Kill-Death Ratios in GCII

I always install giant soundblasters in the stratosphere right before an invasion so they can all hear Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" on the whole planet with a noise level of at least 200 dB. They therefor shi** themselves and run like cowards, making it easier for my evil troops to hunt 'em down.

Herodias,
Tyranny of Evil

Mogadishu, Somalia, Oct 3, 1993:
U.S./UN forces engaged: 120 on ground, eventually ~400 (counting pilots, drivers, etc)
U.S./UN casualties: 18 dead, 73 wounded.

Somali militia, etc forces engaged: est. 5000-7000
Somali casualties: est. 500(-) dead, 1000-1500 wounded (including bystanders)

Disparities in Desert Storm and Iraqi Reedom were similar, though the skew in both cases was toward more captured opponents.

Modern (and future) war is a meat grinder when a prepared elite comes in hostile contact with amateur or semi-pro opponents.

Now try invading a Dread Lords planet. Hint: Bring 3 waves.

drrider

Remember that the attackers in a planetary invasion basically have air superiority writ large, or what Traveler players know as the High Guard: you can attack much more efficiently down towards a gravity well than trying to defend upwards out of it. I assume that "mass driver" bombardment basically means wholescale, scorched-earth invasion. "Traditional Warfare" probably includes lots of stuff you don't see on the screen like airstrikes against enemy bases, anti-aircraft cannon firing at incoming dropships, dogfights over LZs, precision missile strikes against enemy convoys.

Keep in mind also that it's 2,000 highly trained and mobile troops against 10,000 farmers, civilians and scientists as well as some soldiers, and the kill ratios start to look a little more understandable.

And don't forget, it is also based on how much more advance you weaponary, defence (ect.) technolgies are!

Not quite. You take the invasion troops directly from your normal population. Once on the planet, they're farmers again. Also, those 'farmers' have the soldiering value of your population. The game makes no distinction - manpower is manpower, no matter what you use it for.

Otherwise it would have to take into account that you can use troop transports to ferry around population, meaning that part of the population then would have military training...

But the general point is valid. The graphic representation is just a snapshot of the conflict, maybe the one decisive battle. We don't get to see the effects of the chosen strategy, nor the dropships landing, fights for air superiority / supremacy etc...

That's why in Germany you can buy this game when you are 6 years old.
I guess today's six-year-olds think comitting genocide with ABC weapons is fine, as long as you don't see the gore.
DoN't believe it? Check www.usk.de (it's in German though)

The developers made a good point in the chat session for the DA that population numbers are skewed. The population numbers represent the small number of tax-paying "citizens", not everyone on the planet. The developer suggested a comparison to Robert Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" was appropriate, at least for the population numbers.

What's interesting about that idea is that the numbers of soldiers that you see for the invasion actually would represent real, honest-to-goodness, professional troops, on both sides. The non-citizens would be in the background for the fight.

If that's the case, some of the arguments made so far in this thread won't be valid. There really are 2000 invading solders fighting some 4k-15k defenders and winning.

it's always struck me as odd that attackers get such a strong advantage. it opposite the norm of most strat games, for starters.



really? because with our current level of technology, it's pretty easy to fire a missile or gun into the air to take down enemey air craft, but it's not so easy to keep a massive ship capable of carrying billions of people afloat, let alone afloat and coordinating an invasion amidst heavy combat. of course, if we were in combat with an alien force that could actually do that, our missiles probably wouldn't be all that effective; but if our technological levels were comprable, it seems to me the defender would have the upper hand by virture of having lower energy needs.



maybe. if the invading ship had been outside the defender's sensor radius, i could see how the professional troops might be caught off guard. but once a state of war is declared, shouldn't defensive troops are usually kept on their guard?

moreover, it seems to me planetary defenses would be a lot more affordable than mobile attack forces. air forces wouldn't necessarily need to be space-faring, and even if they were it seems to me they'd still be cheaper and/or better armed than space fighters equipped with hyperdrives.

all i'm saying is that it seems unrealistic to me; i'm not proposing any changes to the game or anything. it's an intentional element of a strat game; any 'realism' is secondary to that.

The attacking army also gets tidal warfare and my favorite Mini soldiers, which make the battles lopsided. The AI gets the same advantages as well however.

If you're defending on a planet against a force that is inside your solar system, you have in essence already lost. You are standing under a spotlight in a dark room, peering into the darkness for the coming fist. Hence the advantage to the attacker.

Having complete control of the skies above your opponent's planet SHOULD be a huge advantage.

Ships in orbit aren't afloat, they are falling towards the earth, and continually missing, as I heard one author glibly claim. They aren't using energy to stay there. They get to see everything you do above ground, and if the weapon isn't speed of light, they'll see it coming as well. You can see that might be advantageous for the attacker.

Other little known facts-

Robinson's First Law of space combat is that something hitting at 3 km/sec (kips) delivers kinetic energy broadly equal to its mass in TNT.

It's pretty easy to get stuff up to that speed without the friction of an atmosphere. In Niven's "Footfall", the bad guys sat in orbit and basically dropped the equivalent of crowbars on the defenders of Earth, taking out interchanges on the interstate when they didn't have more interesting targets to focus on.

