FreeOrion

I'm not assuming they will exist, i'm proposing that they should exist.

Is that aimed at MikkoM or me? I'm not proposing that the orbitals be "discreetly buildable", but that as the defense meter increases, new defense orbitals are automaticly appear.


An equally valid statement: "Planetary Missile Bases mostly duplicate the function of a ship (without interstellar engines), and so are redundant."
Orbitals can serve precisly the same function as ground based, trans-atmosphereic weapons. They have the additional advantage of lending themselves to easy, obvious display.
Both kinds of weapons are distinct from ships in the following ways:

* They can't manuver (they stay in an unchanging orbit until they get blow up)
* They are cheaper than the equivalent firepower in ship form-- the logical trade-off for their lack of manuverability.
* they might be distinct in other ways, such as being automatically linked in a group. I.E. if you select one orbital, and choose a target, all orbitals will attack that target when they can.

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Good that you weren't, though in case others were, I felt it needed to be noted.


I have the same thoughts on ground-based weapons as I do on orbitals...


If number/type of orbitals is primarily determined by a meter, then what happens on the turn after the orbitals are blown up? Do they all regenerate for the next turn's battles, or are they depleted and take a while to regenerate somehow?

Number of remaining orbitals (etc) could be tracked by current defense meter value (assuming such a meter), with the max number possible dependent on the max meter value... but:
* That would mean that number of orbitals is the only thing that can be tracked by current defense meter value, as otherwise you'll have missile bases blow up / disappear when orbitals are shot at, or unrelated damage destroying orbitals (the latter being more plausible)
* If planetary shield strength is also dependent on meter value, then how would it be tracked separately from number of orbitals?

For the shields issue, one possibility would be to have the planetary shield strength depend on the max meter value, and have the max meter value not depend directly/strongly on weapons fire during a battle. That is, the planetary shield would be Hoth-like, and strong enough to withstand any bombardment, requiring the use of ground troops or other means to disable it, and leaving the current and max meter values independent enough to usefully track the two things separately.


Cheaper? If orbitals are a function of a defense meter, they're essentially free, as the meter will presumably grow itself without spending anything on it.

Regardless, it's probably premature to make such assumptions about how balancing will work... The ability to produce defenses far from a shipyard might be strategically very useful and worth making the orbitals very weak in comparison to equivalent-tech ships.

Buildings, appearing in a battle is hardly irrelevant. If there is never a shipyard in a battle, then the enemy never gets a chance to have a goal of "destroy there shipyards". The only way to achieve such goals is to drop bombs, and hope random destruction hits a shipyard. We need to think of what strategic goals there are in a battle for the player to attack/exploit.


I think anything that is temporary or undecided or not final, should always be open for finalisation. Almost every 4X space game has orbitals. So I think it is a time waster to remind us of the obvious, cause I think it is clear that we will eventually have orbitals, if some of us get our way .


Weak points elezar.

Orbitals:
-Able to get larger orbitals sooner than larger ships, as they do not face the same forces as a ship in warp travel.
-Restricted to planetary orbit, so only has manuevering thrusters for orbit adjustment.
-May have colony onboard.
-Resupplied immediately, and do not use fuel.

The point is there are minute differences between an orbital, system ship and interstellar ship. Whatever the differences, they have strategic implications.



Utilae's Defensive Proposal - Codename: DefensePlan01
The main goal of this defense system is to simply and abstract planetary and system defenses, but also allow for player customisation to the level of buildings, and all without the micromanagement.

Overview
In a screen, the "Defense" screen, the player is presented with a view of a mockup solar system, with random planets and the systems perimeter clearly defined. It is here that the player will create one or more Defense Plans that may be applied to any and all systems in the players empire. The players available defensive technology is listed on the left side of the screen, with the system map on the right. By defining sectors using the different defensive technologies, the defense plan can be saved and then applied simply to any system in the empire. A defensive meter for each system will determine the development level of the defense plan. When the defense meter is full, the defense plan is in full effect. When it is empty or not full, the defense plan is inactive or partially active (eg mines not ready yet, but orbitals active).

All defense items are selected and placed within desired sectors (inner or outer orbits/planet). Since the enemy fleet may enter from any direction, a good defensive plan may have to cover all appoach sectors. A defense plan can be applied to any system regardless of number of planets and system contents.

