Question about capture planet strategy
 

How do I get my ships to destroy weapon platforms and sats first before my troop transport moves in and drops the troops on an enemy colony???
In SE IV this worked perfectely.
In SE V my ships seem to ignore/are unable to destroy the sats and weapon platforms and the troop transport is ignoring all danger and rushes to the planet.

I am using the balance mod version 0.92, SE V version 1.08 and fleets with the capture planet strategy. I moved up the planet with colony and sats in the strategy priority list and changed to "damage until all weapons gone" for the colony. No effect.

Re: Question about capture planet strategy
 

No ideas??
And of course this is without the treaty restriction "no planet bombardment allowed".

Re: Question about capture planet strategy
 

As nobody seemed to know an answer, I did some testing:
Damage to planets is randomly distributed between all types of cargo, facilities and population. Therefore there is no strategy possible that will selectivly destroy weapon platforms (or any other cargo). Using tachyon projector that only damage weapons does not work either, even if you mod them to penetrate shields and armor: they do no damage at all to the cargo units.
But you can create a new damage type with "normal damage type" and the two lines:
Facility Damage Percent := 0
Population Amount Killed Per Damage Point := 0
Such a weapon will indeed only destroy all cargo of a planet and will not harm population or facilities.

If you want some "collateral damage" you could use something like:
Facility Damage Percent := 5
Population Amount Killed Per Damage Point := 0.01
Such a weapon would do a small damage to population and facilities but still mainly destroy the cargo (you would have to test the ideal numbers to find the amount of collateral damage you want).

Re: Question about capture planet strategy
 

That sounds pretty good.
I'm going to have to take a closer look at the planetary bombardment missiles in GGmod, myself.

Re: Question about capture planet strategy
 

Hmm maybe Kwok can implement this on all weapons for the balance mod? Sounds like a good way to "fix" planet bombardment issues.

Edit: It occurs to me that this could be more than a fix. How about having the amount of collateral damage be based on cultural or racial factors? Berserkers do more pop damage, for instance, because they're more violent. Maybe tech could have something to do with it too. More precise weapon targeting systems would allow ships to selectively destroy enemy targets with reduced or even no collateral damage.