Posted by: Garfunkel
« on: February 28, 2023, 06:01:53 AM »Building PDCs was fun. With the new orbital weapons systems this could be even better. And having ground based fighters and Missile systems would make my day. Why were they removed? Any thoughts? Better ai diplomacy with more options would also be great.
Because they were just stationary ships you had to build in place. That's literally how they were implemented. If memory serves, they were also easily detected by ship sensors, as a ship would be. Thus, orbital defense bases (the only way to implement missile launchers as static defense for a planet,) are functionally identical to a PDC. They don't get four free layers of armor (big woop) but don't need to be painstakingly built in situ either which more than makes up for it.
This is correct. Steve has said numerous times that he wants to get rid of all special cases and instead have a uniform system in place. We used to have special fighter engines and gunboat(FAC) engines as well as missile engines, for example, all of which obeyed different rules from ship engines. So PDC's as they were will not come back as Steve very deliberately removed them.
Instead, you can have STO and Construction ground units on a planet, where the latter fortifies the former to a high level, keeping it hidden and secure against enemies. The principle will be largely the same.
Perhaps Steve might add a new facility to simulate even deeper/stronger bunkers that can house STO ground units to further entrench them but that's probably very low probability.