Militia and troops.
 

This is not a bug but quite unbalanced:

The miltia is extremely weak. You can conquer a full sized homeworld (4000M population) with a few small low tech troops.
That can easily be modded of course.

Re: Militia and troops.
 

I'm not sure that it's unrealistic if militia are "free". If you had to pay ongoing maintenence on them and the number you got was proportional to both the population size and how much you'd been paying, you could postulate that they are something like the Swiss army. However, if they are free then it is basically a bunch of untrained volonteers with whatever weapons can be scrapped up. Looking at the real world, in locations where private ownership of firearms is common and military service is popular (so lots of those firearms owners will be veterans), an ad hoc militia might be fairly effective. If you postulate a location with no private firearms and very few veterans, though, an army from the US Civil War era could probably conquer an otherwise undefended modern country without too much trouble (trained troops with muzzleloaders are going to beat a mob of civilians with garden tools, even if the civilians have technical skills that are 150 years higher).

Re: Militia and troops.
 

its just in stock SEIV. Even there a full homeworld with 8, or even 12 million people only readied very few militas.
Think about it. If earth was invaded by aliens, wouldnt 50 % of the population, excluding chidren and old people help fighting ? I bet so. There is enough weaponry, do doubt about it.

Re: Militia and troops.
 

I forget what the exact settings I used were, but for GGmod, I believe I used a formula something like "# militia = population ^ 0.5"

Healthly numbers of militia on a big planet, without covering the whole map http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: Militia and troops.
 

Aliens have anti-proton beams and shields.

Farmer bob has a rail-rifle.

Who wins? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif

Re: Militia and troops.
 

I think basically that stock militia should be very weak against well equiped and well trained military units. Look at real world Earth. Even the difference between very well equipped and trained military forces vs. average military forces is absolutely decisive.

One option would be to mod in Militia training facilities. This way you would have to make an investment in research and valuable real estate to improve the war fighting capability of you militia. The results could be in the area of damage done and to hit modifiers for militia units.

Re: Militia and troops.
 

I don't like to talk about realism in a game like SE (although you could argue about the difficulties the number one military power on earth today has in certain countries against very rudimentery equipped "militias").

I just think that it is not good if you can conquer a homeworld with 20-30 small troops without shields and one louzy depleted uranium cannon. That makes the first strike option against any encountered empire in the beginning of the game too strong. I like it better if in the early game destroying or conquering a homeworld is almost impossible.

But everone has his taste of the game and the beauty is you can mod it accordingly.

Re: Militia and troops.
 

Regarding the Iraq refernce it depends entirely on if you are talking about seizing control or eliminating all resistance. There has always been and always will be partisan resistance following a military conquest. the Romans dealt with it and so will the generations to come. perhaps there should be negative production and resource modifiers on conquered worlds for a a few years after.

I agree completely though that 20-30 small troops should not be able to take a homeworld. In fact I did not know this because I didn't even try.

Re: Militia and troops.
 

The one that shoots first http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Militia and troops.
 

What does a small troop mean at this scale.Is a small troop an infantry army or just one trooper?

Re: Militia and troops.
 

I'd consider a small troop to be some sort of armored tank type vehicle.

Re: Militia and troops.
 

Or possibly a platoon of them...

Re: Militia and troops.
 

I don't think that it says anywhere specifically but everything else, like ship combat and ships themeselves, are modeled on a per vehicle status not at a platoon / squadron, or whatever larger unit, level.

Re: Militia and troops.
 

Ya, though it looks pretty preposterously out of scale if you take it literally, like a lot of stuff in stock (says the guy who made Proportions mod because he couldn't stand it quite so severe). I guess the "troops" must all be enormous hovering battleships or something. The ground combat in SEV is of course vastly more interesting from a tactics and gameplay perspective than in SEIV, but the literal representation is like conquering a planet, even a homeworld, involves one small urban section with some buildings on it, and dozens or at most hundreds of fighting craft on each side (and again no infantry), having a pitched shoot-out.

I'm trying to think how it would be possible to mod SEV ground combat to seem like a planetary-scale battle, and am having trouble. I think it would involve a lot of 3D modelling, for one thing...

PvK

Re: Militia and troops.
 

The combat map size can be increased in size and additional buildings and landscape added. I think the facilities themselves can also be dispersed and so on... it'd at least increase the scale. If you add elements like automated ground turrets (ie Ground WPs) and more unit types, it could be really fun.

I think TampaGamer is kind of working on a more comprehensive ground combat mod...

Re: Militia and troops.
 

It already looks fun to me! And that's good to know about the battlefield size mod option!

I'm sure there's potential there to make it more like an invasion and less like a urban skirmish. Should be nice to see - I'm looking forward to seeing what people do with modding this game.

Re: Militia and troops.
 

A good quick solution to troop invasions is make it so that All weapon types can attack troops as well as fighters/ships/etc. Troops only ever appear in ground combat so then the weapons platforms would serve as ground defense as well. Or you could make ground defense specific WPs that only carry anti troop weapons. In any case. It is more realistic to think that an enemy homeworld will have defensive emplacements against invasion.

Re: Militia and troops.
 

Did the entire population of every country invaded by Germany in WWII turn out in mass to face the German army in open battle with whatever they could scrape up? What's the difference in getting invaded by aliens and getting invaded by Germans. Unless the aliens are bent on extermination rather than conquest, not much. People will do what they did then - whatever the occupation forces tell them, at least as long as the occupation troops are looking. And, no, there won't be enough militarily useful weaponry if there isn't any around - like in just about any European country today. Early in WWII, there was a major program to get American civilians to donate hunting weapons to be shipped to the UK to arm the Home Guard - and if Sea Lion had come out of the blue in 1940 there wouldn't have been time for that.

