Two commanders totally control a planet each...stalemate?

[Addicted_fool]

I've never really worried about other planets yet since the single orbital launcher unit I have is broken (I think) and can only transport one unit at a time. Recently in a game this actually messed me up for the very first time since the AI actually did use it and took his commander to a small moon.

Now we both COMPLETELY control our respective planets and it is 100% impossible to land units with the broken 1 unit lander. If I had orbital technology unlocked maybe I could send orbital builders over and get something built fast enough (doubtful even then), but I'm honestly not sure if either of us could even possibly win at this point.

Do I need to give up? Is there a way to break this kind of a stalemate? Is this intended?

[gokens]

It's normal they can only transport one unit at a time. You can either transport a fabber and build a teleporter on another planet, or build a lot of astraeus and area lift (select a bunch of astraeus, click the lift button, click on a unit and then drag your mouse away and it will create a blue circle, let go of the click and your astaeus will move there and lift as many as they can). Also you can build an orbital fabber which builds a teleporter pretty quickly as well.

Also if you have enough astraeus they won't be able to shoot them all down before you drop off a few units. In fact, if you had a single astraeus carry an entire army the situation would be worse and your astraeus would still die but so would your entire army.

Also the situation is much better in multiplayer where you have the entire tech tree.

[Addicted_fool]

It might be normal, but you can see it is broken because of the way the load button works. Why would it have a click to drag area you can load if it can only load one unit?

All of the things you tell me I can do, I can't do in the game I'm playing. I could build hundreds of launchers, yes, but I could never build enough to put a dent in his hundreds of units that swarm you within seconds of landing. Same thing with a builder making a teleporter, there isn't a single spot on the planet that he can't see with radar and pulverize before your unit can even start moving as it gets off the launcher.

I guess I'm just stuck and have to start over and get a foothold on the moon before he takes it over completely.

[gokens]

You can click to drag an area because you can be directing multiple transports at the same time, and instead of clicking individual units for each transport, you can tell a group of transports to pick up a group of units.

Not with that defeatist attitude you can't.

[Addicted_fool]

I don't think you get it, the other commander had sole control of the moon for almost 20 minutes before I even realized he could get there. He has every mining node built, radar covering every square inch of the moon and about 100 bombers that can get to your units as soon as they land. It's not a "defeatist attitude", it's recognizing the situation. If I built 1000 anti air units and 1000 orbital launchers I *might* be able to get a foothold long enough for them to get killed by his land units that show up after. I could play the game 10 times over the right way before that.

[Serafine]

You DO know that you can shoot nukes through space? Just build 10 nuclear missiles launchers and bomb him back to the stone age. One nuke can pulverise half of a small moon's surface.

[Addicted_fool]

If I had nukes unlocked that would be awesome.

edit: I do have anti-nukes unlocked ironically enough, so if the other guy tries it I'm ok to defend and keep the stalemate going literally forever lol

[Serafine]

Oh, so you're talking about Galactic War. Well, that's something completely different. Your best option is to build 1000 tanks, 1000 Lifters and try to drop them right on top of the enemy commander. Did this two or three times, worked well. You may need more than one try though.

[haniblecter of .tw fame]

Control orbital sphere, ensure that he can't get anything off. Then laser platform creep (they can attack air too). Bam, beachead. Teleporter with T2 tanks and bots (those tactical launcher bots are very helpful) some combat healers, start aircover, pow, done.

Requires execution at every level, not failing to cover the orbital sphere so he can't lift off.

[Addicted_fool]

Sounds like some of that is preemptive? I'm not sure how I can prevent him from lifting off the planet once he controls it, I have no space weapons.

I think a lot of the limitations I'm looking at are because I'm playing Galactic War. I didn't realize there was that much difference. I guess it obviously isn't common, but I guess this is a problem I would point out to the designers as a SP campaign sort of issue only.

Also, I don't really know what you mean by laser platform creep. I don't have anything I can build called a laser platform, unless you mean laser towers. If that is what you mean, I'm not sure how you expect them to get built when I could drop 100 engineers and not get one tower built before they are all destroyed.

