[WIP][Server] Orbital Warfare Overhaul

Whats exactly the wraith? in-game its just an orbital fighter, but in the description it says that it is for scout purposes, light firepower and recon. So in other words, it would be some kind of spaceship even lighter and smaller than the orbital fighter? Perhaps an starfighter?

So:

Wraith - Starfighter class. Very small ship. It is the fastest orbital type unit. It is designed for recon and scouting purposes, it has very few health points and weak weapons, although that if they are used in swarms they can be a nightmare for other ships that don't have point defense turrets such as the Excalibur. (Plus dogfighting in space sounds awesome).
http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2...nt_fighter_ortho_by_unusualsuspex-d77oil4.jpg



Avenger - Interceptor class. Small/medium sized ship and the second fastest. It doesn't have much health, but its strengths are its combination of speed and weapons that deal significant damage to all the different types of orbital units.

Hammerhead - Corvette class. Medium/Big sized ship. It's point defense turrets are really effective against Wraiths and avengers, but against greater and bigger ships they lack of firepower.

Excalibur - Cruiser class. Big sized ship. High health points. Very slow. It's main cannon deals a lot of damage to other orbital units, but it is very hard for it to attack fast moving targets such as the wraith and the avengers. For that it is recommended to escort it with hammerheads for protection purposes.

Hailfire - Siege Frigate class. Big sized ship designed to attack planets and destroy units that are inside its atmosphere. It cant attack other orbital units and it is a pretty slow unit, so it needs other types of spaceships to escort and protect it from other orbital units.

That sounds like great plan, isn't it?

EDIT:

I was using Rescale factor 0.4 mod so all the ground units were way smaller than vanilla, this made the orbita units look giant in comparison, I did not notice that until now lol

Spaceships aren't that big as you posted in the comment below, but I think it would be nice if they were bigger. The only problem is that the orbital hangar facility would be too small... what if you resized it and made it bigger? Then you would have more freedom with ship sizes.

Yeah, we totally did all that stuff on purpose just like that. We ordered it in that way in our documents and totally didn't just add new units as we thought of them without a plan.

Honestly though, I just see them all under the category of "small ship" and "slightly bigger ship" TBH. And the wraith is an advanced scout, it's a bit more expensive than the avenger, and might even end up being bigger than the avenger, but it's mostly used as a support vessel.

Continuing the update spam:

added the "lancer", a long-range, high-powered anti-orbital railgun capable of blowing most orbital units or structures out of the sky. However it has a pretty long recharge and pretty huge energy demand so don't expect it to save the day by itself.

Just posting this here as well. Most of these new units do not have a dedicated model yet, but I will be working on the models soon.

In the future we may add units to a private build of the mod and make it public when they have a model and are more polished.

I think the wraith vision is broken. I kept a wraith over the enemies base without realizing it was the base and I couldn't see any of his structures or units.

That's odd. It works for me. This shouldn't be part of the issue, but what was your economic efficiency at the time?

Excess power but stalling metal.

I was using Rescale factor 0.4 mod so all the ground units were way smaller than vanilla, this made the orbita units look giant in comparison, I did not notice that until now lol

Spaceships aren't that big as you posted in the comment above, but I think it would be nice if they were bigger. The only problem is that the orbital factory would be too small... what if you resized it and made it bigger? Then you would have more freedom with ship sizes (or even you could resize all the units and buildings the achieve the size and scale you were expecting for).

BTW what do you think about starfighters dogfighting in the orbital layer? do you have other plans for more units and features? Maybe you are considering the addition of dropships or drop pod - ing ground units from space carriers? I can't wait to see more updates

http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/236x/5d/08/2a/5d082ac1464f6c082297d8d18109008e.jpg
http://www.cooldadstoys.com/assets/images/lego/70701-prod1.jpg

Shhh. Don't give away the surprises.

UPDATE:

Added latest commanders to unit list (so they now have build bars when you play with them) changed the anti-orbital railgun so that it area builds in a sphere and has better spacing. Also nerfed teleporter HP to 1/3 of it's original value so that you have to protect it and really establish a beachhead.

Played a match with this mod today, and I got a server.exe crash when I sent a couple of BlueHawks to attack a target. The sim completely froze followed by a windows error message. I am not using any bluetooth software AFAIK. The only software I had running in the background was FRAPS.

After the server.exe crash, I got kicked back to the main menu with a "Connection to server lost" screen.

EDIT: I was using the Orbital Warfare, CPlosion, and Custom Skybox mods.

The PA log is attached below.

Yeah, we've been seeing this issue every once in a while, we're not quire sure what causes it. Did you specifically target something with the bluehawks?

EDIT: I also notice you have multiple particle effect overloads and by multiple I mean hundreds of them, is that normal for you?

I targeted a metal extractor with the Bluehawks when the crash occurred.

And about the particle effect overloads, this only happened when I enabled your mod. When I tested a game without your mod, no particle effect overloads occurred.

would you mind attempting to re-create the crash by targeting more ground units with bluehawks? I want to see if that caused the crash. Otherwise I'll take a look at the particle system...

I tried to reproduce the crash with Bluehawks, but no crash occurred and I was able to finish the match.

I still got particle system overload errors in the latest PA log attached below.

all right. We've found the crash source to be really hard to pin down, so we're not quite sure if it's even our mod that's causing it. But I'll definitely look into the particle effect overloads.

Disable CPlosion, run a test game and then check the log for those same particle effect overloads without that mod. I'm pretty sure that since CPlosion directly modifies particle effects, it's the culprit. Makes sense right? It could be a cross-tie between that mod's effects and the large amount of thruster particles being used by the ships. That's only a guess though.

This mod really adds something that PA lacks, thanks for putting this together. Imo, I think these ships should be really expensive in metal compared to what they are now, not because I'm against having them, but because it makes sense that they would be expensive. It makes the fights and hold of orbital more tense/valuable/strategic as well when the price of the ships is high. It is the final frontier after all. Any plans for a 'carrier' ship?

Was going to keep it a secret, but a few people have hinted at it already.
We will in the near future be looking at implementing an orbital multi unit transport and possibly an avenger carrier of sorts.

That's awesome! Hope you don't encounter many problems while you tryo to manage to implement that thing, can't wait to make massive planetary invasions !!


I Wonder what kind of transport Carrier you have in mind... It could be a giant ship that lands and deploys troops, or a ship that enters the atmosphere and deploys units using dropships. Or even a spaceship droping orbital drop pods to the planet. I think it would be nice if you could transport aircraft too, not only ground units. What about assault carriers being able to produce/use antinuke/nuke missiles too? This way you could defend your units from incoming nukes, or even clear a landing zone.