Asteroids

Asteroid bombardment has always been a big part of the game’s unique selling point. However, Jon acknowledges that it still has a way to go. One of the improvements that Uber are working on is the implementation of asteroid belts, in order to make setting up asteroid-containing systems easier and more interesting. The idea for asteroid belts is that they, and the asteroids they contain, are likely to be differentiated slightly from planets in the way that they are generated. Players will have options in the system editor to specifically add in an “Asteroid Belt” entity with specific properties, like the number of asteroids, their size, metal richness and so on. In-game, an average belt might contain 10 or 12 asteroids that players can land on and commandeer. There would also likely be a much larger number of purely aesthetic asteroids in order to make the belt look like the kind of asteroid thicket that we all know and love.As games scale up Jon believes that having a good number of asteroids in play is vitally important, both as a potential metal resource as well as weaponry to assault your opponents. To this end there have been various ideas for how to keep the belt relevant as the game progresses.This would make capturing an asteroid and moving it into orbit around your own planet a very viable way to capture and control the resources of an asteroid belt, denying your opponent not only of its worth in metal but also its use as a destructive tool against you.One feature that we asked about that we can confirm is still on Uber’s minds is the variable scale of damage that an asteroid can cause. This is still planned, but until recently, there have been some project management difficulties that, unfortunately, have delayed its implementation. Hopefully, once asteroid belts are part of the system editor interface Uber will have more time to work on spicing up the asteroid impact mechanics into the core feature it so rightly deserves to be.