orbital arriving pinpoint, possible change?

No orbital unit should stack, although that's only half the problem.

no, personally I find it even more annoying when opponents win air 2.0 fights thanks to orbital travel.

yup.

After some thought, I'm totally convinced that units should not stack upon arrival. Totally unbalanced as you guys have pointed out. However, having a fixed-ish landing spot of any kind is not part of the answer, in my opinion. Now, if you're talkin having orbital units leave and arrive in formation, sign me up.

You know, we wouldnt this problem if we all just played on a single moon system...

Oh look, another "poll" where the author concludes that there is only one obviously correct answer to situation. Naturally sorting out the rift raft who cant see the brilliant solution to the discussion of the thread

But on point. Why would it be that the day night line of the planet be the only place where a unit should arrive? We mear humans can plot trajectory's to within a rather respectable margin of error. With the computer we even can plot out the entire trip and get to other body's in space. Anyone who has played Kerbal Space Program knows what a challenge the is and its solutions. NASA is even about to have a prob meet with a commit and land one it and both the probe and commit are moving many meters/s/s

Surly machines of the distant future can plot a orbit to have a Avenger or SSX arrive where the wish.

it's almost random, not fixed, even if the actual place where they come out relative to a planet's point in it's solar cycle is.

To be fair I agree with your poll question that orbital units need a new way of arriving, but your poll only gives two options there are at least three others I would include and all of them I would think would be better.

• Add a height element to the orbital layer, shriek, micro management. But it allows a smoother transition and allows for interception.
• Add a secondary orbital layer, this one purely for arrivals at any point around the planet. Allows for interception and requires no more micro management than regular movement orders.
• Add a cooldown to SSX, this could be a nifty animation where the ssx slowly drops down facing the wrong way and has to turn round. Silly SSX. Allows for interception and doesn't require a lot of work.

dude why don't you try making one see how it is.

Here's how it is, you often post it before you're done because tab key
and you can't edit afterwards.

OK??

To be fair, forum polls are just generally a terrible idea, regardless of wording.

Chill dude, I wasn't criticising. Just pointing out the troll had a point.

The can be made unbiased, but don't show jack unless it's an overwhelming majority; in which case it's obvious and doesn't show anything :S

back to the matter at hand guys, we've already done to death how this poll is unsatifactory, please lend me your solutions to the orbital arrival issue.

Best way: Add another orbital layer for arrivals/departures where stuff can get blown up.

Fastest way: Add a cooldown for SSX arriving on a planet, and fix stacking ffs.

It's not as easy to fix stacking as you make it seam, especially on a space craft/aircraft.

Flowfields would look weird on planes as they shove past each other......in the air/space.

any weirder than them all occupying the same space?

Yeah, actually it might looks janky as hell.

But don't mistake me, I agree that having orbital stuff teleport in a kill instantly is a problem, (Imagine what it would be like with half the orbital stuff suggested.) as well is having bombers clip during a bombing run, but it won't magically disappear just because units can't clip.

People find a way to snipe, it's just kinda their thing.

It's more about transparency than preventing sniping (the clipping thing). You can't tell numbers, how much danger there is, or respond in a way other than to stack your units up as well.

Good point.

At least for air this will kick up complexity. For now you can use simple pathing on air units. This is using paths that does not consider other air crafts.
Say, for example, you have 20 Bumblebees and you attack a commander, every Bumblebee can do a simple path from its position to the position of the attacked commander. Since this is a similar task for all Bumblebees you can share pathing information using flowfields or other fancy stuff.

If you don't allow stack than attacking a single point like a commander is getting really complex. Basically you need to plan ahead when each Bumblebee will be over the commander, so that all Bumblebees know when they need to start to queue up properly.
This is real path planning and isn't trivial, because the plan of each air craft is now dependent on other plans (here the Bumblebees that attack before).

There are some simple solutions, like adding repelling forces to units, where you avoid that units will collapse on a single point. This might help for some problems, but they do not well when you want something like single point attacks.

If someone knows a better solution (or a paper on unit pathing for this kind of problems) I would be very happy to know about it

Cheers,
criz.

is'nt flowfield supposed to defeat stacking in the first place?