UI suggestion and asteroid belts

Hey everyone,

I had an idea for the interplanetary UI. It's a bit complicated, but let me just tell you about it:

But first, let's talk about asteroid belts.

Asteroid belts would introduce a serious problem: Either the UI has to provide us with means to play a game on 50 or more celestial bodies at once, or it will be unplayable. But it could be circumvented.

My idea was to shift gameplay from planetary to interplanetary view a bit. There'd simply have to be some commands that you could use in interplanetary view. You'd access them by clicking on a planet, a window would open with a list of all of your units on that planet. Then you could give those units orders from interplanetary view. Just keep in mind that in most cases you can only select all of one unit type. But in most cases that's exactly what you want to do.

For example:
By clicking on the orbital fighter icon, it will select all your orbital fighters on that planet.
Then you could give them orders like patrol, which would make them patrol the whole orbit.
Attack, which would make them group up and attack stuff.
Travel, which would make them travel to another planet.
Defend, which would make them circle over your base and defend it.
Attack, which would make them circle over the enemy base and attack anything there.

And maybe even more commands. To make the defend and attack commands possible, we'd have to be able to "draw" something into our "map". Sounds strange, but just follow along and you'll find rich rewards.

What I mean is that there could be a button that let's us designate an area, with which we could define certain points of interest on a planet. For example an enemy base, our own base, clumped up metal spots, strategic terrain advantages and so on. Some of the orders, like attack and defend, would work in conjunction with this. Another good thing about it, is that your teammates see the points you have marked, too. Which would make voiceless communication that much easier. Also they would be visible from interplanetary view, and they'd be interactive.

Now there are some special cases for orders that I'd like to mention:
- Clicking on a dox, or any other land unit, and telling it to travel to another planet, will pop up a slider, with which you can set the amount of doxes, then will look for the nearest transport automatically.

- Clicking on any unit and telling it to attack will group it up (into multiple groups) and attack anything on the planet.

- You can click on the nuke symbol, and it will show you how many nukes you have on that planet. Then you select the amount that you want to use and the destination, all from interplanetary view.

- Selecting a fabricator will give you a few options:
Build energy: They will automatically build energy in an area that you have designated before.
Build mexes: They will automatically build mexes on the whole planet, but try to avoid enemies. If you have designated an area of mex spots, then they will prioritize that area first.
Build other structures: You can set the amount of structures and the fabricators will build them in the area you have designated (your base, in most cases).
And the orders that other land units have, too.

Maybe there could be more, you guys probably have some ideas on this, too.

This would really help automate some aspects of the game, and make this game truly unique. It would increase enjoyablity immensely, I think.

But wait, there's more!

Let's just get back to asteroid belts for a second. Even with commands like that, and the possibility to manage our planets from space, having so many celestial bodies will still not be very fun to play, just because you'd have to click on every tiny asteroid individually and fight over them invidvidually and scout them individually...

What about area commands in space? Just an idea

Greetings everybody.

Space area commands sounds promising, it would likely need to ignore planetoids over a certain size; assuming asteroids are crazy small compared to even a size 1 planetoid, (Slightly off-topic: asteroids should need less Haley's to move or small planets need more?), this way orbital combat units can reliably patrol small bodies, it would be infeasible otherwise i think, what with them orbiting a each planet in the zone some 20 to 500x depending on radius before moving on.

Also don't forget the egg; if it works anything like i think it should, the egg will more or less place the necessary hardware on the asteroid no fuss, which would reduce some of the fuzzy area's of you arachnis' proposal (area build preselected? buildings, although that might be a good idea in an of itself for any build related area command.

I love the idea of having icons around a planet to select orbital units.

Id love buttons to have a per planet AI Activate-able.

Would Lift a lot of the hard work off a single player when handling the larger battles PA will have.
I'm talking about the the big systems that everybody wants to play on, with 5-10 planets.

I don't know if the game can support too many interplanetary interactions though. There would need to be an expansion of orbital/space layers alongside your suggestions.

What do you mean by that? I'm just suggesting to automate some tasks, and make the game playable via interplanetary view.

Do you have any examples in mind?

Of course there would be many possibilities to exploit area commands in space combined with asteroid belts. (Asteroid Belt Wars?)

For example there could be a rocket-jump unit that is deployed in an asteroid belt, and that can travel between asteroids. You could give it the area command for patrolling and i would roam the asteroids you designated.

You could give satellites the command to scout several asteroids at once, and giving you the information in interplanetary view via a small pop-up screen or something.

Same for fabricators that want to abuse the metal spots on the asteroids, and same for invasions through land units that're getting transported by some device or shot out of a unit cannon. The units would split up equally between the asteroids you choose.

I fell like I should state that while the game is in beta, the orbital and planet system isn't.....mainly because it hasn't been done for a rts before, and so is likely to have some rough edges and hurdles to get over so it stops feeling like a barrier and a problem, and more like a part of the terrain to be exploited and thought about.

There's no reason to think we need to treat individual asteroids the way we handle planets, especially the smallest ones. If the entire asteroid belt were a single entity we interact with via the celestial view we could sharply reduce the demands on the player and the PC running the game.