Being at the bottom of the gravity well really sucks for the defender.

need a reason before i'm willing to accept this. dlapine provided some.



but transport ships aren't in orbit, they're landing, for falling gracefully at best. but controlled reentry isn't exactly easy; it involves very precise trajectories that aren't really condusive to manuevering. ships in orbit, true, aren't expending any energy. but in that case, all they've achieved is a blockade.



people in the future don't have tents? if we're assuming all this advanced technology, who's to say sensor scrablers aren't commonplace?



so they shoot it down or stear out of the way. missiles launched at ships in orbit might be easy enough to shoot down, but i'm also thinking about a dog fight situation. also, just 'cause they see it coming doesn't mean they can do much about it. you used a fictive example, and so will i: on Stargate when Earth was defending against Anubus, a sea of drones that could be seen miles from their target were still capable of totally destroying that target. sure, the drones were of a level of technology far beyond what Anubus had, but i think all the meant is that Earth needed fewer of them to get the job done.

also those crowbar things must have been a very special material to not disintegrate in the atmosphere. sounds like an interesting plot device.



fair enough: the things you mentioned could certainly be used to an attacker's advantage, and i'm pretty fairly convinced. if they wanted to utterly decimate the defending planet, it could be done very easily from orbit; even landing invasion forces wouldn't be too difficult.

i guess what i find unrealistic isn't the attacker's advantage, but the lack of options for defending, and how simplistic the whole process is in GC2. the biggest orbiting defense fleets can only have 9 ships without shutting down the planet's starport. no mines. no planetary shields. no defense staelites. no ground-based cannons. none of it. it just gets abstracted to a simple invasion with major attacker advantages. there is the planetary defense structure, but it doesn't do enough to be worthwhile.

Here's an example from real life: in World War II, the Allied invasion of France and Germany basically won from several different factors, but one of the most important was this: America established air superiority over the Luftwaffe early on. A German soldier heard an airplane coming, he ran and took cover because it was probably an American P-51 or B-17 heading over to deliver some whoop-ass. An American soldier heard the same thing, he relaxed, because there was an angel over his shoulder watching. Air superiority gave the Americans superior intelligence (better eyes in the sky), superior mobility (you don't need to worry about hiding from German dive-bombers), and better morale (obvious reasons).

Now imagine that situation writ large. Imagine being a defender trying to defend against an orbital invasion. You try to move your tanks towards the front lines, but even with camouflage, you can't disguise dust clouds and engine emissions. The moment you try to move quickly, you're seen, and then you've got kinetic penetrators dropping from orbit: the aforementioned "crowbars" (which, unlike the space shuttle, are designed to move quickly through atmosphere, not slow down to a survivable speed, so you can do it without too much ablative heat shielding).

Imagine trying to fire shots upward at enemy defenders: your missiles have to break the gravity well, and so they need lots of fuel to move upwards. The enemy can sit up high, watch your missiles move (comparatively) slowly upwards to meet you, then either shoot them down or stay up out of their effective range.

Imagine trying to move troops. You're on the ground, trying to move troops from point A, where they are, to point B, where the fighting is. You have to pack up your guys, pack them all into huge trucks, spend lots of fuel driving for hours and hours from one side of the country to another, assuming they don't all get killed by the enemy's high guard. Meanwhile, the invaders just need to say, "Hmmm, we need another legion at Point B, tell dropship Alpha to load up another group of guys and head down there. Since we're orbiting the planet about once every fifteen or twenty minutes, have them ready in ten, and dropped in fifty."

Imagine trying to set up defenses. You set up your anti-aircraft guns at Point C. The enemy loses a couple of dropships. They first start bombing the living crap out of Point C, then just to be sure, they drop a legion of troops just out of gun range at Point D, have them run up to Point C and take a leak on the ashes. You can try to build overlapping defenses to cover the entire planet, but it's not going to work: something will get through, or you'll burn your entire economy on mothing but missiles and have nothing left for bread and beans.

It's possible to defend against an enemy who has the high guard, but it sucks. Think of it this way: give a dozen guys grenades and guns and have them stand at the bottom of an elevator shaft with no way of getting out. Open up the elevator doors on floor four and have two guys with grenades and guns start shooting at group A. That's the situation facing a defender in an orbital assault: if they're lucky, they can shoot the two guys up top, but more likely, the guys up top will just roll grenades down the elevator shaft and blow them all to bits.

I like that last example.

dystopic does have a good point about the difficulties of actually landing the troopships. You do have go through the atmosphere at survivable speeds and have enough energy to drop do a 1G descent straight down or suffer the "land halfway around the planet" version of aerobraking.

That being said, it is really easy to clear the landing site. Just drop a few crowbars.

that's a very good example, themocaw. i guess the pivotal point is the fight for orbit, which is more like a naval battle than anything. i admit to having given too much credit to the defenders.

...which is sad for me, i guess because i'd always thought they'd be a useful thing to put around a planet (from games like MoO2 and SE4), and they formed part of the fiction that makes this game genre fun for me. c'est la vie.

Fighting for the Orbital High Guard should be the big point of the fight. I do agree that planet defenses need to be better, but I get the feeling the designers wanted the major planetary defense option to be those Orbital Fleet Controllers (I think that's what they're called, I can never remember the exact name, I never built them because it was better, for me, to get the enemy to waste turns shooting down by little fighters one by one instead.)

The military was working on satelites that would throw rods from orbit to earth... they called it the "rods from god". Yes it is a special material... I believe it was tugsten rods. But I am pretty sure they are much larger than crowbars.



The defending starships do get an attack bonus... prolly to simulated most of the above... no planetary shields however.

well in fairness, according to the openning movie humans apperantly created a force field bubble to protect the Earth from the Drengin fleets. i could imagine a reason why it would only be a last-resort defence, if you couldn't pass through it from the inside (cuts you off from space) and took a lot of energy/time to turn on and off.



makes sense. the filaments in incandescent bulbs are tungsten, IIRC - i think because it takes a pretty high temp to make tungsten malleable...?