[Emperor's Child]

I've always thought that you shouldn't be able to kill ALL of the population by bombarding it from space. You would have to practically blast every square centimeter of the planet, and then find all of the populace hidden in mines, basements, etc. I have always thought that planetary damage should never be allowed to kill the last 1-2 million to represent this little point... you need boots on the ground to do that messy work.

Another Alternative is that you could consider a planet "killed" from orbaital bombardment as destroyed from the empire perspective, but then allow 1-2 M of the original race as automatically being added to whoever colonized the planet next (rather than needing to kill them). Basically this could be one way to implement the "bombed back to the stone age" approach. You could also use this same approach for automatically getting "bonus" population upon establishing a colony for Native, pre-warp cultures which could be seeded to planets similar to ruins (basically ruins that give you population rather than tech).


Another interesting thing I'd like to see is options for burning off a planet's atmosphere. Could be used by attackers as another type of planet trashing raid style of attack against stronger / parity opponents, or could be used by defenders in a scorched earth move.