Stalemate, Orbital Combat

That's really nice information, thanks Brad.

I think the real problem being highlighted in the OP is the orbital fighters cancelling each other out, creating an orbital stalemate.

There are a lot of potential ways to give this stalemate a next step that will advance the game state. My preferred solution is to actually abolish the "air fighter/orbital fighter" distinction. Instead, the same unit used as the air fighter will also be the orbital fighter, but it can't fly between planets. Although you could load air units onto an interplanetary orbital unit to move them, like land units.

Defending against an interplanetary fleet would involve making fighters which are also useful for keeping air superiority against planes. An attacker could even bring fighters onboard an orbital carrier and engage enemy fighters to obtain air control over the planet. Furthermore, there could be several types of aircraft, including an air unit that is strong against small, numerous fighters, and an air unit that is strong against big targets like large orbital ships.

A large cloud of fighters would be very effective at defending against orbital units, replacing orbital fighters. Superficially, this would appear to lead to a slightly different kind of stalemate, where both players are on separate planets and neither is capable of penetrating the other's fighters/orbital defenses. However, if there are multiple dimensions of orbital defense required, then it becomes less feasible to just defend against everything. Such as making large orbital ships with high armor and good anti-air, strong against fighters, but vulnerable to some type of "orbital torpedo bomber," with large, high-damage missiles, which would be a different unit from an interceptor or ASF. A large blob of fighters would be able to intercept dropships, bombers, etc. but not outright kill the enemy's fleet.

Furthermore, even if a player has a large, mixed cloud of aircraft to control the skies, those units would not be able to attack ground targets. Which means a concerted attempt to get on the surface can resolve the stalemate. Any resources spent on making an impenetrable orbital defense will detract from the planet's surface defenses, and vice versa. Crashing down a commander, a group of constructors, a teleporter, or just a large army, would allow the player to break into the battle for the planet quickly, resolving the orbital stalemate. The land war will then allow a player to exert influence upward using anti-air and air units produced locally.

For situations where the orbital defense has become very entrenched, with so many fighters and ships that you can't even rush down to the surface, players can use nukes to break the stalemate. Which forces antinuke, defenses to stop the antinuke from being sniped, and makes a universal defense harder to maintain since you can get nuked.

And lastly, if a planet has become so incredibly entrenched that nothing can be done to attack it, then the logical move is to use an asteroid to simply destroy it entirely instead of trying to capture it.

Here is another idea, don't know if it worthy of another thread, but having the game timed and have the star go supernova would be a good game play mechanic. You could set a match length of like 30 min and if you haven't won by then the start goes supernova killing everyone. Then you could have some other win metric like resources collected, units built, total score, etc. Or you could have your commander be the first to escape the solar system.

Also having nukes be interplanetary would also help. During that match that got me thinking about the stalemate I eliminated two other teams on the surface of the starting planet by raining nukes on them. Didn't matter that they had nuke shields because I just launched 12 nukes at a time. When you do that you don't have to worry the delay between worlds, just that you have more nukes than they have nuke shields. You could overload an area and then you have your landing zone.

I tested it to remind myself and... It's a lot faster than that. Frighteningly so.
If you ever get 100 air fabbers, just pass go.

Forgot that health wasn't equal to metal, and a tick wasn't a second.