TIME LIMITS: Done with extra AWESOME!

This is one of those ideas in the back of my mind. The something for everyone. With the scope PA is shooting for, it sounds like it's going to focus more heavily on long epic battles lasting many hours (even days) which leaves the question of what to do for mere mortals who may need or desire a smaller battle.

And then I had an interesting thought today.

Scenario #1: Meteor incoming
Start both factions on the same planet, add a meteor on a collision course with this planet. Guaranteed planetary destruction at a known specified time in the near future. Escape to another planet and or just straight up win before the meteor hits.

Scenario #2: Black Hole
Similar setup, but this time being on the same planet isn't necessary. The black hole will eventually eat every single object in the system. Win before this happens. Have fun.

Scenario #3: Impending Solar Expansion (i.e. the birth of a Red Giant)
Another similar setup. When the sun expands, everybody dies. You both know it's going to happen, and likely also know exactly when it's going to happen. Win and escape the system before everything melts in the heat of an expanding star.

Yes, I know, some or even all of these are uncommon celestial events. But who cares? They're also all AWESOME! They're the kinds of things that get written about in Sci Fi for a reason. And be honest, wouldn't you enjoy playing any or all of those scenarios at least a few times?

So anyhow. Share your thoughts. Like/Dislike as you desire. Better yet, add more ideas onto the fire. Ideas are fun.

I like the first one, the others make less sense from a gameplay point of view IMO.
could be a game mode modifier.
These kind of things should be moddable alternatively I guess.

Some kind of Sudden death mods may be fun, but I think limiting the size of battles is done by setting the mapsize, smaller maps with few small planets = quick games.
Lots of big planets = Giant games.
That worked in FA already.

Scenario 4: Doom fleet

That wouldn't end up looking like the giant fleet of UberBombers from the intro to Forged Alliance, would it?

Because that could be amazing.

-Stretch

Nice ideas, but

Sucky black holes, well, suck. Hard.
Anyone having even the slightest idea about how gravity or black holes work will tell you that this kind of black holes is stupid, and probably that the Earth isn't flat btw.

If you want a cosmic sudden death, there are novae and supernovae for that. And even any semblance of believability aside, giant star explosion is way more awesome than vortex of stupidity.

Problem 1. There is no one who have even the slightest idea about how black holes work. There is a lot of incomplete hypotheses, though.
Problem 2. They actually may work in the way described, consuming nearby solar systems (this is one of the explanations of their visibility). You just need to place black hole far enough, so whole solar system slowly disintegrating into space dust sucking towards some point beyond horizon. May create a cool visual effect, BTW, actually showing "how much time left" with more spectacular way that simple clock.

Nope.
Black holes are not holes. They are supermassive objects.
They look like supermassive objects, they behave like supermassive objects, and they affect other things like a supermassive object would.
That means high gravity, not magical sucking force.
They are not wormholes. They are big things in a small space.
Movement into a solar system will just disrupt the orbits and likely just send all planets their separate ways. The only way for a black hole to 'consume' something is for them to collide, which usually only happens by decaying orbit over a very very long time.

Very high gravity, to be precise. Near black hole gravity is so big that it's greater than intermolecular forces, so gravity tearing matter apart.

Also, refer to Phaeton planet myth to see examples of what could be done by couple of (hypothetical) Jupiter-weighted objects with objects in-between them.

Yet everything that falls into it never came back and black holes are not growing by fast pace, no matter how much nearby solar systems they consumed.

Yes, but while object is moving around that decaying orbit it also being teared apart by superior gravity forces. So, if we assume somehow growing black hole (we don't know why the hell it should grow at all, but anyway - that's a fiction) that it's "disintegrate horizon" - beyond which everything is teared apart into atoms or less - is growing too. So, system being "sucked away" into black hole is quite possible.

You may also imagine small black hole emerged on solar system boundary slowly pulling whole system towards it, consuming everything that approaches too close. It will create same effect, thanks to relativity (black hole growing = system moving towards it).

Yeah... no.
You don't need black hole to destroy stuff that goes too close with tidal forces. Ask the Saturn's rings some day. They may tell you about careless satellites who wanted to go too close to the planet, and ended up ripped apart once beyond the Roche limit.
Inversely, we know about stars in happy stable orbits around black holes. There are probably planets around some as well, after all there are planets around neutron stars, which are quite the same thing for said planets (km-sized post-supernova star remnants).

If you do want to have fun with black hole in a crazy SF way, there are musings about how a planet could exist inside a black hole and survive the Universe. Now I'm a bit sceptical about this, but that would be an awesome plot tool.
Or just go the whole way and make the planets flat and the stars orbiting them. Wait, no, even Discworld would not have sucky black holes.

Thats not exactly true. Black holes (at least all observed ones) had two jets on the poles, similar to regular pulsars. The radiation is not within in the visible spectrum, but it is present. The term "black hole" is also misleading, actually it isn't even black. It has just a gravitational field which is so strong, that no radiation can escape the low orbits before being reabsorbed, except for the two gamma ray jets.

