The following is a proposed system for the orbital layer that does away with the concept of an interplanetary "orbital fighter” and replaces it with orbital carriers that can launch smaller suborbital aircraft. In summary, fixed-wing aircraft would be able to interact on the orbital layer, but cannot travel between planets on their own. Suborbital Craft A suborbital unit can enter the orbital layer, but cannot travel between planets on its own. For the most part, this would be fixed-wing planes. Not all aircraft should qualify; slow, low-altitude craft that are the analogue of today's helicopters would be locked to fly close to the surface, and would be unable to interact with orbital units by design. Suborbital craft can be manufactured on the planet's surface, or in space. This means an attacker might be using craft produced from orbit around a planet besieged from space, and a defender might be using craft produced on the ground to try and contest the orbital layer. Because they are limited to one planet, they naturally would be much more combat-efficient for cost than a full-fledged interplanetary unit. Instead of spending a fortune on independent interplanetary "orbital fighters" with mediocre combat capability for cost, the defender of a planet can instead opt to use suborbital units to try to fight a player with orbital superiority. Suborbital Gameplay The key mechanic here is that a suborbital craft can interact with the orbital layer, but cannot travel between planets. They can be useful for a war confined to a single planet, and they can be used on other planets if transported there by a space carrier. Most importantly, suborbital aircraft allow a player to engage orbital units without constructing their own interplanetary-capable orbital units, or dedicated anti-orbital units. Suborbital units are useful as aircraft when there are no orbital units in play, and they give options to a player who is trying to deal with orbital units, other than using their own orbital or dedicated anti-orbital units. In gameplay terms creating suborbital aircraft will make the orbital layer less distant, and make orbital units less untouchable without having orbital units of your own. Especially in the context where one player has orbital superiority above another player's planet, it is important to have counterplay available apart from just not allowing such a situation to occur. Allowing airplane fighters to absorb the role of the 'orbital fighter' makes orbital gameplay less dominating, and gives non-orbital aspects of the game the ability to interact with the orbital layer. Orbital Ships The bulk of the orbital gameplay is built around ships which can travel between planets. Orbital ships never land or enter any planet's atmosphere. They are unable to fly down to the surface of any planet, but instead they can travel between planets. Large orbital ships are necessary in order to make any large interplanetary military action. Small or disposable interplanetary transports could be used to send a constructor to a new planet, but would not be useful for a large, concerted interplanetary attack. And small dedicated transports are useless in an orbital siege situation, where a large vessel that can construct suborbital units would be very useful. In fact, such a ship might even be able to build and then orbitally insert land units by crashdown. Large interplanetary transports would use dropships instead of descending to the surface themselves. Orbital Carriers Instead of having a fleet of orbital fighters that flies between planets by itself, players will load their suborbital fighters into larger ships for transport between planets. For suborbital craft, leaving a space carrier to engage enemy fighters or attack targets on the ground is much the same as leaving a sea-based aircraft carrier. The only difference being they fly up to return to base. Space carriers would be essential for besieging a planet from space, but the defender can use suborbital units without a space carrier. An airbase on the ground can launch suborbital fighters just as easily, and these craft would be extremely useful for attacking enemy units in orbit, especially when your own orbital units would be immediately destroyed. The primary advantage of this approach is that it separates orbital combat capability from interplanetary transport capability. This means orbital fighters can be cheaper and more focused on combat, since they have offloaded their interplanetary functionality to the carrier. This lets orbital fighters be more available, more numerous, and more efficient than the existing interplanetary-capable orbital fighter. And the option to use these units without building your own interplanetary units makes waging a war against an army in space much more practical. Especially since you can build a carrier later and even potentially use your surborbital aircraft offensively to besiege an enemy planet. Conclusion Currently, the existing orbital units largely function like air units, except in a separate layer. I propose to allow fast movers to operate in both the air and orbital layers instead of having an 'orbital fighter' as well as a regular fighter. Surface fliers that are more like helicopters would not be able to enter the orbital layer, and orbital ships that are more like naval vessels would not be able to enter the planet's atmosphere. Instead, an orbital ship could launch suborbital aircraft that could also be produced by the player on the ground. Long story short, think Battlestar that launches Vipers that can operate either in space or in atmosphere. Except the same Viper can also be created by a player on the surface with the purpose of attacking units in orbit around that planet, or just as regular useful aircraft against an enemy on the surface.
