I can see orbital happening one way that would ate everyone's appetite. Satellites are explicitly support units. As in, ballistic missile interceptors, recon satellites, maybe a satellite that allows units to teleport ala WH40k Deep Striking. Nothing like Rods from God or a Killsat Ion Cannon. Satellites are pretty cheap, though their launcher is a decent investment due to the amount of utility it provides. Maybe twice the cost of a nuke launcher, but satellites would only cost maybe 1/12 of a nuke's cost. (2500 metal with current nuke balance, on average) Generally a very uncluttered layer that provides the same level of support Artillery would, except more utilitarian and less destructive. You might have 20-50 Satellites around a planet maximum (depending on planet size), any more would be redundant and pointless. Then you also have asteroids. Asteroids can be large solid bodies, or take the form of rings of small asteroids (ala Saturn's hundreds of potato-moons). These asteroids were either naturally in orbit of a celestial body at the start of a match, or they were put there by a player. One way or another, Asteroids function as actual land masses adrift in space, which can be jumped between by air units, jetpack bots and unit cannons. They could also be crashed into the planet's surface for maximum explosions. Alongside Asteroids, there could be ancient space junk large enough to build on, and reclaim. Of course you also have Asteroids in deep space, as was seen in the Kickstarter video. I'm suggesting you have a large asteroid belt in deep space with hundreds of large astroidal bodies, and a smaller ring of "bite-size" asteroids large enough to support a few factories, some mexes and a unit cannon in orbit of planets, along with an amount of varying'size moons which would support larger structures, maybe even a power farm and some T2 Orbital platforms. Larger Asteroids (small and big moons) would be able to support construction of anti-orbital weapons, short-ranged (relatively) missiles that could intercept satellites as the space rock they're mounted on passes into a low orbit (assuming the orbit is eliptical or just really fast and really low). In addition to these, larger orbital gantries could be built, which might be able to construct a space navy capable of orbital bombardment, or just transportation if people hate space navies that much. Personally I don't see a reason not to include them if they add strategic points to the game in the form of large asteroids capable of supporting a "space drydock". Heavily contested land is a good thing. The space gantry would be built in space to negate he cost of building rockets to hoist large space ships or weapons satellites into orbit. This way, you can incorporate T1 orbital to keep orbital from looking like T3; in the form of cheap support satellites. Then in T2, you can have "deep orbit" units capable of reaching and building on asteroids. Which opens up an entire new layer of strategy as the fight for control over the planet's various moonlike bodies begins. Control over these moons means control over the surface, as well as the low-orbit T1 layer, and as a result, control over recon and ultimately the planet. It wouldn't be a necessity, on moonles planets (like a Mercury-esque planet), but similarly to Naval, it would provide a huge amount of extra depth to a battlefield, an entirely new environment to fight in which has only been explored in a sparse few other games.
Damn one big bitch session in this forum. 1st pass on orbital units and you expect them to have correct orbital physics. Realistic physics is nice for satellites but we don't want to do anything that hypes up cpu usage by introducing too much precision in physics. If need be a simulated rendering model that mimicks physics is better if it greatly reduces cpu power. CPU usage low in the game and I would like to keep it that way. Besides you can always figure out some trick to making an orbital system, or any other game physics system seem real. Like others have said earlier its more important how orbital behaves in the function of recon n strategy in the game than how it looks. Besides I'm sure once it's polished off it will look damn good. As for coding I hate insane amounts of floating point numbers for precision & eyecandy. Use more integers, I am an ALU man use the ******* ALU's
Actually curious anybody figured out the radar range of the satellites, or is it infinite. what sort of integer ops does this game use anyway, integers better for massive multithreading
It isn't infinite, "just" 1350 units which is about twice the radius of the advanced radar (600 units) and thereby invalidates the later one as soon as you can afford it, since it effectively covers over 4 times the area of an T2 radar, with the added benefit, that it is no longer vulnerable to regular attacks and that you can relocate it. And why even the assumption that advanced orbital mechanics would require extensive floating point operations? A stable orbit can be expressed by only inclination, longitude and the height of each apophysis and periapsis, as well as a timestamp to determine the position in orbit. Trigonometric functions can tell you the location of the satellite in orbit as a function of time, there is no need to do an expensive, iterative simulation of the orbit. Things get even easier, if you only allow circular orbits, in that case only inclination, longitude and radius need to be stored.
