the main problems with war in space.

turtling, as we know it, is suicide.

as a general strategy turtling would be paramount to gg. all an enemy commander would have to do is make sure that you stayed in the base and then blow the planet up with an asteroid. The general strategy then would be to run to the asteroids themselves as fast as possible, because blowing up every asteroid is much harder then blowing up a planet and would require more resources from them, leaving you ahead.

how to find your enemy.

unless your opponent noobed it up and turtled on the planet, you probably have no idea where the little bugger scampered off to. One moon, one asteroid, and one planet wouldn't be too hard to search, but lets be honest a three thing system is boring and no one wants to fight for that anyway. Now something worth fighting for would be lots of asteroids, and finding an opponent in that would be like finding a needle in a haystack. So we need a metal detector and preferably one with a inter planetary range to give us a general direction to point our carnage creating forces in. This means that the battle field isn't going to be the planet but rather everything around the planet in question. some form of space artillery/interplanetary nukes, might not be a bad idea for when ramming an asteroid into it is just a bit too heavy of a hammer.

the two big resources

mass and asteroids. both are limited in supply. mass requires nodes. flying missiles the size of Texas require things the size of Texas, and you don't just make them out of thin air. controlling all the asteroids lets you control the planet and mine in peace knowing that the planet you live one won't die in a fiery inferno of rock. This is where any turtling that would happen, will happen, on the asteroids. its your ballistic missile from God and your going to keep it no matter what. That being said, it shouldn't also be a place to get mass, that's what planets are for, and why you shouldn't end them. Usually its because people live down there, but robots are replaceable and hard to be emotionally attached to. Planets survive cause you need their mass. unless the enemy commander is there, then you blow it up.

the actual fighting.

its going to happen on the asteroids. and a little on the planet just to control the mass extractors, but mainly its going to be search and destroy through the stars. The asteroids will serve as capture points, so why not make them able to be captured. The enemy built engines on a rock, forgot to build some towers, and now you own it and your ramming it into their moon base. its a bloody battle for rocks in the sky and its happening all over the map. of course there's not much counter play, but what if you blew it up with nukes before your opponent took the rock. you don't have it any more but neither do they and your planet is one more asteroid safer.

There is no way to anticipate the meta-game this early in development.

We don't even have a clear idea on how interplanetary combat is going to work. I can imagine it will not be an easy feat to launch an asteroid into a planet. We also have no idea if there's a possible counter, such as anti-asteroid missles.

So how do you know what the possible problems are?

Speculating on features that aren't even fully designed yet is pretty silly.

That's not entirely true, If you watch the demo vid, then you will see several nukes firing at the asteroid and breaking it up, but not enough where launched to do the job, so I think a crap load of nukes may end up being the counter.

Considering they're trying to capture everything shown in the video as best they can, I think it's fair to presume we'll have some type of anti-asteroid defensive weaponry.

But even so, it definitely won't be any easy feat to launch an asteroid into a planet, and the only true counter to an asteroid is to deny them said asteroid.

Assuming we DO have anti-asteroid ballistic missiles of some sort, or any other weapon with this function, I doubt it will be completely effective against an asteroid, otherwise there'd be no reason to use them in the first place. Theoretically, if you chuck missiles at an asteroid, it's not going to just.. vaporize.. or disappear. It breaks up, and the pieces will land on the planet anyway (if they don't burn up in atmospheric entry). It causes less destruction and saves the player from a planet-ending catastrophe.

What I'm curious is if there's going to be terraforming of some type to bring back planets that have been nailed with asteroids. (As long as it's still a solid planet, anyway.) It doesn't have to bring back the lush greens, but it would give you access to the planet's metal again. It could possibly just include areas burned away around the planet, and not the edges of the crater, or as some maps have done, give metal in the center of the crater..

Iunno. It's just an idea.

I imagine interplanetary combat in PA would be as simple as building space combat units on one planet and sending them across the expanse of space to attack another planet.

Many TA and SCFA mods did the exact same thing. Nothing new here.

That CGI is nice and all, but it's a fairly new concept and I imagine it will take quite some testing to balance it out properly. Imagine this, I figure that the enemy is holding a planet, and he has these planetary defense missilepods installed, then what would stop the enemy from just launching the asteroid on the other side of the planet and cause the entire planet to blow up?

And since we don't know how the whole system is going to balance itself out, it is hard to guess what the potential problems are. Which is what this topic is about.

Every rock is susceptible to the same fate, and in fact it takes less to obliterate your asteroid if its smaller than a planet. Remember that you can add engines to planets and move them around too. Put asteroids in their orbits and intercpt incoming ones with your own. And don't even get me started on metal planets...

Please, no. I don't like anything about that paragraph. The trade off for leaving the planet behind and having less mass and space available to you is that you're hard to find and spread out. Having easy ways to find and destroy people on asteroids from your base anywhere on the map makes asteroid bases and landing forces worthless.

Any stellar object (except gas giants) will have mass points and has the ability for rockets to be applied to them so they can move around. Maybe in your vision of the game the above paragraph is true but from what I know there is no way to have unlimited range anything. All Tech 2 artillery has range, all radar has range and all missiles and nukes have range. You will need to land or otherwise besiege other peoples planets to win and planets are going to essentially be the biggest asteroids of them all.