Troops

[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.

[geoschmo]

I guess it's just a matter of opinion then. I don't really see a need for it myself. It simple enough to adjust the settings and make planets a little tougher. It doesn't matter to me if they are militia or actual troop units that I construct. It's not that much of a stretch in my mind to just view the militia as the primary defensive forces against planetary invasion and troop units as specilized offensive forces for attacking. There are many types of units and tactics in real combat that are good at offense and not so good for defense.

I guess it would be nice if there was some way to "harden" a planet with a low population to be able to repel an invasion. There is an ability "change ground defense". I haven't found anything that uses it. It may not be an operational ability. I am going to experiment with it and see if it could be applied to a facility to boost the ability of the militia further. There was a facility like that in SEIII IIRC.

Otherwise the only way to do what you are wanting Baron is hard code changes. I guess you would need to have the cargo get destroyed gradually, the way facilities are now. The problem I see with that is you are back to not being able to eliminate the weapplat's without destroying the rest of the planet, and your troop ships are going to have a rough go of it getting close enough to drop troops.

Geoschmo

[geoschmo]

Well, I tested the change ground defense ability and it doesn't appear to work.

Geo