Troops in Proportions Mod
 

PsychoTechFreak asked me off-board about troops in the Proportions mod, and I thought my reply was interesting and good to know for all players of the mod, so I'm copying it here.

His observation was that large troops (i.e. vehicles) seemed to be getting killed off by infantry, and so he thought infantry were simply better than large troops. He also asked if Elite Infantry got any other bonus besides +1 to hit.

My reply:

Try mixing large troops with infantry, and/or using large troops with shields and/or armor. Infantry and vehicles have complementary effects - either one is weaker without the other. Infantry are cheap and quite hard to kill but have much lower firepower than vehicles. Vehicles without shields or armor are particularly vulnerable. Infantry by themselves don't do much damage. Vehicles by themselves (except maybe high-tech shielded designs) tend to get killed quickly. Vehicles and armor together add the bonuses and damage resistance of infantry to the firepower of vehicles. In theory and (I think/hope) in practice, this leads to some semi-interesting design trade-offs.

Elite infantry only have one other advantage - the silly way SE4 handles vehicle_size to-hit bonuses. I believe that (unlike weapon to-hit bonuses) both share and stack, so if you have 100-200 elite infantry, all your ground units in your army will hit each time, until your elite infantry gets killed off. So, it turns out to be a major advantage.

PvK

Re: Troops in Proportions Mod
 

I ran into a curious situation: AI builds a lot of infantry on all its colonies and it is very hard to take them over, but had only weapon platforms on the homeworld ! One sneaky transport was able to conquire it - several military ships with weapons served as a decoy to draw fire.
I think it might be agood idea to boost militia - conceivably it will make taking AI homeworlds (and homeworlds only !) harder in case of AI troop building blunders.

New unit_building.txt file should solve this problem though...

Re: Troops in Proportions Mod
 

Nice way to set up the infantry-tank co-dependency, but is it possible to make it more complicated?

Say, somehow, a representation of infantry, cavalry, artillery, and... something else like air-corps?

Also, can I please have a ninja?

Re: Troops in Proportions Mod
 

In the game I'm playing I am using troops and I have not found a problem with "Taking Em Out" I have tried inf to find out they got dead Real Fast! now IF we can combine this one with Dev's mod http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: Troops in Proportions Mod
 

<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr>Also, can I please have a ninja?<hr></blockquote>Religious + Organic Manip in P&N will do that for you.
For play balance, you need a few hundred of them to subdue a few billion people.

Re: Troops in Proportions Mod
 

And what tech do I need to have a clone working at office while I spend hours at this board ? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/tongue.gif

Re: Troops in Proportions Mod
 

<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by oleg:
I ran into a curious situation: AI builds a lot of infantry on all its colonies and it is very hard to take them over, but had only weapon platforms on the homeworld ! One sneaky transport was able to conquire it - several military ships with weapons served as a decoy to draw fire.
I think it might be agood idea to boost militia - conceivably it will make taking AI homeworlds (and homeworlds only !) harder in case of AI troop building blunders.

New unit_building.txt file should solve this problem though...<hr></blockquote>

Ya, the current AI's will build troops on the homeworld, but may then carry them away and not replace them. As you say, adding entries to unit_building.txt to maintain homeworld garrisons will help. Some time after 2.2, when I add these to the AI, I may start getting feedback that no one will ever take a homeworld because of the mobs of weapon platforms and armies on them. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif We'll see.

Your idea to increase militia strength a little makes some sense. A small ground force should be able to take an ungarrisoned colony pretty easily, but not one with a really large population. However, the problem there comes from SE4 - it automatically regerates militia every combat round, and in Proportions, combat is intentionally slowed down so that it will often Last more than one round. It seems to me that pretty much means militia should be kept pretty weak, although I suppose it could use some testing and experimenting.

PvK

Re: Troops in Proportions Mod
 

<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by Loser:
Nice way to set up the infantry-tank co-dependency, but is it possible to make it more complicated?

Say, somehow, a representation of infantry, cavalry, artillery, and... something else like air-corps?

Also, can I please have a ninja?<hr></blockquote>


The SE4 ground combat system is pretty limited in what you can do with it, but I'll think about adding some more unit types for variety, even if it turns out to be mostly cosmetic.

What do you want in a ninja? For troops, I guess you're thinking of something more elite than the elite infantry? Historically, ninja would actually be intel units (assassins and spies), rather than conquest and main battle troops.

