[geoschmo]

Ok, as far as making Monster planets harder to conquer...

I can confirm the ground defense ability does not work for facilities. I tried doing that when we were working out ways to toughen up planets in general.

Options:

Make a monster culture with bonuses to ground combat.

Raise the strength characteristric.

Build lot of troops. With monster tech you can make some really tough troops. This is kind of a waste of resources since they can be toasted from orbit. But you can make a monster-only weapon platform that is small (troop size) but has a lot of tonnage structure, and heaavily armored. Make them tough enough and yo can't bLast the troops from orbit, if the troops are strong enough you can't conquer the planet.

Give the monters another racial trait that is similer to the advanced storage racial trait, but with as hign as a percentage as will allow. The population expands on the homeworld, more population means mreo militia, and militia can;t be killed from orbit, without glassing the planet. Also with uber-adv storage, you can have more monster plats and monster troops.

If you do ALL of these together, that should make the planets unbeatable by anything but glassing.

Geoschmo