Orbitals
Created in the ship design screen. Then in the defense plan screen, orbitals of selected design are placed within the orbital sector.

Defenses
Shield - an energy shield around an entire planet
Ground to space weapons - a ground base that fires beam or missile based or other weapons at targets in space
Ground to ground defenses - determines the planets resistance to ground invasions, involves stationary weapons, troops and mobile armour. No plan to layout defenses at this point, just a 'ground defense meter'.
System Bases - placed on moons, asteroids or under there own power, in outer sections of the system. Such bases may be missile/beam/fighter/etc bases. May possibly have 'ground defense meters'
Mines - Certain sectors winth the system littered with mines (even coverage through sector).
Other - eg gathering points for ships currently in the system

Example
You desire to create a basic defense plan. You place one shield generator on the planet. One missile base on the planet. Some system bases are placed on moons in the outer sectors of the system (four, covering quarters). Mines are placed in some inner sectors. Ships that would be in the system are evenly destributed on two waypoints situated in front of and behind the planet (in battle the ships will start here).

Well, in that case, there's a certain rationality to the opinion. The game could work without planetary weapons (orbital or otherwise). It's a position i might be converted to in spite of my preference for planetary weapons.
However, since this is a game element that goes all the way back to MoO1, i don't think they should be hastily discarded. I like them because their function is obvious, there is no need to constantly avoid selecting the defensive contingent, when grabbing fleets for attack. Once placed, i know that planet has protection no mater what happens to my fleets.

Also if there are no planetary weapons the case for having system-only ships is strengthened.


This should work the same way i presume that the infrastructure meter of a bombed planet reacts.
When a planet is bombed (and the shields are down or not totally effective) the current value of the infrastructure meter should be decreased in keeping with the damage done. The max value would remain unchanged, and after the bombardment the current value would being to climb again at it's normal rate. Population and explicit-buildings may also be destroyed, but that's not relevant here
Similarly any destroyed orbitals decrease the current value planetary defensive weapons meter. And would be rebuilt, up to the currently possible max at the same rate they were originally built.



I agree that it's very problematic to try to cram all these things into a single meter. That's why i proposed shields and weapons should have separate meters, and that there be no trans-atmospheric missile bases.


"Free" is the ultimate embodiment of "cheap." However i admit to not thinking that statement all the way through.


FURTHER THOUGHTS:

The maximum range of planetary weapons should be rather short, i.e. because otherwise planets will be able to attack each other with their weapons. In situations where enemies both have planets in the same system, this would create a large number of rather uninteresting battles.
The two planets just sit there and barrage each other. Tactical choices: none.

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Well what I was trying to do with my proposal was to build some sort of a system for these defensive buildings as was done with regular buildings.

Here the defensive orbitals would be the "special buildings" that the player builds on some key locations within his/hers empire to strengthen the defensive readiness of for example some thin parts of the empire or to secure their home world etc. This is also the reason why I wanted these orbitals to be under quite heavy maintenance costs, since if ships are also under maintenance costs you couldn`t build these orbitals all around your empire without reducing the amount of ships that you can build. And there are very good reasons to build more ships than orbitals, which are mostly related to their ability to move around in your empire or attack other empires.

And what comes to the question of how these orbitals could be special I already had a couple of thoughts about the sizes, since there could be orbitals that are much bigger than any of the ships, maybe like DS9 and those space docks in Star Trek and so could withstand a lot more damage and have a lot more weapons than any of the ships and so put up a good fight against attacking fleets. And then some orbitals might be a lot smaller than ships, but you could build many of them so their combined fire power would be great. There might also be other advantages that others have mentioned in their posts.

The other defensive buildings, like planetary shields, beam bases, missile bases, fighter bases etc. would be “the not so special buildings that will be on every planet” and together form the basic level of defence for the planet in question. Now this basic level of defence shouldn`t of course be too strong, since otherwise it would always take a tremendous effort from the attacker to conquer a planet/system. However it should be strong enough to withstand attacks from a very small fleet and of course support the defensive efforts of your fleets.

