Okay, about land invasion and each faction... let's see.



United Empire

Basically human, with 'our' approach to invasion. Bomb them, invade them, done. Not sure how their peculiarities would affect things. Would they - beeing basically greedy corporate sods - put emphasis on more casualties(defending pop or troops) for less collateral damage, or consider infrastructure damage irrelevant since they will get the well-paid job of fixing it afterwards?. In other words:

1: Options to leave more structures intact but kill more defending pop, or

2: Get dust for winning.



Sophons

Science guys. I'll have to go with the other comments, the science leech bomb sounds odd, but i have no good ideas here.



Hissho

The inspiration is obvious, and since planet invasions are modeled on the island hopping invasions of WW2 since Starship Troopers (the books, not the movies) it seems likely that the Hissho may be best on the offensive in space, but on the ground, their strength is extremely tenacious defence. Their offences generally would be decent, but due to the no retreat, no surrender mentality would be exceptionally costly in manpower.



Amoeba

Peace loving slugs. Erm. I don't initially really see them invading anywhere.... there's mention of 'flower power' and such but amoeba's would be using enzymes, and they can be pretty nasty. As such: Chemical warfare experts, from zombiefication bombs(not that name!) to simply dissolving all flesh. Best delivered with bombers.



Automatons

They seem fairly straightforward.



Cravers

I liked the locust bombs outlines, both the original and the 'they eat everything!' version.



Horatio

Clones. Yeah, fair enough.



Sowers

"Look, we're terraforming this planet. Too bad you're on it. We hope the inconvenience will be manageable.. but we doubt it.". I kind of get the impression they'd approach the whole thing from a different direction entirely.



Pilgrims

They allready have their special ability here - basically flee with everything on the planet.



Just thinking aloud here really.

The invasion modules now have their own use, finally...........

They did before, But it is was also logical to have your fleets guns assist in the invasion as well.

What about defenses that are system defenses? In other words they would be just like a fleet, only restricted to the system. In essence we could have ship types that are cheaper to build and maintain (half cost seems reasonable) and defend the system ONLY. This would also allow for a higher CP, and they could be augmented by normal hyper-capable ships. They could also just be various types of installations. You would then equip them just like you do normal ships.



Or we could do this:



System-based Fighters and Bombers - 50% of the cost of the modules used on ships and you can have 1 base for every Moon and planet size or something like that.

Planetary Defense Bases - Missile Bases - could be similar something you build that always has your best missiles and some armor/HP/flak whatever to defend it. Has a fixed maintenance cost but has the best "x" weapons on it to defend. Again maybe 1 per moon and planet? Or more than one on larger planets?



Again the idea would be you would have to beat both any fleets on the system + any active defenses the system had built. It would be expensive to build too many, so they might be focused on your borders.

This topic made me think about ion cannons from Star Wars and the Hoth invasion. Systems/Planets really need to be able to shoot back against ships! Hero Bonuses and good defenses should be able to mitigate it, but any invasion should at least be somewhat risky.

SilverSliver wrote:
This topic made me think about ion cannons from Star Wars and the Hoth invasion. Systems/Planets really need to be able to shoot back against ships! Hero Bonuses and good defenses should be able to mitigate it, but any invasion should at least be somewhat risky.

Yup, but I think that's what the system defense tech already does by prolonging the invasion.

Other games have defenses fight and I think that would be cool to do in ES as well.

Here are my ideas from playing similar games but to keep a system like this in line with this game.



1) Troops should become UNITS like every other war/combat unit. They gain experience as well. This will serve to separate rookies from veterans. Which makes sense as a unit that has seen a lot of combat would be more effective than a unit that was just produced.



2) Multiple kinds of troops from new techs. In order from least good to best; Militia > Troops > Commandos > Spec Ops. This way as you advance in tech you can produce units which are more effective. Leading to...



3) Unit promotions. And...



4) Troop HEROS.



Now there is a lot of room for improvement and additional ideas to expand on this but those are my general ideas. For now.

1) Basically what the ships have but for ground troops? It'll be hard since it'll be like "10,000 militia" to "15,000 Troops" "5,000 Commandos" etc because... well its a ground invasion.



2) Why not infantry > tanks > mechs



3) Like veteran status?



4) NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO BROKEN!!!

stasik28 wrote:
1) Basically what the ships have but for ground troops? It'll be hard since it'll be like "10,000 militia" to "15,000 Troops" "5,000 Commandos" etc because... well its a ground invasion.



2) Why not infantry > tanks > mechs



3) Like veteran status?



4) NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO BROKEN!!!

1) Well the troop quality COULD have a different population cost to keep them in alignment and to create diversity. So the basic militia would cost 1 pop, then as they get better it's 2, 3, and 4. This would make the player think about how he wants to create his army of troops. This would also create a balance that is simple to understand 1v1 militia have no chance verse Troopers since the power equivalent would be 1:2. Likewise militia could still have a chance verse even spec ops. Where Spec Ops have a power equivalent of 4... it would take 5 militia units to beat them and 4 to "hold them at bay" and to lock-down the battlefield.



