Space / earth / ideas?

[DeathByTheSword]

i have a question how do you all think that space and the normal world will interact. because if you think about it if a spaceship would orbit a planet it could attack bases and stuff. and how will space fights will be played? and does anyone have any ideas or summary that allready been done? (i am too bussy to look it up on the freeAC forum )

[Rasbelin]

Currently AFAIK that aspect of the game hasn't yet been planned so much, but I would say that Blake might have some ideas about that. I personally don't yet have any.

But the space fights will be played on a mini combat map where the players will play more like realtime as that gives better chances to retaliate, etc. I'll have to look for the right post on FACF.

[DeathByTheSword]

ok tanx. If it hasnt been planned much here are some ideas:

*When a party has a dominance in space they can spacebombard bases on the ground. (2x as strong as normal artillary every ship can attack two bases but every city can only be attack one a turn)

*fighters, besides the huge cruisers and battleships one-man-spacecraft can be very effective for partol and stuff

*orbital facilities

[Joeno]

I think I can safely say space stuff is to be implemented Later. Some basic design is already being thought of - the map will possibly be able to use multiple 'layers', but we're really aiming for the basic game to work first before we complicate it even further with these kind of things.

[Blake]

I would be inclined to have the space stuff more like SMAC than CTP1, you might build orbital laser platforms that can be used to bombard any point on the map once per turn.. but you wont be able to (or have to) manually move them into position on a "space layer". Basically any space combat will be a numbers game rather than a tatical game....

Atleast that's how I think it should be implemented....

[Frozzy]

Well, I think you have the put in the stacking system, like in CtP1. It worked so well then, and was one of the most popular features of the game.

[NeOmega]

I posted two ideas in the time thread.... http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...threadid=62233

[Straybow]

In SMAC launching any orbital lets you see city locations. They should also let you see tile improvements—they are sitting out in the open.

A Spy Satellite would let you see unit positions as well. Orbital weapons need ammunition or consumable high-density energy materials (superheated gasses, etc), so they should be very limited in attack capabilities. Only a small, very high value target is worth attacking from orbit. SMAC's ICBM interdiction is a sensible limitation.

Eventually moon colonies, asteroid mining, etc make orbital heavy industry possible. Then attacking units and cities from orbit is possible.

[Blake]

Orbital weapons would be a ""Giant Laser"" and as such not require ammunition... early in FAC design a couple of orbitals where dreamed up:
An Orbital Bombard sat: Can bombard a single tile/turn, causing some damage.
Devesation Orbital: Can erase everything from a single tile per turn, Now you see your HQ, now you dont. 50 million vaporised. Obviously such a weapon would come late in the game. Prehaps there could also be defensive shields that can be used in cities. Saying it'd be quite expensive would be an understatement.

With spy sattelites, prehaps they orbit at geo-sync radius and can be set to spy at a certain point on the globe. This would be useful, realistic and much less unbalancing than getting complete unit information over the entire world.
Altough it is reasonable that "launch of the first orbital" gives a complete map of the world and broad features, like cities and tile improvements.

[NeOmega]

Orbitals should realistically be east to shoot out of the sky though, unless protected.

[DeathByTheSword]

maybe u can send spysats. in space and every turn you can let every spysat. look at a 4x4 (orso) area on the map. a little more realistic and removes the long turns from the AI a bit (i hope) and they get a tactical adv. to have and to shoot down! . this can be done with almost every sat. because they have to be controlled from earth they cost money to use

[XarXo]

The best form to avoid the space problem is just create an irregular square division by orbits, so when the planet gravity is bigger, bigger is the square division and smaller the size of them (smaller near to the planet).

The problem is how to implement the "x","y" and "z" coordinates (and the "t" if you include blach holes and other singularities).

[Blake]

I dont think it's a problem. In it's simplist form (which could be the best) the interface would work something like this:
- Press a button/hotkey to bring up orbitals dialog.
- Press another button/hotkey to choose the class (spy sat, etc) lets say you choose spy-sat.
- Now you get a list of currentely active spysats and their orders, you can click to select one, or just press a key to grab one with no orders.
- The mouse icon changes to indicate you are currentely ordering a spysat, click a point on the main map to have the spysat reveal that area the next turn. There would be other orders you could give:
ctrl-click: Reveal that area indefinitely (until you give a new order)
shift : queue orders. You could hold down shift and click points to be revealed each turn, you could also hold down shift and drag a line, the game will automatically calculate optimal waypoints to reveal a swath of territory along that line.