Now the reason why I have come up with this sort of a“complicated system” is that I don`t want to build all of the defensive buildings separately on every planet, since it would take a considerable amount of micromanagement. However I am also not very happy about leaving the defensive readiness of the planets completely to the AI in a meter solution. Instead of that I would like to have a hybrid solution where the not so interesting strategic decisions would be left to the meter, which hopefully would be even player controllable on planet basis, and the interesting strategic decisions would be directly under player’s control.



As you might not see any purpose for having weapons on a planet and for the orbitals, I can`t see this kind of a system adding anything useful to the game, especially if there are no planetary weapons/orbitals.

Now without the planetary weapons/orbitals this kind of a system would mean that if there is no enemy fleet in an enemy system you could just send a huge fleet of troop transports to the system, land your ground troops and probably take control of the whole system. Also once other empires and diplomacy are included to the game, the negative effects of this kind of a system would only increase, since if your fleets are fighting against a powerful enemy on one side of your empire, your neighbours could just declare war to you and take control of a large number of your star systems with “a troop transport blitzkrieg” on the other side of the empire before your fleets could react to the problem.

This would seem at least to me to be quite a high price for making ground troops distinctive from ship to ship weapons. Also having planetary weapons and orbitals in a system, could still allow troop transport attacks, but would also require the attacker to use normal ships to destroy the planetary weapons/orbitals or to protect the troop transports, and would also lead to attacker ship casualties. So the attacker would have to think about if such an attack would be worthwhile. Also as ground combat might damage the infrastructure of the planet in question, it might be desirable to reduce the amount of ground combats.

In addition, one good reason for having planetary weapons/orbitals could be that they give the player/ the AI a change to move their fleets around more freely, since your planets can defend themselves from some enemy attacks. Like eleazar said:



And if there are no planetary weapons and orbitals there is the question of, How do we explain this to the player? Why he/she is unable to build weapons on his/her planets, which produce the resources for the empire, house the population and take a considerable amount of his/hers time to be managed? Now at least to me it would seem that the planets have quite a big role in the game, so it would only seem natural to offer them some sort of way to defend themselves.



Others have already commented this matter, but my point behind this was that if a building is important enough that the player builds it, the building is most likely then also important enough for the enemy to destroy and so it might be worthwhile to appear in space combat.



Well I see that there currently is a defense orbital in the game and see no reason for removing things similar to it from the player build able items. Therefore I am hoping that defensive orbitals will exist.

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When I refer to "planet(ary) weapons", I mean anything attached to the planet that is a weapon (does damage, rather then protecting against damage), be it orbital or not.

Assuming there are planetary defense meters that are dependent on factors such as colony development level and which take time to grow to their max value, planetary weapons don't really eliminate this need, in general. Planet weapons could do so for a particular system / planet that is highly developed and well-defended by its weapons and (presumably) shield alone... However, many planets won't be sufficiently self-defended to be able to leave unprotected by fleets, which means that the player has to check each system when decided whether and how much to leave defensive fleets to augment that particular system's own defenses.

In all but brand-new colonies, it's reasonable to assume and require that whatever planet weapons and defenses are available would be enough to prevent just any piddly enemy ship from single-handedly destroying everything in the system. Having this wouldn't require actual weapons on the planets though, as long as the planets' defenses (eg. shields) are sufficient to stop trivial bombardment by enemy fleets.

However if we want to have any sort of blockading of systems, in which an enemy fleet is present and stops an incoming and outgoing physical resource transfers, then we likely need a few things:
* Shields strong enough that it's probably for there to be situations where one empire has enough fleet strength to hold a system and blockade it, but not enough fleet strength to actually break through the shield to capture the planet.
* Limited range planet weapons, or none at all, so that it's possible to have a fleet in a system without it being in range of the hostile planet's weapons. This has two advantages:
1) As suggested, it prevents hostile planets in the same system from having a meaningless battle against eachother each turn
2) Similarly, it lets a blockading fleet be in a system with a weapon-encrusted planet without actually battling the planet every turn.

Ensuring #2 might be tricky if we have meter-based planet weapons, as likely the blockading fleet will want to elminate the weapons attached to the planet. If we have no way of depeting these meters outside of a battle, then there will be motivating to have an essentially trivial battle each turn. Also: I don't like the idea of abstracted such battle, so that every few turns the blockader randomly loses a ship to to planet's weapons. Conversely, if there are no planet weapons to eliminate, then we don't have to worry about how to eliminate them every turn.

