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Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
Hi all,
In early-mid game (low-tech start, high-tech cost) what is/are the weapons of choice for anihilating an opponents home world as quickly as possible. I am not interested in capturing or saving anything. I want them to cease to exist. This time, it is personal.... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif SMB |
Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
Well, I found that two ships with planetary napalm can toast Norakians pretty well early in the game...ouch!
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Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
Well, in standard game nearly anything glasses a planet in 1, 2 turns max... This is quite ridiculous but that's it !
Put a pair of "large" bombs on a Lt Cruiser should be largely enough ! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif |
Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
After you clear the area, just about anything that can whomp on planets works.
The AI is pretty stupid. I was once able to clear a home world early in a game with a single ES mounting a DUC 2 I think. Pretty lame, but you have to ATTACK several times in a row maybe over several turns. A human player never would have let you get away with that. |
Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
Custom weapon: Transphasic Torpedo. One shot one kill. Very expesensive though. Only a Base ship can carry one. And one only. Its destroyed after use.
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Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
For just one world any of the aforementioned weapons, for a system a Star Destroyer
just some ideas mac |
Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
"Well, in standard game nearly anything glasses a planet in 1, 2 turns max... This is quite ridiculous but that's it !"
Not a homeworld.. takes a little more pounding than that. Phoenix-D |
Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
Yes, it has always been unrealistically easy to destroy a planet with standard weapons. While I don't like the 'kludge' used by many games of requiring special ground-attack weapons to do any damage to a planet, I think we need something changed. I've been requesting MM to create a special power to cancel the planetary damage ratio for certain weapons. Then we could crank that ratio up very high and make it very difficult to completely destroy anything but a very new/small colony with standard weapons. Planetary weapons would then really be worth something because they'd be 100+ times more efficient than standard ship-to-ship weapons for ground attack.
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Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
I agree with Baron that this needs to be changed. Because of the planetary destructive power of normal weapons, I don't even bother to research planetary weapons. I either take the planet with troops, or glass it with APB's.
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Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
Why not create a weapon-platform-only emissive armor with a decently high emissive level? It could start out around, say, 65 or 75 at level 1, and work its way up to around 400-500 at level 6. At max tech, normal mount PN, and heavy or massive mount big guns, like WMGs or TKPs, could still damage planets, but even massive APBs/PPBs couldn't, or would have to be at point-blank range, which can be fatal while fighting planets.
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Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
It SHOULD be easy to kill a planet from space. I bet 10 of our big nukes now properly used could start this planets destruction (Hitting a Plate edge maybe). Even a simple kinetic weapon used from space is terrbly destructive. I think the problem could be better solve by halving the firepower of point defense weapons which would allow near earth orbit weapons to become more effective. This would help the defense in many cases. Nothing a well designed Fleet could not overcome but it would swing things to the defender enough that Glassing would be tougher.
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Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
Emissive Armor is 'all or nothing'. It would only aggravate the problem by forcing you to use incredibly powerful weapons, like Planetary Napalm, in order to make any attack at all -- even a capture attempt. What we need is to reduce the need for gigantic numbers to create balance.
No, our nukes could not come anywhere close to destroying the planet. There have been many discussions of this on the Master of Orion BBs. If every single nuke ever made could be piled in one place a detonated together they would not be a fraction as powerful as the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. If nukes totalling three times as many as have ever been made were piled in one place on the moon (which has about 1/4 the mass of the earth) and set off together they would barely alter its orbit. (Take THAT Space: 1999! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/tongue.gif ) We cannot destroy the earth or even seriously damage it, only ruin the very delicate balance that makes our lives possible. [ June 27, 2002, 03:52: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ] |
Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
I bed to differ. Not to go off topic here but I just wanted to make this point. In a recent report 5 years ago or so. They said that there were enough nukes on the plenet to destroy it 6 times over. Specking of the population and buildings. So really there is enough nuke power on this planet to destroy it. I mean look at what happened in Japan with the atomic bombs that were dropped. And I'm pretty sure the US has a few more of those some place. So more the enough power to do it.
