How big a planet can be in PA's planet generator?

From the April 19th LiveStream, we know that the planet's radius is 650m.

I just wonder how big the planet could be exact in meters?

A Radius compare created from 3dsmax:

If i interpret the "Planet Editor" and Jon´s words right, then we´ve seen a mid-size Planet which can be made fairly smaller or bigger.

They said during the stream that they were only about a quarter along the size slider I believe, but the end goal for how big a planet can get is;

As Big as your System can Handle.

Mike

I hope planets are (or at least can be) very large. 650 meters in radius seems quite small to me. While large enough to be playable, it still seems very much like a TA scale map which is functionally a single battlefield.

In fact ideally planets could be arbitrarily large depending on your hardware. A full-size Earth and other to-scale planets would be very cool. Where players control regions large enough to have quite significant deployment time within a region, and require careful deployment within a single player's territory both offensively and defensively. Rather like nations controlling large amounts of territory on Earth, requiring them to distribute offensive and defensive assets because it would take too long to react after the fact. Planets would play very differently from asteroids simply due to their size.

Still, it is fairly unnecessary to state that larger maximum size is better. But larger standard size might require some argument.

I was going to say the same thing, and suggest that Mavor meant kilometers, but I ran the calculations and a 650 meter radius gives you a circumference of ~4084 meters. Assuming a battleship is 70 meters long (eyeballing it from this large image), that's 58 battleships parked end-to-end around the globe's equator. It seems about the right scale to me.

Well, they did say it was a small planet, good for 2 players to start on or 4 if you want a a hectic game.

Based on Neutrino saying it's about where that planet size on the slider, we can assume at this stage the slider can go up to around 2600Meters, or a circumference of over 8100 Meters.

Assuming the size slider is linear in nature of course and things could change.

Mike

He said 650 km is a quarter of the slider.


So i assume 1950 is the biggest PRE ALPHA


I would think that in the final game it should be able to go up to around 6500 on the slider, but much larger if you mod it in.

A circumference of 8 kilometers means the most distance possible between two points is 4 km; one half circumference.

If we assume for the sake of argument that the scale is relatively comparable to SupCom, the 8km circumference planet is functionally a smaller map than an 8km x 8km flat square SupCom map. Granted, units might be smaller, shorter ranged, and move more slowly, which would increase the effective map size. But then we're really only redefining what a "kilometer" means.

Counting map size by arranging units end to end is a somewhat inappropriate metric of size. Although in this case it does drive home how small the demo planet really is. Nortyspock estimates that the entire playable map area can be traversed with only 58 battleship lengths. If a battleship takes 5 seconds to travel its own length, it can completely circumnavigate the planet in only 290 seconds, or 4 minutes and 50 seconds. This is very small.

In my opinion a 650 meter radius planet being 1/4 of the maximum of the slider means that slider needs a higher ceiling. Potentially a dramatically higher ceiling. It ultimately boils down to how large a planet modern hardware can potentially manage. If a few kilometer circumference is the best we can do for the moment, then so be it. But real planets should be measured in many kilometers in radius, even if we can't get up to Earth-scale 6,000 kilometer planets.

It's very hard to compare the sizes of PA planet maps to flat maps in FA and TA not just because we're talking about spheres versus 2D surfaces, but because the scale of PA to FA and TA are quite different. So we have to consider relative sizes of units between these games.

If we look into FA, we find battleships were about 300m long (I could be wrong). So on a 10km map, that's 33 battleships parked end to end. Nortyspock says that you could park 56 PA battleships end to end around the circumference of our 650m radius PA planet. As the route to an enemy base on the other side of a planet is half a circumference away, the 'length' of a planet map is effectively half its circumference, or 28 battleships away.

Which means that a 650m map is equivalent, surprisingly, to something between a 5km and 10km map. Sounds good to me. So proceeding linearly with the slider, at the moment, the slider's maximum size planet would be equivalent to something between an FA 20-40km map.

