Ground Combat
 

What is the basic formula used by the system when computing ground combat? In my current Devnull game I know that militia units have a combat value of 10, a hit point value of 30. I also know that they have a combat modifier assoicated with their defensive stance, but I don't know how this all works into the calculation. Any help would be appreciated.

Ex

Re: Ground Combat
 

The best offense modifier and the best defense modifier from all troops and components in the stack is applied in some way. I don't know if anyone has taken the time to work out an exact formula though. But note that I am dumb. (used to be there is absolutely no randomness in SE4 ground combat...)

Re: Ground Combat
 

That is why I am trying to determine what will be needed to take out these certain planets in the game I am in. Just need to figure out what I need to bring to the fight to succeed.

Thanks.

Ex

Re: Ground Combat
 

Well i dont see the need for a formula anyway. Ground combat is about masses. Load a transport full with ground cannon I, II or III and invade whatever you like. At any rate, a full transport will overwhelm every planet, unless that planets controller did mass troops as well.


Mods are another topic though.


edit: with mods, im referring to gameplay mods. Not offense mods :p

Re: Ground Combat
 

Ground cannons are lame uberguns. And stock GC dosen't give much room to see randomness.

I have seen decent randomness in ground combat in my mods. When ground combat takes many turns, you can see the losses pile up, and they aren't nessesarily in the order of placement.

Re: Ground Combat
 

I have not found the First in First out, First to die advice given in the guide to be correct. (In stock) I am beginning to think that damage to troops is allotted much like damage is to weapon platforms. i.e. randomly. This throws out the three style assault force advised of a shielded type, a weapon toting type and a small ECM leader section.

I now put a small force of shielded leaders with all assults, but the rest does not matter as much. Using a lightly shielded weapon carrying group, or my cheap organic troopers just loaded down with organic guns seems to work. Possibly a force of small heavy shielded troops (saving space in the transport), large weapons troops, and a few leaders would be best.

Re: Ground Combat
 

I suspect that the damage is allocated in a hitpoints lottery similar to how components take damage.

Lots of high hitpoints troops should act like leaky armor for your leader and artillery troops.

Re: Ground Combat
 

this may have been patched out. It definitly USED to work as a FIFO-First-Killed queue.

You can still use combined arms tactics, especially in mods that include infantry. huge swarms of cheap infantry soak damage, while the big guns are carried by a handfull of traditional heavy troops.

Re: Ground Combat
 

I always load heavily shielded troops first. If any troops survive, they always include the shielded ones. Even at loss rates of up to 50%, only rarely have any died.

Once an enemy dropped troops on my planet. He is a good player and would have loaded his people correctly. Yet, everyone of the assault wave died except most of the strongly shielded troops. They had no weapons and so I was able to extend the planetary battle for over 5 turns effectively trapping his fleet around the planet.

The best troop mix could be found using a Game Theory Equation. A combined arms mix of small, large and medium troops with different ratios of shielding and weapons exploiting the "Leaky Armor" effect SJ mentioned.

For organic races the minerals and build time saved by not putting on the relatively heavy shields means you can have three or more times the troops if transport is available. I just use it on the leader classes. If ground cannons or other mineral weapon is used the shield weight percentage is less and leads to a mixture possibly being the best way to go.

The basic truth is that you can never have too many troops. Send all you have (with at least one or two leaders for ECM/ECCM support) Any surviving will help the planets morale recover that much faster.

As the saying (and sig) goes...
There is no Overkill... Just the word "FIRE" and "Reload".

Re: Ground Combat
 

In stock, 10 troops will take a colony world with no guards and will have a few losses. 20 will take it with almost no losses. For a homeworld class planet with 4 to 8 thousand million people, you need a little more than 100 troops for just the militia.

Guards troops must be matched with an even firepower ratio or even a little more than that to make up for them firing first. If the battle goes longer than the 10 round first try, there will be few troops surviving even after a victory. Send twice as many and then it will fall.

If defending against a troop attack, build more troops! Even if you are almost done with the multi-turn ship build, cancel it and build some troops. Boycotted planets can still build. Transfer troops from moons in the same sector if possible. Unless he has more transports with troops close he can not invade the other worlds.

Re: Ground Combat
 

I concur with Parasite; I haven't seen the FIFO troop effect in stock SE IV Gold.

Re: Ground Combat
 

Hmm... I seem to recall discussing this before and concluding that it was changed around the same time that the order of weapon platform destruction was changed. I need to stop forgetting these things!

Re: Ground Combat
 

Try my memory.

Re: Ground Combat
 

Hmm, interesting. I thought it was still first-in, first dead. However there may be two mechanics at work, the first being that units on the left being hit first, but the second being that any damage left over at the end of a barrage (round of ground combat) is applied to units which are weak enough to destroy.

My current theory/observation for weapon platforms is similar. I think that although which WP is considered for destruction first may be random, that the WP's with the lowest total structure get killed first, so there is only randomness when damage done by an attack could destroy more than one type of WP on the planet. I.e., I believe I am still seeing the lowest-structure WP's dying first, if there is a large enough difference in structure between the types, as I have seen for years.

PvK

Re: Ground Combat
 

Try this:
http://imagemodserver.mine.nu/other/...p/leakysim.zip
Set up with no shields or armor, and make the criticals your small platform, and your non-criticals your big platforms.

Simple rules;
- hitpoints lottery
- leftover damage is rerolled

But the gist of it is that the low hitpoint stuff will die pretty much every time it is randomly selected, but the high hitpoint stuff dosen't die until the leftover damage exceeds the high hitpoints. Every time a small one dies, it notches the leftover damage back down... so you have to get many hits in a row that all miss the small items before the leftover damage is enough to kill a big item.