Edit: typos... [ June 27, 2002, 03:58: Message edited by: Ragnarok ] |
Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
You are misunderstanding. Enough nukes to destroy 'our world' means enough to destroy human civilization. The earth's mass is measured in scientific notation. Quote:
5.972 sextillion metric tons, or 5,972 followed by 18 zeros. Remembering that each decimal place represents a power of 10, you can see that the mass of the earth is really beyond our genuine comprehension. Current theory about the origin of the moon is that an object the size of Mars collided with the early earth and tore a big hole in it. Most of the material eventually fell back but some stayed in orbit and coalesced into the moon. The amount of energy represented by that collision is quite a few decimal places, too. Our entire nuclear/fusion arsenal is not even a signifigant fraction of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs let alone that moon-generating collision. We can stir up a lot of dirt but we cannot possibly 'destroy' the earth. Period. [ June 27, 2002, 04:13: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ] |
Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
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AFA the destroy-the-world-with-nukes thing, I think we could destroy the eco-system easily; but if we could sustain life for near-indefinite periods in space conditions, we could probably also sustain life near-indefinitely in shelters underground. |
Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
"There should be a difference between weapons which can destroy ships/bases with even thousands of ADUs, and weapons which can destroy planetary surfaces, with what? billions? trillions? of ADUs."
Why? These ships are heavily armored and shielded; planetary populations are *not*. The weapons in SE4 aren't exactly all featherweights either. CSM- nuclear warhead. Presumable a LARGE nuclear warhead. Anti-Proton Beam- When antimatter hits matter, e=mc^2; the beam might not even reach the ground, but it's going to do nasty things even before it gets there. Wave Motion Gun- directed fusion bomb essentially. Take all the power of a fusion bomb. Now point it at ONE point instead of speading out. We aren't talking about destroying the planet, just killing off the population that lives there. Weapons that are designed to take out large warships will certainly take out cities. The biggest issue would be killing more spread out populations. Phoenix-D |
Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
ah, i have not seen a question like this since the older days of the forum. when we had topics like 'whats the worst atrocity you have perpitrated?'
im sure the sci-fi canon (not cannon) would be an effective anti-planet device. if you have the time, you could always blow up the local star, or park a ship with techtonic bombs in orbit for a turn. if the planet is well defended and you need a sucker punch, you could always send in planetary napalm. or you could send in a plague ship. even if there are strong defenses, one hit will do the job. if you send 2 or 3 escorts with plague bombs, one should get through. you will have to wait a while, but odds are his happyness will go to heck, and it will buy you time to come back with real weapons and take care of his defenses. how do break the defenses depend on what they are. ships? bases? weapons plats? |
Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
About the topic: Best weapon to destroy the planetary population/defense/structures is of course the PN. I used to mount Large PN on 1/3 of my fleet when sieging planets defended with large WPs with PPB. With correct planning i barely lost a single ship (though repair cruisers were realy handy).
About the weapons that can/cannot damage planets, i dont like the fact that everything can target planets, but the fact is that the "small beam" measured in our huge kT ships wouldnt be so small when charged to ground, perharps giving a meson bLaster a coverage of an average city. More high-tech weapons are out of the question - i can see how Anti-Matter torpedo damages planets. As for destroying the world, an interesting theory never heard that one. [ June 27, 2002, 06:30: Message edited by: Taera ] |
Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
Yes, if we are striving for accuracy then as Baron says there needs to be some sort of different ratios for planetary bombardment.
Facilities and weapon platforms shoud be fairly eacy to destroy from orbit, even with standard weapons, as they are stationary, fairly large targets. Troops, not so easy, but still not all that difficult given a little time, or a lot of ships. Orbital bombardment, even standard weapons, should degrade planetary conditions somewhat. Although I am not sure I understand the logic for haveing the resource levels of a planet drop as it does now when a colony is glassed. Population should be fairly easy to kill off at first, but should get steadily more diffucult as the population drops. The Last million or so should be almost impossible to kill from orbit, even with planetary weapons. The result of all this would be that heavy bombardment would result not in a glassing of a world, but a wiping out of all the infrasturture and defenses and a significant amount of the population. And degrade the conditions so that the survivors have a hard time repopulating it. Of course this only applies for atmosphere correct planets. If it's a domed colony it should be fairly easy to completely erradicate the population. Geoschmo |
Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
That would be fairly difficult to implicate in the game IMO.
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Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
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Geo |
Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
Well, I agree that the planetary combat need some modification...
