I really wish there were some details on how ground combat strength is determined. Ideally, I would like a hover help over the invasion progress bar in the universe map.



a. How much do non-ground weapons "count"? Is it simply their fist value? For example, a 3rd tier weapon has 10 mass and 30 fists.



b. Do defensive modules like shields "count"? If so, a 3rd tier defense (10 mass, 60 fists) is a better investment than weapons, which would not make much sense.



c. The basic ground weapon, S2G kinetics, is listed as +60 ground combat. Since it has mass 20 and 12 fists (+60=72) I can get a higher fist total with 2 defenses (20 mass, 120 fists).



d. The second level ground weapon, extreme artillery, has mass 22, 25 fists, and it says "+2% invasion power on fleet". Does this stack for ships in a fleet? But not across all the ships in a combat? For example suppose I have 2 of these on each ship, 4 ships in a fleet, and 3 fleets attacking a planet. That is 8 in each fleet, so is it +16% on the total? Or because there are 24 total, is that +48% on the full total?



e. The third level ground weapon, trooper defensives, has mass 24, 40 fists, and says "+10% invasion power on ship". Assuming this stacks within a ship, then 3 of these would give +30% for the ship.



f. How does the hero melee combat statistic affect this? One person theorized that a melee value of 8 would mean +8% on the total. But as with (d), is that for his ship, his fleet, or the entire set of fleets at the planet?



If we knew these, we could improve our ship builds. I had been retrofitting and just keeping the highest tech ground weapon. But if all these synergies exist, we need a spreadsheet to figure out the max. Because of (d) there is a "flocking" potential; mounting one extreme artillery on each destroyer, and putting 15 destroyers in a late game fleet gives +30%. If you also put one of the +10% defensives on each ship, you get +43% (1.1 * 1.3). Then if you put a bunch of shields (highest fist to mass ratio) you might wind up with something optimal.



Does anybody have insight on this?

It depends also of the defense of the system, the population living in, the approval I guess. And to check all the value from the defender side, I think this kind of measurment and experiments will be much more possible when the multiplayer will be playable.

Still, it's a very good idea to check it and I'm interested !

bump one time

davea wrote:
bump one time

OI! no bumping



I just assume its an add-on value to a fleets strength value that allows them to over-power the systems defence value and thus cause the invasion.

A popup would be nice. Also a box that shows you how many turns the invasion needs to complete.

Alright, I did this out a bit.



4 Turns with

19 Ships with 1250 Fists from Armor

Taking 1160 Defense System with 3.4 Recovery per turn.



4 Turns with

19 Ships with 1250 Fists from Armor

Taking 1160 Defense System with 3.4 Recovery per turn.

With a Hero with 25 Melee.



4 Turns with

2 Fleets of 19 Ships with 1250 Fists



Approximately 10 Turns with

19 ships with 200 Fists



Approximately 8 Turns with

19 Ships with 200 Fists and a ground commander of 25.



No Progress with

15 Ships with 100 Fists.



Progress with

10 Ships with 100 Fists and a ground commander of 25.







Conclusions:

Realistically speaking, if you can make fleets of appreciable size, ground combat modules are likely pointless.



Ground Invasion is likely referring to fists when it refers to "Invasion Military Points". This means these modules are, for the most part, trash and to be avoided. Likewise, during my own experiences they have not brought an invasion under the 4-turn requirement.



Ground combat is based around your ability to beat the Invasion Defense score of your target planet with the total fists of your force. I cannot determine how exactly success works, but 20 times the target military is certainly a success and easily maxes out the track. The maximum requirement may be as low as 4-5 times, but I am done testing for now.



The Melee Combat stat definitely works, but functionally meaningless. The way stat multiples work for invasion defenses, it is clearly trash.



Ground combat is currently woefully imbalanced, and easily won if you know what you are doing. Ignore cruisers and invasion modules as the invasion ship, proper invasions can be achieved just as easily by high-defense ships and these ships bear the dual-purpose of actually fighting. Ground combat planet-side improvements are all also clearly awful, with the minor exception of improving invasion recovery rate.



At some point I will write a revamp suggestion for this.

This is a good experiment. But I don't quite understand what you did. I reformatted your data a little bit and got this:



Taking 1160 Defense System with 3.4 Recovery per turn.



a. 19 ships x 1250 Fists, no hero: 4 Turns

b. 19 ships x 1250 Fists, hero 25 melee: 4 turns

c. 38 ships x 1250 fists, no hero: 4 turns

d. 19 ships x 200 Fists, no hero: approximately 10 turns

e. 19 Ships x 200 Fists, hero 25 melee: 8 turns

f. 15 Ships x 100 Fists, no hero: No progress

g. 10 ships x 100 fists, hero 25 melee: some progress



Taking (a) as baseline:

1. Adding a hero (b) makes no difference, maybe 4 turns is minimum

2. Doubling the fists (c) makes no difference, maybe 4 turns is minimum

3. 1/6 the fists (d) more than doubles the time

4. 1/6 the fists but adding a hero (e) shows melee percent is added



So there is some evidence that 4 turns is a minimum.



Do you feel that pure armor ships (maximizing fists) is the best approach, and the ground combat modules are actually useless due to low fist/mass ratio? I have to try it, but I think the +10% ground modules should improve this a little.