In the end, a black hole is nothing less than a extremely compact fusion generator which has sufficient mass to force radiation into an orbit which is lower than the actual surface (which leads to all radiation near to the core being absorbed).

No magic "survive inside the black hole", no "worm hole", no "suck the whole universe in" or "infinite mass". A black hole entering a solar system would just mess with all the orbits, becoming the center of the solar system. And over eons, the mass of the solar system would be form a ring (similar to the asteroid belt) around the black hole while slowing down due to friction and radiation. Until the ring touches the black hole, loosing all it's momentum at once and collapsing into the black hole, feeding it with fresh mass.

If the black hole wasn't fed, it would just burn up until the jets run dry, and even then it would continue to loose more mass due to radiation leaking. Up to that point when the mass isn't sufficient to contain the nuclear reaction and the black hole simply "explodes" like any other supernova.

I don't understand your point. You don't need blackhole to destroy stuff, yes - much smaller object is more than enough. And blackhole has same effect on much greater distances, so how exactly this is counter-argument to what I'm saying?

Link, please. BTW, our solar system is also on happy stable (well, we don't actually know about it's stability for sure...) orbit around black hole.

We also know about active galactic nucleus, which could be (by one of the hypotheses) done from matter of nearby solar systems destroyed.

Our system is rotating around black hole without failing inside as it was created in such way (rotating) from gas cloud. Our system has just correct speed and direction relative central black hole. But if we assume that blackhole may suddenly emerge from nowhere at some random point then our system may not have right speed and direction to orbit it and will fall into. As soon as system will approach black hole it will disintegrate into gas cloud, which will be sucked up (as it won't receive any impulse to orbit black hole).

Any massive object is "sucky", it's matter of distance and mass.

They are "black" as no light may escape it. And they are not glowing - it's active galactic nucleus around them. Blackhole detection is hard task, actually. There is blackholes that do now "glow", their detection wasn't possible until special relativity theory.

Really? Slow down please, I'm writing...

Man, please, we don't know how blackholes work. We don't even sure what they are exactly. So you shouldn't speak with such self-confidence.

Any massive object will. What exactly will happen with orbits depends on object's mass, planets' speed and object position. Half of system has a good chances to end up crashing into this object.

Exterminans, I'll point out that black holes don't quite work that way. They do evaporate due to Hawking radiations, but that's so imperceptible for stellar or galactic black holes (the bigger the black hole, basically, the less it emits) that the cosmic background radiation by itself is enough to counter it.
The relativistic jets are actually matter falling towards the black hole, that is basically heated/accelerated by the varied tidal forces and ejected by the poles of the accretion disk before crossing the event horizon.

So black holes do eventually end up dissipating (we're not quite sure about what happens when they attain their minimal size, when they have the mass of a dust particle), though it's possible that they do turn into energy. Though at this point they were emitting so much energy that you may not see that of a difference.
(Fun fact : if you ever get your hands on a micro black-hole, you can try to use it as a perfect mass-energy converter by feeding it at the same rate as it evaporates. Singularity reactors are actually possible. And with the smallest and therefore most efficient, they would simply blow violently at the instant you stop feeding them.)

Except it doesn't. A star-mass black hole has the same exact effect than any other star-mass object like, say, a star. That it was before loosing a few belt sizes.

So why do you need a link if you give yourself the Sun as an example? Anyway, here is one.

As with any single object.

As with any single object that would magically appear out of nowhere in our solar system, violating nearly anything we know about the basic workings of our universe.
I don't hold my breadth, though.

You confuse "approach" and "fall into". And a big huge star would have more or less the same effect, simply hotter.

Ah, I understand now. You think thatGravity Sucks.
Warning : click the above link at your own risks.

Well, yes. My mistake. I automatically assume that blackhole should have mass much greater than any known "normal" object.

Yeap. But this is sci-fi and people would not believe in star suddenly emerging out of nowhere, while they would believe in blackhole doing the same. Just remember all this rumors around LHC. So, for sake of sci-fi blackhole is more than suitable doomsday device.

Well, no. I believe that "approach" is a correct word. Blackholes are heavy and small, so I suppose that gravity force will raise above (if blackhole is heavy enough, that is) intermolecular forces prior you reaching it's boundaries. Probably big huge star would do the same, but blackhole with same mass will do it with greater probability.

Well, that's why exactly the reason why blackhole "sucks" mass. In case of star it will melt down everything far before it will reach the stage of disintegration, while blackhole will disintegrade and "suck" the mass prior reaching the boundaries.

Only difference from common film "black hole" that molecular gas from disintegrated matter will not always fall straight into blackhole, but it will try to orbit it instead. But as soon as this matter somehow approached it before disintegrating, no matter of particular method, it will probably fall into blackhole eventually anyway (due to remaining impulse towards blackhole).