Ground combat and invasions are flawed

There's nothing I strictly disagree with in what you posted - they're all good ideas. As has been said countless times though, it is easy to come up with ideas but much harder to implement them. I don't doubt that things such as invasions and planetary attacks will become more complex over time but I doubt they are highest priority right now.

Just a note on number 4. The population of a planet is supposedly only the number of tax payers on that planet. That means people of voting age. They are the ones who are drafted for war and the ones who are utterly killed in conflict. You can imagine that all the children under 18 and elderly over 65 dont get killed and are left where they are. It's only imagination but it might help assuage your guilt in genocide!

You should be able to use mass drivers (or any bombardment) from orbit to destroy planetary improvments and it's population without actually commiting to an invasion.

More options would be cool, but being able to waste planets without having to invade them pushes the game towards conclusion in the very early game. Having to build troop transports to defeat an enemy puts the attacker at a disadvantage in an early fight, where if you could just cripple your opponent from space there would be very little incentive to do anything else in the early game but rush for starships.

Invasions should be a multi-turn process and not over in one large battle on a single turn. This would give the defending race the opportunity to send reinforcements to help.

I'd rather deal with other things. This is a matter of personal preference.

The attacking race should be able to siege a planet to force a surrender after some number of turns based on factors such as morale, loyalty, luck, food etc...

All food used by a population is produced on that planet. With no interplanetary supply exchange, the effect of an orbital siege is precisely zero. Again, this change would push the early game entirely towards a starship rush, making that strategy dominate over all others with no chance for defending against it except with a better starship rush.

Right now the game assumes that the entire population of each planet will fight to the death.

The population listed is the taxpayers. That is not necessarily everyone. People always seem to miss that one.

More options would be cool, but being able to waste planets without having to invade them pushes the game towards conclusion in the very early game. Having to build troop transports to defeat an enemy puts the attacker at a disadvantage in an early fight, where if you could just cripple your opponent from space there would be very little incentive to do anything else in the early game but rush for starships.

To defend against a starship rush, maybe the introduction of planetary defence stations. I don't mean like the omega defence system and the like that just improve orbiting ships but actual stations the attacking ships must defeat. Maybe the initial homeworld could get a strong defence system at the beginning of the game. Just throwing out ideas...

I'd rather deal with other things. This is a matter of personal preference.

Why? Wouldn't it be more fun?

All food used by a population is produced on that planet. With no interplanetary supply exchange, the effect of an orbital siege is precisely zero. Again, this change would push the early game entirely towards a starship rush, making that strategy dominate over all others with no chance for defending against it except with a better starship rush.

To siege a planet you would have the option to destory any food production from orbit as my first suggestion states.

The population listed is the taxpayers. That is not necessarily everyone. People always seem to miss that one.

The population number is only the taxpayers eh? So instead of killing 17.5 billion people, only 17 billion are killed... Yeah, I can totally see how that is not genocide.

So, to develop your own ideas... you add in further ideas... and further..... Do you see my point now? There are countless ideas - literally thousands of ideas. No developer could hope to include everything from its active fanbase, it's just not economically possible.

I agree that more micromanagement wouldn't be fun. Again, it's a matter of personal preference.

The definition of genocide means the total destruction of a race. So no, it's not genocide.... but also, if the tax paying population are 17bn, it's more likely that the total population is around 25bn based upon humans. That's not including tax evaders.

I agree with original poster on most points here. Fleets should be able to target specific parts of a planet to destroy from orbit as well as besieging the planet (while destroying their food supplies) and this process or any invasion process should take a significant amount of time. No war on such a massive scare could really be as fast as is depicted here and the increased time would add many strategic opportunities. In addition, if you believe that every able bodied person capable of fighting would actually have to be killed before a planet surrendered then you are dillusional. The cost of arming that many people is extremely expensive on its own not to mention keeping them supplied during a planetary invasion. I think its safe to assume that a planet could be forced into submission without killing the vast majority of its population. Just look at the real world and tell me what % of a population dies in wars because it is not anywhere near what you people are suggesting. What does make sense is for evil races to simply slay everyone on the planet and for good races to grant amnesty and begin the assimilation process.
Alas most of these ideas were brought up during the beta without any real interest shown by the developers.

if you believe that every able bodied person capable of fighting would actually have to be killed before a planet surrendered then you are dillusional.