2) Why not save the tanks and mechs for a future update so they can be upgraded and customized like the ships are currently? Would be a cool thing to see in the future right? Basic tank > Hover-tank with a plasma cannon...



3) No, a bit different. For example; after several battles you can "promote" militia to troops, and troops to commandos, etc... at no additional population cost. This would need balancing in order to work but that's not too difficult.



4) You don't know that yet. And every army needs commanders... you still have a hero cap and with a new hero type you have to really think about how to balance your heros. This adds depth and thought to gameplay. Imagine a Pilot/General... would be fun.

VeteranSpace wrote:
1) Well the troop quality COULD have a different population cost to keep them in alignment and to create diversity. So the basic militia would cost 1 pop, then as they get better it's 2, 3, and 4. This would make the player think about how he wants to create his army of troops. This would also create a balance that is simple to understand 1v1 militia have no chance verse Troopers since the power equivalent would be 1:2. Likewise militia could still have a chance verse even spec ops. Where Spec Ops have a power equivalent of 4... it would take 5 militia units to beat them and 4 to "hold them at bay" and to lock-down the battlefield.



2) Why not save the tanks and mechs for a future update so they can be upgraded and customized like the ships are currently? Would be a cool thing to see in the future right? Basic tank > Hover-tank with a plasma cannon...



3) No, a bit different. For example; after several battles you can "promote" militia to troops, and troops to commandos, etc... at no additional population cost. This would need balancing in order to work but that's not too difficult.



4) You don't know that yet. And every army needs commanders... you still have a hero cap and with a new hero type you have to really think about how to balance your heros. This adds depth and thought to gameplay. Imagine a Pilot/General... would be fun.

1) I was talking more on the fact that how would you actually... "repair" / replenish troops. Losing a fight you might lose 1/2 of your army, or only a 1/3 because you had 2 invaders. It's going to be difficult with this game style because there will be so many of them to hit. The thing is that you would need a lot of troops to invade, but too many would be insane, this is the future so land warfare isn't as important as orbital support. But squads wouldn't make sense because how can 1 squad conquer a whole world (low defense outpost for example)



2) Why not just have them as very late game techs? This would also require a big increase to tech trees because you need to research better weapons, more land army CP, armor, unit types etc.



3) So you can choose to promote them or make them troops, commandos? etc?



4) But with the combat update, admirals, pilots, etc will be getting a lot of bonuses, and if you have admiral/generals, you'd be leveling the hero extremely fast and might even break it with have 3 generals with high invasion chances on a planet having instantaneous invasions early-mid game.

stasik28 wrote:
1) I was talking more on the fact that how would you actually... "repair" / replenish troops. Losing a fight you might lose 1/2 of your army, or only a 1/3 because you had 2 invaders. It's going to be difficult with this game style because there will be so many of them to hit. The thing is that you would need a lot of troops to invade, but too many would be insane, this is the future so land warfare isn't as important as orbital support. But squads wouldn't make sense because how can 1 squad conquer a whole world (low defense outpost for example)



2) Why not just have them as very late game techs? This would also require a big increase to tech trees because you need to research better weapons, more land army CP, armor, unit types etc.



3) So you can choose to promote them or make them troops, commandos? etc?



4) But with the combat update, admirals, pilots, etc will be getting a lot of bonuses, and if you have admiral/generals, you'd be leveling the hero extremely fast and might even break it with have 3 generals with high invasion chances on a planet having instantaneous invasions early-mid game.

1) A unit =/= a squad. Just a combat unit. Just like 1 pop isn't 1 person on a planet. Make sense? Also on something like an outer-world outpost it wouldn't be difficult for a single squad to conquer... most likely there are just a few civilian work buildings in an... outpost (think Mass Effect, Shepard and his squad take a few outposts in that series). So one squad taking that wouldn't be hard, where-as taking an entire colony would be.



1+) I think you might be over-thinking something simple. Troop replenishment would require you to transport the unit back to an established outpost/colony and "repair/heal/replenish" your forces. Maybe 25% per turn?



2) That could work as well. As you unlock more powerful land-units. And like the current military tech tree you could research "Troops" or "Mechs/Tanks" and using the collateral damage idea... troops have a low collateral damage % where tanks/mechs are very powerful and have a high collateral damage % .



3) Yes, after they reach an experience level required to promote them.



4) The way I was thinking combat was going to work now is you can either have a land invasion going OR a siege but not both simultaneously. And both take time. So no, I disagree. And why on Earth would you have 3 combat heros early/mid-game? That's bad management and would reduce your growth drastically. One good unseen counterattack from an opponent that wounds those heros will seriously set you back.



