Planet smashing dictating strategy

With asteroids not being able to clear a planet totally no matter the size.

It could become much more interesting to have only half a planet devastated, and thus make invasions revolve around the use of one or more asteroids to devastate most of a planet, without completely clearing it.

Another aproach could be just up the cost of the halley's instead of having more halleys to build

I also like impacts not taking out the entire planet.

And another big factor is system design.
I like the ZaphodX system and feel its pretty balanced, 2 planets and only 1 smashable, if the other team(s) fight for the smashable moon the other could go for both big planets and not having the moon does not mean game over.

I would say a good rule for system design would then be have 1 less smashable as there are unsmashable planets.
Ofcourse other players may like having lots of smashable planets so its also a taste issue

But many people just seem to think bigger is better and create these big systems with many smashables that result in crap gameplay

simply the case of missing options like orbital transports and stuff ....

I would have thought that gas planets wont be so heavily affected by a halley. So until they are in I don't see any point in trying to balance it, or you might just end up having to change it back.

I think the smashing of two planets should be slowed down drastically. Make it take a minimum of 5 minutes from when the halleys are activated to when the planet hits. Once the halleys are activated, an alarm should go off on all players screen and a giant skull and crossbones marker should pop up on the planet that is targeted. A doomsday clock appears in the corner and you now have 5 minutes to kill the halleys before your planet is wiped out. Also insert dramatic music.

This would create an epic "sudden death" mode where players are given a chance to attempt to defeat the superweapon before it comes crashing down on them. It would also force players to fortify the smashable up some instead of rushing for 3 halleys and launching as fast as possible.

You could also give halleys an energy capacitor that must be filled with something like 1-10 million energy before it can fire. This means that, even if you rush the construction of the halley, there is still a minimum amount of time it takes to fuel up, and it ensures you have a strong energy economy too.

When I make systems with smashable planets, I set the engine requirement to 15. If you want to blow up an entire planet, you're going to have to work on it for a while and you're going to do it with a relatively large and hard to lock-down world (which is always orbiting a much bigger, much harder to lock down world).

I think 5 engines is still a ludicrously low bar for such an unstoppable superweapon. "In the future, there will be other options". Well in the future I might be the president of China. For now, I avoid playing systems with easily buildable smashables.

Personally I'm a fan of have many if not all of the planets be usable, so that by the end of the game, most of the system is gone.