Alternatively, we could stipulate that planet's don't regenerate their weapons turn-by-turn if an enemy empire controls space in a system. To control a system (allowing blockade), you'd need to eliminate all enemy planets' weapons.

I'm also a bit weary of needing to compare fleet strength with planet weapon strength if the two are measured in sufficiently different ways. A meter value doesn't compare well to a mixed bunch of ships in a fleet, and I don't think we can really generate a comparison-ready single fleet strength value for the fleet...


Seems reasonable.


It seems a bit excessively to have two (or more?) meters for planet defense; we shouldn't add more meters than absolutely necessary. That said, I'm leaning towards seeing it as justified.


Why not just build ships and station them where needed? Why do we need a separate class of buildable item to do this?


Them being bigger or smaller doesn't mean anything right now, as it doesn't imply a strategic distinction to justify their existance.


You might have trouble doing this if the planet you were trying to attack had lots of ground troops to defend. And regardless, your suggestion has the orbitals being at the few rare special planets... so most planets would have only minor defenses and thus would be vulnerable to large fleets in either case... unless the defensive player left fleets there to protect the system.


As above, if you have all your forces away from a border, it's vulnerable regardless of what sort of defenses are possible, unless those defenses are excessively strong.


As noted, even if there are no planetary weapons, the presence of a shield that can stop trivial attacks does this.


This is a realism argument, however I'll humour you: Ships are built a shipyards, which are specialized facilities that just every planet doesn't have. Planets can contribute to the empire pool of industry to help build the ships, but they are actually assembled at the shipyard. So, you can build powerful spaceweapons at shipyards, but not anywhere else.


We need to justify adding something, not the other way around. That it's present as a temporary feature of a previous design for a system that wasn't yet being seriously designed doesn't have any importance to me.

The way I'd do this is ask the blockading player "attack planets or control the warp points?" If he chooses the later then not a shot will be fired and the system is blockaded. If he chooses the former a tactical battle starts.

If there is a defence fleet in the system then the defence player gets the choice "intercept fleet or hide near planet?" thus giving both sides the chance to initiate the battle.

This solves the problem, it allows blockading planets without requireing a trivial battle or abstracted combat. It also makes it possible to have a siege against fortress planets.


Agreed.


This is also one of the reasons I want to see planetary defences, while sending you're whole fleet to the eastern front should make you an easy target on the west, you should have some defences.

True, but there is an important difference between "vulnerable" and "defenceless", in this situation you should be vulnerable.


I disagree, if you have enough ships to crack a shield, then you can crack an infinite amount of shields without losing a single ship. Quite a different situation than when the planet has lasers and missiles.

It seems to me Geoff that the goals we want to accomplish with the planetary defensive buildings seem to be quite different. The way I see it, your main goal here seems to be, to make the ground combat an equally important part of the game as space combat.

Whereas my goal is to give the player some breathing room by allowing him/her to build defences all around the empire and fortify some strategically important locations, so you don`t have to be scared to death every time a fleet belonging to another empire moves on the galaxy map. Now this might mean that ground troops only have a secondary role compared to ship to ship weapons and I am willing to except that.

However a system that I have suggested could still leave some room for ground troops as well, as you could use them in situations like:
- The planet that you are attacking has no defensive buildings
- The planet that you are attacking has only a planetary shield (assuming of course that troops can be send through a planetary shield)
- The planet that you are attacking has defensive buildings, but you either destroy them or manage to get some troop transports near enough to the planet so you can land your ground troops (possibly a troop transport kamikaze tactic?)

Also your system puts a lot of pressure to the design process of version 0.6. This is of course not a good reason to not to do or to do something. But it might be worth thinking about if we really can design a ground combat system that is as interesting as the space combat system? This would of course be nice to have if the ground and space combat are going to be equally or nearly equally important parts.

Now I am of course hopeful that such a system could be created, and since we have talented designers and community there is certainly room for optimism. However I personally don`t think that ground combat in MOO2 or 3 came even close to the quality of space combat and therefore I am rather sceptic about it becoming equally interesting in here. Although maybe those games where designed more like I am proposing here and the ground combat only had a secondary role to space combat?


But can it also stop trivial ground combat attacks?



