I've had this game for a couple of weeks now, and I'm having a bLast with it! A couple of thoughts regarding attacking planets have come up and I wonder how others feel about them.
First, it seems to me that planetary weapons should really be the only type of weapons that could knock out large populations. I can see the ability to knock out industrial capacity and other facilities to some extent with other weapons, but I just used a fleet of about 10 ships using mostly DUCs to wipe out 4 billion sentient beings. I can't see how projectile weapons, unless we are talking REALLY BIG projectiles, could kill large numbers of people from space. Mind you, from a game perspective, I can live with it and still enjoy the game, but it just doesn't seem right from a reallity perspective.
Second, it seems likely that if you do enough damage from space to wipe out 4 billion people, that the conditions of the planet should be affected by the attack. While I'm not an environmental researcher, my guess is that there would be severe atmosheric and geological effects caused by pounding a planet that hard. There should also be a lot of depleted uranium dust floating around, based on my above example.
As far as I can tell, the planet is pretty much in pristine condition and waiting for me to colonize it as soon as my colony ship shows up. Seems like I should at least have to clean up the dead bodies or something.
None of this is to take away from the game, it's just some ideas that came to me while playing it, and I wonder what other people think.
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Ursoids of the galaxy, unite!