With settings of:
- Crits = Big plats 10 x 1000hp
- Noncrits = Small plats 10x 100hp
- 200 shots x 50 normal damage

The small plats end up totally gone by the time the big plats are down to 2-4 remaining. With plenty of luck mixing up the results.

Re: Ground Combat
 

Interesting. Thanks SJ. I missed that post before this thread scrolled down. I don't think I entirely understand, though.

I went and found this post though because I just had it demonstrated that yes, things do now get hit out of order, sometimes, but maybe sometimes order does matter?

My example is from PvK's Proportions Game #2 on PBW, where the brave Federated Worlds have launched a counter-attack to re-take the Ilian colony on Hedrox III from my expeditionary force under my nefarious Commander Yujik. During the space battle http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/Injured.gif, they landed some troops on the planet (since it's a PBW replay, Hippocrates is the only one who knows exactly what he dropped, but since the ground battle is still going after two rounds, I can describe my initial forces and what's currently left of his ground forces.)

My occupation force (plus expeditionary force just landed in preparation for further offensives was laid out as I usually do by old wisdom based on the idea that first-in ground forces take the brunt of the damage: first tough units with low firepower, then high-firepower units, then a few token units with the electronic warfare components, since I figured they'd survive to be the last to die so I only need a couple - not so!).

In the following order, where DR = damage resistance:

104 x Regular infantry (each 1kT, 100 DR, 3 firepower, 30% defense bonus, etc.)
2 x LTS2 (light shield tanks - each 10kT, 690 DR + 800 shields, 15 firepower)
5 x LT3 (light tanks - each 10kT, 990 DR, 15 firepower)
2 x AC4 (command car - each 10kT, 712 DR, 15 firepower, +10/+10 attack/ECM)
10 x Fire Support (each 1kT, 100 DR, 5 firepower, 10% defense bonus, etc.)

Total: 24,104 DR, 1600 shields, 497 firepower

After two battles, the remaining forces are:
2 x LTS2
4 x LT3
8 x Fire Support

Total: 6,140 DR, 1600 shields, 130 firepower

So, the units with the best defensive bonuses died first (though I am very confident the defense bonus applies to the entire army, the unit hit being determined after the army is either hit or miss). As SJ says, the units with the lowest DR died first - they could ALMOST be said to have been dying in ORDER OF LOWEST DR... but not quite. What seems odd to me is that 8 of 10 of the Fire Support infantry teams are still there, and none of the 104 Regular infantry teams are left. My guess is that this comes down to entire army barrages hitting at once, and when the 104 Regulars were hit, an army barage would be applied to the whole stack. That is, maybe it'd be much less likely the Fire Support would've survived longer than the Regulars, if there had been several types (different unit design names) of Regulars.

At any rate, I'll be needing to revise my army compositions! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

For Hippocrates' sake, or anyone curious, what I can see of the Federated forces remaining are:

2 x Sherman MkII (each 10kT, 611 DR, 30 firepower, +5% defense)
20 x Sherman (each 10kT, 611 DR, 10 firepower, +5% defense)
177 x Marine (each 1kT, 100 DR, 3 firepower, 10% defense bonus, etc.)

Total: 31,142 DR, 891 firepower

Dropped from a 1020kT capacity starliner, so assuming it was loaded fully, he's at 397kT of ground forces out of 1020kT, or about 39%, while I am at 68kT of 214kT, or about 32% (or 25% of my starting DR, not counting shields). I imagine his transport wasn't full, though.

I'm losing the ground campaign... however, rumor has it that SE4 currently doubles the value of shields, and my shielded tanks have 800 shields plus 690 DR, so it may take either 1490 damage, or 2290 damage, to destroy one. The Federated force's total firepower is currently 791, if they all hit. So it may become important whether SE4 adds up damage from round to round (I can't imagine it would do so from battle to battle), to see if they can actually destroy one of those shielded tanks.

Proportions mod uses the following settings:
<font class="small">Code:</font><hr /><pre>
Ground Combat Damage Modifier Percent := 300
Number Of Ground Combat Turns := 10
</pre><hr />

while the unmodded game, oddly enough, is at:
<font class="small">Code:</font><hr /><pre>
Ground Combat Damage Modifier Percent := 30
Number Of Ground Combat Turns := 10
</pre><hr />

Whatever effect that has (edit: I remember I did it to avoid too many stalemates, and these are hardly the most durable ground units possible in Proportions mod), I think we may have a hint next turn whether it stacks up between rounds, by whether I'm left with two indestructable shield tanks or not. Or not. If it's 3 x rated damage, that'd be almost enough to take out a tank in one round, even if the shields are doubled. Well, we'll see what happens next. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Oh, and by the way, since his fleet of 30 or so cruisers happened to defeat my warships but lose their tankers in the confusion, and I still hold the resupply depot, I think I may just have to take this last stand moment to detonate the resupply base on the planet. Then perhaps I can evilly finish off his mighty armada as they run out of supplies. Muahaha... [img]/threads/images/Graemlins/Envy.gif[/img]

Oh, and by the way Hippocrates, the venerable old Defendre, the ship which the first to destroy a Myneyrsh ship so long ago, miraculously survived the battle and was even repaired, and since there is little it can do here and now, will be taking Commander Yujik away from here at speed 10 - I hope, assuming SE4 doesn't spark a battle there before he can get away. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif

PvK