Why do people need to add insults to prove their point? Perhaps because their arguments are weak. It's a game, it doesnt need to follow reality.... get over it!

What does make sense is for evil races to simply slay everyone on the planet and for good races to grant amnesty and begin the assimilation process.

Makes sense to you but how exactly would a good race go about assimilating biological hating robots? Does it even need to make sense?

It's all a matter of personal opinion. You can come up with great ideas but the moment you say things like

Fleets should be able to

or

Alas most of these ideas were brought up during the beta without any real interest shown by the developers

Then you move into the realms of shooting down people's ideas, so your own are equally permitted to be shot down.

I have to laugh at all these genocide complaints and RL. Lets look at RL for a second, IF an alien race decided to invade earth, I don't think I could name a single person i know that wouldn't fabricate whatever type of weapon they could with whatever resources were available and engage their attacker. Two mayo jars and some twine? bingo. I got a bolas, ect.... I would certainly rather fall in combat, protecting my planet/race, than end up on a chain at Jabba's naval. It would not be the invaders fault everyone got killed, but the defenders.

I like some of your idea's.I think an orbital bombardment could work if it requires 3 turns or more to complete (or even varable depending on how much you want to destroy) a future tech could even make planet killers possible (here comes the death star ).

Invasions are also a bit too easy to pull off at the moment,I'd like to be able to counter them somehow.

btw I had this strange occurance were the AI would still invade my planet even when he was not at war with me (he had just declared peace by means of a united planet agreement).

I think the way invasions work is okay, but it would be nice if you could build improvements to increase troop amount or effectiveness on a planet, a fortress or command center or something...

I do really like the idea of bombarding planets into surrendering, or at least just destroying their industry without conquering the planet, but I don't wanna throw a wrench in the gears of game balance...

I like the idea of strategic orbital bombardment. Take out their farming and suddenly the extra couple billion or so people they can't feed will be very inclined to favor surrender or to side with you under Information Warfare.

Individual planets should be allowed to surrender outright, but only under the democratic forms of government.

That said, I couldn't be more agianst multi-turn invasions. They had that in MOO3 and I had no idea how to manage it. The current system is very simplified, but it's easy to use and intuitive.

As it now stands, it takes between 5-8 troop transports (holding 1000-2000 troops each) to successfully take over a Grade 15-21 planet. I don't mind throwing troops into battle, but I for one can't stand losing the troop transport. I'd like these to live (be empty) so I can return to one of my planets and get some more troops.

I think the ability to build starbases orbiting planets so that the attackers would have to get through these would be a great solution to defense. Right now, you have to keep ships in orbit and they don't even act as a fleet unless you have built a orbital fleet manager. Pretty weak IMO.

I'd just like some defensive strategies to counter the offensive ones. At the moment the attacker is pretty much assured a victory if he's willing to damage the planet.

Invasion is certainly underdeveloped. The defender has no real way to shape the battle, and so if the attacker wants to win they will win.

Losing transports does seem silly, and just is more micro in a game which tries to avoid this sort of thing.

Multiturn would be interesting IMO, with both sides landing more troops.

Defending a planet from space is nigh on impossible, since the attacks can have fleets from the word go while you will struggle to assemble a fleet in orbit. You can assemble one outside the planet, but since ships can go diagonally, it's almost impossible to block an invasion.

That said, it needs depth but not complexity.

The invasion ships are used in the attack, they give you air superiority and a bonus so imagine they get damaged in the fight and have to be refitted at the least. This is why they cannot be used over and over again.

Also to the person who wished you could build up defences on the planet you can. You can make defences to make the troops 25% better, and all sorts of fleet improving defences to ensure your ships fight better in orbit.

The basic premise of the game is that if you have no ships to fight you will get invaded over and over again. I think this is fairly realistic. You would be at the whim of a race with lots of spaceships if you had none, and your only defence would be to fight tooth and nail. I have had planets which have withstood 4 or 5 invasions when boosted up but then i race up the combat tree If i could not get ships there to defend it though it soon fell

god i know i'm gonna get flak for this, but i'm going to reference moo3 for a sec (yes i know, different game, sucky game, all that, but put that aside for a sec). I like the idea of planetary bombardment, ALOT. Having that option attached to military ships, and not transports that is. Scaling the amount of damage done with the sophistication and number of weapons involved in the attack (plus any modifiers like mass drivers).

