A thought on killing planets

[Barnacle Bill]

I've been thinking along the same lines as Apache. I'm working on a somewhat lengthy write-up of proposed changes to the troop & related portions of the game, that I plan to post over in the boarding topic. Part of the intent is to make troops more important in the overall scheme. My proposals include pretty much the same stuff:

1) Separate weapon damages for population and "everything else". Specialized weapons would be required to attack population, bevcause normal ones would be pretty bad at it.

2) The ability to set (via the options in tactical combat or the fleet strategy in strategic) how your ships fire at planets. You should be able to aim at WP's, aim at facilities or aim at population. For strategic, you would be able to specify more than one of those and it would do them in order. There would be severe penalties for aiming at population, though (diplomatic, happiness of your own people unless you are a xenophobe, reaction of the planet's population if you eventually conquer it).

3) You would not be able to reduce the planet's population below 5% of the planetary maximum via bombardment, even with plague bombs. This is for the reasons Apache stated. However, I'm assuming that even on domed planets there will be folks in small outlying facilities, caves, etc... so the rule applies even to domed planets (although 5% of planetary maximum population is still a much lower number on a domed planet). Not being able to wipe them out via plague bombs is because people living in small isolated Groups are pretty protected from the spread of disease. All of the above "reasons" are really justifications - the real reason is that I want to make it impossible to take a planet away from another empire without engaging in ground combat.

4) Bombing facilities would create "collateral damage" and kill some population as well, but this would neither carry the penalties or be able to reduce population below 5% of planetary maximum. It might make sense to have a third damage ability just for facilities, so that weapons designed to kill facilities could be given small population damages and no "everything else" damages.

5) Conquered planets have to be "assimilated" like in MOO2. However, they won't start that process until you make peace with (or eliminate) the empire dominated by the majority species on the planet, and the rate of assimilation is proportional to the attitude of that empire towards you (rate = 0 as long as they are "murderous"). They will never assimilate if you targeted the population. Until you assimilate the planet (or exterminate the population), you can't load or drop population there. You also have to keep a garrison proportional to the population of the unassimilated planet. Insufficient garrison = rioting.

6) Unassimilated planets rebel if the garrison is small enough (lower than the level at which they riot). Rebellion stops all production like rioting. If you have a garrison, you additionally incur troop loses proportional to the population as long as it is in rebellion. If there is no garrison (including the case where the above loses wipe it out), they are liberated and return to the empire dominated by the majority species on the planet. If that empire has been eliminated, they revive it.

7) If you are a Xenophobe (but only if your empire has that trait), after you conquer a planet you can use your troops to kill off the population. It would take a lot of troop firepower to kill a population point, though. Once you do this, they go into permanent rebellion regardless of your garrison size. You also get the same diplomatic penalties as for bombing the population (or maybe worse). If you kill them all, then it is like a planet you colonized but forgot to load population on the colony ship, and you can import population from elsewhere.

[Daynarr]

I think that Heavy and Massive mounts should be able to kill population. A Massive Mount is used on Baseships only, and a Massive Mount DUC can have almost the same impact on planet as today's nuclear bomb. Think of the size of that depleted uranium from Massive Mount, it would be comet like in size.

It would be covered quite well by adding a limit of 100 points. Large Mount DUC 5 makes 80 points and could not be able to kill population while larger mounts will be able to kill it, but slowly.

[Sinapus]

quote:

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Originally posted by Daynarr:
I think that Heavy and Massive mounts should be able to kill population. A Massive Mount is used on Baseships only, and a Massive Mount DUC can have almost the same impact on planet as today's nuclear bomb. Think of the size of that depleted uranium from Massive Mount, it would be comet like in size.

It would be covered quite well by adding a limit of 100 points. Large Mount DUC 5 makes 80 points and could not be able to kill population while larger mounts will be able to kill it, but slowly.

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"..we will be using mass drivers."
"But mass drivers are outlawed by every civilized species!"
"These are uncivilized times."
"We have treaties.."
"EENK on a PAGE!"

Probably why increasing that "number of points to kill population" was recommended. Which is why I asked if the damage neutron bombs inflict is affected by that ratio or not.


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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]

I have one other thought on killing planetary populations. When you kill off an entire planet worth of people, the planetary conditions should not be very good. Last night I started a new game on a small map and encountered an enemy in an adjacent system very early in the game.

I glassed his home world in three turns with two frigates using DUCs and CSMs. The interesting thing was that, since we were both rock-oxygen types, I moved a colony transport over next to his planet so that when I killed the Last of his population, I was immediately able to colonize the planet.

You would think that with 2 billion dead bodies lying around, caused by dozens of nuclear missile strikes, that the conditions would not have been ideal for immediate colonization.

I would propose that the condition of a planet should be degraded as damage was done. Even if the AI had accepted my demands for surrender after the population was reduced to about 5 million (a loss of 1.995 billion population), I would think that the conditions on the planet would be rather harsh. The population would probably need a lot of assistance from the outside, just to survive.

