[Slick]

Kim & all: The difficulties in capturing planets is definitely a recurring issue. I became so frustrated with it (in simultaneous games) that I have been doing excessive testing. It certainly is not intuitive and it involves lots of variables. And I am by no means an expert at it. I have a couple of test games in progress where I am experimenting with ship capture in one and planet capture in the other one which I play from time to time to tweak my skills. Here are some of the things I have learned, off the top of my head. Please chime in with corrections and/or additions. All of these are for simultaneous games with strategic combat since tactical combat can be done manually.

- Your troop transports can be of any hull design so long as you have at least 1 cargo carrying component on board, but if you want it to work right, you must give your troop transport the SHIP strategy of "capture planet"

- If you want your transport to work in a fleet, you need to give the fleet the "capture planet" strategy as well. This will make the fleet work as I said in the post below.

- If you want to try to capture more than 1 planet in the same turn, give the fleet orders to attack the target planet, then load troops from that planet then attack the next planet, etc. The loading of troops can get all screwed up using this set of orders if you have other cargo carrying ships in the fleet. The fleet will load troops into the first available cargo carrying ship in the fleet from the top down. Any troops over its capacity will spill over into the next available ship. Bottom line: the game is not smart enough to load troops into troop transports. Select your "capture planet" fleets with caution if you intend to use carriers or have support ships which can carry cargo. Remember, one of the requirements for the "capture planet" strategy to work is that the troop transport is actually carrying troops.

- I have had very little success in getting more than 1 troop ship in a fleet to work together. I got very frustrated trying to get them to work together and have given up in favor of 1 larger, more heavily shielded/armored transport. Of the few times I got it to work, the result was poor since each time troops drop, a separate ground combat session is generated. Either I win after the first ship drops its troops or I lose with the first ship, the militia regenerates and I lose with the 2nd ship too. I have read about using troops in the first wave with only shields followed by the combat troops, but I have not been able to coordinate this with more than 1 troop ship.

- The number of militia per population is set in settings.txt. If the defending militia win a battle, they regenerate to full strength before the next battle. The only time that this does not happen is if the battle is not completed within the 10 turns of ground combat.

- Having a massive fleet with your troop ship is not really a good idea because your fleet can very easily glass the planet. I almost have to add and remove ships as required on a case by case basis to tweak the fleet for different size planets and differently defended planets. If anyone knows how to configure a rather large fleet so that it will be able to handle huge to tiny planets without getting killed or glassing the planet, please speak up.

- Beware of satellites and moons. If you capture the planet before satellites and moons are killed, they will turn around and glass your newly captured planet, killing all of your troops on the ground. In strategic combat, if this happens, it may not be obvious at first what went wrong if you are not looking for it. Even a couple of satellites or 1 WP on a moon can glass the newly captured planet before combat is over. On this note, I have yet to successfully configure a fleet with multiple troop transports to capture a planet AND its moons in 1 round of strategic combat. The only times that it wasn't catastrophic were when there were no WP's on the moons. Anyone know how do this? Maybe breaking up the fleet into a sub-group for each planet/moon might work, but I haven't done this.

That's about all I can think of off the top of my head. I was going to make an entry for the FAQ for this topic when I felt more comfortable with the mechanics after more testing. Maybe a veteran out there can lend some good advice??

Slick.