Planets, Capturing, Drones Oh my

[Skulky]

This is rather a grouping of a bunch of my questions i've gathered in the month long absence from these Boards:

1. Anyone have good suggestions on how to capture planets? And if so is it anymore efficient to capture them instead of glassing, say against a 150+ planet strong empire would it be worth it to try and capture them all?

2. When playing against a TDM race that has been fully blockaded by my ships and has a score of 13.0K to my 1.1M they still won't surrender or give me anything. What's up wiht that?

3. After reading The Shiva Option (great book) how could you design SRHAWK's, SBMHAWK's and RD2's? could you use drones? and how would you do warp point assaults without succumbing to the minefields? Last thought is how would you replicate gunboats? I really want to make a mod for this universe, posibly a scenario too its such a sick book no doubt.

4. What's the dealio with organic armor on non-ships, does it still work?

5. Relating to 1, how many people does each little militia dude in the combat display represent?

Well, thanks for all your help, i bet someone will answer this before i even post... haha. But yeah i might get some more Q's i finally got into gold and it rocks.

[ July 08, 2002, 19:26: Message edited by: Skulky ]

[mac5732]

In regards to cap planets, 2 possible ways, ground attack from transports and the other is using intel to get them to revolt and hopefully they join you, but they could go independent, if that happens, just put a fleet over the planet and demand their surrender, they more then likely will.

In regardst to gunboats, I would think modding the ftr files would probably be your best bet, as for CV's for the gunboats, do the same with the CV files in the game. Check with one of the modders, SJ, Fyron, Atrocities, Mephisto, Derek, PhoenixD and the rest. They could probably help you in this area.

For the 150+, depends on your time restraints, If you want quick knockout punch, then In my opinion only, glass all his planets in each of his systems except for the best 1 or 2, these I would capture and use for foreward support/repair/build bases, then follow up with colony ships. If you want to knock him out without spending time capturing his worlds, by all means glass each one of them and again follow up with colony shps to keep other races from colonizing them, it basically comes down to what YOU want to do, depends on how many other opponets there are, what position you are in, how large your own empire is etc. To expand you need to colonize or capture, but remember once captured you still have to subdue the population before they work for you, this calls for shps over the world, troops, and one of the pop happiness center facilities.... and it takes time, so again, depends on your time restraints,

good luck,
ps if you like Shiva Option, get the other 3 books in the series, Insurrections, Crusade and In Deaths Ground

just some ideas mac

[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by Skulky:
This is rather a grouping of a bunch of my questions i've gathered in the month long absence from these Boards:

1. Anyone have good suggestions on how to capture planets? And if so is it anymore efficient to capture them instead of glassing, say against a 150+ planet strong empire would it be worth it to try and capture them all?

2. When playing against a TDM race that has been fully blockaded by my ships and has a score of 13.0K to my 1.1M they still won't surrender or give me anything. What's up wiht that?

3. After reading The Shiva Option (great book) how could you design SRHAWK's, SBMHAWK's and RD2's? could you use drones? and how would you do warp point assaults without succumbing to the minefields? Last thought is how would you replicate gunboats? I really want to make a mod for this universe, posibly a scenario too its such a sick book no doubt.

4. What's the dealio with organic armor on non-ships, does it still work?

5. Relating to 1, how many people does each little militia dude in the combat display represent?

Well, thanks for all your help, i bet someone will answer this before i even post... haha. But yeah i might get some more Q's i finally got into gold and it rocks.

1) Build troops, drop troops. It's the only way to capture planets other than the 'Puppet Political Parties' intelligence operation, and that's risky. They declare independence more often then they join you.

Deciding if it's 'worth it' to capture lots of planets is a matter of your game play preferences. Some people like the challenge of capturing rather than slagging the entire colony off the planet and starting over. Some people only capture 'crucial' planets and slag the rest. And some people are genocidal lunatics who would rather nuke aliens than look at them.

2) An AI can be setup to not surrender under any circumstances. It's a setting in the AI files under that race's directory.

3) I haven't read 'The Shiva Option' so I don't know what you're talking about. It would be nice if drones were more flexible and mines were less of an 'all or nothing' effect, though.

4) No, armor regeneration does not occur on units. Organic armor is still good armor for a drone, satellite, or WP but you won't get the regeneration.

5) There's nothing in the game to indicate how many people a militia unit 'stands for'. But if you want to know how many militia will appear when you invade there's a simple formula. Divide the population by the 'Defending Units Per Population' setting in SETTINGS.TXT -- the default is 20.

[Skulky]

So assuming this AI that won't surrender has 10 start planets and another 10 normal planets what do i do short of blockading them for eternity?

[Mephisto]

Use troops. But not all the TDM races won't surrender. Conquering is a good thing to do at least in multiplayer as the rarest, most productive, most useful and hardest to get resource is population.