Personally, my "Suspension of Disbelief" about PA was stopped months ago with planets the size of potatoes but with earth gravity, atmosphere a few meters thin, and planets bigger than the sun, but still orbiting around it. The general scale of the game is throwing me away already, so I don't care much about the orbital layer. But as I'm not sure I still care about the game at all, I'm probably not the guy Uber should listen to
I dont get this discussion.. I have launched a sat. and moved the screen to see the altitude of the sat. Seems to be in orbit to me. Also, Kerbals agree as I was able to launch a sat on roughly the same altitude In my opinion Uber should do: No permanent orbiting units that move around. If you make a orbiting fighter is sits on the ground and you give it a target. The fighter flies into space, shoots the target and returns to the surface. Uber should avoid a new tactical layer where units actively fight eachother.
Then there would be no difference whatsoever to the air layer. This is what we are trying to prevent. Then maybe you should have watched the kickstarter video closer. It gave a pretty good lookout on what scale to expect. And I absolutely love it - 'realistic' scale would be pretty dumb.
This situation is a bit awkward.. The "Air 2.0" scenario is bad since it draws attention from the warfare on the surface on the planet while using the same mechanics and therefor requiring the same amount of attention. Good if you want to draw attention from the lacking mechanics, bad if you want to improve the game. "Real orbital mechanics" however isn't that much better, as it takes a lot of micro and knowledge to handle orbits well so that units show the desired characteristics. Will also either be exploitable if ecliptic and inclined orbits are allowed (they provide gigantic advantages if you know how they work), or dumbed down into insignificance if neutrino goes with his plan and only allows primitive geosynchronous or geostationary orbits, thus introducing additional limitations like the incapability to get proper coverage on the poles. To me, there is only one practical solution: Do away with orbits or "satellite positions" as a game play feature and let that be purely cosmetic. Keep focus on the planets surface and keep controls for anything above as simple and abstract as possible, this includes treating orbital stuff as a kind of "cloud thing", thus providing attack, intercept and such commands, but hiding all the movement stuff behind meaningless visualizations and provide abstract ETAs only instead. I'm perfectly aware that this doesn't play well with the plans to only allow orbital units for gas giants, but who again said that the original air layer couldn't be used for gas planets instead?
Practical suggestion or not, are we in a position right now for Uber to actually change anything? Are Uber going to give the game the time it deserves to get orbital to any other place than it is now? Or are we all just pissing in the wind?
I think it is very difficult to get this right for everybody because there have to be compromises. For example: A geostationary satellite would orbit an earthlike planet at a distance of round about 40000km. This on the other hand would be too far out for something like an He3-mining-platform in the outer layer of a gasgiant. An orbit of 40000 km out would be too far for orbitalfighters. This would be more like Star Wars kinda spacebattles then. You have to do something in between. A compromise. But instaead of wasting time and energy on "forum-fights" we should stick to threads with collections of ideas and suggestions. Make lists like the PA-confirmed-unconfirmed-features-thread. That would be something the devs could easily answer to. And they would not have to read through discussions and trying to find the important information.
They don't even react to such lists often enough, especially in the last 2-3 months. Kind of feels like shitstorms is the only type of feedback they react to now. If don't enough players outrage about something, then it is probably unimportant. Or how else would we have ended up with: Assault Tank&Bot deathballs Strictly tiered tech with economical barriers Air 2.0 Antiquated and limited intelligence system Even in the live stream Q&As, they are rather picky about which questions they answer at all.