4+) Having said that it is currently possible to take planets in a single turn with high numbers invasion modules on tons of ships. Early. It's called a rush and is a valid tactic but against a superior turtler you may take one or two planets and then get smashed by technologically superior units and your invasion falls apart and you are now behind because you didn't build as much infrastructure.

Nasarog wrote:
Yup, but I think that's what the system defense tech already does by prolonging the invasion.

The defense tech doesn't actually damage orbital ships so it doesn't really prevent using a single fleet to steamroll system after system. If we take the battle of Hoth again, the big rebel ion cannon shot down a couple of star destroyers...it would have done that regardless of whether the empire invaded with just 2 or 2000. As long as that weapon is active, it will harass orbiting ships. With that said, the designers could argue that just having ships in a hanger would serve a similar purpose since having higher industry would mean you could crank out ships faster which is one of the hallmarks of a valuable planet, but this threat is not constant and it certainly won't damage massive orbiting fleets.



My vision for this would be something a few hundred to maybe a thousand MP type of improvement that can be built over and over; the improvement can be destroyed but it should also auto-regen health per turn and have a significant number of HP.



The heart of the issue is just something for defenders to do to better defend their homeworlds when their main fleets are not there. minefields on space lanes or warp links should be interesting too.

Well, with the new system you actually have the case that neither orbital fleets influence the siege directly, nor do planetary defense influence the orbital fleets.

This is quite realistic in the sense that there's a lot of kilometers of atmosphere in between that makes the use of any kind of weapon, no matter which direction, a lot less effective. Unless you simply drop the ships on the planet, that should be super effective, if they survive the entry.



As meedoc explained in his first post, only invasion modules count towards actual invasion progress via siege, in the addon. So you will need specialized fleets to conquer planets and the planetary defense installations are the direct counter to this mechanic. Not any fleet can successfully besiege systems, then, because you need, according to the formula under the chapter "siege", the same invasion power in your fleets in orbit as the planet has defense power, just to make any progress, at all.

Not to frustrate the developers here, but I hate the "one or the other" mentality. Is it so much to ask for both?



Situation A: Land forces are getting overwhelmed by, say, Craver troops and a loss is imminent. Trooper A tosses a beacon into the enemy ranks or paints their formation with a laser (I will freely admit that I have NO idea how laser targeting works). Ships in orbit read the targeting information and launch a precision orbital strike that SERIOUSLY wrecks the enemy's day.



Situation B: The battle for the ground is lost, the enemy is victorious and they're currently dancing atop the corpses of your valiant soldiers. The fleet in orbit gets a bit miffed about this and sends an orbital volley to the last known location of your ground army, turning the local area to a smoldering wasteland/smoking crater/perfect sheen of glass.



Bottom line is that the battle for the ground can continue so long as there isn't a fleet in orbit around the target planet. If you win the battle for space, any battle on the ground becomes a game of Whack-a-mole.



Also, Galactic Civilizations 2 did the whole dedicated troop transport thing, and JESUS did that mechanic suck.

Pondera wrote:
Not to frustrate the developers here, but I hate the "one or the other" mentality. Is it so much to ask for both?



Situation A: Land forces are getting overwhelmed by, say, Craver troops and a loss is imminent. Trooper A tosses a beacon into the enemy ranks or paints their formation with a laser (I will freely admit that I have NO idea how laser targeting works). Ships in orbit read the targeting information and launch a precision orbital strike that SERIOUSLY wrecks the enemy's day.



Situation B: The battle for the ground is lost, the enemy is victorious and they're currently dancing atop the corpses of your valiant soldiers. The fleet in orbit gets a bit miffed about this and sends an orbital volley to the last known location of your ground army, turning the local area to a smoldering wasteland/smoking crater/perfect sheen of glass.



Bottom line is that the battle for the ground can continue so long as there isn't a fleet in orbit around the target planet. If you win the battle for space, any battle on the ground becomes a game of Whack-a-mole.



Also, Galactic Civilizations 2 did the whole dedicated troop transport thing, and JESUS did that mechanic suck.

I like your idea, but I suspect that at first, they will get the ground invasion mechanic going. Once it's in play, we will give them enough feedback to adjust it accordingly.

Nasarog wrote:
I like your idea, but I suspect that at first, they will get the ground invasion mechanic going. Once it's in play, we will give them enough feedback to adjust it accordingly.

Such is the way development/mod testing usually works. I, for one, am greatly looking forward to the expansion pack and plan on buying it the day it comes out.

Maybe they can add a mechanic where you can convert some of your population into soldiers which can add to the defense of the system.

Conscription?

Igncom1 wrote:
Conscription?

I'm thinking less conscription and more "Here, this is a gun. Bullets and/or plasma comes out of the end. Use it and you might not get eaten by Cravers"