Troops

Baron Munchausen · #1 December 28th, 2001, 10:59 PM

If there were diplomatic penalties for genocide things would be different. As things are, yes, it's often simpler to just 'wipe the slate clean' and start over. Besides the diplomatic effects, the changes I suggested long ago to planet damage and troops on the ground would make things much more interesting too.

It's far to easy to glass a planet. The damage ratio should be 100-to-1 or higher for normal weapons. Then give "planetary weapons" a special ability to cancel the ratio. Suddenly, you'd need specialized ships for bombarding planets. If the techs are properly tuned, they'd be expensive and vulnerable ships, too. You'd have to escort them and take great care with them. Glassing a planet would be much more difficult. Most other 4X games, like MOO and Stars!, require special weapons for attacking planets. Why not SE?

Then, troops should either be protected by the planetary damage ratio or they should be 'spontaneously' produced like militia, just in smaller numbers. this would force real troop to troop combat which currently almost never happens.

The life of an interstellar despot would be much more interesting with these changes.

geoschmo · #2 December 28th, 2001, 11:16 PM

Baron, wouldn't these changes also make it much harder to drop troops on a world? It seems with those suggestions implemented your troop ships would get pasted before they could get in range to offload the assault troops.

Geo

geoschmo · #3 December 29th, 2001, 12:05 AM

Ok, I think I misread your post. I see what you mean now.

This could be mostly done now with changes to the settings.txt file.

Raise the damage to kill one pop, leave the standard weapons alone and raise the damage of the exsisting planetary weapons. No need for special abilities.

Raise the defending units per population, and hit points and attack strength. No need for actual special units. Just make the exsisting militia a little tougher.

With these changes it would be harder to glass a planet, and it would take more troops to conquer one. The weapon platforms would get toasted fairly early in the battle if the attacker was using planetary weapons, but that's not nessecarily a bad thing. You don't want planets to be inpenatrable fortresses, just harder to glass.

On a side note you could come up with some neat weapon platform only weapons. Missles that fire every 15 turns, but can hit anything on the combat map. Direct fire beams that can reach way out and touch you.

The result of these changes would be... If you want to glass a planet, you'd have to use planetary weaposns, or have a lot of standard weapon ships. You could make the planetary weapon components as expensive as you want to limit there use.

If you want to conquer a world you need more troops than you do now, and you'd have a lot of losses among you troops. No more conquering 8 systems with one small transport and 200 troops.

Put them in a fleet with some standard weapons to eliminate any pesky weapon platforms and then drop troops. Since the damage to kill one pop would be higher, you wouldn't have as much wash over damage and the planet would be more or less intact if the troops succeed in the assault.

Does anyone know how the game calculates whether a facilitiy gets popped? It appears to be a ratio of population killed, but I can't figure it out exactly.

Geoschmo

Argh · #4 December 29th, 2001, 12:15 AM

Baron's changes seem to be the way to go, imho! Just reading the idea made me want to immediately get into modding hehehe. . . if I could do *that* and few other small tweaks. . . lol, I'm sure that's how everybody gets into modding, by being sure that they'll be satisfied if they just "fix" stuff

geoschmo · #5 December 29th, 2001, 12:25 AM

You got it Argh. Modding Space Empires is almost as addictive as playing. More so for some people. There are whole Groups of people who only mod and the only time they play is when testing their mods. It's an amazing game that can offer so many different things to different people. Just one of the reasons it has such a loyal following.

Geo

Baron Munchausen · #6 December 29th, 2001, 01:39 AM

Actually, Geo, I forgot to mention the other unrealistic effect of the current system. Planetary weapons can grind defenses (WPs) to dust with their incredibly high damage Ratings. I don't think that's realistic. Population and industrial facilities are spread out all over the surface. A 'planetary' weapon is supposed to be a wide-area weapon specially designed to destroy this sort of target. So they would be much less effective against hardened targets than the intense ship-to-ship combat type weapons. MM has followed the usual 'marketting-style' of game design in naming the planetary weapons in ways that make them sound right -- like 'Planetary Napalm' -- but not really making them do what they are supposed to.

Would napalm be a weapon you would use against a bunker? It would just sit on the outside & burn. Well, anti-population weapons ought to be the same. They ought to affect only non-hardened targets. So, I guess my first proposal would have to be amended a bit. Planetary weapons should not affect WPs at all, or at least should have a 'damage ratio' like normal weapons have against population. I guess the special power should swap the damage effects between population/facilties and cargo? Something like that.

[ 29 December 2001: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

Suicide Junkie · #7 December 29th, 2001, 03:12 AM

How about this:
- Change all of the "normal" damage-type planetary weapons into "population only"
- Boost up the damage of the current "pop only" weapon (neutron bombs?), if required.
Thus, platforms & troops are protected.