How does ground combat work, exactly?

[Suicide Junkie]

Zereth said:
What does the Ground Combat racial trait do, exaclty? Is the Ground Combat Damage Modifier Percent added to damage from ground combat weaposn, or subtracted, or is that the percent of the weapon's listed damage they acutally do? Does this apply to the damage reduction from Small Emissive Armor as well? Is there any point in adding Combat Sensors or ECM to your troops, or should you jsut load them up with weapons and armor/shields?

The racial trait adds/subtracts from your to hit chance I believe.
The Damage modifier found in settings.txt is a multiplier.

I'm not sure if emissive armors have any effect on troops. Their effect amounts are too small to make a difference in the results, even if they do work.

Use one or two troops with CS/ECM and have the rest loaded with weapons and shields (or modded armor if it has good protection values).
The best ECM and CS from any one troop is used for all of your troops in the combat.

Same goes with weapon platforms. Have one command unit with high targetting bonuses (talisman even) and it will spread its effect to all the units on the planet.

[Zereth]

Well, in the stock, it looks like... a Small Emiessive Armor is "Prevents damage 3 or less", one unit of Militar does 10 damage, and Ground Combat Modifier Damage Percent is 30, so Small Emissive Armors would make troops invincibile to militia, if they worked. Guess they don't.

And don't troops fight at range 1, where the base to-hit chance is 100%? I'm trying to figure out how to capture a homeworld in Devnull, and I have (theoretical) access to Bio-Engineered Fanatics, which make 1kt troops, so I was tyring to figure out if droping several throusand of them, or making acutal troops with them as pilots worked better.

[Suicide Junkie]

I believe the damage from all your troops stacks up into one massive blow, like fighters do.

That's why the emissive is useless...


The Bio-engineered fanatics are originally from P&N, so I can tell you that they definitely are an excellent weapon for ground combat.

[Zereth]

Yeah, but do the numbers favor using 2000 bio-engineered fanatics, or a lot of troopsusing fanatics as cockpits? (Although the huge pile of fanatics in drop pods backed up by one with ECM sounds like it might work well...)

[Suicide Junkie]

Well, that really is all up to how they were changed for devnull.

Just compare the damage and hp per kt of transport cargo space. And maybe the cost.

But considering that they are a racial crossover tech, they'd better be awesomely powerful

PS:
Even if troops to turn out better, you can always use a fanatic in the driver's seat instead of a troop cockpit, for that extra punch.

[Zereth]

Oh, I was planning on it. My anaylisis wasn't going to be "Normal troop vs Fanatic Drop Pods", it was going to be "Fanatic Drop Pods vs Fanatic Piloted Troops".