Troops
 

I have a silly question: why would anybody bother landing troops? If I can't capture the unique racial techs. . . and I can develop tech that will make even unattractive planets livable later on. . . and I can reduce my Strength to, say, 10% in order to boost my Ship Production or other stuff. . . why not?

Is there a big advantage to capturing planets intact, simply on an efficiency basis? I can understand wanting to avoid the severe lag-time involved in rebuilding a planet's hardware, but you can always just dump max pop. on a planet, build as you please, and use your fleets to bottleneck the now-uninhabited solar system, or simply keep moving and raiding until your force meets something it can't handle. . .

Re: Troops
 

I capture planets intact and force ship the aliens off to camps. It is my play style to role play. In time I will move them to planets that they can max out on.

But to answer your question. I can quickly capture and ship aliens to useable planets with a lot less cost then to convert the planet to fit my race. So the plus is that if you are say oxygen/rock and you capture a none/ice race. You can max out all the none/ice planets in your systems.

Re: Troops
 

You would be suprised how much of a differeance you will see by capturing the planets intact. Even a max pop world can only build facilities one per turn. And space ports, space yards, and resupply depots take even longer. That's a couple years for a huge planet.

Also it can be a bit demoralizing to the other player to have you come along and scoop up his planets and populations. When you glass a planet, you take from your opponent, but when you capture it you take from him and add it to yourself. Much better IMHO.

About the only time I'll move pop around is to get oxy breathers on oxy planets, etc. In fact I've been known to take a planet from an opponent just to drag the population off in chains to my core systems to get rid of those domes.

And I prefer not spending a bunch of effort transporting populations around in the middle of a war. Too much work for me. Instead of spending time moving populations around you can concetrate on keeping your juggernaut rolling.

But again it's probably more of a style differance then an actual game differance.

Geo

[ 28 December 2001: Message edited by: geoschmo ]</p>

Re: Troops
 

Aha. . . I'll have to try that one out. . . although it sure seems like if you're just wanting to end a war, which is usually my goal- after all, resource management isn't the bottleneck in SE:IV, it's build-time(see thread above). . . I rarely need more *stuff*, I need defeated opponants http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: Troops
 

I agree I take them for the same reason, and as an added bonis is that if the alein tech is still there it works http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/tongue.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/tongue.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/tongue.gif

Re: Troops
 

If there were diplomatic penalties for genocide things would be different. As things are, yes, it's often simpler to just 'wipe the slate clean' and start over. Besides the diplomatic effects, the changes I suggested long ago to planet damage and troops on the ground would make things much more interesting too.

It's far to easy to glass a planet. The damage ratio should be 100-to-1 or higher for normal weapons. Then give "planetary weapons" a special ability to cancel the ratio. Suddenly, you'd need specialized ships for bombarding planets. If the techs are properly tuned, they'd be expensive and vulnerable ships, too. You'd have to escort them and take great care with them. Glassing a planet would be much more difficult. Most other 4X games, like MOO and Stars!, require special weapons for attacking planets. Why not SE?

Then, troops should either be protected by the planetary damage ratio or they should be 'spontaneously' produced like militia, just in smaller numbers. this would force real troop to troop combat which currently almost never happens.

The life of an interstellar despot would be much more interesting with these changes.

Re: Troops
 

Baron, wouldn't these changes also make it much harder to drop troops on a world? It seems with those suggestions implemented your troop ships would get pasted before they could get in range to offload the assault troops.

Geo

Re: Troops
 

Ok, I think I misread your post. I see what you mean now.

This could be mostly done now with changes to the settings.txt file.

Raise the damage to kill one pop, leave the standard weapons alone and raise the damage of the exsisting planetary weapons. No need for special abilities.

Raise the defending units per population, and hit points and attack strength. No need for actual special units. Just make the exsisting militia a little tougher.

With these changes it would be harder to glass a planet, and it would take more troops to conquer one. The weapon platforms would get toasted fairly early in the battle if the attacker was using planetary weapons, but that's not nessecarily a bad thing. You don't want planets to be inpenatrable fortresses, just harder to glass.

On a side note you could come up with some neat weapon platform only weapons. Missles that fire every 15 turns, but can hit anything on the combat map. Direct fire beams that can reach way out and touch you.

The result of these changes would be... If you want to glass a planet, you'd have to use planetary weaposns, or have a lot of standard weapon ships. You could make the planetary weapon components as expensive as you want to limit there use.

If you want to conquer a world you need more troops than you do now, and you'd have a lot of losses among you troops. No more conquering 8 systems with one small transport and 200 troops. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Put them in a fleet with some standard weapons to eliminate any pesky weapon platforms and then drop troops. Since the damage to kill one pop would be higher, you wouldn't have as much wash over damage and the planet would be more or less intact if the troops succeed in the assault.

Does anyone know how the game calculates whether a facilitiy gets popped? It appears to be a ratio of population killed, but I can't figure it out exactly.

