Ways of Planet transportation?

Haha this is funny. This is how I see it working. You have a planetary transport that can say move, i don't know 50 units (it could be more or less, depending on what tier it is) from your planet to another. That gives you some units to protect your engineers that will start building up a base. Of course you could have more then one planetary transport, so you could move 150 units if you have 3. Or if you had T2 transports they could carry more. I always thought that they would be more like a ship that would be in orbit and smaller transport ships would take units down to the planet, but the actual planetary transport could go into the atmosphere and drop the units if that would be better.

here is the scenario. enemy is on another planet, they have been for some time. You want to kill said enemy, but it is impossible because every engineer you land on the enemy's planet is killed before it can construct a significant force. The game is a stale mate.

No, the game is far from a stalemate you have many options available;

1] You chuck a KEW at it and call it a Day.

2] You send an asteroid/moon* into orbit and use a combination of factories and unit cannons to deliver a constant stream of units to the planet.

3] Send an asteroid into orbit* and use Nucks from it.(I don't quite agree with this, particularly given the current balance of Nucks, but Neutrino has mentioned it being a possibility)

4] Send Orbital units to the Planet to wreck havok either as a distraction or as a defensive play.

5] If his commander is not on that planet, ignore the planet and hunt him down, kill him and you win regardless of anything else.

*You didn't mention anything about the planet having a moon, but if it does you can use that instead.

That's the current options based on what we know so far, it's possible things will change between now and until Uber decides to stop updating PA.

Mike

So what did you think of my post up above?

1] if I understand a KEW, then this means the game will devolve in to an artillery spam fest.
2] this would work (and be really cool) but, many situations will arise where there are no asteroids left.
3] anti nukes always build faster than nukes so you would never win unless it was a surprise (which it could be)
4] Ion cannon / orbital fighters
5] what if he is on the planet?

I for one think your post is just right. I think transports could use droop pods to deliver units to the planet because droop pods are cool.

Well you could argue that machines they dont really care. Not to mention its easier and faster with their technology to just send 1 and build more.

Its even like we talk about in the far future, send out one probe to a planet have it build x copies of it self send out in all directions and continue.

Its just faster and more efficient to send one and stand on site production. traveling in space takes a lot of resources and energy.

I have nothing against being able to move units between planets, but it should be expensive.
because then when one player in a game of say 20 players, "they dont all start on same planet". has won his planet, he just moves all his units and takes the rest one by one, thats way to easy, and then game is basically over no matter if you are 500 players in a game, when the first player conquers his planet.

and ify ou wanna kill a turtle player, well its easier to just smash asteroids into his planet than trying to get down there and take it over, if he is so heavily fortified.

Its very important to keep a balance to keep long games fun and interesting.

Droop? Is that a typo or are you making fun of me?

Read this post here.

I don't think we can accurately plan out how such a unit would work, we just don't have enough context, my gut tells me it'll be really hard to balance against the other things like Unit Cannons and such because Cost as a primary balance lever is.....not good.

1] KEW is the slang for the Asteroid that rams the planet causing it to potentially explode, naturally it's a bad end for anything on the planet, so not artillery in any sense of the word really.

2]That's working under teh assumption that asteroids are finite, and while not unreasonable we also don't know how many asteroids will be available as 'standard for PA yet, Neutrino has mentioned that he like to have tools in the System editor to "auto-populate" Asteroid Belts with Asteroids, so it might be not as much of a limit as you fear.

3]But the thing about Nucks is that the Anti-Nucks only work where they are built where as Nucks can be launched ay "any" point, you could use Nucks to defend your new base on the planet for example if you're good enough with your timing and such, also it's possible he just might not have Anti-Nucks at all(not that I'd rely on that being the case mind you) and it could even be possible to overwhelm An Anti-Nuck if all the numbers line up, it's very dependent on the exact situation.

4] If he has them, you can also send your own Orbital fighters as well, remember that in terms of Orbital, under the current system anything He has, you can send over as well. Also if Ifs got the entire planet covered with Ion cannons, he's wasted a lot of resources on something you are never forced to use.

5] If he is on the planet than any of the 4 other potential solutions are applicable. It's just more so that you don't need to raze the entire planet, just as much as you need to in order to get access to the Commander. If he's fortified the planet such that normal RTS tactics don't work and he's foolishly hiding his Commander on the same planet, just crash KEWs into it, based on the resources he needs to spend to fortify an entire planet chances are you should have a pretty strong grip on the rest of the system, even more so if he didn't use his commander for any kind of interplanetary expansion.

Mike

sry drop pods (like Halo)

Will say the 1 thing im slightly worried about is what happens when 1 player gets enough time to move their commander to another planet and then fortify the crap out if it.

Example, spamming anti-orbital gun's and orbital fighter's. The only thing you'd kinda be able to do is keep sending your orbital transport over hoping if you do enough at once one will break thru, but then it's probably not going to survive too long on the ground if the defender was serious about keeping them off.

Then you've got 2 players, 1 planet each, both fortified up the wazoo.... how do you end that? oh oh, no moons either by the way.... so cant setup an asteroid as a front door breaker.

Orrrrrrrrrrr just crash an asteroid into it.

That's more so an issue of trying to play the game the way it isn't meant to be played, like complaining about a No Nukes No Air No Artillery NR20 Thermoplea Game of SupCom FA has broken balance.

Mike