Knight, bless his heart, made that confirmed features thread, I believe with the expectation that the Developers would be more active in coming in to update facts and ideas and features. They abandoned his thread however, and now it is little more than a big long quotable list of what the Devs won't be doing. The only real activity that the Devs have been involved with lately was the sudden re-emergence of Neutrino. And all he came into the forums to do was shoot down one of the better community members ideas, call some frustrated users "bang out of line" when they're voicing (albeit loudly and rather rambunctiously) that they feel ignored and tell everyone that they aren't worth sharing ideas with, as it would get too "circle-jerky". "Dropped the ball" is an understatement. --- I still keep coming back to this line: Which strikes me as complete bull. Aircraft, while they do act like VToL planes still obey some of the basics of flight that are clearly on display. Momentum is conserved where possible, with planes of all kinds making banking maneuvers, rather than turning on a dime. Bombers approach, drop their payload and overshoot, bank and come around for another pass. It's an approximation of what real aircraft do, sure; but it's a perfectly serviceable approximation for an RTS game, certainly leagues and fathoms better than something like StarCraft II. Yet Orbital Units obey none of the "basics" of being in orbit. Why did they bother with making an approximation of flight dynamics, yet completely handwave away orbital mechanics for units... and then claim that they haven't made Air "realistic" in anyway?
I complete agree with exterminans, both Air2.0 and micro intensive orbital is bad, but i think having orbital just be fancy graphics with effects and etas handled in the back is a step too far. In my opinion, having orbital units be represented as just their paths on the ground would be the ideal middle ground. maybe you could adjust those surface splines to your liking, maybe that's not even necessary. Maybe you just give a command like attack to a certain point and the spline adjusts itself and gives an ETA. Basically i think the whole system could work something like this: Select orbital launch facility, chose type of orbit: geostationary, (inclined) geosynchronous, (inclined) super-, sub synchronous. For certain types of satelites this could be pre chosen as some choices might make no sense. After launch interaction is limited to either giving commands for the satellite to be in a certain position (it alters orbit on its own) or maybe some other form of interaction like increase or decrease scan speed (orbit) for polar satellites... EDIT: And nanolathe, why bother posting if you've given up hope that it will make any difference? Also, i do feel that shooting down yourlocalmdsci's interpretation was reasonable as it was the other extreme of putting KSV in PA, which would be equally bad as Air2.0... The fact that they weren't willing to consider a middle ground was/is the problem...
Hows about this. >Orbital is extremely expensive. >Destroying the launcher should stop all satellites from functioning. (We could rename it the control centre) >Position is chosen at launch and the satellite using large amounts of your energy sets up a geostationary orbit above the chosen point no matter how unrealistic. >The satellite drains power to maintain this orbit. >If power is stalling the satellite should stop functioning (Icon should go darker). >To change this position you have to zoom very far out, select the satellite and double click a position on the planet. This again costs a large amount of energy and is very slow. Having satellites orbiting wildy around the planet would just be a cluster****. The satellite layer should not be cluttered and should be tied to your economy. Destroying power gens or the launcher should be the best counter to the orbital layer rather than relying solely on an anti-satellite missile directly below it or should the current design stick, building anti-satellite satellites which would just make it air 2.0.
Dacite: Thats how SupCom handled it's one satellite and it wasn't really working all that great. Also, i do not think satellites should be selectable entities, they should be selectable path representations with the actual position of the satellite in question being mostly irrelevant...
Why should orbital be "extremely expensive"? What planet are you all from where satellites cost more than aircraft carriers?
That's because the Novax had no counters and was cheap as chips. + There is no mass fabrication in this game that makes the economy irrelevant late game.
I'm from the planet balance. Nukes and Anti-Nukes should be made instantly if we followed that logic.
You can balance things in other ways than cost. Stop satellites being "T3" and they don't need to cost so much.
