Hi, I am loving PA coming together nicely. I actually like that the game is taking a very focused approach. For the usual RTS I basically know what style of game it's becoming. But I would like to discuss / ask about the space parts and what style of interaction is going to happen. 1. Will orbital units "hover" or properly orbit their planets? 2. Is it in general safe to have a orbital unit above my opponents ground base? Will there be a distinction of pre-antisatellite weaponry and post? Will there be anti-satellite ground based weaponry? Will antisatellite weaponry be significantly different from antiair weaponry? 3. Can satellites be automatically spotted from ground? Do I automatically get ground vision from satellites? Will there be different vision layers for ground, air and orbit? Will there be different radar layers? Do satellites see each other? 4. Will there be cross-planetary vision? If a nearby planet has an opponent base covering one half of the planet and the face shows towards a planet that I own can I spot the base without visiting said planet? How about if it's only a single structure on an asteroid? Will there be different spotting distances? 5. What will be the ratio of orbital mechanics to land movement speed? I have played Orbiter that had realistic earth values and found later Kerbal Space Program to be really enjoyable with it's "minituarised" values. How long does it take for a planet to spin around it's axis once (day lenght)? 1 d= 24 minutes? How long does it take for planets to make an orbit (year lenght)? 10 years per 1 h game = 6 minutes per year < 24 minutes per day? How about moons revolving around planets (month lenght)? Will there be harmony in that year and month lenght comes from a unified law of gravitation? The other space games have time acceleration as essentail features. I am guessing no variable time acceleration in PA. Will the game be balanced for one canonical game speed or will there be multiple game rate settings? 6. I am guessing it's possible to kinetic bombard a planet with a moon to oblivion. What happens to the mass of a severly wrecked planet? Will it turn into dust and effectively disappear? What happens to the orbit of a moon with the planet that has suddenly lost mass? Can a planet shatter into multiple asteroids during destruction? 7. Can I aggregate asteroids into bigger asteroids and eventually small moons? How their shape is determined? 8. Will units contribute mass to planets? If I import a lot of heavy units into a small asteroid will it make a bigger kinetic boom? Can I kinetic bombard small asteroids with heavy units? 9. I am the future victim of a asteroid kinetic bombardment. What are my defence options? Are there any? Can I go all Armageddon over the asteroid: Clear out the enemy units + engines and then drill a hole into it and deep denote a nuke in it? Will this result in smaller asteroids? Can I slow a kinetic bomb with my ground arty? Does it make any sense to go to the asteroid and build engines trying to deflect / stop the asteroid? Can I spin the asteroid and use the agressors own engines to accelerate the asteriod away from my planet? Can I just shoot the asteroid with a bazillion nukes? Will this ever be a near efficient use of nukes? 10. Do spacecraft have a maximum velocity in space? Will they have fuel or do they never run out of acceleration? Will it be difficult to reach high velocity asteroids? 11. I hope and assume that there will be Inter-Continental-Ballistic-Missiles. Will there be Inter-Planetary-Ballistic-Missiles? 12. Will there be a global "bank account" for the resource transfer. Can production be built into asteroids? How easy it is to make asteroids go as far as possible. How far can I fling asteroids. Can I have them on escape trajectroy out of the solar system? Possible nightmare situation: I build a small asteroid full of mass extractros and energy production then accelerate it full throttle out of the system. My opponent either has hard time catching it or outright can't. Unharassable economy for the cost of a few engines. (Made worse if buildings don't contribute asteroid mass) 13. Moons tend to be on only one side of a planet at a time. Does this pose a big threat to map balance? Do maps need an even multiple of moons for each player? Or is it that the moon orbital position doesn't significantly affect entry costs to such moon? 14. Are orbital mechanics in general only a long game thing? Will small games miss out on all the planetariness? Do we need special "asteroid maps" to have small planetary games? 15. Will it be possible to collide with stars? Will there be solar flares? Novas? 16. Will there be lagrange points? Will there be trajectories orbiting multiple bodies? Will there be tides? Will there be ecliptic orbits? 17. Will coriolis effect modulate artillery range? Can artillery shoot beyond the horizon? 18. Will it be possible to use small moons as carriers? Will this only be super late game thing? If there is going to be a faster bridge over planets what are the ups and downs of choosing your transport? The time scales for moving small moons between planet orbits would also seem very big. Automatic high ground for any artillery built on the moon possible to be built in transit? 19. The distance between planets orbiting on different altitudes would seem to change quite slow compared to the other mechanics. How important will interplanetary distance be? I am fearing that "transition windows" might be open only twice or thirce in a 1h+ game. I am guessing that a lof of the answer might be in the air. But I am very interested to hear any plans Uber wants to tease out!
