Standard Invasion Procedure and why it will not work in multiplayer or against an intelligent AI

To summarize that long title, I will first define the Standard Invasion Procedure, or SIP, as it will be called for this post.
In Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander, it's explained that, instead of bombarding an enemy base with millions of soldiers in a slaughter to gain very little ground, a la the Imperial Guard in Warhammer 40k, they would rather teleport Commanders directly onto the planet, and build up the invasion force from there.

However, this only works because in campaign, the maps are designed to be playable, and therefore aren't too densely packed, to allow for the invader-you, the player-to build up his base, and defeat the enemy, and in multiplayer, well, there's no pretense of invading, you're put in a deathmatch.

In short, those modes are designed to allow the player to win.

But in Planetary Annihilation, where players will start on different worlds and invade enemy worlds, the SIP would not work, let me explain why.

When you get to a truly Galactic scale of combat, or, in a Stellar war in a large system that lasts a long time, players will most likely convert some planets, like Metal or Gas Giants, into giant, glorified extractors, and other planets into glorified factories, with every square inch covered in structures.

And don't get me started on fortress worlds, brimming with orbital and ground based defenses.

They would be designed to keep out invaders, not give them a fighting chance, and that's why you wouldn't be able to teleport your most valuable unit onto an empty spot, first, because there would not be any free spot, and second, because the indigenous response would be quick and hit like an asteroid... maybe literally.

Therefore, invasion forces, either by shooting units at the surface from asteroids, or by dropping interstellar transports onto the surface, would be necessary, as, against another human or, as I said, an intelligent, purely evil AI, the SIP would not have the time or resources to come into effect.

Yes, I am aware that Uber has stated that there will be no space combat, yes, I know that this would go against the canon of both TA and SC, but think of the most difficult mission from either of those games, now imagine that the enemy was controlled by an intelligent, sadistic human being that was responding to you in real time and with far more force than you could possibly muster, would this be fun?
And, I must stress, there is NO canon on how invasions are played out in Planetary Annihilation, who knows, this post might inadvertently outline the unrevealed canon.

Ideas, criticism, et cetera is all welcome.

To make a lore reason that SIP can work is here:
You have been given the task of colonizing another planet for your gain, to turn it into a new base of operations, but an/the/mutiple enemy/ies have decided to try to do the same thing as you. You are now fighting to gain the upper hand in the intergalactic battle that is waging on by conquering this planet and eliminating the enemy/ies force/s. Now, the war out there is so stressed, so thin that if they divert any resources t your little planet, they will lose everything. You are left to capture this planet alone, and must do so, as fast as possible to support your faction in the greater war.

What this means is
- no destroying the planet unless impossible to capture, eliminates the use of asteroids from the start
- explains why you must build up a new base - they can't afford to use other resources
- explains why you land there, why you are fighting, on a smaller scale
- explains the single commander per person

Might be more I answered without meaning too, or forgot I did.

But what does this apply to in-game? We won't be sending commanders to establish beach heads on enemy worlds, we'll be using engineers, shot from Unit Cannons place on the moon or asteroid(s) we place in Orbit with Giant Thrusters.

And of course, if you don't want to do that, just use KEWs instead.

I don't see the actual problem here.

Mike

I was assuming that this was more from a lore/story point of complaint, and if it is from gameplay, then the lore can explain it anyways.

I never did understand how sending a single Commander was supposed to be useful.
Yeah, sure, it can create an army in twenty minutes... If it hasn't already been spotted by satellite coverage and snuffed out by tactical nukes, T3 bombers, or just a crushingly massive wave of T1 bots sent by a bored base commander with a sick sense of humor.

In SupCom, there's an explanation, but a scarcely believable one... The AI Commanders are somewhere between incompetent and mentally damaged, turtling in one compact base with a handful of factories and a molasses-slow response force. (Not that we haven't all done that at some point or another...)

Somehow, the second most optimal solution is sending a Commander at the exact same time the enemy sends a Commander to roughly the same locaation. (The most optimal solution, sending a Commander to an unclaimed location, never seems to happen.) One can only wonder how that happens.

I think there are a few things wrong with your assumptions.

• Its unlikely that the enemy will have covered the whole planet with defenses and units. Remember they should be focused on expanding and attacking.
• You should be able to invade from all sides. When you build a teleporter you should be able to stream in huge numbers of units.
• If they do end up building an impenetrable fortress you can attack with asteroids and nukes.

What happens when your commander goes boom?

All your stuff goes boom too.

Presumably, if you were to leave, all your stuff would go boom too. Unless you explicitly said "hey guys, I'm popping down to the pub for a pint. Be back around nine." then your stuff shouldn't know the difference between leaving and suddenly exploding.

Why is this relevant? Because it means if there's going to be a pre-established defense, in any system you invade in GW, the opposition must have a commander there beforehand.


Now, what multiplayer game allows one person to start before another?

I can't think of any.

Actually, MMOs do that. But in the PVP MMO scene, everyone already understands that and prepares accordingly.

What did I conclude from this? The SIP isn't at all standard. It's very very specific, for a particular set of conditions.

I was actually wondering whether there would be a "defender's advantage" for GW. I think it would make sense to, and wouldn't be unbalanced as you would have access to the same advantage as a defender yourself. Something like a 5-10 minute headstart.

Given that GW is meant to be some-sort of metagame, it makes sense that there will be some aspects of it which influence the starting conditions of different maps. For example I would imagine that players have Galactic level resources, which are gained based on developing conquered worlds, and can be spent on different things. I would assume that the some of the most obvious things are attacking and defending to some degree.

