Dragar wrote:

I think you're misunderstanding my complaint. It's not that I can't deal with Draft. I can. It's easy - bring an overwhelming force, and even with Vodyani that's easy enough at the point it matters. 

The problem is that what's the point of all these combat mechanics, the repeat battles, the differences in manpower replenishment, and so on, if all anyone should do is drop overwhelming force on a system or not invade atall? It makes the entire combat system completely unncessary.

It functions as a threshold: got enough deployment? Take system. Otherwise, don't bother (unless you want to grind the population up). What a waste of a whole game mechanic!

I actually missed this whole post. And yea i prolly misunderstood your complaint.

Dragar wrote:

Why isn't it the case that if you don't completely wipe out the defenders, you continue battling again until manpower is depleted on one side or the other? That would make combat more than 'can you wipe out the defenders in one turn?'.

That's actually what you do - you may continue battling and opponent in order not to loose will sacrifice his pop for manpower.

Dragar wrote:

This is certainly the case, but the question is: why is this good design? 

And my question is why is this bad design?

Your complaint as i see it now  - is that draft is a lil bit too powerful if you don't seige your opponent enough. That might be so, but making it weaker will strongly reduce impact(thus importance and need) of sieging and manpower deployment modules.

BadBecauseMad wrote:

Your complaint as i see it now  - is that draft is a lil bit too powerful if you don't seige your opponent enough. That might be so, but making it weaker will strongly reduce impact(thus importance and need) of sieging and manpower deployment modules.

Only if you don't buff existing defenses to compensate. 

I did try and articulate why it's bad design: battles are no longer about empire manpower, they're about deployment limits, if you're ever interested in capturing systems without wiping the population out first.

I still can't agree with this idea just because you would just bring INSANE amounts of manpower with the fleets on the system and there will be no way invader experience any attrition ever. And reduced value of sieging that will come with it is just a terrible thing leaving your oppenent unable to react in time. Again my main point against you is that you pretty much asking to conquer anything without much trouble and not bothering yourself with sieging/manpower deployment modules - that shouldn't be a thing - there must be time/manpower/ship slots invested when conquering system for yourself. Like if you wanna fight and enjoy ground combat mechanics you can do it atm - fight, spend manpower, kill pops with draft, etc. If you wanna take system for yourself you have to do it in a certain way and invest in certain things. That doesn't take away from ground combat/manpower mechanincs.

Dragar wrote:

How is that different to now?

Now you may bring all manpower in the galaxy but if you don't siege enough draft will not allow you to conquer system in one turn even with manpower deployment modules. And that's exactly how it should work imo.

From my experience I was struggling to conquer Vodyani systems using draft - the only faction causing me to cry, yet. I analyzed the reasons for and found out, that Vodyani archs seem to be the problem. In my example archs can't be attacked directly if attached to a system. So far so good. But archs obviously regenerate manpower from Vodyanis empire manpower pool and immeditaley send the manpower to ground combat zone - every turn. So I did decide to attack more than one system same time to get the Vodyanis empire manpower pool empty. This resulted in archs not loading up manpower no more at that point I cracked the empire pool reserves. Not sure what exactly is the problem (manpower mechanic) with other factions reported here. I could imagine enemy factions cloaked fleets coming in and dropping additional manpower from time to time - apart from drafting. I could imagine we find out the reason for draft mechanic (in connection with ?) causing trouble by testing and analyzing. Any ideas how to coordinate? In multiplayer games you can switch faction to AI for to have a closer look what happens exactly. My workaround, as long as I didn't use the AI tool (by the way what was it called?) to switch factions, yet.

Guess I forgot about to write the obvious: I still did lay siege (shield symbol) every turn for the system I started ground invasion.

IceGremlin wrote:

You have it backwards.

If anything having Draft cost Approval increases the value of Siege modules because instead of sieging your opponent to 0 only for them to indefinitely keep the ground battle going with Draft, you can now siege them to 0, only deal with as many drafts as their Approval can handle, and mop up the last of their Manpower once they lose the ability to Draft, even if you had less deployment in each battle phase.

This passage just doesn't make sense to me. If you sieged your opponent to 0 and brought a decent manpower/deployment for taking the system draft will never be your problem - you prolly won't even need deployment modules in that case and lately i experience that AI doesn't bother with draft if he was sieged to 0 and can't hold the system. And certainly you don't have to ?mop up last of their manpower? - they already were sieged to 0.

The change makes it so that an empire with superior Manpower reserves and Siege damage but inferior Deployment can grind down the defender through attrition of Manpower, because the defender cannot indefinitely sacrifice their Population to fend off the attrition.

Me not understanding what you wanna do is not the case. The case is that i'm telling you that imo this is a bad change. Overall for sieging/deployment mechanics and for the races that suffer from low manpower stock/generation in particular. Not to mention that this change will kill the ability to grind down opponents population.

BadBecauseMad wrote:

This passage just doesn't make sense to me. If you sieged your opponent to 0 and brought a decent manpower/deployment for taking the system draft will never be your problem - you prolly won't even need deployment modules in that case and lately i experience that AI doesn't bother with draft if he was sieged to 0 and can't hold the system. And certainly you don't have to ?mop up last of their manpower? - they already were sieged to 0.

Me not understanding what you wanna do is not the case. The case is that i'm telling you that imo this is a bad change. Overall for sieging/deployment mechanics and for the races that suffer from low manpower stock/generation in particular. Not to mention that this change will kill the ability to grind down opponents population.

