A thought on killing planets

[Daynarr]

quote:

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But back to ground attack. There can NOT be a special target type of "WP" because WPs do not appear in combat. They are an attribute of a planet, and can only be hit by firing on the planet. What you don't seem to understand is that damage to WPs is NORMAL. Unaltered by any modifiers. Damage to population is affected by the "damage to kill one population" setting in the settings.txt file. If you crank this setting WAY up, to 100 to 1 or so, it becomes nearly impossible to 'glass' a planet as the phrase goes. So, if you then create a special power for weapons to CANCEL this ratio you have a weapon that will do more damage to POPULATION specifically than any other sort of weapon. 100 times more. Yet, it doesn't have an ACTUAL damage level 100 times higher than other weapons and so cannot be used to smoke planetary defenses as the current Planetary Napalm can be used. This creates the need for realistic specialization. You need standard combat ships to take on the planetary defenses, but then you need a dedicated bombardment ship to take out the widely distributed population and industrial complexes.

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You are quite right about WP. They ARE treated as ability on the planet (actually all cargo on planet is treated the same, only WP get to shoot back). The way I see it work is that they are some sorts of shield for the planet - they take all the damage first, and when all of them (and all other cargo) are gone, the planet population is starting to take the damage. Also, the damage vs WP is calculated diferently than the damage vs planet. Since the Weapon Platform (or cargo) is treated as ability on the planet like a shield on a ship, perhaps it would be a good idea to add new damage ability. I have considered 2 types of ability that would do the trick:

1) Weapon will do half or no damage against cargo on planet, like a quad damage to shields, but in this case no damage to WP. This ability would be used on planetary weapons only and would make them much less effective against the WP.

2) Also, it may be possible to add some sort of ability that will bypass WP (like a shield skipping weapon). I believe that the 'WP skipping' ability would be much easier to use for AI since it will just have to approach the planet with his bomber ship and bomb it. If however 'No WP damage' ability is used AI would have to wait with bomber until all WP on planet are destroyed by other ships and only then attack the planet (in short, it would require better fleet coordination for AI).

Of course this alone would not solve the problem of beam weapons doing too much damage to planetary population but I think your suggestion of raising the damage needed to kill one population in settings file would work just fine. However, I have been using 50 points damage for a while now and have seen some glitch that needs to be fixed in order for this to work properly. This is the glitch - when weapon that makes less damage than necessary to kill one population on planet fires on the planet, the damage gets rounded up to the amount necessary to kill one population. For example: If the damage needed to kill one population is 50 and I fire a DUC V on a planet (it does 40 points of damage) that damage gets rounded up to 50 points and you kill one population with that shot. That allows all weapons to kill 1 population with 1 shot no matter how high the damage needed to kill one population is specified in settings.txt file. The weapons that don't do enough damage to planet to kill one population with one shot should not be doing any damage at all to planet. If that is fixed, we would be able to specify how powerful a weapon has to be in order to kill population. For example: if we set the damage to kill one population to 100, all weapons that do less then 100 would be ineffective against the population. That would allow us to make normal beam weapons ineffective against the planet, if we want to, just by changing setting.txt file.

Actually, adding both new ability against Weapon Platforms (or cargo) and fixing that damage 'round up' could fix the problem.

Man, this is a long post.

[This message has been edited by Daynarr (edited 21 January 2001).]

[Daynarr]

quote:

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Originally posted by Jubala:
Baron, that sounds good to me. Hopefully MM will add that. Three extra lines for weapons in the data files might do it together with appropriate code changes.

Damage to ships/bases :=
Damage to units :=
Damage to population/facilities :=

With units being cargo stored on planetsurface and ships/bases being anything in space. The value could either be a percentage of the Weapon Damage At Rng := values or be full fledged weapon damage at range in their own right.

Or if you really want to be able to make different types of weapons:

Damage to ships :=
Damage to bases :=
Damage to weapon platforms :=
Damage to troops :=
Damage to mines := (in storage)
Damage to satellites :=
Damage to fighters :=
Damage to drones :=
Damage to population :=
Damage to facilities :=

Did I miss something? Don't think so. Personally I think the first choice is the better one. Less risk of screwing up and less to keep tabs on. Also easier to implement.

[This message has been edited by Jubala (edited 21 January 2001).]

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I think that Baron meant to change the following line:

Weapon Target := Ships\Planets\Ftr\Sat

to something like:

Damage Against Target := Ships\Planets\Ftr\Sat\WP

where the line would define the targets that can be damaged by weapon. Planetary napalm would have planets as targets; ships would have WP, Satellites, Ships etc. but no planets. So there would be no need add new damages per target as you said (think of the amount of work required to balance all those damage types against all those targets for ALL components). Baron's suggestion looks easier to implement IMO.

[Sinapus]

If you raised the ratio for damage per population killed to 100, and then raised the damage amount the neutron bomb inflicted, would that make 'glassing' more doable? Assuming you don't hit that cap on damages.

Also, does that ratio affect how weapon platforms and other cargo gets destroyed, or just population? I've noticed a damage meter for planets, which I think adds the 'points' of damage a planet's population can take before the planet is destroyed.

Those people who use napalm on WPs probably were playing against the computer. If I spotted a ship with napalm on it that would be the priority target of my first missile salvos.


