[dogscoff]

if the first transport you put in the fleet is the first transport to drop troops.

The first ship to reach the planet is the first to drop troops. In tactical you can send them all in in whatever order you like. In strategic, you will have to consider formation, orders and relative ship-speeds.
Also, in strategic the AI has a nasty habit of sending troop transports scurrying into the corners until all the planet's weapon platforms are down, and/or as soon as the first transport has unloaded. It's often a good idea to put a single meson bLaster or something on your transports, so they will actually stay on the offensive.

I read somewhere that loading troops with shields first will cause Militia to attack them first, but it hasn't worked in my 1.91 games. No matter the order I load them, the troops with weapons get destroyed still. So does anyone know if troops armed fully with shields are obsolete now?
...
Can you build troops with only shields, and by loading them into the transport in some order, make them get hit first by the militias? I read that it was possible, but haven't managed to do it yet.

OK, What I think you're referring to is the tactic of having one transport full of heavily shielded/ lightly armed troops and another one full of heavily armed troops.

You drop the shielded troops first, then fly in the second transport and drop the rest.

The reason for this is the way the game handles militia: If you have a planet with a heavy militia defence, it can be very difficult to take, because every time the attacking troop forces get reduced to zero the militia gets fully replenished. This means if your attacking forces can't survive a full ground combat session (the length of which can be altered in the txt files) then sending more transports of the same size is utterly futile. You need to get a bigger transport in there.

The way to get around this is to send in heavily shielded forces first, capable of staying alive planetside long enough to let you get re-inforcements in, thus allowing you to meaningfully drop more than one transport full of troops.

This is ridiculously difficult to achieve in strategic, BTW, but trivial in tactical.

Try placing a single weapon on the shield troops. There might be something that makes unarmed troops always hit Last
...
1) If your enemy has weapons with a range greater than 1, the AI will do the intelligent thing and attack your vulnerable troops with weapons rather than your harmless shielded troops; and
2) If you don't have many troops, then the "front lines" might contain some weaponed troops, which the AI will kill first, and then continue killing as the weaponed reserves patch the hole.

Hmm. I could be wrong, but my understanding and my own experience has shown that troops are attacked in the order they are loaded onto the transport. If you load troops of type ABC they will be destroyed in that order. Or maybe it's C,B,A... I can't remember so i always load my (proportions mod) transports with a few hundred heavy infantry first, then a handful of high bonus elite infantry and then some heavy artillery at the back. That way, whichever end the enemy attacks from, they have to chew through a few hundred kt of crunchy grunts before they can get to the soft, bonus-giving centre of the elite forces.

For all those ppl who prefer to just glass and rebuild- you should play a few games of proportions, you'll soon realise the benefits of conquering intact.

[ June 29, 2004, 08:49: Message edited by: dogscoff ]