As of now, we can already do some things : * Drop Wp altogether, I don't like them, that's not SciFi as I want it http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/tongue.gif * Make population much more resistant to damage : it just hurts me to see a lone "Escort" killing 100M people with its DUC1... even if it supposed to weigh 150KT that don't help, what I see is a small 100 m long craft... * HEAVILY Shield planets/facilities !! That's what B5 mod did, along with shield skipping bombs ! That's very neat, to kill planetary stuff you have to use bombs instead of rays With this planetary attacks should look better IMHO. If I ever do a mod I will begin with this ... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/tongue.gif |
Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
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Geoschmo |
Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
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Population is a whole other thing. People are not likely to be in one convenient location unless, as Geo points out, the colony is a hostile atmosphere type and everyone has to live in domes. So it's just not realistic to be able to wipe the slate clean on a populated planet with DUCs or even APBs or any other beam weapons. |
Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
As with other discussed weapons/damage/etc, it must be remembered that balance is the key. If one goes overboard and makes a planet to hard or nearly impossible to glaze then balance is gone.
IMHO, Probably the easiest way to help in this area is to increase the use and strength of Planetary Shields. In addition as a side note, the possiblity of stronger wp shields/armor could also be looked into. These would be stronger then ship shields/armor, due to the larger area for infrastructure then you have on a ship. Increasing the range of wp's is also an option, as well as limiting the types of weapons that can glaze or damage a planet. Glazing planets whether pop/resources/infrastructure is needed however, it should not be as easy as it is currently in regards to planets that have progressed past initial colony stage. This is where planetary shields come into play. You could have different levels with higher levels of damage resistance as you go up the ladder. Also you could also have say level one shields stop x type of damage/weapons, level y stops up to ... dypes of damage/weapons, etc. or something along this line. We must remember not to make it to strong or play balance is gone.. This is only my opinon and 2 cents worth. just some ideas mac |
Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
I don't think there is any balance issue to making it nearly impossible to glass a non-domed colony. If you can wipe out the facilities, and reduce the conditions you remove almost any benefit to the owner. It's not a big deal and quite reasonable I think to require some sort of land action to completely finish it off. Actually if population could be used as low tech troops, then you could simply bomb the planet down to 1 Mil and then plant your own colony on top of it. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif
Before that though I think as someone else suggested earlier there should be a chance per turn of blockaded and rioting planets going over to the other side. Even if you didn't implement the other stuff about lack of resources causing starvation and what not. Geoschmo |
Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
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Surface - to - Space Missiles are also quite reasonable, and certain types of direct-fire weapons too (torpedoes, lightning gun). Antiproton beams should certainly never be used in any sort of atmosphere http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif |
Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
The ability to target facilities, cargo, or population would be nice. There have been times that I wanted to destroy a shipyard in my initial attack, but my bombardment winds up killing one WP, a couple of million pop, and a research lab. If you added an inherent defense for these facilities, it would require a player to use a bit more strategy when attacking a planet.
Also, how about not only planetary shields, but also facilities that would protect your population, facilities, or weapons platforms? 1. Bunkers (or shelters)- would add a defense value to your population. Effect would be cumlative. 2. Hardened defense bases-would increase defense value of weapons platforms 3. Hardened Facilities-possibly an upgrade? Would increase the cost of a facility but add a defense factor for the facilities. I don't think any of these would unbalance the game. It would require the planet owning player to sacrifice space/resources to create a defensive planet. Also, it would take a lot longer for a fleet to destroy a world. If you added some other things like beam weapons damage being decreased by atmosphere (thanks MOO!) or increase planetary weapons range, maybe it would make planetary attacks more interesting. |
Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
Also, the original point was to force more frequent use of troops. All we need to do is make more reasons for the use of troops, not make planets so tough to defeat that the game stalemates.