Geoschmo

Re: Troops
 

Baron's changes seem to be the way to go, imho! Just reading the idea made me want to immediately get into modding hehehe. . . if I could do *that* and few other small tweaks. . . lol, I'm sure that's how everybody gets into modding, by being sure that they'll be satisfied if they just "fix" stuff http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

Re: Troops
 

You got it Argh. Modding Space Empires is almost as addictive as playing. More so for some people. There are whole Groups of people who only mod and the only time they play is when testing their mods. It's an amazing game that can offer so many different things to different people. Just one of the reasons it has such a loyal following.

Geo

Re: Troops
 

Actually, Geo, I forgot to mention the other unrealistic effect of the current system. Planetary weapons can grind defenses (WPs) to dust with their incredibly high damage Ratings. I don't think that's realistic. Population and industrial facilities are spread out all over the surface. A 'planetary' weapon is supposed to be a wide-area weapon specially designed to destroy this sort of target. So they would be much less effective against hardened targets than the intense ship-to-ship combat type weapons. MM has followed the usual 'marketting-style' of game design in naming the planetary weapons in ways that make them sound right -- like 'Planetary Napalm' -- but not really making them do what they are supposed to. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif Would napalm be a weapon you would use against a bunker? It would just sit on the outside & burn. Well, anti-population weapons ought to be the same. They ought to affect only non-hardened targets. So, I guess my first proposal would have to be amended a bit. Planetary weapons should not affect WPs at all, or at least should have a 'damage ratio' like normal weapons have against population. I guess the special power should swap the damage effects between population/facilties and cargo? Something like that.

[ 29 December 2001: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]</p>

Re: Troops
 

How about this:
- Change all of the "normal" damage-type planetary weapons into "population only"
- Boost up the damage of the current "pop only" weapon (neutron bombs?), if required.
Thus, platforms & troops are protected.

Re: Troops
 

Well personally I don't think it's unrealistic at all that weapon platforms are easy to knock out compared to facilities and population. Compare it to modern warfare. A HARM missle with a six inch warhead can knock out a SAM site, but it would take tons of conventional bombs to destroy a factory, or to kill millions of people.

Sure, we can assume weapons platforms would be hardened, but hardening doesn't really protect you from accurate hits, just close misses.

It's not totally realistic that all the cargo gets destroyed before any population or facilities get damaged, but it's not that bad a system. You would expect the attackers to target the weapons first.

If your goal is to make glassing a planet more difficult and this make landing troops a more accepted option, making it harder to knock out the weapons platforms is a bad idea. You will end up with what I thought you were originally saying and have a planet that was an impenetrable fortress. Once a colony was established you would have now way of dislodging the enemy cause your troop transports would be toasted before they could get within range to drop troops.

Maybe that is more realistic, battles usually go to the defender, but it would affect game play IMHO. Games would stagnate. You would almost have to use Argh's "Blow up the sun" strategy to make any headway.

Geoschmo

Re: Troops
 

My $0.02...

Population damage should ideally be a inverse-type function (for those who know what an inverse graph looks like, with x &gt;= 0 ). At the start of bombardment, most people should be in a few areas. As bombardment commences, and the population centers are anhiallated, the firepower needed to kill more people should go up. An acceptable mod would just be to increase the damage needed to kill one million citizens.

Militia strength in vanilla SEIV isn't really strong enough. I play with Strength set at 50% (thus, -50% to ground combat), and yet I still use the strategy of capturing enemy planets. The only difference is that I lose a few more troops in the process, but the captured planet can usually replace those troops in a few turns (troop design is Small Troop, 1xCockpit, 3xGroundCannon/ElectricDischarge, depending if I have organic), and it is easy enough to have a few planets devoted entirely to building troops to replace those lost in invasions on the front lines. A Medium Transport full of troops (375) can take out the militia of a Large undomed planet, even with pitiful strength.

Summary: just jack up the damage/population and militia strength. A lot.

Re: Troops
 

Geo, I want it to be harder to knock out the WPs with PLANETARY WEAPONS just like I want it to be harder to kill population with STANDARD weapons. Specialization, see? The current system is not sophisticated enough to allow both. It's one or the other.

With these suggested changes you would need a coordinated strategy to completely destroy a planet. If planetary weapons were then made large and expensive the incentive to use troops would increase. The typical 'raid' by a normally armed ship could then knock out units in planetary cargo and kill some pop but probably not wipe out an entire colony unless it was a new one.

Re: Troops
 

Personally, I'd aim for a scenario where standard weapons would be close to useless for killing pop, myself. Most of the standard weapons are beams and such- not the things you'd use to kill people with- and I think that we have to assume that, in the far-flung future of SE:IV that they arrived at some good method of preventing folks from just dropping a lot of nuclear bombs all over the planet. . . maybe the solution isn't to prevent easy glassing with Planetary weapons, but to make the cost so horrendous in terms of damage to the planet that it's just not worth it when you do the math. Plus, I'd make Planetary arms pretty darn expensive.

