Conquering HWs in Proportions mod

[AMF]

A fellow proportions player is wondering how one most sucessfully goes about conquering a homeworld in the latest proportions mod. I confess I haven't tried it, but I also am curious since I might need to defend my homeworld from him. His basic question is:

"Have you tried conquering a homeworld in Pro3...I'm beating my head against the wall with this. Huge numbers of weapons platforms with tons of missiles, tons of PD and tons of shields. If I get close, I get hosed. If I stand off and fire missiles back, the enemy shoots them all down. I don't think I can pay maintenance on a big enough fleet to overwealm this stuff before I run out of resources. Now I'm experimenting with some up close battle wagons with a
handful of planetary napalm and tons of PD combined with a large fleet of small missile boats to hammer away from a distance. It's an interesting exercise but so far I've replayed this invasion 4-5 times with different
configurations and gotten nowhere close to winning."

I think the earlier Proportions mods had it a bit easier - I've seen a homeworld get "liberated" in Proportions #1 game...but have never tried in in the latest mod.

Anybody have ideas?

Thanks,
Alarik

[Nodachi]

Here's a thought;
Turn 1: change all your ships over to "Don't get hurt", move into (not attack)the same sector as the HW, assuming he doesn't have any ships there your ships will flee to the edges of the map and never get touched by the weapon platforms. You now have blockaded his HW and IIRC that really hurts in Proportions.
Turn 2+: chage all your ships back to "Capture Planet", wait until he attacks you, the combat should start with you right on top of the planet and getting the first shot.
I'm not entirely sure this'll work but it might be worth a try.

[Ragnarok-X]

Nodachi, remember you cant change tactics in strategic combat.

[AMF]

Ragnarok-X said:
Nodachi, remember you cant change tactics in strategic combat.

You coudl do it between turns, though, right? I mean, on turn 2+ have your fleet change to "capture planet" and "Seek target X" to do what he mentions, no?

[Alneyan]

I would advise against putting your whole fleet on "Don't get hurt", as your ships can end up acting weirdly. I recall a "battle" where three of my vessels were on Don't get hurt, but ended up being shot down by weapon platforms. I think you are likely to run into such problems if you are attacked several times while orbiting the planet. Of course, it may have been a glitch in my strategies, which wouldn't surprise me.

Blockading the homeworld is however a very good step (how you do it is another matter), though you will likely have to shut down trade income as well. If you can deny the foe any resources, you will eventually deplete their storage of resources (eventually), and especially intelligence. I am not sure if the Planetary Cargo Damage project works in Proportions (it is broken in the vanilla game), but if it does work, it should be a nice help to destroy all these weapon platforms. Having allies doing some intelligence pummeling to get rid of that Counter-Intelligence would help as well.

Otherwise, I am afraid several waves are virtually mandatory, but if you can prevent them from building any more units, you should win the day, sooner or later. More specifically, planetary bombs should do a lot of damage to the cargo, and will not have the punch needed to glass the planet, even if too many of them are dropped. That should also take care of the troops stationed on the planet (if any are there), but the militia will still be there to fight. I am not sure how powerful the militia is in Proportions though.

Alternatively, something involving a swarm of units might do the trick: units do not have maintenance, and you could probably send a host of well armoured units in the vangard, taking hits away from your ships dealing the damage.

On "not exactly conventional weaponry", you could be creating some storms over the planet, especially the "Penalty to hit" storms and "Lowered Shield Generation". Enough storms lowering the odds to hit could render PDC irrelevent, allowing you to strike at the planet with your missile boats. These ships would need the speed to escape the missiles launched by the planet however, but that might make for a nice softening blow. If you would rather launch a second wave with conventional weaponry, removing the storms should not be so difficult.

The Lowered Shield Generation storms *might* do the trick as well, if they actually negate shield generation from units. I cannot swear it works however, as weapon platform shields are treated as armour for all purposes, but who knows? Lastly, you could get a Crystalline friend, and start fielding those Crystalline Armoured vessels. It *should* work as usual against seekers, and seekers have an usually low damage rate, so that could be fun. Something I will have to try out I guess.

And the standard disclaimer: most of the above post is purely opinion, unless stated otherwise. The day where I will try to take a Proportions homeworld is still far away. Or perhaps not, hmm...

[AMF]

Alneyan said:
And the standard disclaimer: most of the above post is purely opinion, unless stated otherwise. The day where I will try to take a Proportions homeworld is still far away. Or perhaps not, hmm...

Hey! Waitaminnit here....

[Alneyan]

I did not mean your homeworld, really! And everybody knows I would much rather blow up the planet than try to take it over.

In other words, that Last comment was just a joke, at least for the time being (I have my Talisman to research before going to war after all).

[Suicide Junkie]

Alneyan said:
On "not exactly conventional weaponry", you could be creating some storms over the planet, especially the "Penalty to hit" storms and "Lowered Shield Generation". Enough storms lowering the odds to hit could render PDC irrelevent, allowing you to strike at the planet with your missile boats. These ships would need the speed to escape the missiles launched by the planet however, but that might make for a nice softening blow. If you would rather launch a second wave with conventional weaponry, removing the storms should not be so difficult.

Given a typical planet's HUGE defense penalty, that may not be nessesary.
As long as you don't go nuts on the storms, you should still be able to hit the planet without too much trouble.

Check settings.txt for your local values of the planet defense and offence modifiers.

[Alneyan]

Planets in Proportions "only" have a 100% defence penalty (it is 200% in the stock game if memory serves), and a 10% offence bonus. However, weapon platforms can get higher bonuses than in the stock game: the PDC alone will give +40% (for PDC fire that is), you can get +15% at best via elite components, and there is a nice component giving a huge bonus to hit chances (Fire Control Center, ends at +90% offence or so).

If the planet is protected by adequate ECM, and considering all else is being equal, you will unfortunately need to go nuts with storms to offset all of these bonuses, making your own vessels virtually unable to hit anything, even if using the smallest mounts that give an accuracy bonus. And better be safe than sorry I guess.

[Bill Door]

You could try a planetry attack drone swarm, but I'm not sure how feasable it would be.