Right now only planets are zoomable in the celestial UI. Small rocks can be low poly renders that are non-zoomable. Large rocks we land on can be rendered as well, but only become "planets" for landing as needed. An asteroid belt could contain thousands, or even tens of thousands of low poly rocks. If most are non-zoomable we can spawn new planetoids for building on when an old one is destroyed or shifted out of orbit. that way we can still have unlimited large asteroid bases for annihilating planets, but we don't have to worry about managing 1000 "planets" at once.

We can also make units that interact with the smaller rocks by building simple structures on them automaticly. Instead of a "base" on a tiny planet we convert a random rock into a "unit" by sending a special worker to place a missile silo or haleys on it. It looks like you built a tiny base, but with none of the UI overhead or any of the CPU demands that come with a planet. A simple "Add engine", or "add umbrella" would be enough. It would just light up on our celestial view as an object of interest (like a unit in transit) and would have some basic orders. It may become zoomable, but it doesn't involve creating a pathing map for units or simulating any new orbits.

Rocks this size would also be too small to fight over, so no landing units on them. If it's got an engine and is threatening you, just use a nuke, or some other anti-asteroid weapon to wipe it out completely.

Edit: An additional thought.

I like the idea of area commands on asteroid belts. We could tell our orbital fabbers to build engines on every suitable rock in an area, or tell our avengers to hunt every fabber in an area. If the rocks are not "planets" then we don't need to worry about a separate surface and orbital layer, so our avengers can destroy the engines or defenses we find.

Yeah, could make the asteroid belt a kind of asteroid spawning area, sending in engineers only to equip continent busters, as they can't do anything else.

...to equip continent busters, or put up area defenses to discourage enemy engineers from equipping continent busters. I would like to equip some of the rocks with missile or laser batteries to deter enemy workers from building engines in my area.

If the entire asteroid belt were treated like an orbital arena it would make a lot more sense. We could send avengers and spy satellites to patrol it for enemy fabbers or clear out enemy defenses so that our fabbers can get the rocks weaponized.

Would be the perfect place to flush out the orbital and nuclear play.

Hide and seek with firecrackers.

I like your style. So would this entail treating the asteroid belt as a flat "ring" planet, more or less? Perhaps a UI alert when a new asteroid "spawns" to explain it away - "New Asteroid Detected".

EDIT: What if the Asteroid Layer hides orbital units from Orbital Radar?

Could have smaller rocks crash into unstable, usable rocks and brake into stable weaponizible ones.

Also how would we impliments ground units into these?

Could we have jump jet bots to 'island' hop?

Those engineers from the kick starter were little luna lander units, we could just use these to try and have little reclaimer wars in-between the satellites attempting to snipe each other.

And as for uses, what about limiting each rock into a single use, like having a power plant, but then having no more space, so you could have singular rocks for a specific purposes.

Pretty much. The camera could drop down along the solar plane looking away from the sun. Left/right would rotate you along the orbit path, while up/down would slide your view along the north/south axis. Asteroids could sit at varying depths away from the camera to give the illusion of a 3D play area, while keeping your units on the actual ring. "Spawning" a new asteroid could be done by moving an asteroid from the "near" or "far" areas into the actual play field. If you spawn asteroids behind the player's camera it would be pretty much invisible and would never seem out of place when it drifts into the playable belt. Unused asteroids could also drift out of the play depth, creating an ever changing combat zone that looks hectic while still being very simple to play in.

From the celestial view we would see the whole belt and could use depth of field effects to blur the exact edges of the asteroid field so it's not obvious when something has to be added at run time.

Larger asteroids would still be treated like planets when we zoom in on them, but I don't think they should have their own orbital layer. Zooming out for orbital should return you to the asteroid belt's orbital layer.

We think very much alike Pandaelose

Asteroid Belt Wars!

Well, just, what interplanetary stuff is in the game that you would need ui for it?

I didn't want to automate the interplanetary stuff only, but also some ground gameplay. And yes, you're right some aspects of the game would have to be expanded in conjunction to my suggestions.

Asteroid belts would add a whole new gameplay mechanic.

perhaps asteroid belts could function as mostly an orbital playground with a ring type surface instead of a sphere

I read this thread and I really like the idea of asteriod UI and how to colonize an asteriod. However There is a few quips I have with the idea.

I like the idea of having low poly Asteroids that when "activated" by an orbital engineer that colonizes on it, it becomes zoomable and useable for the player, and develops its polygons for construction. The engineers can then have simple endgame technology they would build on the asteroid to fit certain designs.

I don't like the idea of it becoming an "Icon" and represents something that you wanted it to do. I feel that limits the diversity of what an asteroid can offer if it was to be multi-use. Icon's fighting icons in space don't feel strategic to me but more "dice roll" of did he have more avenger icons then me? he must of won. Icon battles on land are controllable... I just can't see how having avengers fighting in asteroid belts yields the same strategic icon battles on a planet.

I also don't like the idea of "automatic base building" since I feel the asteroid is doing something outside of my finite control. Maybe I just wanted to have an asteroid as a placebo effect of existing instead of actually using it.

Not bashing your ideas pendalose they seem cool, I just prefer 1 out of the many i guess.