Thats one way of doing it that doesn't require a "space layer" and would get the job done with a minimum of fuss and the same procedure would work for any orbital that effects the planet below. Ground based orbital defenses would only be able to shoot at orbitals above the horizon and would help to prevent players stationing orbitals above enemy territory.
Orbital combat would have to work differentely, prehaps you can station oribtal defense stations at any point above the map

Random Idea:
On some scenerios prehaps you could start with an orbital mothership, you have a scan of the planet and can have the mothership target a point on the planet, it then lowers a space elevator and sets up your head quarters at that point. So you would start with a space elevator .

edit: The censor didn't like "shift" without an f

[DeathByTheSword]

I like the idea but i think those ground based defense stations and orbitals themself have to be limited, i mean be very expansive so that is will be a real advance over the enemy. not having 100 orbitals up there and in every city a defense against them that way you would cancel them out (the same way as Nukes get canceled out in CivII)

[Straybow]

TANSTAAFL

Originally posted by Blake
Orbital weapons would be a "Giant Laser" and as such not require ammunition... early in FAC design a couple of orbitals where dreamed up:

All lasers require ammunition or fuel. Electrical sources with sufficient current/power level are heavy to launch and require fuel: H2/O2 for fuel cells, D2 for fusion. Lightweight fission thermoelectrics don't have the current capacity for powering a laser weapon. The only laser weapons systems of launchable weight proposed with present day tech are bomb-pumped (nuclear, single-use) grasers. Gas-pumped lasers require consumable gasses (typically binary gasses burned together, such as H2 and Fl2).

An Orbital Bombard sat: Can bombard a single tile/turn, causing some damage.
Devesation Orbital: Can erase everything from a single tile per turn, Now you see your HQ, now you dont. 50 million vaporised. Obviously such a weapon would come late in the game. Prehaps there could also be defensive shields that can be used in cities. Saying it'd be quite expensive would be an understatement.

Attacking a ship might be one thing, an armor unit with many tanks another, while targetting infantry might be ineffective. In any case, mounting the same beam weapon on an airframe is far cheaper and nearly as difficult to prevent from getting within line-of-sight distance.

How many shots from an orbital laser would be required to destroy a terrain improvement, or city structures, much less dispersed dwellings? Compared to shelling with heavy naval guns, or multiple jet sorties, or cruise missiles launches over a long period of time (game turn), lifting ammo/supplies to orbit and attacking from there is many times more costly.

With spy sattelites, prehaps they orbit at geo-sync radius and can be set to spy at a certain point on the globe. This would be useful, realistic and much less unbalancing than getting complete unit information over the entire world.
Altough it is reasonable that "launch of the first orbital" gives a complete map of the world and broad features, like cities and tile improvements.

Synchronous orbit is very high and only useful for gathering gross data like weather patterns. Roads and small vehicles are invisible due to limitations of optical wavelength resolution (lamda·d/f). Spy satellites are universally employed in low orbit because you need to get relatively close (100s of km rather than 10ks of km) to gether useful data.

Highly elliptical paths allow spy satellites to dip lower than any stable circular orbit. Over a game turn one satellite can gather data from many locations by shifting orbits. On the downside, they require fuel to shift orbit for retasking, and typically only last a few years. Then they must be refueled, deorbited, or circularized for sustained lower resolution imaging.

A spysat would be in an inclined orbit to include as much general viewing area as possible. But since the orbit is known it is possible for the enemy to seek cover when it passes over. Retasking gives the enemy limited time to detect the change in orbit and transmit a warning. Cloud cover makes viewing impossible, and that can't be predicted. Thus gathering detailed data is probabilistic rather than deterministic.

A spysat would have movement points, and gathering detailed data from one tile would require a point. It would last for a fixed number of mp before running out of maneuvering fuel.