How do you take over an empty colony?

[Grandpa Kim]

Originally posted by Suicide Junkie:
Can't you just attack it with a troop transport?

If you can attack it with ships, surely the transports can capture it...

Hmm.... Give the troop transport 1 weapon, set strategy to point blank. When the transport is adjacent to the planet, maybe it will drop the troops. Worth a try.

Kim

[geoschmo]

No, that doesnt work. If you set your transport to point blank he charges in and zaps the empty colony. Doesn't even try to drop troops unless the strategy is capture planet. And doesn't seem to register there is a colony there if there is no pop and the strategy is set to capture planet. Runs for the corner everytime.

Works fine in tactical, but definetly a bug for simultaneous combat. Has anyone emailed this to Malfador yet I wonder?

Geoschmo

[capnq]

You might be able to get the owner to give or trade it to you, especially if it's an AI.

[DirectorTsaarx]

Originally posted by Grandpakim:

quote:

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Originally posted by Suicide Junkie:
Can't you just attack it with a troop transport?

If you can attack it with ships, surely the transports can capture it...

Hmm.... Give the troop transport 1 weapon, set strategy to point blank. When the transport is adjacent to the planet, maybe it will drop the troops. Worth a try.

Kim

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There's a similar problem if you create a "troop transport" with neutron beam weapons (pop. only damage) and low-tech troops. Once the ship reduces the planet population to 0, the combat will generally end, even though the colony still "exists", because the combat engine doesn't account for 0-pop colonies with intact facilities. You can force the issue in tactical by attacking a second time and manually dropping troops, but I don't know a way to force the issue in strategic.

[Grandpa Kim]

Some new info, fresh from one of my PBW games. I sent a "capture" fleet in blind to take a planet in another system. As it turned out, the planet had 0 pop. ... but I captured it anyway! There were two other empty colonies in the system so I tried to capture them the next turn and was successful on only one of them. Still, two outta three ain't bad.

So what did these two colonies have in common? ..... Facilities! Of the third planet, I have no idea, but it seems quite likely it had no facilities. This evidence is thin, but I think a colony needs either population or facilities to be eligible for capture.

Oh, BTW, although my fleet took NO action against the third planet, merely passed through, no combat log, it is now uncolonized and open for recolonization. Weird.

Kim