Some New Player Qs

[Mephisto]

quote:

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Originally posted by Kynalvarus:
Conversely, can I set strategies that will cause my ships to fire on a planet until all its weapon platforms and troops are dead, then stop? That will make my troop transport wait outside range until there is no more threat?

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That’s an easy one.
Take your attack fleet, put in your troop ship, give the fleet the "capture planet strategy" and you are done. They will do by default exactly what you requested.

[Kynalvarus]

[quote]Originally posted by Suicide Junkie:

- Edit the strategies in your empire options window. Try using "Nearest ship" as a priority, or have them target by type, and wipe out the transports before moving on to the battleships.

[quote]
I'm not clear on how "Target by Type" decides which ship is which type. Most are obvious (Fighters, Sats, Mines, Seekers, Bases, Drones, Planets). The ones which seem ambiguous to me are Carriers, Transports, and Colony Ships.

Is a Carrier anything built on a (Light|Heavy) Carrier hull? Anything with Fighter Bays? What about Drone|Sat|Mine Launchers?

Is Colony Ship based on the presence of a Colony Module? I go to CL-based colonizers for long-range colonizations ASAP, would those be recognized as such?

Is a Transport only a Small|Medium|Large Transport Hull? I've never bothered to make a Troop Transport that was actually on a transport hull - you don't usu. need THAT many troops, and you need the speed of the 6th engine, not to mention all the ECM, armor, shields, and PD you can carry.

Thanks for the other answers, you da man!

--Kynalvarus

[Suicide Junkie]

Yeah I'm not sure either. If the situation was critical, I'd do some combat simulations to see how they get defined.

I would expect that the hull would be the determining feature, but I haven't played much strategic combat.

quote:

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I've never bothered to make a Troop Transport that was actually on a transport hull - you don't usu. need THAT many troops, and you need the speed of the 6th engine, not to mention all the ECM, armor, shields, and PD you can carry.

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In the games I've played I usually need two or three medium transports full of tanks to win against a homeworld. I had -50% to ground combat, and just threw 700 tanks at em

[Atraikius]

Suicide Junkie -

the -50% ground combat is why you need so many troops, you only need about 150 small troops with a 105% - 115% ground combat to take a homeworld from one of the many -50% races

[Growltigga]

well, I like using lots of troops - I make my physical strength ability 90% only, I also make ground combat only Last 3 turns - result? it takes you several turns to capture a homeworld which in my opinion is far more believable

Gold question, does the AI use troops more??

[Suicide Junkie]

Atraikius:
Yes, I know. But I had other things I really wanted to spend RPs for.
I knew ahead of time that I would need to bring more troops in order to make up for the 50% modifier, and so I did.
In the end, I sent in a total of about 1700 small tanks. They were all produced using excess resources, so they didn't really cost me anything.

700 of them fought for almost two years of game time (at two GC rounds per turn), and were finished off just before reinforcements arrived.
1000 more attacked shortly after, a third of them were lost in space when the transport fell to Platform Fire, and the remainder captured the planet with minimal casualties two months later.

I believe the reason why my initial force lost, but my second force of the same size won shortly after was that the AI was emergency building troops to fight off my first wave.
By the time the planet started rioting and the troop factories shut down, it was too late for my forces, and the militia were winning.
They then couldn't build any reinforcements against my second wave due to the riots.

That was a very entertaining campaign

[Kynalvarus]

quote:

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Originally posted by Suicide Junkie:
In the games I've played I usually need two or three medium transports full of tanks to win against a homeworld. I had -50% to ground combat, and just threw 700 tanks at em

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Providence favors the large battalions, I'll grant you that.

I guess the design decision rests on several factors. First would be your max ship speed. If odd, you lose combat speed on transport hulls. If even, there's no difference.

If you play -50% GC you're probably glassing everything but homeworlds & the enemy's breathables - cheaper and faster to rebuild than to capture when your troops are that lame. In this case you'd have to favor MT over CL and LT over BC/BB. I don't know if it makes sense to make a Troop Transport out of a DN hull.

In my current game, my race is Psychic & 100% GC. I dropped 150 Small Troops (2TxP3+SArmor3) on a 1.46B Homeworld, and trounced the 73 Militia easily, using a CL-based transport. I still had ~110 troops left to mop up the 5 domed colonies in the system, and had 45 left over after doing that and garrisonning them all. All in all I captured three the AI's four main systems in less than a year, using one troopship of 150 troops per, and just received his surrender.

Then, of course, the whole rest of the quadrant declared war on me. :-/ I told 'em all that he broke our TR treaty first, but they didn't care.
Fortunately I have 2 key warp points that I can blockade to lock the Vaxin in with me all alone. I'm going to need that. :-D

--Kynalvarus