, crippling lag and bad performance will make a game a slaughter for critics and players alike.

Metal quantity is completely controllable and has been for several patches now.

I dunno about that, moving ground troops across such planets is actually pretty easy.

Booms especially excel across such distances.

Air forces are fast response, but can be easily defended from.

Not sure where the idea of them being a turtle fest comes from, artillery hasn't changed.

Maybe I'm being dumb here, but to the OP about loving the new planets? what new planets? I haven't noticed anything new about them myself

Do people use it? No. More often than not if they do use it, they increase the amount of metal rather than reduce.

/e: "People", as always, is an abstract term. If YOU use it to reduce metal, that's great.

A quick look through the most recent systems added to the default server on system sharing shows me that almost all of them have changed the metal sliders.

*Edit*
Just looked at the most recent 30 systems added. Every one of them used a non-standard metal amount.

Map size changes the game for any RTS. Large maps favour tech, and small maps favour spam. Both game types are fun and should be in the game. I play anything from comm boxing to 1300 radius ffa. You might prefer one or the other, but does that mean no one should get to play what you dislike? The question isn't "should we get rid of all small planets and replace them with big ones." Rather, I think the idea is simply to add a couple large planets to the default map pool.

I would agree that the reason they're not in rotation is performance. I'm not really a computer guy, but I believe they fill up the RAM in a bad way. I don't know if that's a part of performance that can be improved or not. I'm probably gonna need another stick.

Aside from that, I think big maps have been misrepresented to some of you. That's weird, since in lobby, big maps are a rather popular game type. They're not turtle-fests. Air is not suddenly "better than ground". Teleporters are important. Radar and orbital radar is important. The balance between the snipe and the conventional domination is interesting. I love "one big planet" games.

In addition to that, we could maybe have been clearer asking for bigger maps. I don't want them adding 1300m maps to the random generator, but all the 1v1 planets are just too small. An 800m map is not going to crash most players' computers and it can make the game a lot more interesting to play.

Agreed. My computer can handle that size very nicely. r = 800 is probably my favourite map size.

I don't see why we can't have every map size available to the map generator.

All the default "random" systems got changed when planet generation was changed.

Because not everyone is running a supercomputer.

Thanks for the reply, I had no idea the planet generation had been changed it all still looks the same to me, what exactly did they change about it?

Neither am I, that's why we play on their servers.