orbital arriving pinpoint, possible change?

I actually understood that part instantly. It just makes 0 sense.

The ISS - practically a giant immobile satelite - needs 93 minutes for one orbit around the planet. So "in 80 mintues around the world" is chump change.
These things come from outer space. After doing a slighshoot manevuer around the nearest center of mass.
They can pick where they will enter the orbital layer!

In the end Orbital is a side note. It was clear from the beginning that the focus would be on Land/Air/Naval battles.
But I totalyl agree there is problem, I jsut don't think your solution is any answer.

SXX have to go through one reload sequence when arriving in orbit.
Drop in over umbrella proteced area and they are going to be very expensive and short-lived skeet.
Drop in on an unprotected commander and he is still atomic toast.

Actually just a cooldown before an orbital unit can do anything (move/attack/land/return to space) when arriving in the orbtial layer could do that.

thank you! I knew it wasn't complicated!

I like that idea. make it so we can at least fight back when they come in. this way if you want you can still pass with brute force but not a exploit snipe.

well considering the tilted axi of the planet, the (rather rapid) constant rolling and spinning and that all the units have a tendency to be a tiny bit spread out while space travelling, they would be spread out (in a diagonal line) as they come out.

that's actually what I suggested. I thought the OP explanation was enough but I've understood the step by step is necessary. see this :

that's the arrival point. Now we're going to add a couple things to that recipe.

1. The planet spins around the sun
2. The planet spins on itself
   
3. The axi apon which the planet spins, materialized by a vertex (line) running from North pole to South pole has a certain degree of inclination (it's tilted) (you can check in-game)

say we start of representing the landing zone of the planet when it's not tilted and rotating around the sun but not rotating on itself and with a small North-South randomisation factor. :

Now we want to look at the result for the same thing but with tilted axis :

NOW we add rotation of the planet upon it's North-South axi (let's now not make a a full spin around the sun, but do this in two halves of a solar cycle) First half :

Second half (full spin around the sun plus many many rotations on itself on an axis that kept the same inclination as it went around the sun) :


does it make sense now?


@Geers a gif explaining this would be epic right about now.

EDIT :actually these two do a pretty good job :

i hit tab by acident while typing, tab sends to "Post Reply " and then any key on the keyboard is equivalent to enter.... tried to joke about it after OP......

and then come from that to an abrupt geosynch orbit without tearing itself to bits.......
you wanna use realism as your argument?... sure ...you'll just have to be it's bi tch

aside from that none of the speeds in PA allow us to start constructing such theories to begin with. The speed the planets rotate at in PA.... the speed they rotate around the sun.... none of that is anywhere near physically possible.

All I'm asking for is gameplay here. Orbital has some severe exploits right now, I listed a number of them in the OP it's really about time we found a solution. and what I'm suggesting here holds up in a number of ways.
And removes the "immortality gap" orbital get to profit from during the lapse of time they are neither at end-of-orbit entry point and planet orbital layer.

A simple "can't do anything for Y seconds after entering orbital layer from deep space" does the same thing. Without any need for fancy higher/lower orbits or a height dimension on the orbit layer.
The cooldown is the time they spend on breaking maneuvers. And that they can be picked off with impunity is simply a result of breaking while driving into your enemies guns.

Fabricators are the biggest issue (as they have to not execute orders for a while, but still resum/be able to get different orders).

I'm not sure how you're doing this. quote me where I said that.

EDIT : now that I read your answer more I realise you're saying spread out units is the same thing as clipping units that can't shoot for awhile.

....think about it for a sec.

This idea is bad and you should feel bad

Best solution to most if not all problems with oribital is to have them descend from above oribital shell on arrival / ascend before leaving planet's orbit, and being fairly unactive when doing that + being targetable by umbrellas and anchors (and those being very innacurate when something descends / ascends on them to prevent everything dying)
Heck you could even implement some big *** oribital ships and let them throw shells at ground while descending! crude and innacurate oribital bombardment

i even created a thread dedicated to this idea...

right well you really are getting a point across yourself.

