And one more thought, but these are tied to specific military techs, right? An easy solution would be to strip the anti-air benefits from infantry, and break the cycle. Then you'd always want to move up (losing the perks you'd already invested in), and air (the most expensive units in research and manpower) would be the final tier of troops.

You beat sticks (infantry) with swords (armor), and swords (armor) with guns (air).

That's the first thought that pops out for me.

@Dragar Well, you could do more of a rock paper scissors thing, I suppose. And they could always expand this somehow in a future expansion (where they have the freedom to make changes and add new features).

However, I also agree that it's not very core to the gameplay, and I'm not entirely sure it's very meaningful right now. It feels--atm, unles they make changes to support it--that it should have been outside of their scope.

But again, if someone looked into the values a little bit, it's possible that you could tweak some things to improve the experience a bit. I could look into it eventually.

Dragar wrote:

How important does anyone find invading with infantry to preserve pop/infrastructure versus invading with armour?

Honnestly i dont give a fuck. If I have to destroy everything and kill anyone to get a system, i do it. But it's not really about strategy, it's about showing how villain i am. bwhahaha !

I don't usually pay a lot of attention to this, and I'm sure this is a pretty underdeveloped/fringe part of the game. You also risk breaking whatever the AI is doing here.

But this would be a great place for some mod tweaks; probably very easy to do.

Especially since you will lose a lot more troops if you do not manage to take the system in the first turn, but instead have a drawn-out battle against several conscriptions, I personally do not find that incentive to have infantry troops very strong.

How important does anyone find invading with infantry to preserve pop/infrastructure versus invading with armour?

Copy pasta time!

hp2 wrote:

I use infantry in order to preserve infrastructure and population.  In my mind, that was always the tradeoff -- having a min/maxed army composition may allow you to invade a system earlier, but going with infantry only puts you at a 'disadvantage' that sometimes requires you to delay your invasion and siege first to reduce enemy manpower first before commencing your invasion.

On the flip side, I like to think that since the AI sees me only using infantry, they stick to using infantry + tank compositions and are demotivated to use air units (have not verified).  I prefer this since air units are the worst offenders in terms of destroying infrastructure and population.

I don't think the gameplay is shallow enough to warrant removal.

-HP

hp2 wrote:

Dragar wrote:

Edit: I've located the tooltips! However, the improvement destruction is typically a benefit, used to remove system defenses that otherwise damage your troops.

Which is why if I siege a system to reduce the manpower to a level where my infantry only army can win and keep all of the defenses intact, I no longer have to rebuild those defenses.  Furthermore, if the enemy tries to reclaim the system, now those very same defenses will work against them.  If I really want to min-max, I'll tune my army composition to be infantry only on the turns where I'm invading systems to keep the defenses intact, then flip them to be armor only on turns where I want to defend.  That being said, I usually keep even my defending army composition infantry only in order to prevent self damage to population/infrastructure (I haven't scientifically verified this).

Also note that the defenses which damage your troops output fixed damage.  For empires/minor factions/technologies that give bonuses to infantry health, you can observe that the percent of infantry troops lost during the bombardment phase is reduced due to their higher health.  That's why these traits are considered a positive -- it gives an empire an option to pursue 'surgical' invasions that minimize population/infrastructure damage.  Why is this meaningful?  Consider the following.

Riftborn can not be grown.  If I do surgical invasions of an enemy riftborn empire's systems, I can *preserve* twenty Riftborn population units.  Having twenty Riftborn population units gives my empire a 15% industry bonus to systems with a Riftborn population unit on it.  I can then transport those twenty Riftborn units away from those frontier systems I have captured and distribute them among my safer home planets giving all of them 15% industry bonuses.

This is the most extreme example, but it applies to population units in general.  It takes time to grow populations to hit the 20 and 50 unit bonuses.  If I invade an enemy frontier system and capture three of their population units, I can ship them individually to three different home systems so that they can start growing.  If I perform a sloppy invasion full of tanks and planes and kill off a population unit, I can now only ship them to two different systems reducing my population ramp up by 33%.

To state it another way, if you feel that population damage and infrastructure damage during an invasion is worthless enough to not consider, then growing population and building infrustructure must also be equally worthless.  I don't feel that way which is why I consider the troop composition mini game valuable enough to not simply throw out.  The devs don't have to devote any resources to it other than perhaps bug fixing (I haven't run into any), but I don't advocate gutting it.  I'm okay leaving it as it is.

-HP

-HP

Armor unit is pretty dominate due to balance in firepower, cost, and health. With infantry, you get too less, too little for MP you are paying for. With Air, you pay too much and get a little less for it. Even in scenario where pure Armor vs pure Air, the Armor still more cost effective. You can field more of them so they dish out more firepower. Air need around 3-4 hits even with buff to knock out one Armor woth of 20 MP. Armor need almost the same hit to knock Air out but they can field more of them in the same MP allocate.

Guess we're back to all Armor then... 

Another approach might be to simply move armor up a tech level, since you will rarely see even one (serious) ground battle before researching Autonomous materials, but I still think an approach with soft instead of hard counters would overall make for better gameplay...no idea what the additional +50% counter damage upgrades are about, they're useless for infantry and make Armor even more overpowered throughout most of the game. I would highly recommend just replacing it with another +20% damage or health.