Thus in the early game, you could have say, a fleet of 4 fighters, well armed, that would do very little, but some damage to both population and structures. And in order to completely eradicate a planet's population, and improvements, such a fleet would have to bomb the planet over and over, perhaps too many times to be practical.

Now in the later game, with better weapons and bigger fleets, more damage would be done. Say a fleet of 5 cruisers could do, 10 or 20 times the damage described in the first scenario. Thus takening only a few turns, or perhaps even 1, to kill off a planet's population and trash the imrovements.

That is, at least i think, something simple and worth implementing. I really hope the SD guys peek at this thread, cause it's something i think a lot of people would really love to see in the game. Obviously there are all sorts of other options you could add, dropping a percentage of your payload, 25%, 50%, to do less damage, or a blockade similation with planets surrendering. But i think that's beyond the point, something simple, like i outlined above, would really satisfy alot of people, at least in my humble little opinion.

It just seems odd to me that if you manage to take out all of your opponents starships, until they build more, your fleet is useless. Let's say they start harassing your freighters with small, fast ships, and you build some warships to take them out. Then they decide that they don't want to have to spend money on better ships and don't build any. Then they've neutralized your fleet just as much as they've neutralized their own because there's nothing your ships can do to them when they don't have ships to attack.

Yeah, there's not a whole lot of point in having a navy before ground invasions are invented, unless there are contested resources. If there are no resources, it's better to not have a navy because it can only net you losses. Trade routes in the early game are essentially monetary losses.

MOO1, 2, Stars!, and Space Empires all allow fleets to be used against planets; I'm not really sure why GC2 decided against it.

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.

This is a great thread!

I agree that invasions are the least developed and possibly the area with the most room for improvement in the game.

By not allowing starships do any damage to planets and populations, it almost defeats the purpose of having them, and certainly limits their usefulness. I kind of feel cheated when I have the most powerful fleets, but they don't do me much good in and of themselves.

I think it would be great (and make more sense) if fleets could damage buildings and kill off populations. Maybe planets would start off with an orbital defense system to help defeat the early starship rush. Maybe you would need to research a certain technology before you can actually use your starships to kill off planets (could either be a real military technology, or could be a way to bypass some sort of diplomatic convention that previously prevented starships attacking populations).

I also like the previously mentioned ideas of coming up with a death star technology (moon sized hull, capable of actually making planets uninhabitable) and the idea that a planet will surrender before the entire tax paying population is exterminated. Factor in the number of people killed, morale, approval rating, etc, etc and you can come up with a rate of the # of people that are killed off before the planet surrenders to you.

MOO1, 2, Stars!, and Space Empires all allow fleets to be used against planets; I'm not really sure why GC2 decided against it.

GC2 isn't any of those games; it's a different game entirely.

like the idea of planetary bombardment, ALOT. Having that option attached to military ships, and not transports that is. Scaling the amount of damage done with the sophistication and number of weapons involved in the attack (plus any modifiers like mass drivers).

This was in "Birth of the Federation." You could weaken a planet through bombardment, but could only take it with troop transports. Catch was by mid game many planets had several orbiting defense systems that would usually take out at least one ship a turn and all troop transports.

By not allowing starships do any damage to planets and populations, it almost defeats the purpose of having them, and certainly limits their usefulness. I kind of feel cheated when I have the most powerful fleets, but they don't do me much good in and of themselves.

It is called "Projection of Force." In today's terms, one of the best examples of force projection is a carrier. A carrier (with support fleet) can control a vast region. However, being able to project that kind of power, being able to control the air and sea, still doesn't eliminate the need for the Marines to storm every island. Being able to bombard an island with a battleship does not make it capitulate. By taking out the AI's ships, you have removed their defenses and made them ripe for invasion, but that does not remove the necessity to actually invade them to remove the threat/conquer them.

If you don't want to invade, surround each planet with 4 influence starbases and win the planet through cultural conquest.

Interstellar war is supposed to be expensive, it's supposed to be difficult.

Still, most times I sucessfully invade a planet, they've already done the "scorched Earth" tactic and destroyed most of the improvements already. I find this rather annoying. Why would you want to voluntarily decrease the value of a target planet to begin with?

