Troops

[Baron Munchausen]

Geo, I want it to be harder to knock out the WPs with PLANETARY WEAPONS just like I want it to be harder to kill population with STANDARD weapons. Specialization, see? The current system is not sophisticated enough to allow both. It's one or the other.

With these suggested changes you would need a coordinated strategy to completely destroy a planet. If planetary weapons were then made large and expensive the incentive to use troops would increase. The typical 'raid' by a normally armed ship could then knock out units in planetary cargo and kill some pop but probably not wipe out an entire colony unless it was a new one.

[Argh]

Personally, I'd aim for a scenario where standard weapons would be close to useless for killing pop, myself. Most of the standard weapons are beams and such- not the things you'd use to kill people with- and I think that we have to assume that, in the far-flung future of SE:IV that they arrived at some good method of preventing folks from just dropping a lot of nuclear bombs all over the planet. . . maybe the solution isn't to prevent easy glassing with Planetary weapons, but to make the cost so horrendous in terms of damage to the planet that it's just not worth it when you do the math. Plus, I'd make Planetary arms pretty darn expensive.

[Suicide Junkie]

To help with the "want to have more troop-troop battles", try Phased planetary shields.
Troops land despite shields, and can then fight against the as-yet-unnapalmed defending troops.

[geoschmo]

quote:

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Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
Geo, I want it to be harder to knock out the WPs with PLANETARY WEAPONS just like I want it to be harder to kill population with STANDARD weapons. Specialization, see? The current system is not sophisticated enough to allow both. It's one or the other.

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Actually I think it is doable with the current system. We could make the planetary weapons "population only" as SJ suggested, but raise their damage way up. Then raise the "damage to kill population" and your standard weapos won't be able to do much to population, unlees you have a lot of them. And they would wipe out the cargo first anyway, which is the intention. Increase the cost of the planetary weapons to discourage their use, and you have a planet that requires a comined arms fleet to take it. Standard weapons to take out the defenses, and troops to conquer the population.

Raise the number of militia and their effectiveness so you need more troops to conquer a planet, especially a homeworld.

We could also come up with a slew of platform only weapons that have longer range and more structure tonnage to make them a little tougher to knock out.

And as Argh suggested make the cost for glassing a planet intolerable. Change the "Planet Value Percent Loss After Owner Death" to a high number. It's only 10 percent now. Make it 75 or even higher. So if you decide to glass the planet (or accidentally glass a small one ) it will be useless for any kind of resource production. We could even make all the planetary wepons decrese planetry conditions as well.

These changes might encourage the use of smart bombs too. Does anyone use them now? This will make it very hard to knock out facilities without them.

I like all these ideas. I might put this together in a mod. Anybody have a suggestion for a name?

Geoschmo

[geoschmo]

quote:

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Originally posted by suicide_junkie:
To help with the "want to have more troop-troop battles", try Phased planetary shields.
Troops land despite shields, and can then fight against the as-yet-unnapalmed defending troops.

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This would be cool for tactical combat, but combined with the other changes it would make conquering a planet in strategic combat almost impossible, since the troop ship won't approachuntil the weapons are gone. Unless the shilds aren't that strong I guess.

IMHO rasing the effectiveness of the militia would work fine. We don't really need actuall unit-unit battles do we?

Geoschmo

[Q]

quote:

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Originally posted by suicide_junkie:
To help with the "want to have more troop-troop battles", try Phased planetary shields.
Troops land despite shields, and can then fight against the as-yet-unnapalmed defending troops.

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I was not aware that there are Phased planetary shields, because if IIRC the planetary shield ability is only normal shields. Or do you mean weapon platforms with phased shields only?

[Baron Munchausen]

quote:

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Originally posted by geoschmo:
This would be cool for tactical combat, but combined with the other changes it would make conquering a planet in strategic combat almost impossible, since the troop ship won't approachuntil the weapons are gone. Unless the shilds aren't that strong I guess.

IMHO rasing the effectiveness of the militia would work fine. We don't really need actuall unit-unit battles do we?

Geoschmo

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Yes, we need unit-to-unit battles. It's absurd to imagine that you could destroy every single tank on the shore with bombardment from ships and then land your own tanks unopposed. There are all sorts of ways to hide and disguise a tank from long-range attack. But in SE it is assumed that when you hit a planet you always hit something functional, so you can wipe out every single unit on the surface of a planet from space. There ought to be a way for troops to survive bombardment as effectively as militia.