I've had the game about a week, and I like a lot of things about it. Actually, I was having a great time, right up until I decided to launch a war of aggression. However, I'm very disappointed by how ground combat has been implimented - specifically that it uses population for soldiers. I mean, in WWII the Germans didn't send 10's of millions of men, women & children into France to fight to the death against the 10's of millions of French men, women & children living there - they sent a couple million trained soldiers to defeat the French army and then left a few 100,000 as occupation forces to control the 10's of millions of French civilians.
Galciv II isn't the first game to ever do this, but of all the ways to model ground combat in a space 4X game this is IMO the very worst. In the very early days of computer space 4X games, it was sort of OK, but the genre has moved way past that years ago. Actually, it feels so wrong that it kind of ruins the game for me. Normally, I'd just chuck the game box onto the pile of programs to be sold to a used software vendor and forget about it. However, Stardock seems to be pretty open to introducing new features in patches, so I'll try to sell you on patching in a better way before I give up on GalCiv II.
I'm going to concentrate on suggestions that I believe could be relatively easily implimented from the game's current state. These are presented in ascending order of my personal preference.
1) Undefended individual planets automatically surrender to orbiting warships. This is how "Stellar Conquest" did it (the first popular space 4X game - a board game first published in the mid-1970's). It basically assumes that orbital bombardment is so powerful that the local planetary authorities would rather act as your occupation force than see their world nuked. In SC, the population retained its identity and the conquerer had to maintain at least one warship in orbit or the planet reverted to its original owner. That would be preferred. However, you could just have ownership flip (as with the cheat code CNTL-SHIFT-W) upon the attacker defeating the space-based defenses - so that no distiction is made between a planet you colonized and one you conquered. With the version where you have to maintain a garrison ship to keep control of a conquered planet, you could impose some penalties vs a regular colony (reduced production, can't build defenses, etc...). Either way, this could be implimented as a game setup option that would, if selected, "turn off" ground combat and hide all related techs, systems, core ships, etc... Implimented as an option, those who prefer the current ground combat system to none at all could still be happy.
2) Troop Transports don't load anything. They just convert to troops when landing on an enemy planet (more or less like MOO2). From the attacker standpoint, it works just like the current system except the transports are born full without reducing the population of the planet they left. However, on the defending end some number of troops would be generated based on the planet population, but would not BE the planet population (so their loss in combat doesn't reduce the planet population). Alternatively, defending troops would be generated from some sort of defensive building (like M002). Upon victory, the preferred system would be for the planet population to retain its identity and require occupation troops to keep control (with attrition of the occupation force if the planet morale is below some threshold, meaning an "insurgency" is in progress). Alternatively, ownership would just flip to the successful invader. Either way, the population would basically be the same size as before the attack (with perhaps just a small % reduction due to "collateral damage").
3) Buildable troops. The simplest implimentation is to track them as a separate thing on planets in addition to population. The current ground combat system would be retained entirely, except that when you launch a troop ship now it loads troops instead of population (assuming there are troops present to load, of course). Defenders would get some number (proportional to population) of "free" troops representing militia, but that would be small so if you are expecting an invasion it should be better to build the real thing. Assuming the number of troops per shipboard module stays the same, the maximum number of troops on a planet would match the maximum population of that planet. With this scaling, I would suggest building troops on a by-turn basis. In other words, it always takes 1 turn to build troops but the number you get depends on the production capacity of the planet (or some limit caused by the actual current population of the planet, whichever is less). However, troop transports would not be dismantled upon invading. They would just land their troops, up to the limit of what the target planet will hold. If invading transports carry more troops than the planet holds, the first round only the number the planet holds will land. In subsequent rounds, attacker loses will be replenished from the transports until there are no more "reserve" troops aboard (or the battle ends). Upon victory of the invader, the same comments as #2.
4) Designable, buildable troops (basically like Space Empires IV). This requires troop "hulls" and "systems" in the shipyard. Troops then have to be tracked by "class", and upgraded as new ground combat systems become available. You'd probably want to change the scaling vs #3 - like maybe now a single troop module on a ship holds a single troop unit, and costs of individual troop units are up there like ships (so it takes multiple turns to build one ground unit). Otherwise it would work similar to #3.
