Planetary bombardment(genocide)

[ashbery]

I been playing the game a couple a days now and i think its a great game but i dont like the way the a.i during war just wipes out your planets with ships ive not had troops invade me once yet,i think planetary bombardment should be changed in a patch so you can only destroy facilities from space and you can only get the planet with ground forces anyone agree.

[SirDarwin]

I dunno, I kinda like the idea of destroying a few million people

Now one thing that'd be nice to see is that if a player/AI does bombard a lot, the other AI in the game should get ticked off and attack that player/AI.

[Seawolf]

NO that a rotten idea. In a game where we can terraform planets it makes no sense to need ground troops to take a planet over. Besides what if a oxygen breather takes over a methane planet? IMHO

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Seawolf on the prowl

[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.

[Instar]

Terraforming a planet's atmospehere costs much more money and time than colonizing with another race. Plus it takes less technology.

[ashbery]

Lintman hit the nail on the head you can destroy a planet population far to easy why even bother making ground troops when you can destroy a empire with a frigate.

[Tomgs]

I almost never bomb enemy planets. They are too useful as slaves to my empire . Especially ones that breathe a different atmosphere than I do.

[Talenn]

Well, it is fairly easily to purge a planet as long as it isnt shielded. I kind of like the effect that MOO2 had with the reduction of most weapon's power when targeting a planet.

However, I believe it is a fairly simple tweak to make. In the 'Setting.txt' file I think there is a 'Damage to kill 1 Pop' or somesuch. I think it is set to 10. Maybe try setting a bit higher...20? 30? 50? I think that might make planets far more resiliant to standard weapons.

Talenn

[KillerManJaro]

Changing that stat would make it harder to kill pop with both standard and specialized wheapons. You'd have to up damage done by the planet-only wheapons as well to compansate.

So. Damage to kill 1 pop = 500 Damage done by Planetary Naplam I = 10000. That would keep the ratio of specialized wheapons the same (1 bomb kills 20 pop), while making normal wheapons quite useless. Then, you have to convince the AI, somehow, not to keep sending normally-armed ships against your planets....

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KMJ

[Kev]

Yes you can increase a population's resilience to weapons, but one only wonders if the AI can alter its strategy and tactics to accommodate this - it might continue to stupidly bomb planets to almost no effect, which is the result I've gotten after trying it.

This is a major flaw in the game. You can invade AI colonies but they must take the slower route of bLast\colonize. It's not much fun to play like this, either.

It was the same in SE3. I had been hoping this gameply issue had been fixed in SE4. Aaron, if you're reading this, can you plan and implement some ways to address this weakness?