[Spoo]

That gives me an interesting idea. After a large portion of the popualtion is killed off (say 50%) the planet is automatically infected with a level one plague caused by the massive amounts of dead bodys laying around, but the plague will go away by itself after a year. I'm not sure of the strength of a level one plague, but it shouldn't kill off what remains on the planet. However, it would make immediate colonization of the planet quite difficult for several turns, as the colonists would all die every turn.

For another idea, if a planet is "glassed" then half of it spaces for facilities should be dissabled to reprissent perminant damage done to the planet.

[Baron Munchausen]

Diminishing returns on planet damage and effects on conditions have both been suggested many times. Both in the beta forums and on the eGroups mailing list. Whether MM is just unwilling to do this or hasn't had the time with all the bug fixing I can't say. There's never been a comment one way or the other from the programmer. Just hordes of players asking for this and no one I have seen against it. <shrug>...

[DirectorTsaarx]

Baron, Spoo, Alpha:

From the "Settings.txt" file:

Planet Value Percent Loss After Owner Death := 10

Would tweaking this number help solve the problem? I'm assuming that "Owner Death" means as soon as the original population of THAT PLANET has been killed off, not when the entire empire is destroyed...

Obviously, there'd have to be another factor added in to reflect damage to conditions from other weapons; maybe just add the existing "damages planet conditions" ability to all weapons, not just radiation bombs?

[Sinapus]

I was just remembering a quote from one of the Starfire novels where an admiral (Antonov, if you're familiar with those books) remarks that it is impossible to completely annihilate a planetary population without rendering the planet uninhabitable.

Perhaps there -should- be a few survivors left after a battle, but make the planet like a colony with no people on it like after those cosmic storm events. There are still people on the planet, just not enough to run the facilities left (if they weren't all destroyed) and any reproduction won't reach the 1 million point for thousands of turns.

Rendering the planet uninhabitable should be something that takes several attacks that might as well be done outside of tactical combat if no defending units (or rushed in reinforcements) are available to oppose it. After that, the conditions should become Deadly, value should be 0% for all three and maybe a new atmosphere type should be installed that can't be selected as an empire's native atmosphere. Call it 'Radiated' or something like it.

So, if anyone -does- recolonize the planet, they'll have to build a lot of terraforming facilities first, just to make the atmosphere and conditions breathable. Maybe there's a way to set the values for planet conditions and the number to change an atmosphere to higher than normal so it takes even longer to make the planet remotely habitable again.

At this point, I think most players would rather blow up the planet and reform it again. So maybe the stats for the planet should stay the same even if you do that so you -have- to do some massive terraforming to get it back. Just to be as sadistic as possible both to the victim and victor.



------------------
--
"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?"

[Daynarr]

quote:

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Originally posted by DirectorTsaarx:
Baron, Spoo, Alpha:

From the "Settings.txt" file:

Planet Value Percent Loss After Owner Death := 10

Would tweaking this number help solve the problem? I'm assuming that "Owner Death" means as soon as the original population of THAT PLANET has been killed off, not when the entire empire is destroyed...

Obviously, there'd have to be another factor added in to reflect damage to conditions from other weapons; maybe just add the existing "damages planet conditions" ability to all weapons, not just radiation bombs?

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Well, yes this value represents the % of resources lost on colony that has been destroyed with bombing. Also, this is the only value that should NOT be changed by bombing. The conditions on planet should deteriorate instead and perhaps the planet shouldn't be colonizable for a number of years. IIRC from mining facilities descriptions, these facilities mine resources deep under the surface of planet. Why should a bombing of planet's surface have any effect on the amount of resources on planet? I know that losing resources is some sort of penalty for destroying colonies instead of capturing them, but IMO the penalty should be something else.

[Barnacle Bill]

In Stellar Conquest there was a simple rule that if you eliminated a population above a certain size via bombardment, the planet became uninhabitable.

You could keep it just that simple, or flesh it out with details like:

1) Every time the planet is bombed and population dies, it inflicts a set damage to planetary conditions. If this goes negative, the planet is uninhabitable and anybody left dies.

2) In conjuction with #1, a ship system which can slowly improve planetary conditions from orbit. Perhaps this would be called a "decontamination module" and only improve planets with negative conditions.

3) Radioactivity could be tracked separately as a planet charactoristic. "Conditions" would refer to climate. The "habitability" or some such would be equal to conditions minus radioactivity, and would be the actual number used to determine population growth (I still think that domed populations should act as if conditions are 0, the actual conditions being applicable only to those who can breath the atmosphere, and atmosphere converters reducing the conditions to 0 as they approach the actual change in atmosphere). If radioactivity is >100 the planet is still uninhabitable until deconned per #2. There would be a decon facility which could reduce radioactivity on a planet which is still habitable. I recommend against creating any racial trait that lets you live on radiated planets, as people with that trait would just nuke ever planet until it glows.