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Join Date 02/2006

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An idea for easy, logical planet defense

Remember moo2s planetary batteries? missile silos? orbital platforms?
Wasn't it fun and relaxing not to have to worry about having a big fleet around every star because you'd know you were relatively well protected against small assaults?

wasn't it infinitely better than building bothering to build a few ships (or bring ships to starportless planets and knowing that unless you have a good ammount of them there, and a fleet manager, even the sorriest little fleet could take that planet if it sneaks in somehow?

Well, so why not instead of that omega defense and fleet manager garbage, have a building that acts as a defensive fleet?
Kind of like moo2s orbital platform.
Techs would give it upgrade options and you won't have to ever bother with it because it would upgrade automatically like any other building.
isn't that totally sweet?

It should be powerful enough to defend the planet from any weak attack, or even strong stuff later on, and the enemy would have to destroy it before being able to land.

All this power and convenience come at a price of course.
An ever precious tile.

A tile much better spent than the other stuff. I mean, come on, if an enemy has a good number of troop transports by your planets, no ammount of soldiering bonuses will help, you already lost.

ideas

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Just my $.02, but I don't like the idea of planetary defenses. Here's why:

1) First, I kinda like the risky feeling of undefended planets in the early game. It keeps me on my toes... forces me to decide how long I can hold off having to build defensive ships. It adds a tense, strategic decision point to the game.

2) If a "planetary defense building" were available, I'd just automatically stick one on every planet, as the second building after a factory. It would be a no-brainer decision, and I assume the AI's would all do the same thing. It would make conquest more expensive, but you'd still need a defensive fleet to hold off invasion, because every invasion fleet would include whatever additional ships would be required to defeat the planetary defenses. You'd be scaling up the requirements to invade, but it wouldn't change any of the basic dynamics of invasion.

3) By increasing the cost and strength of an invasion fleet, the potential for invasion is then pushed back into a later part of the game. That might be fine for people who like long games, but not so good if you want a quick small map game that includes conquest.

4) Finally, in military terms, whoever controls space controls the high ground. Even an orbital platform is a sitting duck, and anything on the ground is worse. Read Niven's "Footfall".... all you have to do is throw big rocks. It's trivial to defeat planetary defenses if I can move around your solar system at will, scooping up space junk and changing delta-V and trajectories. I don't even have to come anywhere near your planet to cause massive, precision-targeted damage. So I think it's totally realistic that you need mobile space ships to defend planets, and not static orbital defenses (let alone, ground-based defenses).

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4) Finally, in military terms, whoever controls space controls the high ground. Even an orbital platform is a sitting duck, and anything on the ground is worse. Read Niven's "Footfall".... all you have to do is throw big rocks. It's trivial to defeat planetary defenses if I can move around your solar system at will, scooping up space junk and changing delta-V and trajectories. I don't even have to come anywhere near your planet to cause massive, precision-targeted damage. So I think it's totally realistic that you need mobile space ships to defend planets, and not static orbital defenses (let alone, ground-based defenses).

Except that if you pound a planet with rocks traveling at orbital speeds you don't leave much of a planet to take over. Sure it's easy to ruin a planet with space junk. It's an entirely different thing to take over one. Thus invasion forces and the usefulness of ground based high powered defenses.

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Read Niven's "Footfall"....

Bah, humbug! Read "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress", not that Johnny-come-lately stuff

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Hi!

Read Niven's "Footfall".... all you have to do is throw big rocks

Erm, on the receiving end was the Earth of our time, not the Earth 220 years in the future, with plethora of energy. Destroying those rocks would be just a matter of focusing that energy.

I vote for yes, give us capability to prevent invasions and repell smaller attacks. Either a building with hitpoints, weapons and defenses (1 of the best you'd have in each category) on the groud, or a starbase in orbit.
BR, Iztok

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the 1st replier assumed that these platforms will be available in early early game and based all his gameplay arguements on it.

maybe the OP meant things that only come much later, after invasions are possible...

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Remember moo2s

^ I stoped reading about there ^. This is GC II, not MOO 2, or MOO 21/2, and definitely not MOO 3.

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Remember moo2s

^ I stoped reading about there ^. This is GC II, not MOO 2, or MOO 21/2, and definitely not MOO 3.

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1) I'm not sure whats so fun about being permanently agitated about the possibility that a tiny fleet could sneak around yours and conquer a starsystem.

2) Of course it would change the dynamic of the game!
Instead of having to create fleets and land them on planets and upgrade them all the time and build new ones as tech grows and TONS AND TONS OF MICROMANAGEMENT THATS A PAIN IN THE ARSE (especially on big maps),
you'd build one building (or two or three) and it'd manage itself and make sure you have some kind of protection on a planet.
be it minimal or strong.
another game dynamic is that there is, of course, a tradeoff.
you WON'T just be building those defense centers on every planet because a planet that's one big missile silo isn't going to be very productive or profitable.

It's a HUGE addition to gameplay dynamic, which comes to simplify a cumbersome system and make managing ships much more fun, since they'll all/most be fighting in space now, where they belong and you can see em.
Planets in the back territories would need little defense, but you'll still feel you have something in place there rather than be skittish.
And borderlands would be much more fortified, and less productive, as is befitting.

3) The missile silo style building doesn't start out as powerful as a late game fleet.
it upgrades itself with tech, and besides, stuff doesn't build instantly or upgrade instantly. it takes time and money and proper social production spending.

4) what the heck are you talking about?
there is no such thing in sci-fi literature as a space station or ship without point defense or some kind of shielding to protect it from 'space junk', and if you're accelerating it to incredible speeds and aiming it, well, that's mass driver weaponry, and in galciv2 terms, there's armor against that.

