Planet Native Civilizations

TA did have those "Hydra" native units that attacked your units in the campaign. Maybe if they do a campaign, on a prescripted map, they could have at least a few planets with civilizations that you have to fight through.

It would actually be pretty cool to have some damaged AI or something on some planets. They could be like a failed scouting party that had it's AI cores damaged and now is stuck on a continuous patrol loop.

That way when you're out trying to capture a planet or moon, you never know if they'll be a bit of force that you'll need to deal with. It'll give you a reason to be careful when you send out your engineers and weigh the decision of supporting them with an armed escort or not.

No new assets would be needed for this either. Just use an unusable and obvious army color on the normal units.

Scale is another question for sure. If the robots are as you say, a km tall (or more) than yes, wild critters are going to be like ants under the feet of them which would be somewhat pointless to try to display visually because it would just confuse people.

On the other hand, they did say "We're not going for realism, we're going for AWESOME!" Who cares if the scale is a little fishy? Why wouldn't they put in some random critters as part of the scenery?

That is the point! =D

A realistically wrong scale often makes perfect sense from a gameplay view, as well as from a stylistic view, imagine the robots being 1/3rd the size of the trees, the game would feel very different...

TBH, I always figured the kbots were the sizes of small mechs / large exo-suits... and I wouldn't mind if 'trees' were (sometimes, on some planets/in some biomes) taller than them.

Sandworms would be epic. They could just be a type of natural disaster, like how TA had meteor showers.

Also, while I don't know about actual living civilizations, destroyed old cities would be fine (like from the old TA.

There will still be meteor showers... just, you know, man made ones.

I think giant asteroids aren't exactly 'meteors'...

I would like natural meteor showers though...

OrangeKnight has spoken often about how randomness should be minimised so that one player doesn't accidentaly get destroyed by chance encounters and i think he's got a very good point.

Its not satisfying for anyone to win if your opponent (or you) got half destroyed by a meteor shower at a critical moment.

As part of events or scenarios though its cool but not as core gameplay.

I would imagine that you can toggle this sort of stuff...(or should be able to, e.g., for tournament / symmetric games)...

That said, were meteor showers that damaging in TA? I recall them being an annoyance that you had to repair stuff over... and rarely would destroy anything unless left alone over time...

And you remember exactly right. The only exceptions are the super weak buildings like windmills (just go solar, and you are fine) and t1 radars. Plus, while the areas they hit where random, they where wide areas that more or less guaranteed that everyone would be affect, many times, each match. And with lots of meteors in each shower, all buildings where usually hit, not just a few unlucky ones, leaving very little to actual chance.

Just like in C&C Tiberian Sun.. The thunder storms were annoying!

is it really good to annoy the players? it makes a nice gimmik for special occasions but otherwise...

I think different maps could have different settings for how often the meteor showers came... so in other words... on a bad world you would have to constantly have construction bots patrolling your base to keep up maintenance... otherwise over time, your base would be destroyed.

Could be cool as a weather feature on certain worlds (maybe ones rich with asteroids in orbit... so... you gain resources at a price..)

I can just imagine rolling my commander up to a society just entering the manufacturing era...

Commander: "I am the machine god. I require your steel for reinforced ablative armor plating for my K-Bots. I also require the carbon contained within your fleshy bodies for a carbon fibre skeleton enhancement for my platinum/gold alloy-plated Command Mech. Prepare to be assimilated."

And there would be plink-plink sounds as the civilians fired their primitive firearms unto my machine of ultimate destruction, as I reclaim their entire civilization for the sake of perpetual war.

This makes me want to kill a pillow...

Actually I would be interested in some kind of neutral units, which protect special buildings for the planet

I think some kind of indigenous life on planets would be a nice touch and a factor in planet diversity.
Not necessarily a complete AI faction, but more in terms of some creatures or some independent alien raiders, whatever.

I would give a bit of life to the planetary style. With water planets I could imagine some nice sea monsters.

Yes I agree, I mean you cant have millions of planets but no neutral units lol.

PS: JUMPING HULK FROM ONE TO ANOTHER PLANET KILLING RANDOMALY would be awesome lol.

No - the entire premise of the game is that civilizations have ended. The only thing remaining is their automaton weapons of war - perfected machines that live and "breathe" destruction.

There are no civilizations, there is no peace - there is only scrap. (and boy is there a lot of it)