What I Hate Most About SEIV

taterbill · #1 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 · #2 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)

taterbill · #3 November 12th, 2001, 07:51 PM

S_J,

Your post brings to mind a off-topic question I've had in my mind for a while. What is the formula for calculating how many militia will be on a planet? And what are the statistics of a militia?

It would be nice to be able to know what I'm about to go up against.

Thanks,

Bill

Suicide Junkie · #4 November 12th, 2001, 09:11 PM

See settings.txt for the exact numbers, but IIRC, there is:
1 militia for every 10 to 100 million.
Militia have 1:4 firepower:hitpoint ratio.
Probably 10 damage, 40 hitpoints.

I'll look it up when I get home, and edit this post in about 3 hours.

bearclaw · #5 November 12th, 2001, 09:56 PM

Research. I much prefer the way research was handled in SE3. That was one of the best features in the game. I don't like this "all or nothing" method in SE4. Although, it does work nicely for Intel.

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"You don't know the Power of the Dark Side. I must obey my Master"

MegaTrain · #6 November 12th, 2001, 10:09 PM

What the heck are militia?

You mean the population of a planet actually defend it like troops would? And how formidable are they? How many troops are sufficient to take over a medium-population planet. (Medium troops, filled with Ground Cannon III)

I thought I'd be able to simply pop my troops down there and take over the planet.

Glad I found out about these now, I'm about to launch my planet-conquering fleet.

rdouglass · #7 November 12th, 2001, 10:55 PM

quote:
Originally posted by Slaughtermeyer:
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....

Sorry, but that is one of the things I like MOST about this game - figuring it all out. The game has so much depth (in game and in modding) that it takes a long time (and a lot of questions) to get stuff figured out. If it was easy to figure out and get the pattern that won all the time, it would quickly bore me and I'd find something else to play...

Just my (humble) $.02....