Re: Troops
 

To help with the "want to have more troop-troop battles", try Phased planetary shields.
Troops land despite shields, and can then fight against the as-yet-unnapalmed defending troops.

Re: Troops
 

<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
Geo, I want it to be harder to knock out the WPs with PLANETARY WEAPONS just like I want it to be harder to kill population with STANDARD weapons. Specialization, see? The current system is not sophisticated enough to allow both. It's one or the other.
<hr></blockquote>
Actually I think it is doable with the current system. We could make the planetary weapons "population only" as SJ suggested, but raise their damage way up. Then raise the "damage to kill population" and your standard weapos won't be able to do much to population, unlees you have a lot of them. And they would wipe out the cargo first anyway, which is the intention. Increase the cost of the planetary weapons to discourage their use, and you have a planet that requires a comined arms fleet to take it. Standard weapons to take out the defenses, and troops to conquer the population.

Raise the number of militia and their effectiveness so you need more troops to conquer a planet, especially a homeworld.

We could also come up with a slew of platform only weapons that have longer range and more structure tonnage to make them a little tougher to knock out.

And as Argh suggested make the cost for glassing a planet intolerable. Change the "Planet Value Percent Loss After Owner Death" to a high number. It's only 10 percent now. Make it 75 or even higher. So if you decide to glass the planet (or accidentally glass a small one http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif ) it will be useless for any kind of resource production. We could even make all the planetary wepons decrese planetry conditions as well.

These changes might encourage the use of smart bombs too. Does anyone use them now? This will make it very hard to knock out facilities without them.

I like all these ideas. I might put this together in a mod. Anybody have a suggestion for a name? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Geoschmo

Re: Troops
 

<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by suicide_junkie:
To help with the "want to have more troop-troop battles", try Phased planetary shields.
Troops land despite shields, and can then fight against the as-yet-unnapalmed defending troops.<hr></blockquote>This would be cool for tactical combat, but combined with the other changes it would make conquering a planet in strategic combat almost impossible, since the troop ship won't approachuntil the weapons are gone. Unless the shilds aren't that strong I guess.

IMHO rasing the effectiveness of the militia would work fine. We don't really need actuall unit-unit battles do we?

Geoschmo

Re: Troops
 

<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by suicide_junkie:
To help with the "want to have more troop-troop battles", try Phased planetary shields.
Troops land despite shields, and can then fight against the as-yet-unnapalmed defending troops.<hr></blockquote>

I was not aware that there are Phased planetary shields, because if IIRC the planetary shield ability is only normal shields. Or do you mean weapon platforms with phased shields only?

Re: Troops
 

<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by geoschmo:
This would be cool for tactical combat, but combined with the other changes it would make conquering a planet in strategic combat almost impossible, since the troop ship won't approachuntil the weapons are gone. Unless the shilds aren't that strong I guess.

IMHO rasing the effectiveness of the militia would work fine. We don't really need actuall unit-unit battles do we?

Geoschmo<hr></blockquote>

Yes, we need unit-to-unit battles. It's absurd to imagine that you could destroy every single tank on the shore with bombardment from ships and then land your own tanks unopposed. There are all sorts of ways to hide and disguise a tank from long-range attack. But in SE it is assumed that when you hit a planet you always hit something functional, so you can wipe out every single unit on the surface of a planet from space. There ought to be a way for troops to survive bombardment as effectively as militia.

Re: Troops
 

I guess it's just a matter of opinion then. I don't really see a need for it myself. It simple enough to adjust the settings and make planets a little tougher. It doesn't matter to me if they are militia or actual troop units that I construct. It's not that much of a stretch in my mind to just view the militia as the primary defensive forces against planetary invasion and troop units as specilized offensive forces for attacking. There are many types of units and tactics in real combat that are good at offense and not so good for defense.

I guess it would be nice if there was some way to "harden" a planet with a low population to be able to repel an invasion. There is an ability "change ground defense". I haven't found anything that uses it. It may not be an operational ability. I am going to experiment with it and see if it could be applied to a facility to boost the ability of the militia further. There was a facility like that in SEIII IIRC.

Otherwise the only way to do what you are wanting Baron is hard code changes. I guess you would need to have the cargo get destroyed gradually, the way facilities are now. The problem I see with that is you are back to not being able to eliminate the weapplat's without destroying the rest of the planet, and your troop ships are going to have a rough go of it getting close enough to drop troops.

Geoschmo

Re: Troops
 

Well, I tested the change ground defense ability and it doesn't appear to work.

Geo

Re: Troops
 

This is one of the things I've been doing since somewhere around the 2nd patch. Change the amount of damage required to kill a population point by a factor of 10 or 20. Then change the damage done by planetary weapons up by the same factor.

It makes planetary weapons actually worth using, and makes troops a more fun part of the game.