Troops

[Argh]

I have a silly question: why would anybody bother landing troops? If I can't capture the unique racial techs. . . and I can develop tech that will make even unattractive planets livable later on. . . and I can reduce my Strength to, say, 10% in order to boost my Ship Production or other stuff. . . why not?

Is there a big advantage to capturing planets intact, simply on an efficiency basis? I can understand wanting to avoid the severe lag-time involved in rebuilding a planet's hardware, but you can always just dump max pop. on a planet, build as you please, and use your fleets to bottleneck the now-uninhabited solar system, or simply keep moving and raiding until your force meets something it can't handle. . .

[Dracus]

I capture planets intact and force ship the aliens off to camps. It is my play style to role play. In time I will move them to planets that they can max out on.

But to answer your question. I can quickly capture and ship aliens to useable planets with a lot less cost then to convert the planet to fit my race. So the plus is that if you are say oxygen/rock and you capture a none/ice race. You can max out all the none/ice planets in your systems.

[geoschmo]

You would be suprised how much of a differeance you will see by capturing the planets intact. Even a max pop world can only build facilities one per turn. And space ports, space yards, and resupply depots take even longer. That's a couple years for a huge planet.

Also it can be a bit demoralizing to the other player to have you come along and scoop up his planets and populations. When you glass a planet, you take from your opponent, but when you capture it you take from him and add it to yourself. Much better IMHO.

About the only time I'll move pop around is to get oxy breathers on oxy planets, etc. In fact I've been known to take a planet from an opponent just to drag the population off in chains to my core systems to get rid of those domes.

And I prefer not spending a bunch of effort transporting populations around in the middle of a war. Too much work for me. Instead of spending time moving populations around you can concetrate on keeping your juggernaut rolling.

But again it's probably more of a style differance then an actual game differance.

Geo

[ 28 December 2001: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

[Argh]

Aha. . . I'll have to try that one out. . . although it sure seems like if you're just wanting to end a war, which is usually my goal- after all, resource management isn't the bottleneck in SE:IV, it's build-time(see thread above). . . I rarely need more *stuff*, I need defeated opponants

[mottlee]

I agree I take them for the same reason, and as an added bonis is that if the alein tech is still there it works

[Baron Munchausen]

If there were diplomatic penalties for genocide things would be different. As things are, yes, it's often simpler to just 'wipe the slate clean' and start over. Besides the diplomatic effects, the changes I suggested long ago to planet damage and troops on the ground would make things much more interesting too.

It's far to easy to glass a planet. The damage ratio should be 100-to-1 or higher for normal weapons. Then give "planetary weapons" a special ability to cancel the ratio. Suddenly, you'd need specialized ships for bombarding planets. If the techs are properly tuned, they'd be expensive and vulnerable ships, too. You'd have to escort them and take great care with them. Glassing a planet would be much more difficult. Most other 4X games, like MOO and Stars!, require special weapons for attacking planets. Why not SE?

Then, troops should either be protected by the planetary damage ratio or they should be 'spontaneously' produced like militia, just in smaller numbers. this would force real troop to troop combat which currently almost never happens.

The life of an interstellar despot would be much more interesting with these changes.

[geoschmo]

Baron, wouldn't these changes also make it much harder to drop troops on a world? It seems with those suggestions implemented your troop ships would get pasted before they could get in range to offload the assault troops.

Geo

[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