Macro management on smashing celestial bodies

Currently, the game mechanics of smashing celestial bodies into each other are a bit useless, the resources needed to build the thrusters and the lack of counter actions are making this feature more a gimmick and annoyance than an actual useful strategic endeavor.

I would be awesome if this mechanic could be stretched over time to allow others to do something about the imminent danger.

The time for an celestial body to change it's orbit so it would be on a collision course and hit the target should be much longer and should allow for enough time to alter it's course by anyone else, it should work more like in real life.

Altering it's course by thrusters would be, depending on the location of the body and it's target, a time consuming project. Firing the thrusters should cost large amounts of energy (making the thrusters should be less resource intensive), more thrusters would allow for faster course deviation, but would consume more energy.
Projected paths within the GUI should be generating a thruster firing pattern based on the build thrusters and your selected target to get the course right over the time (doing this manually will be almost impossible).

This would for example fire some of the thrusters once every 2 minutes for 10 seconds and others just twice in 30 minutes, this would allow for enemies to destroy your thrusters and counter the imminent attack.
Destroying thrusters or not having enough energy to power them should alter the generated pattern to make a new trajectory if possible with the new situation and raise an alarm otherwise.
You should be able to build directional thrusters which will be used in the pattern calculation to determine the needed thrust pulses to hit the target, perhaps some visual guidance would be nice as well.

The larger the object (asteroid, moon or planet) the more time and energy it would take to change it's orbit and the more damage it would do. Smashing a moon into a planet would kill everything on it.
Smaller asteroids might just cause the same devastation as 10 nukes would, but would be simpler and faster to send on there way.

The most awesome feature this would allow, is that the enemy has time to counter the attack and start a war for the preservation of an entire planet!
They should be able to build a planetary observatory who would be able to detect incoming celestial bodies so you would have the time to build a counter attack by sending units and destroy the thrusters / build new ones to alter it's course, nuking the hell out of it, smashing another celestial body into it or by getting the hell of the targeted planet.

How cool would it be to build some thrusters on your opponents planet in his fog of war, slowly but surely altering it's course into a collision with it's own star!

Perhaps it would, besides the targeted ones by your enemies, be cool if asteroids would hit your solar system randomly as well. Some defense against them would be cool.

the thing you should do is scouting what your enemy does ...
if your enemy is expanding so should you and stop your enemy doing so ... if you see him landing on a moon knowing that moon soon becomes a cataclismic nuke then you definitively shouldnt wait until it is finished but destroy fabbers and engines before they are built and better capture that moon and refit it to your own needs or escape with your commander from the targeted planet before impact ..
aside from that the bigger the asteroid the more haleys and therefore more metal it takes to finish the asteroidnuke ... that means there is a lot of time going into building already ... time that you should use to make your attack ...

building your own halleys while the enemy does on the same asteroid will cancel out each other ... so your enemy would either have to built more or just destroy yours

Do planets whiplash around the sun yet? If not, that's going to be added.

Planets even in close orbit should probably do that so they gain more momentum for realism sake and for balance sake so there's more warning.

Interplanetary Nukes will also be an interesting addition. You could probably use the interplanetary nukes to hit the thrusters to shut off the incoming planet.

@MrTBSC is right though, scouting is very important.

This concept does not assume scouting won't be important, especially on smaller bodies like asteroids, being warned by your observatory might be too late. But this should not be something you have to do in order to have any chance of survival. You should be able to have a defensive strategy, otherwise it would just be a boring repetitive task you have to do every time you play the game.
The economic part of it is just wrong for balance sake. Building thrusters shouldn't require insane amount of energy. Firing them should, especially over longer periods of time.

You just made my point, having to alter it's orbit to get it on collision course is exactly what I mean. I will take time for something far away to be on a collision course with a possible target and it's course should be altered with thrusters during it's voyage giving others time to do something about it.

If you for example have the control over a moon from a planet. Altering it's course to hit the planet would be far less complicated and time consuming. Leaving the scouting tactic very important!

How do you fire those thrusters???

I've built 8 on my moon and then what do I do??????

thx

Once a planet is launched, it cannot be stopped even if you destroy the engines.

Sounds like a bug.

Its not, it makes sense actually. Its space, the planet it will keep going. The sun would just ram it into the planet even faster. What is a bug is that you cant stop it even if you built engines on the opposite side of it. Although you'd have to do that under a minute so its really not possible.

That's the hole point of this concept, the time it would take to get something out of orbit would take way more than just a couple of minutes. It isn't even possible to thrust something with one burst to get it everywhere you like, correction will be needed on the journey itself, this particular fact makes it possible for others to destroy the thrusters before this happens.

These correction however should be calculated by the game and displayed in the launch GUI when you select a target. It should tell you if your chosen target is possible to reach with the thrusters you build and could even tell you to build more thrusters on designated places to speed up the journey.

Eh. The engines still need to correct the trajectory and increase the acceleration. If we put a giant engine on the Moon, turned it on for a minute so it accelerates towards earth, and then turn off the engine, it's not going to continue at the same velocity at the same trajectory. The engines must fight the current orbit to push the moon into the earth. If the engines shut off, sure, it'll drift a little further towards earth, but it'll still be continuing with its original trajectory.

Sure, there will be a point of critical mass where shutting off the engines will keep it moving towards earth, but destroying the engines a few seconds (or minutes depending on the distance) after they turn on doesn't mean the moon will still hit earth.