The only idea I've seen that has any chance whatsoever would be the 1000/1000 idea, and only if the first round of 1000 was anti-air units instead of tanks. Or maybe 1000 anti-air dropped on the opposite side of the planet right before I drop 1000 T2 tanks on the commander, that might be a sure win.

[Mr. Fibble]

In galactic war you are very much at the mercy of the randomised rewards from each system.

This means that without decent options the only way is to load up a massive force and brute force planetfall on the opponents world. Sending in a few smaller scout forces to random spots means you can more easily dump your force right into their commander.

The good news is that at the moment most galactic war fights tend to have you sharing a starting planet outiwth the faction boss fights. The bad news is that this means fights can be over in 10 minutes or less.

[Addicted_fool]

Yeah now that I know a bit more about the game I doubt I'll ever let it get to this point. The only reason this happened was the AI had control of a moon for 20 minutes before I even realized they weren't all on the same planet with me. I was wandering around building radar towers when I realized the new troops showing up weren't coming from some secret base that the commander kept building, it was from orbital drops. This was the first game I had ever seen the AI actually go to another planet.

[Mr. Fibble]

The top left has the list of commanders in that particualr fight. If you cant find them all on your world by scouting then you can usually focus more on prepping for an offworld asault (lifters or other orbital tech) while your factories churn out units.

Air patrols can usually squash incoming orbital drops since as yet the ai doesnt tend to dump units in the same way as a human will. Or at least I've never seen a lifter drop appear right on top of a base/commander.

[Addicted_fool]

It wasn't that I didn't know that commander existed. For a while I thought I was just missing the commander somehow, it took me a long time to realize he had left the planet.

The problem isn't that I can't defend, the problem is that both of us can defend TOO WELL. We both completely control the planet/moon, and unless one of us does the "drop several thousand tanks on the commander at once" tactic there are no real options.

With orbital launchers only carrying 1 troop at a time, I also consider that a "non-option" though. In the future I'm just going to have to make sure I never let it get to that point.

[Mr. Fibble]

The devs have said they're looking into ways of reducing the stalemate and certainly there are plenty of options people have come up with. The galactic war is still very much in the creation stage rather than the ironing out of kinks.

I've a feeling that even if they just add a bigger transport some folk might opt to stick with the basic one for the potential cost per death as they descend.

Kind of hoping for a beachhead rocket kind of thing where you load units into the orbital launch facility and it then lobs the units on a one way trip, kind of like the supcom2 unit cannon, rocket breaks up in orbit and the units rain down over the designated area. Would reduce the overall unit count at the very least.

[Captain Sardonic]

Even worse than this stalemate is when you've got a subcommander on your side who's maxed out their own planet/moon, but just wants to turtle or colonize your territory rather than going on the offensive and taking down an enemy commander. I've had three different scenarios where this occurred.

In the most recent case, my subcommander killed two enemy commanders on its home moon, then packed up and set up shop in the 1/4 of my home planet I hadn't already overrun. We killed a third enemy commander which landed on my home planet, and narrowly avoided getting wiped out when the last surviving commander threw a moon at us. I was left with about 2/3 of a usable moon, my subcommander had overrun two others, but the last enemy had fortified his moon so heavily with orbital fighters, umbrellas, and artillery that even sending ~350 units (not including the 100 or so Astreus I launched as a diversion) couldn't get through. My subcommander, meanwhile, just sat around turtling on its (and my!) worlds, never even launching an Astreus to scout.

I'm enjoying Galactic War, but it's currently starting to feel like a losing battle between stalemates, UI crashes, and slowdowns caused by unit capacity.

I can only hope that the devs manage to balance GW so the subcommanders become more of an asset than a liability, and so there's another way to hit a fortified enemy planet (other than superweapons) without throwing 500+ units into a meat grinder and rolling the dice. Then again, I hear Eisenhower and Churchill managed to overcome a similar problem about 70 years ago...