Population and combat
 

Hi,

there is one little thing in SE4 that really bother me:
The population on planets could be killed to easy.
If there is no defense you can kill 4.0M people in one round with only a couple of (low-tech) ships.

Because of this no one will use "Planetary-Napalm" or some other planetary-weapons.
It is to easy to kill that planet with energy weapons or some missiles.

There is an entry in the Settings.txt
("Damage Points To Kill One Population") - in my privat games I increase it to 100 (normal 10).
So you need ten times the firepower of normal wepons to do the same damage.
Simultaneously I increase the damage for the plantary-Napalm - so that you build bombers.
Maybe troops will be more important(?!)

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And now my question:
"What do you think about the
population-kill-ratio?"

Regards
Seik

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Re: Population and combat
 

Troops are already very important. It is much wiser and more profitable to conquer enemy worlds than it is to glass them.

Re: Population and combat
 

Well, WP mounts (firepower and ranges) have been changed in GOLD. It almost makes you want to add a planetary napalm.

In the real world, bombardment with low tech nukes and asteroids would easily kill the ecosystem and it's "top of the food chain" inhabitants.

To bad the kill is not exponential. The fewer there are, the harder to hit.

Re: Population and combat
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Yes, we've requested this in the past. It makes perfect sense that the ratio would go up as the population goes down. Apparently it's too complex to do with this Version of SE.

Re: Population and combat
 

In some mods (B5)they got an elegant solution : all facilities generate heavy shielding, and bombs are shield skipping ! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif
I don't know if it's phased or not, or if they left out other shield skipping weapons (PPB), but you get the idea ...

Re: Population and combat
 

Apparently both standard shield abilities work the same for ships or planets. So, if you just make a facility with phased shields you'll have phased shields for your planet.

[ June 20, 2002, 16:31: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

Re: Population and combat
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">How's that? They did it in MOO2...

Re: Population and combat
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Oh, yes - that's fine.
But as far as I know there are no phased-shields for planets or facilities (hard coded).

Seik