PvK

Re: Troops in Proportions Mod
 

<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by PvK:



The SE4 ground combat system is pretty limited in what you can do with it, but I'll think about adding some more unit types for variety, even if it turns out to be mostly cosmetic.

What do you want in a ninja? For troops, I guess you're thinking of something more elite than the elite infantry? Historically, ninja would actually be intel units (assassins and spies), rather than conquest and main battle troops.

PvK<hr></blockquote>

Have you tested whether the strategy set on a troop has any effect on what it does in combat? It would be nice if there were an affect allowed in the 'algorithm' that resolves ground combat for troop strategy.

Re: Troops in Proportions Mod
 

<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr>Your idea to increase militia strength a little makes some sense. A small ground force should be able to take an ungarrisoned colony pretty easily, but not one with a really large population. However, the problem there comes from SE4 - it automatically regerates militia every combat round, and in Proportions, combat is intentionally slowed down so that it will often Last more than one round. It seems to me that pretty much means militia should be kept pretty weak, although I suppose it could use some testing and experimenting<hr></blockquote>That is not true.
The militia only regenerate when there are zero foreign troops actually on the planet.
If you play a sequential turn, and set the number of ground combat rounds to be very small, you can watch both the attackers and the militia get whittled down.

I have had about ten year-long conflicts going on recently in my current hotseat game, so I am very sure it works!

Re: Troops in Proportions Mod
 

<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:


Have you tested whether the strategy set on a troop has any effect on what it does in combat? It would be nice if there were an affect allowed in the 'algorithm' that resolves ground combat for troop strategy.<hr></blockquote>

Good idea; no I haven't yet. Seems like probably the only thing that could be affected would be targetting priorities. Like, target smallest or largest might get troops to try to take out infantry or vehicles first. Someone should test it, but my guess is it won't have any effect, because the system seems to pig-pile everyone into two opposing armies, add up the abilities and damage inflicted by both sides, and then apply it. It's worth a test, though.

PvK

Re: Troops in Proportions Mod
 

The 'ninja' bit was only (something like) a non-sequiter.... Sorry. The word 'ninja', like most words, really ought to mean something unique, and not 'elitest elite' or something, I think.

An assasin might be novel, but assassins are really inefficient. For the massive amount of time and resources invested in his training, he will kill a relativly low number of enemies. Only by being specifically targetted does he make up for the investment. No such targetting seems possible in SE IV ground combat...

Although.... Is is possible to use the Alegance Subverter in Ground Combat?

What other funky-combat-tools are _not_ ground-combat-compatible?

Other than a novelty like that, there's really no place for any sort of 'intel' troupe in ground combat, is there?

Ground combat cloak?

Can you think of any way to represent 'air superiority' in ground combat?

What about the mobility allowed cav, armor, and mechanized inf?

[ 25 April 2002: Message edited by: Loser ]</p>

Re: Troops in Proportions Mod
 

No, that's what I mean - assassins and ninja in SE4 would be intel ops and maybe an intel facility, rather than ground troops. The ground troop equivalent would be elite infantry (although generic).

It would be easier to list what does work than what doesn't in ground combat. I don't think cloak would have any effect. Allegiance Subverter ability I don't think would work, since it doesn't work against fighters, but I heard boarding parties can work on drones, so that ability might allow you to get an Allegiance Subverter troop weapon. I hope phased weapons work, but I don't know. I doubt armor-bypassing would help. A lot of that I have not tested, because so much was not working when trying just to get the basics to mod.

For air units, I think it would be a new troop vehicle "size" (to get a plane picture) probably using a flight system component, which would have some to-hit and mods that can stack with armor and infantry, to add a third type that is good to have all three of (thus, the side with air superiority gets the bonus for the whole army, and denies it to the enemy by taking out their Last air unit). It may (or may not) be tricky to make it so you can't put the flight component on an AFV to get a tank-type unit. It would probably be best if there is a way to limit their firepower against ground troops and vice versa, but make them most effective against each other - probably need to use shield-bypassing and/or armor-bypassing, or maybe engine-destroying, or something, to get that to really work, if it's even possible (sounds like a lot of trial and error and testing and tweaking).

Armor is handled by small/med/large "Troops" with armor and/or shield components.

Mech inf is small "troop" vehicles with light or low armor combined with infantry.

I'm not sure what you mean by "mobility allowed cav" - if you mean that armor and mech inf have an advantage because of their mobility, I'd say that's abstractly represented in this locationless combat system by their high firepower Ratings. An infantry-only force can't dish out much firepower, and will gain a lot from adding some larger units with good firepower.

