Stalemate, Orbital Combat

Anyone have a good resource for what is planned for orbital combat? We had an awesome match last night that ended in a stalemate. I ended up taking one planet and the other team took another. There was no way for either of us to get an advantage. We'd send about 100 orbital fighters back and forth and by the time they arrived at the other planet we'd have our own force rebuilt and fend them off and back and forth it went until we gave up.

Unit cannon and teleporters will add a lot of variety to interplanetary combat. I think at least one of those is coming in the next update.

I think the idea for endgame orbital is to use asteroids and moons for bombardment and as invasion platforms. Imagine an asteroid slamming into the enemy base while another asteroid decelerates into orbit and starts launching unit cannons at selected points on the surface. Meanwhile, a few fabbers descend on a lander into the crater made by the roid and set up a teleporter.

Sure. Here's your resource:

Because unit cannon is surprisingly harder to program.

Nothing wrt orbital combat plans has much to do with balance... People spamming that quote are getting too cute by half.

Well that's dramatically unhelpful in this instance.

The best resource would be to do a search. It's talked about a lot on the forums.

PA Match's "Not in the Game" wiki entry can also provide some additional insight: http://pamatches.com/wiki/not-in-the-game/

Neither the unit cannon nor the teleporter seem to provide any solution to the problem of "two individual, built-up planets with no moons". You won't be able to shoot units to it and you'll never land long enough to make a teleporter.

I did find one interesting solution, though.

If the enemy commander is hanging out and you can find out where, try this:
* Make about 20 Astraeus
* Load them with advanced fabrication bots
* Insert them into orbit with queued orders to land next to the enemy commander
* Quickly move the empty transports out of the way
* Order your fabrication bots ("F") to reclaim the enemy commander.

It's apparently impossible to stop them from landing and 20 advanced fabrication bots will kill an enemy almost in literally about 2 seconds. Even if he has formidable arrays of defenses you should be able to kill him. The hard part is really getting him targeted quickly when all the landers are blocking your view. Maybe some free-camera shenanigans would make that easier.

I've only done this once but it worked great. The defense against it would probably be to surround your commander with triple-barrel laser guns and have your own fleet of fabricators set to assist him so that they can start repairing as he takes damage.

Or load him in an Astraeus and have it set to patrol around at flight height so that the enemy doesn't have a good way to land on you.

But most people don't do that (yet) so I think it will usually work.


Really this could be the new trend in commander assassination. There's no reason it wouldn't work on a single world. You may refer to this method as "Getting Slamzed"...... >.>

My apologies - I had intended to insert an emoticon of some sort to signify that I was being light-hearted.

The point does stand though that Uber have said the above and stated that they want to rework Orbital considerably, so any 'resource' that may have assisted OP with his question is likely to be redundant.

There's a huge 13 page thread already out there dedicated to this topic.

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/planetary-invasions.54449/

Good thing we started a new thread with some fresh ideas then! I hate it when people bump old threads that date back so many builds ago that opinions and conditions may have changed.

Today in our playtest, we had orbital fabbers that could build portals on other planets. Dunno if that'll be a permanent thing, but that's just an example of how we're playing around with orbital so stalemates don't happen.

But it's not a balance problem, it's because of insufficient tools.

Unlike a lot of the balancing problems, which were caused because the counter involved escalation, but that same escalation made the counter redundant.

Wahoo!!! Like Crash Bandicoot?

I've always imagined this tactic using levelers, but Astraeus can't carry combat units.
I never thought of using fabbers to do it, because I used 100 or 200 air fabbers to reclaim a stuck AI commander once and it wasn't nearly quick enough for my tastes. Quite hilarious if you can make it all come together with advanced bot/veh fabbers.

200*6 = 1200.

So that's 11 seconds?

That's plenty fast.

That plan is so crazy, it just might work.

* Orbital fabbers build a teleporter.
* Ground units hit the teleporter but with enough orbital superiority, you can maintain the teleporter by repairing it with the orbital fabricators (?).
* Ground must regain orbital superiority to get the orbital fabbers out of there.

Hopefully the orbital fabbers are tough enough that it's feasible that a fair collection of them could build a portal while under fire from 2-3 umbrellas, such that to really stop them you need orbital fighters and not just umbrellas scattered around.

I don't like the idea of a teleporter build by orbital fabbers. This way of an invasion seems very boring to me, but on the other hand you have to give it at least a try.

What if the orbital fighters could be moved into the atmosphere of a planet and used as fighter-bombers? They would be slower than fighters, and their gun, the laser, is powerful, but doesn't seem to track moving targets well. Against a decent fighter screen they would fail pretty hard (fighters never miss), but would be fairly effective versus bombers. Against ground targets, they could be given a new weapon or just use their laser. To prevent them from being used for a cheap commander snipe, they would need to have trouble hitting moving ground targets as well, assuming that commanders aren't given other countermeasures (i.e. cloak) Ideally, such a unit would be less effective than standard fighters or bombers for cost, but could be useful in setting up a beachhead on a hostile world where anti-orbital defenses are heavy (target nukes/umbrellas/catapults and clear a place to land and build a teleporter), and provide passable anti-air and ground attack capability until local production of standard aircraft can be established.