Here's pretty radical idea, why not make an end-game ability to 'suicide' the planet by building four giant thrusters at key locations on the planet to "boost" it into the sun completely destroying it? Done only if your obviously loosing or just don't give a ****? Or perhaps if you have a base on another planet and don't want the opposition on that planet getting any stronger? If this is made, I'm sure many people would sincerely jizz their pants.
Planets have been mentioned kinda 'in passing' along with moons and asteroids, so it's plausible, but nothing specific has been said to confirm it one way or the one from what I recall. Mike
I'd like to see giant engines to push planets over a certain size impractical and you'd have to give it a push with a nice sized asteroid or moon. That way you might be able to be somewhat sneakier about it for a bit longer than a couple megalithic engines that are oddly aiming the planet toward the sun.
It's a matter of physics, we've been told to we can build engines on planets if we want. But.... The area for engines/mass ratio is great for asteroids, but gets really bad for planets. Because I have no data for the game: made up numbers! radius asteroid: 100m Planet: 10km (10000m) surface area asteroid 125664 m^2 planet 1256.64 km^2 (1256640000 m^2) mass (1kg/m^3) asteroid 4.18879 * 10 ^6 kg planet 4.18879 * 10^12 kg area/mass ratio asteroid 0.03 planet 0.0003 In effect because area is proportional to thrust, with the same engines, you accelerate at 1/100th the rate, which means it takes 100X longer to get anywhere with a planet. tl;dr; Physics is a cold, hard, toy stealing bitch
You could just stack a lot of engines on the planet and destabalize it's orbit. You don't need to give it enough velocity to slam it into anything. You could also potentially nullify the planet's rotation, therefore keeping your thrust on the appropriate angle to destab the orbit. Also, it would be cool if the enemy is relying on solar power to keep him on the dark side of the planet. Both teams built too many engines that are fighting eachother? planet chears itself apart, GG.
Anything you do with an asteroid you can do with a planet, it just takes MANY times longer, no matter how you do it.
This. This stuff is for matches that are made of legends. Screw metagaming your economy to the max, then metagaming your units to be the most effective until you can finally compete on strategy. Just say at the beginning of the match, let's destroy this planet, in the least efficient ways possible.
I thought there was a mention during a live stream that moving things larger then a asteroid won't be possible.
Indeed, the ability to move planets around will depend more on game engine concerns rather than real life physics. Moving an asteroid with a base and a few hundred units isn't that bad. Moving a planet with 10 players and thousands of units? Moving it into orbit with another world? That could create some severe data issues, never mind the gameplay problems.
Not quite. All unit data is stored relative to a planet (unless in an inter-planetary trajectory, I assume). This means there aren't any more CPU issues or RAM issues than when they aren't moving, I'd assume. EDIT: Anyways, the planets are always CONSTANTLY moving and rotating! They are orbiting. I don't see why a change in orbital path would break anything.
The challenge is not in moving isolated planet ecosystems. The challenge is in putting two of them side by side. Or even crashing one into the other. We'll have to see how well that turns out, it could go smoothly or very badly.
Well, it seems there is much interest in Planetairy Suicide, so I think the game developers should deffinately consider it! Plus it wouldn't be too hard to hoard resources and just start making a megalithic engine much bigger than one that would be used on an asteroid, there would just need to be a function to scale the engine up by dragging your mouse out when making it, and the mathmatical formulae for materials and thrust created to go along with it. :lol:
I think if you crash one planet into another then there isn't going to be much left of either so it doesn't matter.
Obviously the crashing part isn't that bad. But have you played Sins of a Solar Empire? Build a system where gravity wells overlap. It gets hilarious pretty fast. Overlapping territory might not be a problem for a tiny asteroid ecosystem, but when two planets get dangerously close then things can very well get messed up.
Sooooooo... Saw this and immediately thought of this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vksZY2WHd1w especially after 6:45 or so.