"It's just Sci-Fi, it isn't real - anything goes" is what gets us, for example about half the episodes of the original 1970's Battlestar Galactica.

There you are talking about insurgents with outside support, in countries where private possession of military small arms is darned near universal - not an ad hoc militia with improvided weapons facing an invading army in open battle. Even then, the kill ratio is something like 10-1 against the "militia" and they don't appear to have any chance of actually militarily driving the occupation force out.

Depends on what a "small troop" represents. It could be that a small troop is Hammer's Slammers, a medium troop is a regiment of Ogres, and a large troop is a regiment of Bolos. I've certainly never taken them to represent individual vehicles. I mean, it takes up 10 tons of cargo storage - which would hold how many colonists (and colonists have to include all their gear including pre-fab housing)?


The real problem here is that unless it is the Planet of the Amish there is going to be a defending army of regular troops on the homeworld, so the AI should be programmed to maintain one.

Not if the Alien is in Mobile Infantry powered armor a la Starship Troopers (the book, not the movie).

Re: Militia and troops.
 

I'm sure if Aliens invaded far less than 25% would fight to the death,and most of the worlds governments would be trying to get a deal pretty fast.Humans are cowards.

Re: Militia and troops.
 

This brings up an interesting point. If the aliens were humanoid oxygen breathers with a vast, well-run empire with a similar type of government, and if they had superior tech and good worlds for migration, then they might very well be received with token resistance at worst. Think of examples from human history, like the Persians and Romans and (sad to say) the Nazis. But if all the opposites were true, then resistance might be fanatical, even if pointless -- the invaders might have to wipe out the planet dwellers. There would at least be a scorched Earth policy. That last option is actually available to the human player. He can abandon a planet if he sees that its conquest is inevitable next turn. But really one shouldn't be allowed to do that, willy-nilly, without severe repercussions. Where did those two billion people go; did they all drink Jim Jones Kool-Aid?

Another point is that the type of inhabitants should partially determine their reaction. To use StarTrek examples: Humans might fight a suicidal war to prevent becoming part of a Borg collective, but probably wouldn't in most cases. Klingons would be more likely to fight a hopeless war; Vulcans might accept defeat as logically unavoidable. Ferengi probably wouldn't care at all as long as trade continued. Etc.

Anyway, some awesome possibilities, but what is actually achievable in SEV (without re-coding it)?

Re: Militia and troops.
 

Ground Defense WP are the way to go in my opinon. Forcing empires to choose between Space and Ground Defense options.

Also Barnacle Bill, it isnt 10 tons of ground troops, its 10k tons, which is 10000 tons...

Re: Militia and troops.
 

Uh-oh, you miss something very important here. HUMANDS did fight HUMANS. Because humans have emotions, they believe and know each other.
However, should your country be invaded by giant bugs, or giant lizards, or giant-something with no reference to earth at all, i dont think your 25 % would work quite well.

Heck, even human principles, or ethics like morale, life/death and culture could potentially have a totally different, or no meaning at all to something which is not human. No one will adopt to that.
What about those Xing Hive Insects from SEIV. Do you believe you, or anyone else could adopt to thier lifestyle ?

Unfortunally i cant bring a good example, because their has never been a situation of comparable value in history.

Re: Militia and troops.
 

Sure you can. What about War of the Worlds, Independence Day, Mars Attacks, and even Terminator. In all cases humans rise to fight and eliminate the alien invaders. Except maybe War of the Worlds were the microbes did it.

Seriously though it brings up an idea. So far we only talk about defense by the dominant intelligent race. Maybe there should be some risk that the invader doesn't get along so well with something living on the planet that they didn't know about ala WotW. Medical technology could reduce this risk.

Re: Militia and troops.
 

If you are going to do that, you also need to add a chance for some pathogen carried by the aliens to mutate and wipe out much of the conquered population, as happened in the new world here on earth.

Re: Militia and troops.
 

Ayep, all extremely convincing real-life historical examples..... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...s/rolleyes.gif

Re: Militia and troops.
 

Right - my bad.

However, here is more about my point...

The maximum population of a large world (i.e. default player homeworld) is 4000M. Given that the Earth currently holds roughly 6 billion, 1000M can't represent less than 1 billion people (or whatever). In other words, it is safe to assume that "M" stands for "Million" so 1M of population = 1,000,000 people (or whatever). 1M population takes up 5kt cargo, and a small troop takes up 10 (at starting technology). In other words, a small troop takes up as much cargo space as 2 million people. So, if a troop is a single vehicle it's a mighty big one.

Re: Militia and troops.
 

More to the point, they are examples in which the alien intent is to exterminate the human race, not simply rule them. What is going on in SE is typically conquer & rule - if you want to exterminate you glass the colony from space. I don't believe that humans are going to fight to the death man, woman & child with bare hands if necessary to avoid paying taxes to Lord Amon-Kurath of the Amonkrie instead of General Takei of the Terran Confederation.

Re: Militia and troops.
 

Real world example? Japan got pretty extreme in World War 2, due to some misconceptions of Americans and there own culture.

Re: Militia and troops.
 

Although the Japanese talked about doing that and even made some preparations for it (women training with improvised spears & such), they did not not actually do it when crunch time came. Neither did the Germans do it, and the Volksturm was better armed that spears (a lot of with guns that would have been obsolete in WWI, but guns at least). The general population just doesn't behave that way given an alternative involving a reasonable chance for personal survival.