Why do you feel that the melee rating is useless? Comparing (c) to (d) shows some benefit.

davea wrote:


Taking (a) as baseline:

1. Adding a hero (b) makes no difference, maybe 4 turns is minimum

2. Doubling the fists (c) makes no difference, maybe 4 turns is minimum

3. 1/6 the fists (d) more than doubles the time

4. 1/6 the fists but adding a hero (e) shows melee percent is added



So there is some evidence that 4 turns is a minimum.



Do you feel that pure armor ships (maximizing fists) is the best approach, and the ground combat modules are actually useless due to low fist/mass ratio? I have to try it, but I think the +10% ground modules should improve this a little.



Why do you feel that the melee rating is useless? Comparing (c) to (d) shows some benefit.

First of all, a melee rating of 25 is absurdly high. That hero can trivially turn the course of combat to beat fleets stronger than him and with nearly no casualties. He can also slightly increase capture rates? The bonus is a joke in comparison to the other advantages of a hero.



Lets construct a picture:

HE Shells: 72 Invasion Fists, 20 Weight

Shields of the same level: 23 Invasion Fists, 9 Weight.



Extreme Artillery: +2% of Fleet 22 Fists, 22 Weight

Shields: 60 Fists, 11 Weight



Trooper Defenses: 10% on Ship, 40 Fists, 24 Weight

Shields: 90 Fists, 14 Weight



This are some pretty simple baselines.



My strongest planet defense in a high-end empire is 1596. This is an empire I am holding onto for testing that is one turn away from winning if it really wants to. My more average planets have a defense of about 800.



It is trivial to get a mid-range destroyer to get about 900F of power. This means that it takes one normal fleet of destroyers that are well suited to the moment to take over a territory at maximum speed. Could you have specialist ships? Yes, but is it really worth it?



Assuming a +5% module with an 11 ship fleet. This is basically the ideal setup you can get midgame. You can get about 7 of those about a ship. That is an additional 35% per ship.



This means that one ideally placed ground combat ship is worth about 3-4 normal ships worth of ground combat ability.

Here is the trick though.



I would rather have the combat capable ship anyway. Fleet size strongly represents combat power. Not only that, but it is trivial to overshoot your goal on ground combat power. Unlike a military where this will be useful, overshooting ground combat has such diminishing returns that these ships quickly become useless to you.

The only case where you would want them at all is on campaign to wipe out a vastly inferior enemy as fast as possible by hitting multiple locations at once, and even then they are practically useless, because they will likely be unneeded invasion fists..



Don't get me wrong, invasion tech might actually be useful if invasion rate scaled anything close to linearly. Twice as many fists, unfortunately, does not keep meaning twice as fast a takeover. Because of this, and because of how easy it is to hit initial takeover maximums, it is just best to ignore invasion tech entirely.



PS: Taking over several systems at once will tank your economy due to the temporary dissatisfaction anyway.





Edit: In case it wasn't clear, I killed all of an AI's military then tried taking over their territory in different ways by reloading the save.

davea wrote:
I really wish there were some details on how ground combat strength is determined.

I agree with you and hope that dev team follow your thread as I will from now ^^



That Invasion matter bugs me since my second game, how can we optimize ship when the Prototype view doesn't display the sum of our module invasion ground force ? There is missing info right from the beginning. And as you pointed it out, there is no way to know (with just the game info) how long will it take to invade a system … Tiresome.

OK, assuming that invasion fists are same as regular fists, here is my optimization.



a. HE Batteries tech (S2G kinetics module) is useful, but only at tier 3. After that any defensive tech (deflector, shield, flak) has a higher fist/mass ratio. On a cruiser, with -25% support module cost, S2G is useful for one more tier. But never after that.



b. I cannot think of any situation where Extreme Artillery is useful. The +2% isn't big enough. Since you can put any number on a ship, the fleet stacking ability never helps either. Its fist/mass ratio is too low, even on a cruiser.



c. Limited numbers of Trooper Defensives are useful, but math is involved. On a standard cruiser, 200 tonnage, with -25% support tonnage, the shield tech available along with TD has mass 14, fists 90. Compare to TD at mass 18, fists 40, but +10% to invasion power. You can fill a cruiser with 14 shields for 1260 fists. You can put 1 TD + 13 shields to get 1331. 2 TD + 12 shields is too big to fit, 3 TD + 10 shields gets 1326 which is less. So for some sizes, a small number of TD may be useful; but the calculation may be too much trouble.



Conclusion: Except for the limited effect of (a) at one tier and possibly adding a few TD for (c), the optimal ground assault configuration is to fill a ship with your best defensive tech. IMHO, this is not flavorful, or "realistic", or even much fun.



EDIT: some race specific differences. United Empire have a tier 11 tech for +500 invasion power, which would be useful on destroyers. Hissho have a modified Trooper Defensives with +133 invasion power but no +10%; it has a slightly better fist/mass ratio than the same tech defense. Also it is not clear if their +40% damage buff applies to invasion. If so, then they are slightly better off with weapons than defenses.

In cursory testing, it seams consistent that military fists are the same as invasion fists.





Anyway, thanks for doing your own analysis. I was reasonably confident in mine, but find explaining optimizations to be pretty awkward on forums.

Agree - needs a tool-tip breakdown.

Also agree -- Invasion seems to be kind of hard to understand at the moment... Just sending in hordes of ships and waiting for the magic to take place seems to be a sound solution for now !