I also like the previously mentioned ideas of coming up with a death star technology (moon sized hull, capable of actually making planets uninhabitable) and the idea that a planet will surrender before the entire tax paying population is exterminated.

This reminds me of an earlier thread. Someone made a similar response to the "Death Star" request: "This game is called Galactic Civilizations. Part of the goal is to expand your empire by conquering other planets. How can you achieve that goal if you are destroying every planet you come across?"

Realistically. A "Death Star" type weapon would be sooooo game unbalancing. While it might prove entertaining to destroy the occasional planet there's really no challenge to the game with that kind of technology. Why play?

It is called "Projection of Force." In today's terms, one of the best examples of force projection is a carrier. A carrier (with support fleet) can control a vast region. However, being able to project that kind of power, being able to control the air and sea, still doesn't eliminate the need for the Marines to storm every island. Being able to bombard an island with a battleship does not make it capitulate. By taking out the AI's ships, you have removed their defenses and made them ripe for invasion, but that does not remove the necessity to actually invade them to remove the threat/conquer them.

**Yes, but bombers and battleships destroy factories, soften up defenses, and kill defenders making it easier for an invasion. So, you have made an argument in my favour.

I don't think invasions should take billions of soldiers. If someone is too weak to protect their planet with starships or planetary defenses, then they don't deserve to keep it. Are there planetary defenses in the game? (i.e. planetary guns or shields?)

Welcome to the planetary bombardment thread number 46.

For the love of God do people read anythign on this forum or just start new threads for the hell of it?

What you propose is so unfeasable it boggles the mind. You think the devs will put somethign in that will destroy the gameplay to please you? Get over yourself.

That's it for now...

I pray there isn't any mroe to this

Ignore the above post I blew a fuse and went on a rant, and I can't edit the forum because this forum sucks!

Welcome to the planetary bombardment thread number 46.

1) What you propose is so unfeasable it boggles the mind. The infrastructure of a planet takes years to buildup! A year is over 50 turns! Also who woudl destroy factories on a world

2) Only thing that may make sense in your whole post. However I think changing it right now without a huge change in the game would totally alter the flow of play. But it's worth looking into.

3) Makes no sense, planets are selfsufficient. THe food is grown on the planet not in space. It just seems liek you want an easy way to conquer a planet without usign transprots and putting your population at risk. That's lame, but there is already a way to do that with influence.

4) That is not true, you can use information warfare to persuade the disaffected part of the population to your side. You can also culture flip planets. Buy the planets, or get planets in a peace treaty. Many ways aroudn killign populations. Good races will fight evil races, so the evil personalities would probably have no place in a good civilization anyway. Killign them is the only humane thing to do.

That's it for now...

I hope so

Also to the person who wished you could build up defences on the planet you can. You can make defences to make the troops 25% better, and all sorts of fleet improving defences to ensure your ships fight better in orbit.

Yes, that 25% bonus that takes up a slot on the planet is comparable to +100%-200% that the attacker gets from Mass Drivers. /sarcasm

The defenders need some way of defending themselves that has a chance of working.

Anyone read the Night's Dawn trilogy? I liked the authors concept of planet colonization as a financial investment and the tactic of putting an asteroid in orbit as a source of resources. Oh yeah, and dropping them on people. I think making asteroids a physical entity in-game would help improve a couple things.

i) An asteroid put in orbit could be an alternative to rush-buying a factory. It could count as a regular factory which doesn't take up a planet tile (effectively improving planet quality) and helping with inital colony build-up.
ii) The asteroid could be used as a weapon for an invading fleet. With the proper research, an invader can drop a colony's asteroid on its head, removing the bonus, and weakening the planets soldering ability. Alternatively, a free asteroid could be shot off toward an enemy planet. It would be up to the defender to recognize this threat and send out ships to destroy it en route. This would obviously be taking the place of the existing mass driver invasion option. It could be a compromise for those who want to weaken planets without commiting to invasion. It gives the defender time to act, and the attacker something to do with their ships (asteroid escort duty, anyone?).

Asteroids could be directed by constructors to appropriate planets for resource gathering or to enemy planets as a weapon. This would place asteroids as a minor resource in the galaxy and would change some of the game dynamics. However, because you'd be paying for it, asteroid production would only be worth while for those stuborn low quality planets and in times of war. The rest of the time, maybe asteroid belts could act as a persistent source of anomalies.