1 - 7: Unknown. 8: No, I seriously doubt the Uber is doing Astrophysics Calculations on this level at all. 9: Unknown. 10: You're either in orbit, or in transit between planets. It is currently unknown as to how this will be handled. (There are no 'Spacecraft' so try not to use that term.) 11: Unknown, but possible... though not necessarily probable. 12: Unknown, but it's pretty certain that you won't be able to "game the system" in the way you propose. 13: Why do maps need to be "Balanced" for everyone at the same time? 14 & 15: Unknown. 16 & 17: No, see #8. 18: Unknown, but possible... and given Neutrino's comments here and there, Probable. No information as to pacing and timing yet and what "Late Game" even means yet. Aim point for "Small" 1v1s is 20-40 mins. Games larger than that.... who knows? Not even the Devs at this point. 19: Unknown, possible candidate for #8.
I second those question. Would like to see as many of those answered as possible. Also I think orbital shouldn't be limited just to satellites, we should have an orbital navy. It would be awesome if this navy would then fall to the planet/moon/asteroid and cause destruction. I am thinking of something like this: sup com orbital battles mod, but obviously the orbital ships could fly much higher then your standard fighter, but could also come closer, where they could attack ground, but be targeted by AA weapons. This also brings me to another question: Will there be areospace fighters (fighters capable of taking off the planet, but engaging in orbital battles)?
:roll: You'll get answers when Team Uber actually gets around to iterating Orbital Units, and not before. Neutrino does not go in for the "1,000 page Design Document" approach to game development. For Planetary Annihilation the mantra appears to be: "Make it as and when we need it."
Since it's a pretty systemic result of the mechanics the method how it's made impossible might have big implications. It would be pretty sad for example if you could not have asteroid orbits outside of the asteroid belt. But then if you allow those how do you delineate reasonable orbits from unreasonable ones? I wouldn't mind the use of localised resources as an answer but that is a pretty big impact on the general design. If I would think of a SupCom:FA game with a moving island with mexes circling a island map the first player that has a decent chance of tapping into it would get a pretty big boost in a otherwise symmetric map. Even if the maps wouldn't be acccurately mex distance neutral in respect to starting positions if one player has access to 1/4 more map uncontestable by other players early on the role of map topology might overshadow what yo do with your units a little too much.
My impression is that Uber is doing some level of orbital mechanics mechanics, so not hovering. They have not confirmed anything, likely because it's not implemented much.
And how would you feel if the WHOLE planet/map wasn't symmetric? Because that's what's looking likely at the moment.
With the very brief experience with TA and healthy dose of SupCom alot plus some other random strategy games I have pretty much lived in a symmetric world. I guess it would be neat and new. I might be a bit worried that the basic interesting mechanics would need to be secured by the design in other ways. It's a pretty big topic. I guess I have seen planet screenshots and not have realised they are not symmetric. However it felt like they would be so in a trivial way. A planet would have multiple swirlies and they wouldn't exactly line up but the transitions from swirlies to open seas and to solid continents would be within 50-25% of the mean value for each players perspective. For example if I take a symmetric SupCom FA map and add a 1/16th of the map width random offset to each mex I would propably be very much in my confort zone. However if the map deals one player a continent while another player gets an island forcing the other and forbidding the other to go naval I would be very hard pressed to not mix up problems of my skill and problems of land and sea balance. If the map deals different map archetypes it does way more than disallow click-precise brute force remember-train grinding. With symmetry very minor strategic advantages are apparent even if it reduces the strategic advantages able to be displayed. With an asymmetric situation it's not much of a choice to go naval when given an island. Normal terrain features are somewhat local in that a mountain only lifts units that are on it and blocks only shots that try to move through it. However a moon is a "supermobile" terrain element. It is not bound by any particular 2D surface location. There is no routing to the moon. You just point up and launch the rocket. A moon seems to be a pretty big deal in a map and to my knowledge it comes in very discrete chunks (maybe if it came in moon + bunch of asteroids it would be more scalar) so it would seem like it would be more of a archetype definer than a detail.
I think you are over-thinking it... Even if the moon & planet are reasonably close orbits there is probably going to be an "interplanetary" barrier that marks the edge of the orbital layer. Chances are the only things that are going to be able to cross this barrier are things marked interplanetary like transport rockets, unit cannons, interplanetary artillery, and falling asteroids. You aren't going to be grabbing a transport plane 2-5 min into the game to lay claim to the mex rich moving island... It will probably be more of a rocket rush where the player on the moonless side of the planet might have an extra 15sec of flight time, assuming he doesn't just decide to try and destroy you while your focus building your rocket
http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=44950 This will answer most of your questions, in the negative unfortunately. Especially your questions about space combat. There will not be any space fighters. Most of this stuff may be possible to mod in but they will not be in the base game as far as I can tell.
