Look At All These Bombs!

That is true but if a comm in on that planet and can't get off or most of there resources is on there, the out come is very good. It can be said to be sort of a nuke (if you are playing smaller games), if a nuke hits a base they have a big opening, easy attack, probably decreased there resources and by the time they build it up again the other player has another nuke if not more.

I see asteroid bombing being the final solution that you'll only going to use if all else fails. Or for fun and giggles.

I definitely want interplanetary nukes to be a thing.

lol problem solved.

they should launch from orbital station though, you can't get that into orbit and beyond without tons o fuel and maybe also some staging.

Fly the nuke over to the orbital launcher, and blast off!

Be very careful not to confuse the attack and load commands, though.

ahhhh, me likes

What i'm mostly concerned about is the balance of an Asteroid KEW (AKEW?) and an Asteroid MegaUnit (AMU?).

An Asteroid is an excellent player dilemma that can be used for many cool and interesting things. You can throw it on one planet. Given the limitation of the human mind, i think that there inevitably will be a "prime" world that is very, VERY vulnerable to AKEWs. Take out the Prime world and you win due to the massive drop in enemy economy. So, there should be a reason why someone takes the slow path and parks the asteroid in orbit and starts to shower enemy units.

So what would this be? would it be possible to park your own AMU's in orbit and use it as an active defence mechanism, ranging from sacrificing your AMU against an AKEW? Or using nukes on that AMU to shatter the incoming AKEW enough so, say, 80% of it misses the planet and the rest causes mild destruction?

Interplanetary nukes can be useful in this (preventing AKEW construction).

So many questions. So many cool things possible. I never thought i'd play a game where i'd contemplate smashing a frakking asteroid into a planet to win!

Isn't balance the last thing to look at? Making something harder or more expensive is fairly easy. Adding in more counters is also easy... balance is more about testing than anything else.

Would you consider good counterplay systems under balance, or as core systems?

Balance is iterative like anything else. You have the big, sweeping generalizations that form the foundation (like a peewee costs X and has Y health). Then there are simple interactions sort of like what we have now (A shoots B, B is great against C, etc.). Special abilities come into play, then all the little secret interaction tricks, refine, refine, refine and wrap it all up with the supreme autism deluxe treatment.

The problems are happening at the sweeping generalizations, before anything else happens. Namely, the scale of air and orbital attributes are making big question marks. How can these be expected to interact with the rest of the game, when they are not being aligned with things that already exist? When they are not aligned with themselves? An orbital pad is costing 30K, when it is clearly not 50 times better than a basic factory, and it doesn't even get to survive a single extra hit. Bombers can kill themselves 70 times over. These are not trivial numbers to be tossing around. They are so obviously out of whack that they shouldn't even leave the gate.

Supcom shields showed how a 5x change in stats can absolutely wreck a system. Downed shields gained 5-6x health regen, which let 2 shields block 12 MMLS when a single shield could block 2. That single mistake led to so many problems with shield defense, that it was simpler to remove them entirely from PA.

Just to be clear orbital stuff is radically expensive because it's not really usable yet.

It depends on whether ore not the counter is being added in response to something that is already a problem.

There are a number of ways of countering asteroids:
- hit it with another one
- move
- fly out to it and take it over and re-direct

Nukes are not going to be effective as we showed in the original video (that was basically the entire point of the nuke launch).

The way I read it I can interprete this two ways:
1. Evacuate the commander and whatever units possible from the planet, letting it be destroyed, but I'm not sure how this counters anything.
2. Move the entire planet out of the trajectory of the asteroid.

So does this mean that we will be able to influence the trajectory of actual planets?

Because of reclaim, you can pack up a base and rebuild it somewhere else. It won't actually be that straight forward, because fabricating is a very high expense in this game. Keeping double workers around isn't a terribly good place to be starting from.

Countering something isn't necessarily needed.

At the end of the day, as long as you're the last commander standing, it doesn't matter how many bases you've lost to comet rockets.

Nukes are not going to be effective as we showed in the original video (that was basically the entire point of the nuke launch).[/quote]

Agreed. The nukes that hit the "roid in the movie basically disabled the engines, but it was already beyond the point of no return...with this in mind, nukes may be able to be used to clear a spot for your invasion force to land on, if you can catch it quick enough Otherwise your invasion force becomes a more weightier problem.

Ah good to know. Yea this was what i was aiming at: actual game mechanics of balance and not just tweaking numbers.

What about a LOT of nukes?

Like as many as shown in this video should be able to deflect an asteroid. But not like, one or two, you need a fuckton.


As for arcs, I like the idea of tactical missiles (catapult and stingray) hugging the terrain, and strategic missiles (nukes and anti-nukes traveling in ballistic arcs.

I do not think any amount of nukes is really enough. I think it's far more effective to fire an interplanetary nuke at an AKEW in orbit-change to destroy it's engines and disable it, effectively averting impending doom.

Basically the nukes will work only as mitigators, won't stop the collision whit the target but it will be able to either missguide it or hopefully delay the impact giving the commander and some units to evacuate the impact zone... But i'm thinking a real counter to that would be to send some units and reclaim the asteroid (or maybe put some kind of explosive/laser drill that can shater or missguide the asteroid) , find a way to change the planets rotation speed so the asteroid hits somewhere else or just move to another planet/area... Oh maybe we can create an artificial wormhole to catch the asteroid, you would build a big anti matter cannon that shoots small temporal black holes!!!