First off, everything is freaking amazing and I will most likely be adding more to the hundreds of hours I already have in this game. My suggestion for the Ragnarok is to let us fire the payload that goes into the planet after the drill is complete instead of automatically being sent down. My reasoning for this is it could be used strategically. For example you are surrounded and losing the planet is inevitable. You can use the Ragnarok as a f*** you and if I can't have this planet no one can. Thoughts?
The Ragnarok doesn't use power, the charging is a fixed timer. We originally had it trigger from an attack command, but too often people would build one and just stare at it as it finished building frantically attacking the ground while someone else was trying to destroy it. It created some tense moments, but it was a bad experience. It was also weird and unintuitive to have to attack the ground to get it to fire. Basically there's a handful of people who want it to work by having it blow up as soon as it finished, and a (smaller) group who wanted to control exactly when it fired. Also, it was more work to get the experience of manually firing better.
Why not just have an alt-fire button on it that you just click to have it fire without having to target the ground or annything?
Because we don't have any orders that work that way; apart from stop they all require a click in the world. Using a stance button (fire orders, energy orders, build orders, etc.) might make more sense to toggle the auto-fire nature, but ultimately it was cleaner to just not have anything and our UI guys were swamped as it was.
The real question is if this is something that you'll revisit in future updates or not, now that your UI guys are (presumably) less swamped.
Could there be a button like the Annihilaser/Halleys where it's big, red, and difficult to miss in the planetary menu?
I´d like them to be started at your will, but once they are started the only way to aboard should be self-destruct---otherwise they´d easily become a trolling weapon! (they still can, which would be an argument against having them operate that way!)
Pretty sure there will be a mod for this, fingers crossed! I love using Halleys in this manner in the base game.
I love the fact that its just a straight countdown timer and you can't control it. This thing explodes the freakin planet! Once you start it to building, you deal with the consequences and if you set off armageddon and don't get off planet in time that's your own fault.
Since it is a planet destroyer, it really should use the kind of alert that you get when your halleys are completed. The button to destroy the planet doesn't need to be in the Ragnarok's command set at all as long as it shows up somewhere in the UI. *Edit* I just want to add that I think pressing the big Annihilate button can be just as fun as watching the explosion. I know it's a little thing, but everyone wants to feel the power of being able to press the red button.
You know me so well. I also like to say "You're fired" when the Halleys I built on the enemy planet are complete.
I like it the way it is, it makes it unique. You build it knowing it goes off in 1s and nothing else. My vote: don't change it.
Would be awesome to have a big red button akin to annihilazor/planet smash for fun and comfort, but I think it's fine the way it works now.
We'll keep an eye on it for a while to see how it's played. We really like the way it's designed, as it does make it very much a doomsday device type of thing. It's built, if you can't kill it before that missile drops, BOOOOOM! also makes for some very frantic teleporting when it's found too late.