To the concept of seperate military and civilian populations I think your reason is backwards. True, not all the population is troops, but why would troops not be considered civilian when they are on their homeworld? Both pay the same taxes and consume the same food, so one could say rather that the troops are supplimented to the civilian population when they are not in combat. After all, the only time that your entire population is considered militarized on a planet is when it is being invaded; in which case wouldn't you expect the populace to form a militia at least to defend their home?
As for this thread, I see two contradicting concepts turning up. First, attackers want to be able to maintain a use for their ships when their opponents fail to maintain similar ships to attack. Second, defenders want a strategy to more easily repel attackers when they've gotten the jump on them and surprise attacked a planet that they thought was safe. Because of this second concept, I think that bombing technically is not a viable addition (though it would be nice and perhaps more appropriate as a high level research development). Defenders should be able to repel an attack even if their attacker has prevailed with the first hit. Unfortunately, I don't know how; currently I'd say make sure you have reserve fleets in store that can move on and disperse attackers when necessary. Still, at the same time, I think ships that maintain air (or space) supremacy should offer some advantage be it to influence or more advantage to invasions made when air support is maintained. I just think that it is ridiculous to have ships that have managed to neutralize a planet's defenses babysit the planet until the transports arrive only because there is no other use for them.

I beg to differ Saber. Parking two fleets off an undefended planet can be great. When ever a ship is created you destroy it and raise your HPs. I use the second fleet for replacements when one fighter gets more than 50% damaged. Then when tech improves upgrade these high HP monsters. Nothing like small ships with a 100 HP long before medium hulls is possible. I do this with minor races all the time and hate to finally have to invade them.

Exactly, having the first fleet in the air is no small deal. If you gain air superiority (or space ) then you can stop the other player ever having a fleet in the first place! In the campaigns I was launching fighter ships as early as possible and camping outside planets, shooting down everything that was built. It meant I was free to expand across the map while my opponent had to focus on putting better ships in the air to take down my HP boosted fighters. I could form a fleet, while they could only send ships singly.

I just love the way you can actually siege planets in this manner.

Defenders are screwed though. If an invasion hits the ground you are probably dead unless they screw up. Attacker bonuses are options on a menu, defender bonuses require you to use valuable real-estate. The only way to really defend a planet is to have a transport on standby by each planet ready to re-invade once you lose the planet.

It's insane.

It sounds an aweful lot like some of you want the MoO3 PI system. It wasn't a bad system, but it also didn't really add that much more depth to the game, other than the ability to reinforce. However... assuming that the attacker doesn't wipe you out in one turn you can still reinforce by sending your own transports to the planets and dumping off more population.

Though really PI is just a side element in GC, its not a main element. The main element is fleet superiority. Once you've achieved that it's just a matter of time before you can invade and conquer the enemy planets. Glassing worlds would really only speed up conquest games, but I think ultimately its a bad option, as it means once you have your 'mega' fleet the game is over, you just run over every planet and glass it, and stick a couple fighters or whatever by it to keep anyone from recolonizing.

As it is now, once you have a mega fleet you are in good shape, but without transport support you can't just run over everyone to a win. I guess I don't really care if they add bombardment or different defense options or not, I just don't see them as necessary or even interesting to the game.

I am not convinced the game will improve with planetary bombardment but I agree that invasion is too easy and too powerful. In Amost games I have played, MIGHT is RIGHT, meaning that invading planets to increase (economy, influence, production etc) is THE key strategy.

I hope some changes are done to help planetry defence and to make invasions harder. From GC1 changes have been made to make invaion fleets a bit smaller which helps. However I agrre with comments such as: defenders should be able to fleet in orbit up until their logistics value (maybe even a bit higher). Base defense values of defendors could be increased to achieve this without any new code.

Some parts of a planet not suitable fopr anything else could be suitable for defense (representing underground silos, defense basis in extreme regiopns of the planet etc). This would allow better defense, but at a lower cost ie. good squares can still be used emsewhere. Burt something like this would need new code, balance and above all the AI would need to be able to use it correctly.

As for bombardment as many people seem to like the idea (Im not one of them) if it were considered I hope that it could be done together with high spendng on esponage or something + a sperate tech needed on ships eg. so tyhat you can trget key structures you need to a) know what and where certain structures are on a planet (espionage spending) ability to attack something from space or different invasion type eg. Mission to attack manufacturing captial etc.

I personally am not too happy with the current invasion model, the graphics are very poor, such that I ignore them and far too one sided.

I also think Minors could stay in the game a bit longer if they coulf defend a bit better. On a large galaxy with rare planets AI taking over Minors on the other side of the Galaxy is a sure way of getting an advantage (I do it myself), this is basically cheese and should be made harder.

Hmm...if the number representing the population is not really the actual population, then perhaps it's not that the original planet population was killed off, but that the inhabitants refuse to pay up? Well, I never was too convinced about what the population number actually meant (households? tax-paying individuals?), especially when the population of a planet grows from the 100,000 of the initial colony ship to the billions in a few years. As the robot on the public announcement sometimes reports, in effect, 'critics and experts maintain that such population increase is physically inconcievable.' Oh well~
By the way, on the harder difficulties, invasions become very atrocious, as all sides have lots of tech and infrastructure, along with ships and bases. Utterly destroying the opponents' fleet around a planetary system is a must, and invasion as it is nonetheless is yet drawn out. Especially when I'd rather not destroy that Restaurant of Eternity by a mass driver invasion, or the Galactic Bazaar by detonating the core, only by having enough dissenting populations within the enemy planet and/or many MANY troop ships end successfully. And building up such force....