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--
"What do -you- want?" "I'd like to live -just- long enough
to be there when they cut off your head and stick it on a
pike as a warning to the next ten generations that some favors
come with too high a price. I would look up into your lifeless
eyes and wave like this..." *waggle* "...can you and your
associates arrange that for me, Mr. Morden?"

[Alpha Kodiak]

The one thing I would like to add to this thread concerns hit probabilities. While it is true that hitting a planet with almost any weapon from orbit would be easy, hitting a pinpoint target such as a weapon platform should be pretty hard.

I would think that planetary napalm should be easy to hit with, do a lot of damage vs. population, but not much against weapon platforms. On the other hand, pinpoint weapons should damage weapon platforms just fine, but be hard to hit with and not do much to population. Alot of this has been mentioned before, but I want to emphasize the difficulty of hitting pinpoint targets through an atmosphere.

Actually, the atmosphere causes another problem. I would think that beam weapon energy would be attenuated by atmosphere, so they would cause less damage. I'm not sure you could even get small projectiles to survive penetrating the atmosphere, and if you could I think that both accuracy and damage would suffer severely.

I'm not sure what the perfect solution to all of this is, especially in light of minimizing the coding impact on the software. Some of the ideas mentioned before sound pretty good, but I think weapon accuracy against planets needs to be addressed.

[dmm]

Maybe the weapons aren't targetting the population directly, but instead are taking out "soft" infrastructure, like power plants, water purification, refineries, factories, high-tech farms, etc. Sadly, we know from history that this kind of warfare can be devastating to urban populations. The more-advanced societies of SEIV might be extremely urban and therefore extremely susceptible to such warfare. The deaths from a DUC cannon would then be due directly to starvation, exposure, poisoning, disease, fire, rioting, etc., and only indirectly to the DUC. There might be a few hardy civilians able to survive in the wild, but not enough be worth counting. (Hey, there's an idea for a special race trait: Survivalists. Or maybe PhysicalStrength and EnvironmentalResistance could be used, making them much more valuable abilities.)

[Spoo]

But even if certain weapons could destroy infrastructure, it would take several months for the population to decrease from starvation.

Not that this would be a bad feature; you could then "resupply" the planet with transports loaded with food. (How this could be implemented I'm not sure, maybe similar to a plague).

[dmm]

quote:

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Originally posted by Spoo:
But even if certain weapons could destroy infrastructure, it would take several months for the population to decrease from starvation.

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Each (strategic) turn is 0.1 years, which is over a month. Also, famines don't usually kill people with outright starvation. Most of the people die from famine-related diseases. That is, the malnutrition makes them susceptible to stuff that wouldn't normally kill people. And keep in mind that famines on Earth usually involve _shortages_ of food, rather than a sudden total cutoff.

Try to imagine a society that relies on replicators, or similar "just in time" food delivery. Very little food is stored in homes, not even staples. Now they are suddenly attacked. There's no power, very little food, and no water except from the environment (which may be inhospitable).

Which brings up another point: Besides the population's EnvironmentalResistance and PhysicalStrength, the planetary conditions should generally be taken into account when determining population damage from bombardments. (Someone has already sensibly suggested that domed colonies should be more easily destroyed.)

Added: And planetary type should matter. For instance, rock dwellers should Last longer on a rock than ice or gas dwellers.

[This message has been edited by dmm (edited 22 January 2001).]

[Barnacle Bill]

Actually, hitting pinpoint targets from orbit is not that hard. Rumor has it that satellite recon photos can pick up a pack of cigarettes, but not tell you what brand it is. With today's tech, we can drop a guided ("smart") bomb down a vent shaft from several thousand feet. With smart weapons, a longer distance to fall just gives you more time to correct the course of the weapon in-flight. The problem today is that the weapon costs more than most targets, and that little problem of how much it costs to get the weapon into orbit in the first place. You spend half a million $ hauling a $100,000 per pop smart missile into orbit, then use it to bLast some tinhorn dictator's Red Army-surplus T-72 that's worth maybe $10,000 on the international arms market. Presumably, in the distant future the high tech weapons will be cheaper...

[apache]

Actually, I think it should be impossible to completely wipe out a population from a breathable planet, unless you are using plague and/or neutron bombs. Its pretty historic that airstrikes alone, even pinpoint ones, cannot bring a population to their knees. There should be a minimum population on breathable planets that simply cannot be destroyed from orbital bombardments. There will always be those folks in caves, ruined structures, underground structures, and generally just not able to be taken out effectively from orbit. Maybe it should be a bottom limit of 10M, above which you can use planetary napalm to good effect, but once it hits that number, you need to invade or use neutron or plague bombs to finish off the population.
On domed planets, well, they really do not have much chance if that dome cracks, so they should be much easier to wipe out, even using beam/projectile weapons.
I think beam/projectile mounts should not be able to be used on population at all, only on weapon platforms and facilities. Planetary napalm should be limited to population and facilities, and not be able to wax weapons platforms. You figure that a weapon platform is an armored structure that won't be affected by napalm significantly.
Now, on plague bombs, I think they should be changed to kill a percentage of the population, not a set amount, per turn. This would be more logical since a huge population will be hit a lot harder than say, 3 people spread out across the whole planet.
I should also mention that CSM's should be excluded from most of these rules since they are described as using nuclear warheads. They should be less effective at killing population than planetary napalm, but still much better than nothing or beam/projectile weapons, and be able to kill point targets as well. However, they should not be able to break past the minimum population limit.

[Spoo]

I like your idea apache.