I rather not feel bad so I won't. I'll continue to feel glorious thank you very much.

No, I am saying:
Your idea would screw up attack planning totally.
It would be nigh impossible to predict where you invasion force is going to enter orbit wich is neither fun nor realistic. Every slight delay in leave time (not that uncommon with big fleets) would let the units be spread out over several degrees.

Fact is:
We managed to land a rover. On mars. And got to freely pick the place where it landed.
Despite having no direct input on any part of the landing (7 minutes lag). We managed to do that with just some calculus and current day computers.

The PA universe has advanced AI tech and FTL-Communication.

It is true that the game does not do the full orbital pathing that is actually needed to get to the point they want to go to. Because there is no point in having any more detailed flightplans then we have now.
This is planetary annihilation, not Kerbal Space Programm. We don't need properly calculated orbits. Just predictable travel times and points of arrival. Wich the current system deals with.

The issue of orbital superiority being next to useless is a different mater. And won't be solved by picking some arbirary longitude where the units will arrive.

That's my goal and no, I don't see the problem with that.

Might I remind you we're playing a game with no unit cap here. If you want to send a million avengers feel free. And if you do, It won't really matter where they land will it? (exaggerations aside you should merit your victory not simply profit from unit clipping)

you're not playing this game right.

landing a bunch of SXX above someone's head isn't a factor of talent, anyone can do that. Fact is I can do that faster than you. much MUCH faster.

I much rather be thinking about strategy.

The cooldown has to be finely balanced. 10 second cooldown means sending 100 avengers is wasted money and invasion is never ever possible everly ever. 1 second cooldown might still trade. 2 second cooldown will get things shot at a ratio of 1 to 1 but still allow for a mass invasion to force itself on it.

Basically, invasions are already too hard. What you want is just long enough a cooldown to reasonably require 10 avengers along with your SXX.

An ultimatum eh?



Get rekt nub.

Why make them do something that puts a player at a disadvantage. If they have enough time to build 5 ssx and attack your commander, you should lose, because you weren't protecting your planet, and most likely werent doing enough orbital attacks to stop them from being made.

Why not make it so that umbrellas can fire at arriving orbital? As in, when the orbital is making its loop for landing?

Not to mention giving the SAX a cooldown before it can fire on landing

If uber ever made it so orbital always landed in one specific point on a planet, that would be the dumbest move ever.

Umbrella spam 'at midnight' sounds so fun

I would rather the orbital UI get improved for example
a) Orbital pathways of units should pulse with a moving hologram of that unit icon or something to show where it's headed too. The current green lines are too hard to make out at a glance without super zooming in, and then when you zoom in, you can no longer easily tell where the green lines are actually going to because of how the camera behaves.

The easiest way right now is to go to each planet, zoom out, and see if there is a green orbital line arriving on the planet. And that's only going to tell you the endpoint, not what is travelling, from whom, and the start point. The rest you have to use your powers of deduction

b) The orbital shell should maybe show a pulsing holographic icon on the orbital shell where the orbital unit is going to land. This has balance implications, which is why i put this as a maybe. I would not be opposed to an adv deep space radar that actually costs something to build and run which would give you this detailed information.

c) An easier way to get the system overview top down in the PiP. Only recently I learned you had to do this via PiP mirroring button. Very unintuitive and timeconsuming

I prefer the orbital units landing on the spot I told them to land on.

We need cooldown on arrival, and keep the pinpoint arrival. It would be realistic enough that the space-units could just, i dont know, calculate how to land where they want? and to change their speeds to the right one? The technology is definately advanced enough for this.

I tried reading the OP and can only make out that Tatsu is a strange, strange person

oh? why?

You should not loose, because the commander should be invisible at that stage of lategame, a feature which is still missing.

And yes diving orbital in and out should be fixed cause of other problems mentioned in OP.