All this talk of Orbital Bombardment got me in the mood for some verbal exterminatus!
OB is super fun. It's the pinnacle of mankind's destructive capabilities, annihilation at it's purest, most shocking, awesome form.
It is glorious - WHEN done right!
I loved calling down OB's in the Dawn of War series, or C&C Tiberian Twilight, but just how well would that go in Starmade?
What WOULD happen if you unleashed a mighty OB salvo?
- The game / server lags or crashes based on available PC / Server power.
- Chunk by chunk the ground is updating, and drawing craters.
Not quite as glorious.
Even so, let's not sink the idea because of a perceived flaw; Indeed, there could be many ways to make Starmade handle OB's reasonably well, and drawing some fire and shockwaves is far from impossible.
First solution that comes to my mind for projectile transition from space to planetary plate:
-Projectiles fired in space hit fake planet sphere
-Their damage and coordinates are saved into a variable, stored by the planet.
-Impact sprites of fire, magma, and craters are drawn on the fake planet sphere at corresponding locations. Size depends on projectile's damage.
-If / when somebody is down on the planetary plate, the saved variables are called, and the game calculates cratering according to those locations and damage values.
Then we encounter the problem of facing a gajillion block updates that in it's current state can stop the game for some time, but we could introduce yet more methods to handle it; such as limiting the number of chunks the game will attempt to work on, thus hopefully not creating lag, just a very slowly updating surface. We can draw more fire and magma spouts on top of it all to hide the slowly updating surface until it's done.
No doubt someone more qualified could refine the idea or come up with a better one if needed, but we're not there yet.
Introduce planets that work properly, and then we can worry about orbital bombardment.
However, as so many times in science(!) the real question might not be "can we?" rather "should we?"
In any sci-fi world there is always something that holds back the people from going crazy and glassing every planet's surface with supermassive death lazors and vaporizing the remaining ball of bare rock with skyscraper sized warheads filled with the concentrated essence of the actual burning hells whenever a single resident of said planet mildly disagrees with them.
.....Noooot so much in Starmade. The potential loss of life, resources, and territory would hardly bother a player or even a group of players as much as an actual flesh and blood civilization would feel about having permanently one less planet in their empire, even being the hardened and callous bastards they are.
Indeed, I strongly suspect, as soon as planets would become a good, profitable, nice, and lag-free place to settle, there'd inevitably be players who'd go around nuking them one by one fer lulz' sake.
Maybe they should have this freedom in a sandbox game? How would one defend against it? How would a fresh player defend against it?
Does tracking criminal acts actually matter when one can have as many names as he pleases?
And most importantly, why would players spend resources and time on deploying troops and equipment for surface warfare when they can just settle the whole deal with a few clicks from high orbit?
Once again, they can always make up a good reason in our respectively beloved franchises, such as " Ten millenia ago, The Emperor lost one of his lucky socks on this very planet and we must recover it!" or "The locals make the absolute best banana shakes here!" but such concerns are unlikely to restrain a bored gamer who just wants to set the world on fire.
Especially if they are concerned with efficiency.
So this was the theory that let's you use OB's with the proposed planets, and the question of whether you should do so or not.
To further disarm a lack of OB possibilities against instanced planets as a valid complaint, I'll raise my final point:
Even if instanced planets made it into the game, and orbital bombardments were never made possible, you would not lose something you have ATM;
True, you CAN shoot at the current planets and they will take damage, and eventually get destroyed.
Except no enemies were present on the surface because it kills the server, it's small, ugly, and there's no good reason to settle there in the first place.
On the rare occasion when somebody does, he's politely "persuaded" by the rest of the players to cease and desist.
TLDR:
Orbital Bombardment on instanced planet = possible.
(Good planets - Orbital Bombardment) > (Useless planets + Orbital Bombardment)
Balanced gameplay > Orbital Bombardment at all costs
-edited in a last point for clarity
