Ground Combat Lessons

[dogscoff]

I *never* bombard population from orbit. It's just not nice. I've been trying to capture the crysonlite homeworlds recently (Devnullmod, V1.35) and I think soon I will also be able to take an 8000m world intact.

First up, getting troops in to land is easy. Destroy most of the weapons platforms from orbit without damaging the population. Then either use a heavily shielded troop transport, or a heavily shielded/ expendible "decoy" ship to soak up what's left of the weapons platform fire.

One shipfull of troops just won't be enough, so you need to make sure your first wave will survive at least 10 ground combat rounds. Othrwise, you can't get any reinforcements in.

For this reason I developped the Scuffle III vanguard troop. These are all shields and no weapons, so won't do much (any?) damage, but based on my experiences with 4000m worlds, 1200ktonnes of these will Last long enough to deploy a second wave of troops. Once I have 2 or 3 loads of vanguard troops down, I don't have to worry about the 10 ground combat turns while I deploy as many ships full of heavily armed troops as I need to take down the militia.

I'll let you know how I get on.

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"Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?"
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[dmm]

Info that's been posted before but is worth recalling:
In a transport, first in = first out, and first out = front line. So put all-shield troops into a transport first, then put in all-weapon troops for counterattacks. This is extremely effective for storming smaller colonies. Remember that the defenders get to fire first. For large colonies (high pop), your first transport might need to be ONLY all-shield troops, so that your attack can Last >10 turns and not let the planetary militia "regroup".

[capnq]

On a related note, does weapons range matter in ground combat? In other words, do troops with range 2 weapons have an advantage over troops with range 1 weapons?

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Cap'n Q

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all of its contents. We live on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was
not meant that we should go far. -- HP Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

[Baron Munchausen]

quote:

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Originally posted by capnq:
On a related note, does weapons range matter in ground combat? In other words, do troops with range 2 weapons have an advantage over troops with range 1 weapons?

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You could probably test this easily. Setup a situation in a savegame where you are just ready to drop troops on a planet. Drop them one way and see the result, then edit the components.txt file to change the range for the weapon use in the troops and then reload the savegame and see if the result changes. Short range first, long range first... Whatever order you want.

[Suicide Junkie]

quote:

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Short range first, long range first... Whatever order you want.

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But be sure to do four or five trials of each, since there are random factors involved too!

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I don't understand the difficulty discussed here. Against even homeworlds I never needed bigger than a Battle Cruiser (or was it a Dreadnought ?) with basics plus three phased shields V and the rest cargo bays. It holds 150 large troops equipped with shields 3, ecm, sensors, and a ground cannon 3. Possibly you are using some other weapons ? Somebody pointed out that other weapons do not work properly for troops. I would not know since I always considered GC3 to be most cost effective and cheap to research to boot.....

I ignore weapon platforms on the target, just use a decoy ship to draw off missiles, then when they fire the troop ship runs in. But it occurs to me that only works in tactical, not strategic. Okay, use two decoy ships at least as fast as the troop ship, with the decoys leading the fleet. Since they have weapons the AI will target the weapon platforms on them first. Use the cheapest combination of shields and armor available (no regenerators) and just one cheap and small weapon on each decoy.

The 150 troops will blow away all weapon platforms with no effort. Before you send in the invasion fleet, make sure you soften them up by taking out all satellites, otherwise the sats will fire on the newly captured planet. Also checkout any moon colonies for WP and if found just wipe them first. A piece of cake. Your fleets need to be given orders to stop firing when all weapons are gone, otherwise they will bLast population, when capturing it is the whole point of the exercise. OTOH if you are an organic just build facilities to change atmosphere and whatever it is that generates 40m pop/turn per colony in each system....

[This message has been edited by LCC (edited 09 August 2001).]

[geoschmo]

IIRC the problem with this in strategic is if your transport doesn't have weapons you are correct it will be Last on the enemy targeting list, but it will not approach the planet until all the WP's are gone. Since you are not targetting the planet, your transport will never land troops at all.

The only way to get the transport to approach an armed planet is to have weapons onboard, and then it becomes a target for the defenders.

It is doable I am sure. It would take some testing of various fleet configurations to get the right mix between decoys and troop transports. But against a human player it would be harder cause they could simply modify the targeting to target closest first instead of biggest weapons.

Geoscmo