Wow, ninjaed by a post similar to mine in construction but making the opposite point. xD

Edit: Notably though, the fact that bases will be more sprawled than FA bases due to a lack of adjacency bonus will make bases bigger compared to maps than in FA. We might end up having 2 players covering an entire small planet in a protracted battle with their bases. I very like.

I know! It sounds playable and can be a lot of fun. The units in the vid seemed awfully slow, but that will probably change as the engine gets more refined.

I don't know about you, but I don't play an RTS to order chinese food and do my taxes between attack runs.

Also that you can.....you know......potentially have multiple planets, moons and asteroids as well.....

The planet they showed was a small one, they said as much and it they can get bigger and more numerous, I think we should wait until he have a semblance of balance and gameplay before claiming things like "it's too small" or "The slider needs a bigger ceiling".

Mike

Damn all you Ninjas :lol:

Just for the math:

Surface area of a sphere = 4 x Pi x R^2

Take the square root of that number to figure out Length x Width of a square map that we are used to.

So in the video, the planet has a radius of 650 meters (.65 km) which comes out to a map that is about 2.3 x 2.3 km going by SupCom dimensions.

Now that may appear small (smallest in SupCom is 5 x 5 km) but we need to understand that every point on that sphere is a potential for conflict to occur. There is no hiding in the corner or going around the edge of the map that we see in our rectangular map that we have been playing on. Basically, no wasted space as we typically see from areas near the corners. You can attack and be attacked from any direction. In team games, there will be no more the back player and front player. Instead it will be the closest and furthest. No map edge to act as ring in a boxing match or outside of play lines in a football game (USA and rest of world version).

It will be very interesting once we get some battles going and start to feel how big the "front line" actually is.

And, oh, by the way, the enemy not only comes from every planar direction, but they come from above as well (asteroid drop).

You wouldn't. You would cover a lot of territory, and so would your opponent. The distance between your frontier bases would be suitably small to make it a tense fight that happens quickly.

A large planet would have many areas of persisting conflict which move as the lines get pushed back and forth. Not just a few points of interest where the time-distance between them serves only to delay attacks to create a production-caused defender's advantage.

Unfortunately people are very, very stuck in this mindset that you have one base in an RTS game, and that you make units and make "attack runs" on the enemy base. And this paradigm persists despite the fact that it is extremely boring compared to having lots of things happening in many places across a larger map.

But how long would it take to get to the point where frontier bases are that close on a planet that's 1:1 to earth?

Mike

You are assuming linear expansion in all directions away from a point, which is a reasonable assumption as it is a quite safe approach. But what stops me from putting constructors in a fast flying transport and setting up a base in a very distant location?

If there is more empty space, players are incentivized to grab larger chunks of land faster in larger, more aggressive leaps, relying on the size of the map as protection against early attacks. More empty space means you can control more territory with less hardware, until the enemy starts to contest your control. And if you try and grab too much at once, the enemy might set up a base in the middle of what you thought would be your territory.

Interceptors?

Don't get me wrong, big planets sound great on paper. But PA is also a game made to be enjoyed by finite, fleshy mortals. Big games with huge shifting fronts might work in a huge 10+ player match, but it's not something a typical player is capable of.

Define 'Fast', a 747-200B travels at 893 km/h, meaning to go from one side of the Earth to the other takes about 22 hours.

I get the feeling we won't be seeing transports(even fast ones) going quite that fast.

The Game isn't designed around fighting on 1:1 Scale planets, not without mods to adjust everything else about the game as well so how use it as some kind of "standard"?

Mike

Advanced orbital transports could reach speeds of 1-10 km/s knight.

Interplanetary craft would have to reach speeds of up to .1-2c for it to be playable.

they still need to get up to orbit and get down from orbit, I suspect they can't do those at 10Km/s, if they could they could go form one side of the Earth to the other in about 35 minutes....EXCEPT that when in an orbit they have more circumference to travel along based on the altitude. That is still a loooooong *** time, and even longer once you factor in time to get TO and FROM orbit it gets longer.

Mike

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Falcon_Project

Hypersonic launch is already being worked on, and similar principles can accelerate it out of atmo.


Give something like that 1000 years and you definitely could.