What I Hate Most About SEIV

Master Belisarius · #1 November 12th, 2001, 01:05 AM

quote:
Originally posted by vreln:
Can you post a recipe, please? I've made it work, but neither reliably nor gracefully. Suppose I'm moving in with a fleet containing both attack ships and loaded troopships -- what orders do I give? What settings? Do I break up the fleet, or keep it together? Any pointers would be appreciated.

If you change the fleet strategy to Capture Planet, and keep your ships withouth break the formation, usually you will take over the planets (first the attack ships try to kill the weapon platforms if exist, and then, the Troop trasnport drop the Troops.
Remember that the ship with the troops must be designed with the type "Troop Transport".

capnq · #2 November 12th, 2001, 04:30 AM

I can't think of anything I hate about SE IV, just a few annoyances. Most of them have already been mentioned in this thread.

The one that most immediately comes to mind (since I just saw it happen again today):

When ships are abandoned for lack of maintenance, sometimes a satellite group is abandoned, even though sats don't have any maintenance cost.

------------------
Cap'n Q
My first SE IV mod! Hypermaze quadrant
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all of its contents. We live on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was
not meant that we should go far. -- HP Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

Slaughtermeyer · #3 November 12th, 2001, 05:51 AM

quote:
Originally posted by Master Belisarius:
If you change the fleet strategy to Capture Planet, and keep your ships withouth break the formation, usually you will take over the planets (first the attack ships try to kill the weapon platforms if exist, and then, the Troop trasnport drop the Troops.
Remember that the ship with the troops must be designed with the type "Troop Transport".

If your fleet consists entirely of ships all of which have both troops and weapons, should you designate all of your ships as troop transports? Will their weapons be used against the planet's defenses?

Master Belisarius · #4 November 12th, 2001, 05:56 AM

quote:
Originally posted by Slaughtermeyer:
If your fleet consists entirely of ships all of which have both troops and weapons, should you designate all of your ships as troop transports? Will their weapons be used against the planet's defenses?

Yes, I think that you should designate all of them as troop transport.
About the weapons, I don't know... probably they would use the weapons if fail to take over the planet.
Anyway, IMHO, you should have different ships designs for your attack ships and troop transports.

Slaughtermeyer · #5 November 12th, 2001, 08:42 AM

quote:
Originally posted by Master Belisarius:
Yes, I think that you should designate all of them as troop transport.
About the weapons, I don't know... probably they would use the weapons if fail to take over the planet.
Anyway, IMHO, you should have different ships designs for your attack ships and troop transports.

That's another thing I hate about SEIV, too much "I think that you should..." "I don't know...probably" and "IMHO you should have" when trying to figure out basic game functions that should have been explained in the manual. I did a test and found out that ships designated as attack ships will indeed drop troops.

[This message has been edited by Slaughtermeyer (edited 12 November 2001).]

taterbill · #6 November 12th, 2001, 08:50 AM

quote:
Originally posted by Master Belisarius:
Not very hard... at least to me! I have conquered a lot of small colonies.

Yes, I've managed to take a couple lightly defended small colonies also.

But taking a homeworld is pretty much impossible. Any fleet strong enough to get past the weapons platforms, defending ships, satellites, etc. will invariably glass the planet before the troops land.

Or, you try some different strategy and then the ships don't do enough damage to the homeworld, and your 100 troops get annihilated trying to take on all 4 billion of the population.

In tactical combat, I could bombard the planet until, say, 500M population was left, then send in the starship troopers. Simple. If you know a strategy to reliably accomplish that in strategic combat, then please share.

The strategy dialogs allow you to say "bombard planets until 70%" or whatever - the problem is, it doesn't work. Your ships bombard the planet until it is 70%, then they look around for more targets, and finding none, return to the planet to continue scouring it of all traces of civilization.

To me, this is the one glaring gameplay problem that desperately demands attention. All my other complaints are merely cosmetic or easily worked around.

Well, at least I feel better getting it off my chest...

Bill

Suicide Junkie · #7 November 12th, 2001, 05:00 PM

Will the ships blow away the planet if the troop landing is a stalemate?

If not, use 2-3 Large Transports full of heavily shielded troops.

I was a race with 50% ground combat, and I took an 8Billion pop planet that way. First load had 375 troopers, second boat was a smaller transport, with only 125 or so. My troops got whittled down over 5 turns, and at the end, my troops lost by the slimmest margin (<10% of the militia survived)

The key is that militia don't regenerate unless there are no foreign troops waging war on the surface.

So, if one boatload of troopers can survive 10 rounds of ground combat, dump 1000 of 'em on the planet and wait.

If you break up your fleet into squads, with each troop transport as leader, you can probably get all the transports to drop and run, while under cover of the warships (use a formation with the leader in the middle)