Thinking about this I just want to say it'd be amazing if when Halleys are destroyed mid-operation they caused the body to continue on its only-somewhat altered course. So maybe it has broken out of its orbit, but since it's before it has started to slingshot now it's just a rouge planetoid that may come crashing into a different celestial object (or eventually end up exiting the system altogether).

just don't play with moons under 250m?

I make my moons 300-350m so it takes 25 rockets to send the moon. That means me or my enemy will be building those things for a long time. If they happen to get all 25 built, hats off to them, thats a lot of eco and a lot of time me or my team either: A: Didn't find them in time, or B: didn't wipe them off of the main planet already or C: Didn't build our own in time.


I agree there needs to be something where you can shoot the incoming planet and attempt to blow it up (give it HP). Like if you have enough Umbrellas or something else (a new building) that can shoot the incoming planet, you might be able to destroy it before it hits, thus mitigating or even outright stopping the damage to your planet.

No where getting somewhere!
That would really make is very important to defend your planet before someone thrusts it out of orbit and out of the playing field! Some kind of asteroid belt around all solar systems might just help in killing everything trying to leave it!

That's why I came up with the observatory, just like in real life, they will be able to detect incoming celestial bodies, depending on the size, speed and distance this might give you enough opportunity to counteract the attack.
The amount of thrusters would only speed up the process giving your target less time to act on it.
Just like in real life, you could alter the course of anything with a small thruster, It would just take ages with full thrust before the change in orbit would be noticeable on large bodies. Perhaps we could employ tech 2 thrusters which would replace 10 simple thrusters to be able to speed up the change in orbit of planets.

That's why the engage GUI would have to predict the time it's going to take with the thrusters you build, it should even give some suggestions on possible extra building places to speed up the journey.
2 thruster could easily mean it would take 2 weeks to get to the target, which would be futile in a game that lasts a couple of hours.

You are referring that it should be more like real life but I wonder do you know how orbital mechanics work? First off you do your burns continously on the beginning of the journey if possible. Secondly while travelling you are not overcoming friction so tend not to burn on the majority middle part of the journey. The damage done would not be proportional to size per se but the relative kinetic energy. Yes similar speed object a bigger one is going to hit harder, but you also have the option of using a speedier smaller object to have equal impact. Usually if you have engines it is the final speed which you can affect. And with the same amount of engines you unload equal amounts of kinetic energy to small or big bodies of mass. So in fact you prefer a smaller one as the boom is going to be the same anyway and the smaller makes the trip faster giving less warning.

Beside you would obviously first set an orbit that would precisely hit the target even if at low speed and keep accelrating in a fashion that would keep hitting the planet even if the power was cut off at any time (first aim it and then put the muscle behind it). There might be a tradeoff that an acceleration profile that would only finish aiming at the point of impact would be a little more energy efficient

The trajectories the planets now take don't much make any physical sense. At first they have an instantenous acceleration to an elliptical orbit around the sun. This shold at the very least topple all bots on the planet if not straight up launch them into orbit. Then they do another instaneous brake burn to have a circular orbit around sun. Which by the way is restricted to be rather away from the sun because of it's huge size compared to orbits. If you could get closer to the center of gravity you could transition faster. Then they make another instantenous orbit form change into an elliptical one not at the victim planet but to it's orbit. Only when they are almost stationary beside the target do they change to a true collision course. The last two are especially silly as it is the equivalent of accelerating to 200 km/h on the city limit then rolling without engine power approaching sideways a house rolling to a near rest at it's yard making a 90 degree turn towards the house and THEN hitting the pedal to the metal. Not exactly an optimal strategy for ensuring a good speed buildup on contact with the house.

So sure it would be nice if the halleys where firing when actually in use or actually take paths that require wholesome acceleration.

If you would take kinetic energy into account then you almost would need to take gravitational potentail enegy into account. That would mean far away orbits would take more energy to make them collide. Which would potentially not be good gameplay.

kinda wrong thread but anyways.

in the planet list it shows you how many thrusters you need to move a planet. if the planet is bigger than a 349 radius you can't move it. otherwise you'll have icons showing the number of engines needed, and those grey icons will fill up green as you build the halleys, once they are all green you'll have a move planet and smash planet button underneath the engine count. you click one of those then click the bullseye of the planet you meant to hit/orbit (then they light up red, and if you zoom in you'll see they're turned on).

bear in mind this is beta so the state of the UI is unfinished and more work will come that way.

Thanks for a great post.

Orbits, in the real World, work pretty much differently from the simplified model of PA. Great inspiration could be taken from Kerbal Space Program, where orbits are super smooth. Basically, destroying the halleys wouldn't necessarily avoid the impact, and quite certainly wouldn't cause the asteroid to escape the orbit. More likely the celestial body would simply slightly change its course, and orbit's shape. Still orbiting its planet.

I agree that it would be awesome to have a better physic in PA but obviously it can't be too complicated either. The most important aspect is the game-play.

Honestly, I do not see this form of improvement happening for PA. Not even in the next future, 'cos many other things might have a higher priority.

But once the genre will be established, and if the public will appreciate what Planetary Annihilation is bringing in the scene, we may see other games using a similar approach, or even a Planetary Annihilation 2 with an enhanced physic and even more awesomeness.

Can't wait