You're not the one grinding down your opponents population with Draft though. They are. And if they're willing to sacrifice their population indefinitely, then clearly you're not actually harming them, or else they wouldn't do it. Which makes sense- you only need 300 Food to permanently max out population growth rate on a system, allowing you to rapidly replenish those losses in a short period of time. If they didn't have that capacity to undo the damage, you'd expect them to use System Defense or Surrender.

If you want to damage an opponents population without taking their system, you just use Orbital Bombardment and then Raze in the event you win. For each other victory action though, destruction of the local population is a negative that reduces the value of Subdue (which is where Dragar and I's complaints started elsewhere) and Occupy.

A lot of this seems to boil down to a difference in experience with enemies who use Draft. You suggest that it's extremely easy to overcome, and in general I would agree, but in my experience the AI sometimes just holds on by a thread. In which case that willingness to sacrifice every single unit of population is a surmountable-but-boring speed bump that turns every ground war into a slog.

IceGremlin wrote:

You're not the one grinding down your opponents population with Draft though. They are. And if they're willing to sacrifice their population indefinitely, then clearly you're not actually harming them, or else they wouldn't do it. Which makes sense- you only need 300 Food to permanently max out population growth rate on a system, allowing you to rapidly replenish those losses in a short period of time. If they didn't have that capacity to undo the damage, you'd expect them to use System Defense or Surrender.

If you want to damage an opponents population without taking their system, you just use Orbital Bombardment and then Raze in the event you win. For each other victory action though, destruction of the local population is a negative that reduces the value of Subdue (which is where Dragar and I's complaints started elsewhere) and Occupy.

Well, fair enough. Mind tho that Raze costs approval.

A lot of this seems to boil down to a difference in experience with enemies who use Draft. 

That seems to be the case, yes.

You suggest that it's extremely easy to overcome, and in general I would agree, but in my experience the AI sometimes just holds on by a thread. In which case that willingness to sacrifice every single unit of population is a surmountable-but-boring speed bump that turns every ground war into a slog.

Well, yea, that's just not my experience. But in any case if you are on par with your opponent in terms of manpower/deployment/troops distribution/health/damage that is how it should be - that's where Empire's manpower stock comes into play(tho it's almost never the case to be fair). Only case i can think of when AI sieged to zero could held by a thread with draft and not me poorly combining my fleet(modules,manpower)/troops(health, damage, distribution, deployment limit)/tactics, etc is Amanthoid system upgrade and maybe some particular system/pop/faction/hero, etc bonuses.

Dragar wrote:

This is certainly the case, but the question is: why is this good design? Why isn't it the case that if you don't completely wipe out the defenders, you continue battling again until manpower is depleted on one side or the other? That would make combat more than 'can you wipe out the defenders in one turn?'.

It might be, as you say, that the design is supposed to be that players can choose between throwing manpower away to damage enemy systems, rather than even trying to capture them. If so, that's pretty weird. 

I would say the answer to why is that lowering population is a form of "siege" in-and-of itself.  It makes sense that an entire system should be able to draft more people as long as they have people to fight.  It should be hard to overwhelm a system, even over a long period of time.

What doesn't make sense (as mentioned already by others and yourself) is that there doesn't seem to be a proper limiting factor to Drafting as long as the enemy can generate enough food to replenish their population quickly and continue the fight.

The solution(s) that the devs could apply if they felt so inclined could be:

• Drafting takes Approval and has a threshhold required to be used (already suggested)
• Drafting takes more population each time (slimmer and slimmer pickings from the remaining population, not everyone is a strong, capable adult)
  --First draft 1 pop > second draft 2 pop > 4 pop > 8 pop > etc.
• There should be more siege and invasion "options" for invaders who have differing agendas

Also, I didn't see this mentioned at all yet -and I assume you are all doing this, but just in case you aren't- don't forget that while you are sieging, it's a great opportunity to look at their manpower ratios and couter properly before you innitiate the invasion.  Makes a huge difference.

videovillain wrote:

Also, I didn't see this mentioned at all yet -and I assume you are all doing this, but just in case you aren't- don't forget that while you are sieging, it's a great opportunity to look at their manpower ratios and couter properly before you innitiate the invasion.  Makes a huge difference.

Don't get me started on the manpower distribution stuff...

After reading through this lengthy discussion I have made the decision to throw in my personal experience woth this system.

First of all, I think it is great. As someone who is incredibly fond of logistics and the puzzles good logistical choices provide, i think amplitude as implemented something that outshines the ES1 system in almost every concievable way. I have never see a system quiet like the manpower system they implemented and it is a unique way to solve the problem of how do we handle invasions.

That being said, it is far from perfect. There are several things that either are not intuitive or make a lot of sense, but in general it works.

The biggest complaints i have are about how underdeveloped it is. The entire thing has such potential that seems lost in the shuffle of other concerns and game mechanics.

To address drafting...it seems like a very poor choice for a military tactics card. I am of the belief that drafting should be removed entirely as a defensive tactic and sinoly replaced by the production que of chain gang. This makes eay more sense to me, as it seems that they both kinda serve the same purpose. Just allow a chain gang to recuit X manpower in defense of the system at a cost of 1 population when being seiged. 

This porvides more itneresting choices for milotsry tactics. They spent so much time on all those naval battle tactics it baffles me why the ground battles dont have similar interesting choices.  Imagine if ground battle tactics were a deverse set if optimizations and hindrences that were tied to technology, heroes, and maybr even specific options only available if you have certain population types. ie each population has its own specific battle tactics they like to employ but your system must include them to use it. 

Also it is absolutely assinine for me to have space ships...but not tanks or air supoort at the beginning of the game. Every faction should have access ti all three from the beginning of the game and some factions should have differing starting breakdowns of troop types. This would open up more options for specific battle tactics that interact with trooo types and give morr tactical choices.