Orbital units - 2 directions

Imo we need those things only, if they can be used actively against other planets than the one they orbit within the first 10-15 minutes. Like someone else proposed, orbital units should be quite early in the game, but not dominate the planet they are on, and in the same time still be a threat to other planets. That would be perfect for me. Maybe most orbital units should be like space probes and have the ability to fly to another planet and hit it? They could prepare for land troops to land.

we surely need oribtal bombardement. if a turtle is on the planet using for example nukes as point defence you need a way to destroy the nuke silos. the often mentioned rods from god are a good way. lets say a bombard satelite with for example maximum 5 of them who has to build them. slow expansive (but with no "anti" against it) high dmg single hitting (or smal aoe) unit.
this way there is no "bombing everything that moves" out of space because its not cost effective, and you still have to invade the planet with units, but can do so way easier because you can destroy several effective defences like nuke silos lobbers or catapults at your landing area.

+1 for orbital bombardment with kinetic/nuke/etc.

+1 For nukes getting a total overhaul so they're less of a binary 'Work / Don't Work' mechanic.

Orbital bombardment should be a no brainer. Of course we do need it.

Only if we can get an Ion Cannon to shoot back.

You mean the boobie cannon?

About nukes: I was imagining something along the lines of smaller, cluster-launched missiles.
You build a certain amount, paint an area to attack and they start swarming that area.
The anti-nukes would be more like tac-missile defenses: The more you have, the more of those mini nukes you are able to stop.

Didn't put too much thought into this yet, but this was my first idea on that topic.

This isn't really about nukes, but about orbital. However, i prefer the way nukes were in TA: powerful, and they could swing the battle around. But they weren't game enders (unless you managed to nuke the enemy commander). In SupCom they were too powerful.

For orbital: given Neutrino's earlier comments they'll likely be able to do whatever other units can do: Bombardment, shooting other sats down, hitting air, land, naval, nukes.

Orbital has -again- a few advantages that Air doesn't and is what makes it different (a second Build layer for all intents and purposes). You could have a satellite move in over a base while dropping KEW's and obliterating anything in it's way. What is interesting is that with slow accelleration vs high top speed, you could have a satellite overshoot the base and hit nothing. Or it goes too slow and is destroyed before it arrives.

nukes in supcom were not too powerfull....they were balanced out by cost AND buildtime there. since we can assist anything with same "speed" in pa (witch is a great improvement over supcom) build time is no longer of any mean only cost.

more interesting is what units you can hit and what not. for example air units are hard to hit for kew because they move to fast. mostly kew are good for hitting stationary units (except for the really big asteroid who simply takes out anything) but they mostly fail at hitting anything what moves, meaning orbital bombardement can take out any stationary installation but not an army of bots/tanks wandering around the planet. (and after orbital bombardement is finished you could rebuild your base, therefore getting equal to the attacker who lands units and maybe has to build a base from scratch too).
also it would be interersting if orbital bombardement (except for nukes maybe) cannot hit the under water layer (i know, not realistic, but for game making fun) so a base under water would be relatively save from orbital bombardement.
this all would prevent lategame from being orbital fights only without any ground combat since you allways have to invade to take over the planet (if you dont want to annihilate it with an asteroid).

Okay, I finally have enough time to sit and think about a response.

For the sake of keeping this relatively short and digestible, I'll arrange my response in bullet points:

• I don't believe that Orbital should be used for area control. We already have buildings, two types of land unit, air units and naval units for that sort of thing, why do we need another method? I had envisioned that orbital could be a very unique unit set, with more specialised roles.
• I'll be intrigued to see how the 'orbital shell' works for giving orders, and this may yet make fake orbital a lot more intuitive. However, I don't feel that having a slightly different method of giving orders to orbital units would be that demanding for players.
• I had envisioned that 'special' orbital units like landers and fabricators would be much more manoeuvrable in orbit for obvious reasons. I'd table the suggestion that orbital structures have a two-click placement method - click once to set a location, which then displays a white outline and a ring going around the planet. Moving the mouse will adjust the position of this ring, clicking will finalise the order. Space fabricators can then assist by right clicking and manoeuvring into position.
• A lot of the downsides you mention again work on the assumption that orbital units will be trying to fulfil the same roles that units inside the atmosphere are trying to fulfil. Again, I would argue strongly that orbital has the potential to be much more than this. To clarify, I don't believe that it should be necessary to have orbital units to expand onto other planets. Inter-planetary travel and control of the orbital layer should be treated as two separate things.

I'll finish by saying that, having read through a lot of your responses in this thread, Neutrino, I can understand why you are looking to go in the direction of fake orbital, and your responses have given me a lot more confidence that, if we do end up with fake orbital in the final product, it will be done in the most sensible possible way.

I am also aware of the time and cost constraints on this project, and if implementing more unique and detailed orbital looks to be a very costly exercise, I can fully understand that argument.

It's already a little more complicated than that isn't it? Even if you can't the touch the center of the base dropping a nuke just out side can kill defenses or you can use them against an army and counter attack.

Orbital bombardment thoughts:
The advantage orbital bombardment Sats have is they can move (if relatively slowly compared to the planet), and they should have pretty high accuracy and high damage and depending on how they move they could have a damage path ie they drop a weapon on anything that passes in a narrow window under them as they move. This gives you a path of destruction that is very different from a nuke and advanced artillery, also it would be usable over water...

Nukes do massive damage once in a big area around one target.

Good for taking out armies or large sections of a base.​

Artillery does damage to one spot at a time with ok accuracy within it's range with some splash.

Good for disrupting attacking forces as they approach or hassling bases within range.​

Tac launches do damage to 1 target at a time within range.

