Can someone explain what is happening here?
I invade and the AI keeps drafting troops. All fine and dandy, except, although I do damage in excess of the opponents HP, they are still left with defenders. Next turn starts. They draft again. Again, I do damage in excess of their total HP … and they are left with 2 tanks.
This happened on every single land battle fought.

This continues until all population is gone. ( Btw.: For obvious reasons, it might be fun to actually capture a few Sheridans as Horatio … )

20 infantry x 60 HP + 6 tanks x 288 HP = 2928 total HP.
I did 3388 damage apparently …

The other example:
armour alone did 3214 damage,
and Empire should have deployed 2868 HP.

1. AI does that draft a lot, yes. That is a thing. Best way to counter it is manpower deployment module stacking, that way you can field thousands of manpower into a battle.

2. You can upgrade the health of troops, I am sure they did that and have more HP than that on their troops.

You definitely want more "Manpower Deployment Limit (ATK)" if you want to take systems without running through the A.I.s draft pool. 780-900 that is shown in your images is pretty small and easily matched by Tier 1 and 2 defensive buildings that are almost immediately available from the beginning of the game.

Salterius wrote:

1. AI does that draft a lot, yes. That is a thing. Best way to counter it is manpower deployment module stacking, that way you can field thousands of manpower into a battle.

2. You can upgrade the health of troops, I am sure they did that and have more HP than that on their troops.

(1) You mean: The only way to counter it, I suppose.
(2) I think that’s not the issue. The tooltip lists the AI infantry and armour HP exactly as mentioned: I = 60HP A = 288 HP

dustwhit wrote:

You definitely want more "Manpower Deployment Limit (ATK)" if you want to take systems without running through the A.I.s draft pool. 780-900 that is shown in your images is pretty small and easily matched by Tier 1 and 2 defensive buildings that are almost immediately available from the beginning of the game.

If you put these modules on Coordinator or Hunter (Medium) hulls or greater (Carriers) than they get x2 or x4 effects, not just the one module slot itself.

I’ve read that elsewhere already, but couldn’t try it in that game.
It’s not the answer to my question anyway: The numbers say I did more damage than the total HP they deployed, yet troops remain.

dustwhit wrote:

Alternatively, you can design a few ships that have siege modules on every support slot (keeping in mind how much movement mods you want) and park them on a system for a few turns before invading. At some point, no matter if the AI choses "draft", you will be able to overpower them in one attack. But I think this is generally an inferior approach; best used by races that have manpower difficulties (Riftborn/Vodyani) or limited resources to upgrade the stats of your troops.

That being said, you will destroy less infrastructure and take the planet with more pops.

See, this is exactly what I did. I sieged them down to 0 manpower & invaded. They converted 1 pop to (whatsit?) 175 manpower in troops which converts to 20 infantry & 5 armour for them.
And regardless of the damage I do, they are left with 1 armour.
I got this ground battle resolution screen maybe 30 times on 3 or 4 systems. Should there not have been a roll where I outmatched their HP by even more or one where I did minimal damage and they were left with more tanks?

There isn’t a building like: “You’re always left with two tanks after every battle?”

"(1) You mean: The only way to counter it, I suppose."

You can always hack the enemies homesystem and deny him ground battle options for a few turns. (Ofc if you have Penumbra)

I don’t have the save - can’t find it.
But one of you were probably right and they had some HP buff, which wasn’t displayed.
I got an extremely lucky roll of 6198 damage (some troop compositions) which overwhelmed them. It probably just averaged out to “not quite enough” most of the time. :-(

After that I just dumped 2k manpower and was done in 2 turns.

@Dustwhit Siege modules are quite useless then, if you have enough manpower to deploy?

Besides that: Problem solved. Thanks everyone.