There are threads for unit idea's. Please use them. So I'm seeing orbital aircraft carrier that makes little planes for orbital and air layer. Might be fun... might be very annoying to kill.
The point is to make all (or most) aircraft have this behavior of being able to interact with orbital units. However they cannot travel between planets. Such as using an air factory or advanced air factory to produce fighters to kill satellites, instead of having a very expensive 'orbital fighter' produced at the orbital factory which can travel between planets on its own.
If you would do that Orbital officially would be Air 2.0 and Orbital units would be redundent. The only use for the Orbital launcher would be to colonize planets. Orbital factory, do you mean a factory in Orbit or the Orbital launcher? Wouldan orbital fighter still be worth their cost if they die against cheaper fighters? I agree with you that orbital is very expensive and should be improved by a lot. Currently orbital is broken/incomplete in my opinion. I am very curious how Uber will implement/complete orbital, but it sure is a long wait.
Every time I see one of your original posts, I know it'll be a long, indepth, and good. I like the ideas on this one. Would be a really cool invasion technique to build a bunch of fighters in orbit, and then send them down to the sub orbital layer to shoot down sub orbital bombers and fighters and aid with the invasion from the unit cannon. Would also make orbital defense easier. Right now, if your opponent builds an orbital factory first, good luck gaining control of the orbital layer. All he needs to do is plant two orbital fighters right above your orbital launcher and you're screwed. With this, you could amass an air force on the planet's surface, and then send them up to the orbital layer to fight off the waiting Avengers before sending up satellites and orbital fighters. The orbital carriers idea is also pretty awesome. Could even be paired with units that can transport other units to the surface for invasions. So get an orbital carrier or two, load them up with ground invasion craft and orbital fighters. Send them over, and out comes a flurry of ground, air, and orbital units. Could be awesome.
I like this idea, & if uber ends up liking this it would obviously be awhile before they even implement it. If it's not in the ideas forum, then this really needs to be brought over to it.
sounds quite complicated to make imo ... i am defenitevily expecting uber to improve orbital gameplay but suborbital Units ? you could as well just take the interceptor/avanger and add a an Option to fly on the surface or Orbit and you got that carriers and large transports would be a nice idea for longrange interplanetary war it would add another option to the "put engines on a asteroid and use it as a pseudo spacecarriership" the only thing i don´t ever want would be large ships or ships in general that can attack the surface that would make a lot other units just plain useless i´m all for a starshiptroopers-like interplanetary war but not intrested in starwars or wh40k spacenaval warfare just imagine it : enemy umbrellas firing at your carriers aswell as incomming orbital fighters while you hectically try to get transporters in possition so they can drop their load and you can finaly attack the enemy eco or production base? or imagine that were an enemy sends you a invasionasteroid full with longerangecannons and unitcannons and you have to get your dropships on its orbit for a desperate counterattack to not lose your important eco planet? yeah that sounds awesome maybe a bit silly ... but awesome
Hmmm. I could see removing "Orbital Fighter" as a stand-alone concept. That may make sense because the role is so specialized that a lot of times the fighters are useless. So maybe it should be like: Basic Fighter: Sucks, but is cheap. Adv Fighter: Is awesome but costs more and does not go into space. Orbital Fighter: Not as good as the Adv Fighter, better than the Basic Fighter, lives in the air layer, more expensive than the Adv Fighter but can additionally attack orbital units. Perhaps this new "Orbital Fighter" attacks by firing long range air-to-air/space missiles. The DPS isn't as good as the Adv Fighter (maybe it's even lower than the Basic Fighter) but it can engage from further away, including space, whereas the Adv Fighter is purely air-to-air. The "Carrier" concept is fine but really we just flat out need a better way to move units through space, period. Incidentally, we need to axe the current transport. I've not seen anyone bother with this in beta but some day, in competitive ranked play, we're going to have to fight people who will just go from planet to planet to planet, never stopping, with their commander in a transport, and the game will never end. Air can possibly be moved via space transport but I think ground units, including the commander, should be committed: if they move to another planet, they land there and getting back off the planet requires a new ground structure be built.