Maybe it is, although I have never seen how a real star empire organizes its defences. However these are also the questions that I as a player would be asking especially after playing games like MOO, since like eleazar already pointed out the planetary weapons have quite a long history in games like these. But then again if I can remember right a certain Geoff the Medio once said something like: I find myself frequently reminding people that we are not making a MOO clone. So I will leave this matter.

Since Tortanick already presented some nice arguments I am going to try a different approach and list some requirements that I would hope the planetary defensive buildings system will meet.

-There should be as much player control over the building process as possible, without things turning into micromanagement.

If we are going to have a system that has more than a planetary shield in it, I would like to be able to control the defensive buildings building meter/s in some way (perhaps by setting a focus to it/them). The reason why I want to control the meter/s is that the building speed of these defensive buildings might determine the faith of a colony in a battle. So it is by no means irrelevant how fast the defences are being build. And if we can tie this meter/s to the already in place meters, so that if you for example put a focus on the defensive buildings meter/s it slows the growth of the resource meters or perhaps decreases their max value, we can create a strategic option for the player. Build your defences fast, but at the same time loose some of the production capacity of your empire or go for the max production capacity and leave your planets very vulnerable.

- The planetary defences building process should be controlled at planet or system level.

I am suggesting this, because the defensive needs will likely be different at different parts of your empire. Now if a star system is for example at the border of your empire and your neighbour is a war hungry race, the need for a strong defence is likely greater than if a star system is surrounded by your own star systems or if the neighbour is a peace loving race.

Someone might say that with these goals I am needlessly complicating things. However the comments that I would like to hear from our future players are:

- "Damn, if I had only taken care of the defences of that colony, I could have saved it."

Instead of:

- "Well what can you do, the colony just didn`t develop fast enough."

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Ok, so what is the focus of this thread then. I thought this thread was about defense and anything related (eg my idea is one way to do defense). At the moment I don't see any goals related to how defense is mean't to work. You seemed to have cut past that, talking about 'should we have shields' rather than 'what are the goals in space combat', eg "fleet to destroy planets".

Details of how planets interact with ships is an important part of this, but this does not include system "defense plans" or a UI to deal with them.


There are some high level goals in the design document.

For anything more specific than that, we are considering game mechanics and systems and discussing the consequences in context. If you have some preference for how ships and non-ship objects should interact, and that preference causes you to prefer doing things a certain way or suggests that there should be something in the design, and it falls into the scope of this thread, then suggest doing things that way and explain why.

Partly. Read the questions earlier in the thread.

Read the v0.4 design pad.

This doesn't address the quoted issue. If planet meters can only be depeted in battles, and grow between turns, then you need to have a battle every turn to reduce the previous turn's meter growth of planets in a system you're blockading. Rather than offering a choice of whether to have such a battle, it would / might be better to eliminate the need to make the choice, if possible and reasonable.


The shield cracking point assumes that all shields are of the same strength, which probably isn't accurate... So you might have a fleet that's able to crack the shields of small, poorly-developed planets, but unable to get past, or pass quickly, the shields of larger planets. However, the point of attrition is reasonable.

OK, i thought of a simpler way to approach defenses, while including most of the good stuff in my previous post and eliminating the nasty 2nd planetary defense meter. The key is to think of Regan-era Star Wars and not "Far, Far away" Star Wars.

Basically we eliminate World-spanning shields from normal planetary defences. The defensive orbitals can shoot at nearby ships and destroy/damage enemy fire directed at the planet. If PD is too weak against certain kinds of attacks we can add Chaff or other kinds of PD-like weapons. Any craft which try to land may be destroyed by these orbitals.




I don't think that's necessary, though it might be advisable on other grounds. However with the above concept of orbitals, an invader can blockade a system merely by eliminating all ships. He can prevent commerce merely by sitting in the system (outside of the range of the orbitals). The invader may choose at any time to assault the planet, otherwise the planet is safe, but cut off. A planet with (or without) orbitals cannot initiate battle.



Agreed, i very much want to avoid aggregating a fleet into some sort of numerical value, which is compared to something else to determine if a blockade (or other event) is occurring. It kinda defeats the point of any RPS if ships can be boiled down to a single number.

