True flanking manoeuvres possible on a sphere map?

Quite simple really. What do you guys think about the potential for true flanking and surprise attacks now that PA is going into new territory with spherical worlds?

I always felt artificially boxed in by the imaginary black borders of square maps. There would always be a few safer points along the edges because you knew you couldn't be attacked by a certain angle of approach.

Also I'm thinking we'll have no "off screen" bugs (to be fair, SupCom handled this pretty darn well, maybe it's an old problem already solved).

I guess there will still be things like mountains that might impede movement and create rather "safe" places.

Also maps will have to be twice as big to feel the same distance apart.

If you are playing against someone on an 8km square map then you can put 8km of terrain between you and them. But if you are on a sphere with an 8km circumference, and you are on opposite ends of the world, then you will have at most 4km of terrain between each other.

If radars stay the same, and possibly having less units that project it.

The it should be fine.

Easily solved by clever placement of high mountains that only very high angle artillery can shoot over.

Yep, there are lots of interesting consequences to going to a sphere.

As I've been playing around with the map creator the world I'm mostly messing with has a radius of 600m. So from that we can calculate the surface area which is 4.5M m^2 or about four and a half square kilometers.

If I want a "slightly" larger planet I bump it up to a 1000m radius. That gives a surface area of 12.5M m^2 or 12.5 square kilometers.

As you can see the surface area grows exponentially. We are going to have some fairly large play areas if we want them

That is a good point, effective terrain size will mean different things in PA.

It is important to also bear in mind that there are going to be multiple planets in most games and I would think a reasonably high possibility of there being planets of varied size too, so it isnt as though all games are going to be effectively smaller, just faught across a more varied battlefield. It is going to be somewhat more complex than just mountains deliniating battlefields. Especially given the game engine is going to be procedurally generating planets.

[Edit] Ah there we go, Neutrino confirms the varied size of planets : D
Interesting point about exponentially increasing surface area!

Can we take a shortcut through the middle of the planet? Going the long way around is so exhausting.

Point of order: The surface grows with the square of the radius, which is not only not actually exponential, but it's not any faster than the surface area of a square map. A 600m square map has a surface area of 360,000m^2, while a 1000m square map has a surface area of 1,000,000m^2, an increase of a factor of 2.78, exactly the same proportional increase as in the case of a 600m radius sphere and a 1000m radius sphere.

Except that the surface of a sphere is calculated by 4/3*pi*r^3...
So 600m = 4/3*pi*r^3 = 904778684 m^2
And 1000m = 4/3*pi*r^3 = 4188790204 m^2
So the increase is a factor 4.6296296.

... this is the volume of the sphere ... the surface is the derivative of this, i.e. 4*pi*r^2

Lecrap, I derped, sorry.

You can ride an asteroid into your opponents base if you feel lazy.

I'm sure there'll be teleporting too!

I'm more excited about being able to send off troops in opposing directions towards an enemy base on the other side of the planet, to have them meet the enemy at the same time from north/south. In no other RTS have you been able to do this properly. Sure, you could send one group off to the left edge and one to the right edge, then have them swing back in. But true flanking from totally different approaches? Much fun.