Troops

[geoschmo]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[geoschmo]

Well personally I don't think it's unrealistic at all that weapon platforms are easy to knock out compared to facilities and population. Compare it to modern warfare. A HARM missle with a six inch warhead can knock out a SAM site, but it would take tons of conventional bombs to destroy a factory, or to kill millions of people.

Sure, we can assume weapons platforms would be hardened, but hardening doesn't really protect you from accurate hits, just close misses.

It's not totally realistic that all the cargo gets destroyed before any population or facilities get damaged, but it's not that bad a system. You would expect the attackers to target the weapons first.

If your goal is to make glassing a planet more difficult and this make landing troops a more accepted option, making it harder to knock out the weapons platforms is a bad idea. You will end up with what I thought you were originally saying and have a planet that was an impenetrable fortress. Once a colony was established you would have now way of dislodging the enemy cause your troop transports would be toasted before they could get within range to drop troops.

Maybe that is more realistic, battles usually go to the defender, but it would affect game play IMHO. Games would stagnate. You would almost have to use Argh's "Blow up the sun" strategy to make any headway.

Geoschmo

[Will]

My $0.02...

Population damage should ideally be a inverse-type function (for those who know what an inverse graph looks like, with x >= 0 ). At the start of bombardment, most people should be in a few areas. As bombardment commences, and the population centers are anhiallated, the firepower needed to kill more people should go up. An acceptable mod would just be to increase the damage needed to kill one million citizens.

Militia strength in vanilla SEIV isn't really strong enough. I play with Strength set at 50% (thus, -50% to ground combat), and yet I still use the strategy of capturing enemy planets. The only difference is that I lose a few more troops in the process, but the captured planet can usually replace those troops in a few turns (troop design is Small Troop, 1xCockpit, 3xGroundCannon/ElectricDischarge, depending if I have organic), and it is easy enough to have a few planets devoted entirely to building troops to replace those lost in invasions on the front lines. A Medium Transport full of troops (375) can take out the militia of a Large undomed planet, even with pitiful strength.

Summary: just jack up the damage/population and militia strength. A lot.