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I wouldn't say that's my goal... If design of the space combat system can make ground troops important and useful, then that's a plus, but I'm also concerned about other aspects, such as the feasibility of blockades, necessity of repeated trivial battles, difficulties comparing planetary weapon or shield strength to fleet strength, complexity introduced by adding extra meters, etc. Multiple people's concern about the need for attrition of attackers against planets without fleet support is enough to make me consider the importance of this as well.


Ground troops being important doesn't mean that the ground combat system has to be equal-weight of importance in the game as space combat. I rather doubt it can or should be, as I don't plan on or expect to have a separate ground combat system of any complexity (ie. no ground maps with orders for moving units around on planets). Rather, ground troops would just be a specialized ship weapon for use against planets. Given the importance of planets in the game, this could make the ground troops somewhat important as well, though.


That would depend how ground combat works. I would hope that trivial drops on ground troops would be generally ineffective, especially if there is a defensive contingent of ground troops, or a much larger civilian population on the planet that isn't fond of the attacker. Now, if the civilians actually liked the attacker, and saw the attacker as a liberator, then the "trivial" attack might be something we'd want to be workable, in order to make previous espionage and culture war efforts useful. But this is getting a bit off topic...


Adding a "Defense Focus" is a rather significant issue that is probably veering too far from the scope of this thread...


This is probably too detailed for this thread. We can discuss how things are controlled after figuring out what is being controlled... Feel free to start a brainstorming thread, though.

Ok, to make it easy, i'm going to present my proposal on planetary defenses all in one thread, and develop it in a bit more detail. For my purposes here "planetary defenses" refer to things that defend a planet from space. There may or may not be other kinds of defenses for surface threats in v.6. Once something enters the atmosphere, it's not the concern of this topic.

A planets defenses are represented by a defense meter. It's value ranges from 0 to 100, as is customary for FO's meters.
• The meter's current value gradually increases towards it's max value. Max value before the endgame will always be less than 100. It is determined by tech level and probably other values like population, and/or infrastructure.
• The rate of increase may be determined by various factors like governmental choices, infrastructure, and/or a defense focus. Preferably a well developed planet which was recently attacked can raise it's meter back to the pre-attack value much more quickly that the original time it took to build the meter that high.

How does this defense number translate into battle? When the defense meter increases enough a new defensive orbital is created. Orbitals, and only orbitals, no whole-planet shields, missile bases, or giant guns aimed at distant systems.

* Orbitals can show up in a nice obvious way in the space battles
* They also can blow up in a nice obvious way.
* It would be quite hard to consolidate a diverse collection of weaponry (missiles, shields, etc. into a single meaningful meter number)
* Stronger defenses are very easy to display with orbitals, just add more.
* Having a bunch of different weapon types that do essentially the same thing is redundant and somewhat confusing.

There may also be special building that provide complimentary but distinct defensive advantages, usually system wide, such as scanner jamming, or something that hinders stealth. But buildings that merely replicate the function of the orbitals should be avoided.


OK, how does the defense meter and tech level translate into concrete entities in battle? The following numbers provided are for general impressions only.
We'll assume that there are 4 tech levels of orbitals. Each would obviously be more powerful than the previous, in all ways, because to avoid micro the player doesn't choose what is built, the best/latest is always built automatically. For the same reason there are no alternate branches in the orbital tech tree.

We'll assume the following meter values for each orbital:
1 Mark-1 orbital = 1 pt on the meter
1 Mark-2 orbital = 2 pt on the meter
1 Mark-3 orbital = 3 pt on the meter
1 Mark-4 orbital = 4 pt on the meter

Furthermore there's a cap on the total number of orbitals, otherwise the player could simply build more orbitals of a lower tech level to make the tech levels pointless. With these numbers the obvious cap for # of orbitals is 25.

So, if you have 12 Mark-1 orbitals around a planet, the defense meter will read "12". If you have 7 Mark-2 orbitals, the meter reads 14. If a hostile comes and blows up all but 2 of the Mark-2 orbitals the meter decreases to "4".

Ok, so what happens if you have 15 Mark-2 orbitals around a planet, and then you discover the tech for Mark-3? I believe the simplest solution is to put any additional meter points into upgrading an old orbital to a Mark-3. So in this scenario, each meter increase of 1 will convert an old orbital to a Mark-3. Once all are converted, each additional 3 meter points will produce a new Mark-3.


I apologize for the long post, but i hate being misunderstood, and am trying to make my ideas abundantly clear.

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