I was tempted to add Starship Troopers-like battlesuit mobile infantry, but it seems like that's more of a Foundations mod type of thing (should probably have its own tech area[s]).

PvK

Re: Troops in Proportions Mod
 

I've got an idea for Air Superiority, and while I'm awfully confident most of my logic is sound, I'm not sure these component abilities are 'live' in gound combat.

&lt;wacko theory&gt;

The flight-vehicle-size needs a special cockpit, this cockpit is the only ground component with standard (non-phased) shields, and it has a &lt;blank&gt;load of them. This keeps regular ground units from being able to do much damage to flight units. But enough peasants-with-rifles will still toast a small number of flight-type units.

PPB-type ground weapons (the only things that can hurt flight-type units) do very little damage, because they are highly specialized, but all flight-type components have almost no damage-tonnage. Flying machines _are_ inherantly delicate, after all. These are AAA weapons, and are awfully poor against non-flight units.

Flight-units can have AAA (which means they would do very little damage against ground-type units), as interceptors. Or they can have regular-type weapons, as gound-support flight-type units.

The flaw I see, with this, now is that shield-skipping (ones that skip _all_ shields) weapons will be inherantly AAA. Not sure what to do about that...

And, oh yeah, no troops have engines... so maybe all flight componets would be engines, and AAA would be direct-damage-asainst-engines... Would that skip the altitude-representing-shields that are part of the flight-type cockpit?

&lt;/wacko theory&gt;

The way that the to-hit bonus form air-units would be cancled out by a to-hit bonus form other air-support units might be a more elagant solution. But the only reason I plat SE IV (g) is because I dig the complexity-approaching-convolution.

Ground Troops with Boarding Parties? Sounds like a real good time!

Re: Troops in Proportions Mod
 

The engine thing is what I was thinking might sort of work, but actually I'm afraid that the way SE4 resolves ground combat will probably torpedo that. Yes it would bypass shields, but engine damaging can't damage non-engines, and units are either alll destroyed or partial damage is applied, so the weapons applying the killing damage might have to get through the shields anyway.

Using unphased shields would mean that suddenly APV Phased Poloron Beam would be an AA weapon, which I guess isn't a big problem. Might work. Would need a bunch of tedious testing to see, and to try various things and try to determine what effect they were actually having.

I'm a bit worried though that ground combat's "pig pile" damage system might make it hard to really pull off, though.

PvK

Re: Troops in Proportions Mod
 

If _every_ flight-type component is an engine, and all 'AAA' weapons are engine-destroying-type, then they would skip the shields inherent to flight-type units. Then you just have to make these inherent shields the phased kind, and phased shields just aren't available for ground combat. Every ground-type unit that used shields would use normal shields, and stuff.

Would that work?

THe issue I can see would be if those shields on the untouchable air units are applied to all ground units in the pig-pile scheme you have referred to. That would be ... unfortunate.

BTW, PvK? Player vs. ....?
kilo- something?
King?
Kelvin?
potassium?

[ 27 April 2002: Message edited by: Loser ]</p>

Re: Troops in Proportions Mod
 

I'm pretty sure shields don't share between ground units, but this is the kind of trick that you want to test before designing details for it, to make sure it really works.

PvK = Peter von Kleinsmid

Re: Troops in Proportions Mod
 

Ah, that's cool. 'Cause I was going to have quite a few more questions about what sort of contests of wits and skill one could engage in with potassium.

Another troop question, perhaps OT: Do any sort of troops affect population happyness the same. Would it be possible to build incredably cheap Flower Power Friendly Tanks with nothing but a cockpit and still get the happyness bonus?

If you used troops with only shields (assuming they survived obmital bombardment), would ground combat damage be applied to them begore being applied to the militia? How is such damage spread around?

Re: Troops in Proportions Mod
 

<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr> Another troop question, perhaps OT: Do any sort of troops affect population happyness the same. Would it be possible to build incredably cheap Flower Power Friendly Tanks with nothing but a cockpit and still get the happyness bonus? <hr></blockquote>Yes. Only troop quantity matters for happiness, not quality.

Re: Troops in Proportions Mod
 

I originally thought damage was applies left to right only, in the order the troops are listed (placed on the planet). I think that may just be the lowest order, though, and/or it's changed. If I recall correctly, I've seen Proportions troop combat where losses were occurring to both vehicles and infantry in the same combat round.

PvK