quote:
Originally posted by Master Belisarius:
Not very hard... at least to me! 
I have conquered a lot of small colonies.
Yes, I've managed to take a couple lightly defended small colonies also.
But taking a homeworld is pretty much impossible. Any fleet strong enough to get past the weapons platforms, defending ships, satellites, etc. will invariably glass the planet before the troops land.
Or, you try some different strategy and then the ships don't do enough damage to the homeworld, and your 100 troops get annihilated trying to take on all 4 billion of the population.
In tactical combat, I could bombard the planet until, say, 500M population was left, then send in the starship troopers. Simple. If you know a strategy to reliably accomplish that in strategic combat, then please share.
The strategy dialogs allow you to say "bombard planets until 70%" or whatever - the problem is, it doesn't work. Your ships bombard the planet until it is 70%, then they look around for more targets, and finding none, return to the planet to continue scouring it of all traces of civilization.
To me, this is the one glaring gameplay problem that desperately demands attention. All my other complaints are merely cosmetic or easily worked around.
Well, at least I feel better getting it off my chest...
Bill