So how easy will it be to annililate a planet?

As i understand it there is no research in game, but there are tech trees.

SupCom is my only resourse (never played TA) so i am going with the assumption that new units and building are unlocked by upgrading old bulidings or workers building the next generation of buildings.

so the steps are 1 ammass resourses 2 get to space 3 distroy planet. Or 3 get to low grav enviroment 4 distroy planet.

so my question is threefold. how hard is it to reach the games namesake, are all planets capable of being distroyed the same way and after annihilation is there anything left i can use?

Very hard.
The idea is that you need to find an asteroid or other rock, put engines on it, and fly it towards a target.

The production costs for said engines would probably be very, very high.
The game wouldn't be fun if every person who could get to space immediately had the power to destroy planets, now would it?

There are probably other ways of destroying planets.
Finally, what happens after the usage of such items is dependable on some things.
The larger rock you have, the more playing space is taken away (until there is none left).
I think the metal Death Stars might be an instant GG if used (though getting to that point is very hard in the same way as the asteroid engines.)

Well since im just a forum dweller and we havent been given the answer on some of these questions, i cant realy answer them, but i can give you a bit of input regardless.

That the tech tree will be built on the map and not researched has been confirmed so your correct.

The devs vision they have given (in videos and such) regarding destroying planets is to diminish the playing field, going by that i doubt there will be anything left to fight over after a planet is completely destroyed.

We dont realy know how easy or hard it will be to destroy worlds, i doubt that even Uber knows for sure this early in development, but remember that there will be ways to prevent a astroid from smacking into your base too.

FALSE ADVERTISING! I want more planet nukes, not less!

The idea of changing the map dynamically like you can do in Battlefield is pretty interesting on the RTS level.

Well they wont be cheap.

Been digging a bit, judgeing by the following quote they seem to be aiming for high cost (If thats "hard" or not is debatable, but i assume its not something you will see early game).

(The quote is about asteroid projectiles)

You mean like global warming?

Maybe, if you want to wait a few million years for the runaway greenhouse effect to happen.

I actually meant that they will probably add more ways of destroying planets before the game is finished.

Also, polynomial, I think we all want planet busting nukes.
We just have to hope.

I already crossed some fingers.

A destabalizer rocket which destable the core of the planet.Then is a step by step progress of destruction first unnormal gravity changing-->(+)random vulkans,tsunamis,earthquakes and lava rivers--->super vulkans all other the planet surface are going to blow up--->planet implode(explode).

I really would like to see a weapon that can cause a sun to go nova... could wipe out an enemy system that way.

Here's another question: will there be any defenses for such methods of annihilating planets? Or is it just game over for that planet?

I think the defenses are either nukes (as seen in the kickstarter video) or actually going to the asteroid/metal death star planet/other 'planet annihilator' site and destroying it before it can be used, or destroying it as it is about to be used (like destroying the engines on the asteroid while they are being used to transport it to your planet)

And seal the fate of your planet? Surely you need to capture the asteroid (and ergo the engines) in order to alter it's course away from your planet. Destroying the engines just means that it will continue to travel to your planet and annihilate it anyway. You know, space physics and all that.

I personally think I would really like to see asteroids used to destroy planets as a last resort. Sure it's 'awesome', however if it happens on a regular basis it will quickly become much less awe inspiring. It should be a climactic event that isn't witnessed in every game. Something of a stalemate breaker that spectacularly concludes a hard fought battle between two evenly matched opponents. Perhaps annihilating your enemy in the process or forcing them to abandon the world and move the war to another planet. Either way, I want to see it and think "wow", not "oh look, yet another asteroid impact".

That and if you make it so cheap and easy to do, then what's the point of doing anything else? People will just be slinging rocks all over the place because actually using armies to attack one another wouldn't even be worth entertaining.

Destroying a planet will be somewhere on the line between trivial and impossible.

There seems to be a lot of discussion over what kind of visual effects or lore will be used. But the simple fact is that a dead planet is a dead planet. It doesn't take a wide range of units to accomplish the same goal. Instead, it may be more interesting to talk about the kind of fallout that a destroyed planet will create. The main goal of destroying worlds is to change the field of battle. Different super weapons may very well be designed to change the field in different ways.

For example, an asteroid impact doesn't really "annihilate" a world. The surface might be destroyed, and a celestial body might be kicked into the orbital layer. There's still a lot of leftover stuff, which might still be usable. The planet basically gets rebooted.

A "death star" type weapon might gib a planet, leaving an asteroid belt. There is lot of debris, but still plenty of smaller battlefields to fight over and use as future weapons. Destroying those asteroids might leave nothing else.

A planetary scale D-Gun (E.G. the "little doctor") would dissolve the planet down to its most basic wave forms, leaving nothing but a hydrogen cloud blown away by the solar wind.

A star killer would exterminate an entire system, make a huge mess of intergalactic travel, and generally piss everyone off.

I believe I heard Mavor say on the kickstarter end video that an asteroid strike would turn a percentage or all of the surface of a planet into lava, so you could just have the planet transformed from a lush world into a lava world, with whatever game mechanic Uber already have planned for the lava worlds.

Yeah and game play wise it's probably a bit better to say that you need to protect some engineers as they capture the engines on the asteroid, rather than just spraying the whole thing with damage until it stops moving.

I meant 'when the asteroid is moving to its gravitational slingshot' or 'in the process of burning in the slingshot'.
I do agree it would be foolish to destroy the engines when it is closing in on your planet.