I think the current damage ratio works well enough to compensate for atmosphere. It's just not enough to compensate for the difference beteen the wide-open spaces of a planet and the hard-point target of a ship, troop, WP, etc. [ June 27, 2002, 16:04: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ] |
Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
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Geoschmo</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Well, it was a shortcut http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif : I mean they can't work "properly" in SE4 - they can't be specifically targeted ... |
Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
[quote]Originally posted by Suicide Junkie:
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I suppose the destruction of matter would overheat and radiate the world before the atmosphere would be depleted. The game could use some radioativity factors in the game. Use the Environment Resitance factor to reduce the ill effects of radioactivity. Ever consider what a ramming colonizer would do to a planet? 300 KT of mass hurling right at a city would do nasty things to a fairly wide area. [ June 27, 2002, 17:49: Message edited by: LGM ] |
Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
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Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
OMG! You want to deplete an atmosphere with APBs?!?
You do realize you're talking about matter-antimatter annihilation with all (or at least most) of the atoms in the atmosphere, right? Annihilating a planetary atmosphere with antimatter would vaporize the entire starsystem! Check out This amusing thread, about Spoo's sig, and a squirrel made of antimatter |
Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
farther in the one tech tree, can't remember name right now, you have torpedo's etc that target spaceyards, supply bases or other specific targets, problem is that they are so far up the tree that by the time you research them they are basically useless, maybe bring them down lower on the tree so they can be used earlier in the game??
Also defending planet/s troops should be given something like a static defense against assaulting ground troops. Assaulting troops should not always land 100% intact in a planet assault, there would always be some type of ground fire at the assault shuttles, at least in fairly advanced colonies, some casualties should be taken. Ground assaults need to be looked at closer so their usage would be more beneficial then just glassing a planet, but at the same time not making it to easy to accomplish. Ground troops should have a fairly decent defensive value vs assaulting troops on their way down. Therefore, just because you have more numbers in assault, it wouldn't always be a given that you will take the planet, this could be tied in with the physcial strength of your race.... just some ideas mac [ June 27, 2002, 19:35: Message edited by: mac5732 ] |
Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
Planetary weapons has the Smart Bombs for taking out Resupply Depots and Space Ports. They are in the upper half of the field, at tech levels 8, 9, 10 but it's not a very expensive field. You might possibly move them to computers, since they involve 'homing' technology that has to figure out which facility is to be the target. I wouldn't move them down very far in the Planetary Weapons field, though. They can be very powerful. A drone with a 'smart bomb' warhead might be even more effective than a ship armed with the direct-fire weapon. You could send a swarm of drones fairly cheaply (erm, if drones are modded to be cheaper... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif )
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Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
tks, Baron couldn't remember which one, I agree, moving them would be a better idea, one reason is that a lot of players don't research to far into planetary weapons at first because most of your beam weapons will do the same thing as the napalm etc. so it usually is done later in the game. Moving them so they become more readily researched might be the way to go making their use more important especially for raiding units.
Again, I think it comes down to too many weapons being able to pound a planet, maybe more restriction as to weapons or only certain types?? |
Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
MOO2 simply cut beam weapon strength in half for planet attacks. Missles and bombs were not reduced. I just swarmed the planets with missiles.
Anyway, it seems like a nice fix. But I'm not sure if it would be easy to do in SEIV. It maybe easier to add special WP armor and double planetary weapon power. [ June 27, 2002, 20:51: Message edited by: Wardad ] |
Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
Damage Points To Kill One Population := 200
Just increase this number to a hugh amount in your settings.txt and do the same for your planetary weapons. That will mostly solve the problem but your "nuclear" capital ship missiles will will hardly kill anyone. [ June 27, 2002, 22:44: Message edited by: CW ] |
Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
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We need to be able to damage WPs in a reasonable way with standard weapons without being able to wipe out the population, and able to damage population with planetary weapons without being able to effortlessly annihilate WPs. We cannot 'balance' the system with the available options. Either standard ship weapons are too powerful against planets or 'planetary' weapons are too powerful against planets. The problem is just that. [ June 27, 2002, 22:54: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ] |
Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
"No, that falls onto one horn of precisely the dilemma we are trying to avoid. Planetary weapons will then be able to smash WPs to dust."
Bump the WP's health up then. Fairly simple to add a WP-only mount that adds large amounts of hit points to them (troops too, though that's a bit diceyer). Then only facilities are vulnerable. Phoenix-D |
Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
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WP armor, ie total unit damage resistance, could be easily increased by raising damage resistance of WP computer. Only drawback is that it does not scale with WP size. ---------------------------------------------- Rock, Paper, Lawyers |
Re: Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?
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Geoschmo |
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