Actually, the same concept of suborbital units would work for aircraft transports, too. A dropship would be an air unit with transport capability that can go into the orbital layer. It couldn't travel between planets on its own, but it would be useful to ferry units up to a space transport, or down from a space transport. And the same dropship would also, of course, be useful for transporting units about the surface of the planet. Getting rid of the orbital fighter that does nothing else would be a step forward. It behaves like an incredibly expensive and not terribly interesting air fighter. But the fact that it is in a separate layer makes it very binary, and requires orbital fighters in order to effectively engage other orbital fighters. Except the other player may already have more orbital fighters, making it impossible to acquire enough of them at once. It is exactly the same issue the SupCom ASF experienced, only with orbital superiority instead of air superiority.
Doublechecked the op to be sure Conclusion Your suggestions would shift the focus too much torwards orbital taking away the avenger leaves the player without any option to escort or back up his units making almost any attempt to even touch the planet the enemy is on almost impossible ... so here is my countersuggestion including good suggestions mentioned by others aswell Have rockets from the orbital launcher be interplanetary with austreus and groundunit (maybe air aswell) capsules for early but limited expansion Have more expensive interplanetary orbital aircraft and groundunittransports that in order to unload their units have to get to the respective layer of the unittypes they are carrying Leave t2 air fighters as they are and let avengers be in as a means of escord and mainbackup for anything orbital and traversing orbital Anchors and umbrellas aswell as avangers are your defenses against anything orbital with umbrellas being the weakest so for surface your aa has to make up when the tranports get through This keeps the focus on surfacecombat were it realy matters still with a well ammount of difficulty but not close to impossible as your suggestions would make invasions imho Orbital is meant to be primarily supportive .... the main combat happens on a planets surface this is what should be focused on Thoughts?
In another thread the idea of making the Peregrine a unit which can fly up into the orbital layer and fight orbital units, but unable to travel to other planets. I think that's a pretty cool idea.
I like the idea of a limited number of fighters having the capability to operate sub-orbitally. As a basic principle, the more interesting ways there are to differentiate units, the more different units can be made and the more tools we will have to play with. However, I dislike the idea of it being a common or universal trait, for the same reason that I wouldn't want it to be common for land units to be amphibious. The ability to change layers is a unique ability and it shouldn't be common in order to create better differentiation ability between units. However, dedicated wet-navy-in-space is something that I cannot support. I have yet to see a suggested space-ship implementation which either: A. doesn't completely trivialise ground combat. B. Doesn't create a large thematic dissonance as to why planets can't just be nuked from orbit if this is a universe where sci-fi space ships are effective. There are more unique ways to allow diverse methods of invading planets, and I'd like to see those developed before resorting to the standard tropes.
A. Is easy to work with. If interplanetary is more transport and escort focused we don't trivialise ground combat. B. I think we're there already. Any race/machine/etc that can PUSH A PLANET has to explain why he didn't just bomb it. The resources, even just raw kinetic force, needed to alter the orbit of a small moon is redonculusly Ginormotasticly ubered up times more force than you need to simply destroy the surface of the target planet and everything on it. Humans learned how to kill everything on the planet before we made it into orbit, and we're not considering altering the moons orbit any time soon. I think you have to accept B. as a thematic decision from the very start. Robots don't "nuke the site from orbit" because it's less awesome than the alternatives. It's the same reason they still use infantry shaped like humans, battleships, and a score of other tactics and technologies that are painfully obsolete despite a huge dose of awesome. As the most meaningful resource on the topic of planet smashing, I reference Invader Zim "Battle of the Planets"
This doe not sound bad, i like the idea, however if air units could become orbital, and orbital could become air... that would change the gameplay exprience a lot, however as there are submarines that go inside and outside the water, there could be orbital units that could go inside the planet from orbit, and that sounds ok since that would allow the air/ground/water units to interact with orbital units in a different way. https://forums.uberent.com/threads/orbital-gameplay.56369/