For example, suppose that on the galactic war screen, players are able to zoom into a conquered star-system, and see a representation of the planets in that star-system (not actually a full instance of the game). A player can spend some portion of their Galactic resources to fortify individual planets, which means that if that world is later attacked, they may start the game with a couple of factories, turrets, etc. Likewise, attacking players can commit more resources to the assault, allowing them to bring other commanders along (if a team game), temporary resource boosts, or maybe even an asteroid (although not necessarily one developed enough to use for bombardment right at the start of the game).

There are also options as to how it can be used to generate new and interesting victory conditions. For example, suppose a player was able to buy a commander factory on the galactic warfare screen for a planet. This serves the purpose of allowing players to manufacture replacement commanders for the ones they will inevitably lose on unsuccessful campaigns. However, suppose it also served as a destruction target on that world if it was invaded. This game could be set up as a "defend the objective" kind of game instead of the normal assassination mode.

I wouldn't want such a gamemode to be the norm, but occasionally adding such things to the Galactic War could possibly spice up missions by giving some invasions a different objective. There are lots of different things that could be done from this angle, and I believe that a decent number of them could be balanced to make fair and engaging games.

It's utterly ridiculous you're claiming it will be impossible to invade another player's planet.

The stuff you're describing there reminds me very much of the metagame in Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle Earth II. I had many hours of fun with that on single player and that's actually a very good initial model to base things on.

I will say that the radar technology of games like TA, SupCom and PA means that keeping a vigilant eye on an ENTIRE solar system would require you to have detectors in practically every location of the solar system.

And by the time you can set that up, people would ignore your system anyway and go on to conquer all of the surround systems.

And if you leave, your units no longer function without a commander to lead them, so they'll either self destruct or be captured by any passing commander, making the defence pointless.

Perhaps armies are biodegradable and automatically recycle themselves into the landscape without a short amount of time if a commander is not around to inhibit the process. It's part of some hardcoded environmentalism protocols built into the robots and they lack the tools to remove it. When you assault a system your teleport signal is detected and another commander is teleported in just after you to defend. This makes sense of the balanced combat but then the whole idea of controlling systems falls apart.

If you mean the value of one system over another?

Well this could be a way of making the metal worlds more distinctive and important.

It could also be apart of the process in producing new AI commanders to supplement the player in attack and defence missions.

But there are trillions of stars in the galaxy. Who cares if some guy has armored up a dozen worlds? If you can capture a thousand worlds, then you win.

The galactic gate already provides a sound explanation for both the purpose of Commanders and the viability of fortress worlds. In both instances the answer is the same. Once you lock onto a good target, teleport in an endless stream of antimatter explosives and don't stop. Something's gonna give.

Why would the units just explode when the commander teleports away? That removes any sense of -controlling- a solar system. Controlling for me means that you have buildings there, especially metal extractors to fuel your war efforts in the galaxy and to build space-craft meant for transportation and what not. Dropships and the like. Or just nuclear weapons and such. It would make sense if the people who are defending the area start with an actual base. The attacker would just need a proper assault force.. like..they get teleported onto the heavily fortified enemy planet, but not only their commander, but also an army of tanks, AA, artillery and some way to stop nukes for a while. Perhaps a pre-assault EMP strike on a big part of the planet to slow its defences for enough time to develope your own factories, anti-nukes and whatnot so you can reinforce your forces while they try to mob up the rest of the enemy's presence of the planet to then spread to other planets.

If you are playing a game of SupCom and quit mid way through, what happens to your units?

And what would happen if they did not?

They would be captured as with no control they couldn't effectively defend themselves, and that is an advantage you don't want your enemy having.

Think of the Commander and his Army akin to the human body.........it's hard to get the body to dance after you've taken the brain out.

In SupCom, the Generally Accepted Lore is that if an ACU is not in direct contact with it's units they self-destruct to prevent them from being hacked. The units themselves don't have any smarts actually, they are just motors and servos and sensors, the ACU itself handles all the automation and such, so without an ACU present the units are nothing more than fancy lumps of metal waiting for commands and without a connected ACU they can't avoid being easily captured.

PA could have something very similar, the Commanders are the only units with an AI installed, and the AI, among other aspects of the Commander's design, are the reason why they don't just build more commanders instead of other units, so like in SupCom without a commander presently connected to the units they can't do anything.

To me Galactic War is less about controlling the planets themselves and more about trying to track down and intercept enemy Commanders, the planets are just areas used to combat the Enemy Commanders.

Mike

"Hardcoded environmentalism protocols" is exactly the kind of tongue-in-cheek quip that PA needs in its lore, especially the juxtaposition of planet smashing KEW strikes. I really like it, plus the M.A.D. teleporting signal response thing.

Sending an engineer to an enemy planet is even worse, they're weaker, have no offensive capabilities and have longer build times. My entire post was saying that yes, we would need to use giant asteroid factories or the like to bombard the ground with enemies, instead of the SIP.

Let's say that I play a large GW with my best bro. There's two of us, and maybe a few bots, and a giant galaxy between us. I'm not expecting us to run into each other for maybe a few hours, and then I doubt we would engage in warfare for another few after that. And when you're gearing up for a massive, galactic war that spans many stars, why wouldn't you turn a couple of Gas Giants/Metal planets into glorified extractors? Why not have some mostly land planets pumping out piles of units so that you can stick them on asteroids and send them as roks to enemy bases?
And, going under the assumption that there WON'T be trillions of stars with a half dozen planets each, and most likely a few hundred, connected by specific lines, a la Endless Space or the like, yeah, you would have strategically placed worlds brimming with defenses, which I would most likely rename to Cadia-X, with the X being replaced by the appropriate number.

You, good sir, are inferring something I did not imply. I merely stated that it would be very difficult, but still possible.