Good for sniping targets, less good at disruption as walls allow you to out build them & no AOE​

Bombers hit anywhere on the planet very quickly

Disrupting expansion, disrupting attacks before they reach your bases field of defense, and sniping of specific targets. Go anywhere FAST!
​

Orbital Kinetic bombardment assuming a slow continuous fire rate, within a few degrees of directly below it.

Good for punching narrow windows in a vector through what ever lies below it, or killing stuff that moves into the area it's watching over like a choke point. High damage, medium splash but only a small area it can attack underneath it on the surface.​

That's not quite the point I was making. Nukes either hit something and do EXTREME amounts of damage regardless of your target, be it factory, economy or army... or they fizzle out in orbit without hurting anything because they got shot down.

Very binary.

According to the Kickstarter Pre-Vis, even an asteroid can be "countered" by hitting it with multiple missiles, and maybe even break apart to cause more or less damage based on how and when it was struck.

Nukes have no such depth. They either hit, or they don't.

For gameplay reasons I would also tend more to the "fake" orbital behavior. A brief idea that I came up with would be that you could have 2 different orbits:

1. geostationary far out for spysatelites -> higher costs and stays on the equatorial (or near it) orbit; BUT provides great coverage over a big area of the planet but is too far out to be reached for repairs so it must be replaced if distroyed

2. would be much more close moving orbit. its the orbital layer we you can actively work with a limited "slots" on each orbit so that one particular orbit does not get too crowded (provided the idea of a certain amount of orbits related to the size of the planet). You start with a fabricator send up from the launchpad which then builds like a corestructure which can then be upgraded by stuff send up from the launcher. Like modularbased spacestations today. But because it is moving on an orbit the build stuff like orbital cannons and so on can only be launched from the launcher in a certain timeframe. This would make the stuff vulnerable while sitting on the surface and waiting for the launch. In that pretty close orbit rendezvous of units could be possible by move- or atttack (for orbital fights) orders. And because we are closer to the planet the field of view would be narrower for spy satlites and orbital cannons compared to the outer gestationary orbit. The move orders on that layer would require the whole structure to change orbit. With all the disadvantages of consuming time and being shot down from the planets surface.

I still dont know how to figure out stuff like interorbital warfar or colliding orbits but perhabps some one else has a great idea about those.

Let's not forget that the economy in multi-planet games is going to extend way further than what we see now. Orbital units are currently more expensive than nukes, I'd like to see that changed so that some orbital units actually become cheap enough to use early game.

A single satellite wouldn't be able to accomplish much, but a group of orbital units could clear the way for ground units to mop up whatever is left after the bombardment.

right, that exactly how nukes work now, but you dont have to shoot at places where you didnt scout first so your nuke gets lost to defence, that would be the binary thing. you shot 4 of it there to break the defence, or you shoot the nuke at the border of defence hitting less but still for example destroying base defence so your units can get in with less losses and destroy the rest, or you use it as point defence against an upcomming army...there are so mutch more actions possible than to fire your nuke blind in the enemy base getting the binary scenario of there is anti-nuke or not.

true, nukes in their base design are quite binary.
from my perspective, the easiest approach to add a gradual feel to it is to use some kind of multiple (smaller) warhead variant for the orbital bombardment. If the flight time can be divided into separate stages (first as one and second each warhead for itself) you could even add some variation to the anti-missile defense, some larger long range for the first phase and some smaller, more distributed and short range for the second phase.
If you can take out the missile early all the better, but even if you missed that chance you might be lucky enough to take out most of the individual warheads.
For the control one could use different targeting modes some somewhat automatic where only the primary target is chosen or some where you can point and click multiple times for each warhead.

i say mid- to lategame at least in a 1 planet battle .. otherwise for what reason would i want to use a t2 surfaceradar when the satradar already covers a big chunk of the planet and is relatively safe in orbit f.e. ? ... no, those should stay expensive compared to say groundradar imo ...
though depending on how the solar system is build up and when players start at different planets one could also achive early sat/orbitalrush through fast expansion and econ build up ... as beeing less exposed to harrasmend

I think it depends on what supporting systems look like and how you envision the units. For example using the radar sat, if orbital is like it is(i.e. not orbits) and intelligence is like it currently is, it should be a later unit because it has likely large coverage, can move, and has to be attacked in a totally different manner than normal radar. But if orbital uses orbits, and you have a more granular intelligence system (example, radar sat can only see structures, but ground radar can detect units+structures) then it becomes an option comparable to a scout if you use smaller range, harder to hit, less movement control, less information but also maybe faster over ground speed.

I think different people are making different assumptions about what is happening at different economic stages. If we have say a half planet worth of economic control, what should a player be capable of? What about 2 planets worth?

I'm of the mind that T1 should be relatively cheap (i.e. expensive for T1 branches, but not current cost) but very limited support(scout radar sat, SpySat, FabSat and lifter sat) roles that cap out at moving a single unit to a moon, no interplanetary capability. T2 is where you get the heavy lift and is where you get the super radar sat, ground bombardment, orbit fighter ish unit and so on that are way more expensive but slow to push to other planets, but now you can start pushing T1 units quickly to other planets (vague on details I know, maybe an orbital booster structure that acts like a gateway to interplanetary? or bigger transport sat that can carry other sats and speed is dependednt on load? ewwww....), because a part of what we're doing at T2 is paying for the bigger rockets that we need to do all this stuff. My thought is micro satellites and small capacity rockets vs school bus/skyscrapper sats and Saturn V+, which is not the T1 general vs T2 specialized model people been talking about, but makes more economical sense(to me at least) in the case for orbital.

My idea here is that if you allow orbital early game, it's going to include the same type of "upgrade to advanced factories" system to even use a radar with that vision range. Early orbital units could function in a different way. Perhaps a something like scout who can only scout the orbital layer.

you have orbital fighters that could do that ...