Hello everyone, I haven't been around here for quite some time. But there is a lot of things that I want to say whenever I play this game. First of all: PA is meant to be the spiritual successor of TA. The "cool" thing about it, is the interplanetary aspect. Orbital warfare and battles that span over multiple planets, hell you can even smash planets into each other. Sounds awesome, right? So basically what PA is, is a basic form of TA with interplanetary warfare on top of it. Now, to many people, after seeing the kickstarter trailer of this game, this appears to be the natural next step. Take a great RTS concept and make it bigger and more epic. But, what has to be said is that ideas that sound awesome in theory, don't always turn out to be awesome in practice. Also, the idea that just adding more content/features to a game doesn't necessarily make it better. So for example, if you'd add a puzzle sidegame to TA that you have to use to unlock new units while playing the game, just for the sake of having more features, then that doesn't mean that the game will be more fun. The same is true for interplanetary warfare. In contrast to the puzzle sidegame idea, intreplanetary warfare sounds awesome in theory. But that doesn't mean that just having more content in form of interplanetary warfare is automatically resulting in more fun. That means that interplanetary warfare in an RTS game like PA is not intrinsically good/fun. So what is creating fun in RTS games? What is the magic key to take an awesome concept and make it fun? Generally speaking, it varies from person to person what each one of them is considering "fun" in a game. But for RTS games, usually the key is to make our brains work. If a game is too easy, or choices are too limited and gameplay is too straightforward, it will become boring. So what is causing fun for players in RTS games, is strategic variety. Our brains want to be challenged in a way, that we can always think of new, valid strategies to use in every situation. It's the opposite of being forced into doing something. Summed up, I would say that difficult, strategic choices are the core of what's making RTS-games fun. Now with that in mind we can analyze the interplanetary aspect in PA and decide what is fun about it, and what is not. In respect to the current metagame, going orbital is quite difficult. If you go orbital that means, that you want to go to other planets, gather more ressources and/or just smash something. Spending too many ressources into orbital can quickly lose you the game, though. You will lose the ground battle and no matter whether you have your commander on another planet, your opponent will have a lot more ressources to play around with. And that means game-over in 99% of the cases. So it's not really a choice to go orbital or not. It is always dependent on your main plan: having more ressource-income than your opponent. If you can afford going orbital, and conquering new planets without risking your main-base to incoming doom, then you will always do it (or should if you want to win). But what are your choices anyway? If you're far enough into the game to smash a planet and thus defeat the enemy, you will always do it. If you have enough income to support T2 units instead of T1, you will always build them. If you can crush an enemy with an early push, you will always do it. Bots or tanks, air or naval, nukes or orbital laser planetforms, in the end it doesn't really matter how you destroy the enemy commander. It will depend on convenience, which path you'll choose. The path you're going through a game of PA is quite linear. More often than not it turns out into a numbers game. Expand, build factories and units, expand, build factories and units, and so on. Is my brain challenged when playing PA? Certainly. It's not an easy game to play. But, I don't really feel challenged in which units I'd like to choose. Because it doesn't really seem as if different units are attached to different strategies. Interplanetary warfare is just an eyecandy, expanding and at the same time limiting gameplay by making you play on multiple maps at once. The path is always given before the game even started: Have more ressources than your opponent, have more units than your opponent, have more planets than your opponent and please, if you don't know what to do, then just smash a planet. Balance still lacks, but it's not the main problem. Air-transports could be T1 for example, creating a much more dynamic playing field. Interplanetary gameplay is the main problem: if you lose your main base when going orbital and conquering other planets, there is rarely any way to come back into the game. And the main option is always to smash a planet. In which case it is just becoming a race against time. Can you build halleys quick enough, before your opponent can destroy you? That's a very simple question, and a very simple concept. Nothing bad about being simple, but my brain needs strategic challenges, and not "yes" or "no" questions. Greetings
Not completely sure what your point is... Air-transports used to be T1. And that resulted in the un-counterable strategy of commander rushing being in the game. There is literally no way to stop a air-transport uber cannon commander rush. The only way air transports are moving to T1 is if they can't move commanders, which isn't intuitive, which likely isn't happening. As for the issues with Orbital... we're getting there. Some of the biggest issues with Orbital is us not having full multi-window support which is tied heavily into optimizations. And we won't get a lot of the optimizations until right before launch. Once we have multi window support where we can resize and move around the windows... that'll be awesome and will make multi planet interaction a lot easier. It'll be awesome. Also. For Halleys. In the future they won't automatically destroy an entire planet. The damage will be proportional to the size of the smashing object and the object being smashed. Uber wants planet smashing to be common (like, multiple times in a match) and something you can recover from. So there's several fixes coming for the issues you bring up. We'll get there. The game isn't finished yet.
Interplanetary mechanics are quite difficult to talk about seriously without information about how asteroids (and the closely related planet-smashing) will work. Just remember there have been hardly any changes to the original implementation of interplanetary travel. It's probably the least touched category of thing in the game as of now, besides perhaps the planet builder. I don't really get your complaint about PA being Hyper Economy Fighter Turbo EX 2015. Its focus on an ever-expanding economy and armies is kind of the core of the game. All I can really tell you're saying is that planet-smashing bores you. Which is, indeed, an issue.
