Planetary bombardment(genocide)

[LintMan]

One thing I've been thinking is that it's just too easy to obliterate a planet from space with normal weapons I've had a single fairly low-tech AI ship come up to a defenseless colony of mine and destroy it in about 3-4 tactical combat turns using nothing but low-end beam weapons. I've done the same to enemy colonies similarly.

Currently, there's really no reason to ever use the planet bombs (unless you're using one of the specialty ones like a plague bomb). Standard ship weapons do a fine job against planets, so why invest time/space in planet-only weapons?

I think it should be possible to kill off an entire planet population from space, but I think it's just too easy right now, where you can do it with a few standard combat ships, compared to how hard it is to capture a planet with troops (which takes some expensive research, requires you to build troopships and lots and lots of troops, and since ground combat is only 10 turns, it can carry over for several game turns to capture an enemy homeworld).

Genocide is far too easy right now, compared to conquering with troops, and there seems to be no real repercussions from it.

What I'd like to see is the normal ship weapons (direct fire and seekers) do substantially reduced damage to populations (but maybe not so reduced for planetary facilities and platforms), so that it would effectively require more specialized weapons/ships to actually eliminate the population.

That would at least make it more difficult for a raiding frigate to destroy undefended colony worlds. Unless the frigate was loaded with planet bombs... but then it would have less room for ship to ship defenses/weapons.

Perhaps if troop tech (and troops themselves!) were cheaper, that would balance things a bit more also.