How is it trivial to defeat planetary defenses if you can move around the system?
beam weapons don't hit you (nearly) instantaneously anymore? missiles tracking systems cease working on you?
what?
I think you're forgetting the niven thing is more 'war of the worlds' in terms of timeline

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I like the idea, mostly because such an auto-upgrade structure would be less management than moving tiny defensive fleets hither and yon. Make it expensive enough to build and maintain that you don't want to put one on every planet, but powerful enough that several current tech ones at once would be a bit tough to crack.

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Well, kinetic weapons don't all have to be dinosaur-killer sized. That would be counterproductive, unless you're doing a "Sherman's March" through the enemy systems, and not sticking around to colonize. Actually that could be sorta fun.

My point is that there really is no defense, if you have no mobile space forces. The enemy can strip away your ability to even find them, and they can hit from as far away as they want to. They can use tiny kinetic weapons (like the flying crowbars from Footfall) that cause minimal collateral damage. The only way to counter that is with mobile space forces. Anything static on the ground, or in space (orbital platform) is just a sitting duck.

And yeah, it's just a game.

Maybe it would work out okay if we had something like this, but I'd like to see how it actually affected game balance. It could be fun, or it could just add more aggravation to the game, when you're on the invading side.

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1) I'm not sure whats so fun about being permanently agitated about the possibility that a tiny fleet could sneak around yours and conquer a starsystem.

maybe because that's the whole idea behind military strategy. Using a the smallest force as efficiently as possible to flank enemies/capture territory, rather than just throwing thousands (or in this case millions and billions) of trooops into a meat grinder. Its part of the strategy. If I leave my flank undefended, I deserve to have the AI take those planets.

the way it is now is fine with me. There are two different levels of defense:
1. spaceships
2. ground troops

if they manage to cicumvent/destroy my spaceships, then it's up to the ground troops to defend the planet. I wouldn't mind being able to build structures that increased ground defense.
but, I definitely don't want a single structure that replaces a defensive fleet in orbit.

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The structure to increase you ground defense is a "farm".

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Remember moo2s planetary batteries? missile silos? orbital platforms?

That's nice for MOO2. This is Galactic Civilizations II. I know they both have 2 in their name, but they are different games.

I'm not sure whats so fun about being permanently agitated about the possibility that a tiny fleet could sneak around yours and conquer a starsystem.

If it concerns you that much that your planets are vulnerable, maybe you shouldn't be at war?

When you go to war with someone (or when they do with you), it should be a risk. This means that your space is vulnerable. It forces you to carefully consider your choices, as well as carefully consider your friends and "allies" when someone goes to war with you. If you can't afford to protect your assets, then perhaps you should make sure that you don't go to war with someone who can take them.

This isn't Civilization, where war is the natural state of things and peace is, at best, a temporary state until you can bring your war machine to bear. This is Galacitic Civilizations, and you need to meet the game on what it is, and not what it isn't.

If you want war, that's fine, but you have to accept that war brings risk. And this is good game design.

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What pisses me off is when i put a fleet into orbit around the planet it auto disbands the fleet? What my ships can coordinate in space but not space closer to a planet? So now it's even more difficult to stop say a single DL battleship *shutter*. So instead of attacking 3 ships it only attacks one at a time.

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I'd have to agree with Romeo on the fleet thing. Ships in orbit around your planet should keep the fleet status. Heck, since they're so close to a home base, they should be allowed to be in a bigger fleet than usual. Wouldn't ALL ships orbiting a planet converge to defend it from an enemy assualt? The attacker already gets first shot, the defender of the planet should get a bigger fleet size.

But the risk of leaving planets undefended, and the strategy with managing your fleets goes away if you have some building that makes your planet impervious to all but a huge assault. So I don't think it's a good idea unless you want to dumb down the game.

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Erm, on the receiving end was the Earth of our time, not the Earth 220 years in the future, with plethora of energy. Destroying those rocks would be just a matter of focusing that energy.

No dice. That doesn't work in a realistic scenario because no matter how many planetary defense weapons you have, the invaders have more rocks. You have 10 planetary defense batteries? The attackers throw hundreds of rocks at a time. You have 100 batteries? The attackers throw thousands of rocks. They don't have to be big rocks, either. Smaller rocks are harder to target from the ground, easier to steer, and do less collateral damage.

Rocks are cheap, expendable, and a typical star system comes with a nearly unlimited supply. Ground-based defense platforms, on the other hand, are expensive, hard to replace, and in very limited supply. Rocks win.

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The problem with some people here is that they go for ridiculous 'rock logic' and 'not moo2' arguments while the ppl who see the point are the ones who understand the benefit to gameplay dynamic (ie not having to bother incessently with creating/sending/moving/replacing/upgrading planetary fleets everywhere, and constantly.

As for the fun factor, I suppose that's just a basic disagreement. I don't agree that its fun to be winning, but having to retake planets all the time because I neglected to design a new defense ship with the latest techs and send it to a couple of non-shipbuilding planets in the back of my empire every few turns.
Nor is it fun to have to break up your offense every time you get a couple of new planets because you need to put ships around them so they're not retaken right away (since planetary defense would be very low)

The rocks logic btw is completely insane.
small objects get burned to nothing by the atmosphere, or burned enough so that wind would completely change their trajectory. there are beam/missile/mass driver weapons that can break any of those up, or better yet, explode the enemy ships while they gather rocks in space.
You can't do it from far away either because gravitational fields from nearby planets/stars would alter trajectory and because of the infinity tons of space-junk it might collide with.
As for 'invisibility', what? I think you can fit better sensors on a PLANET than on a ship.

Also, any orbital defense platforms is bound to have thrusters for course correction which can be happily be set for evasive manouvers (aka 6G acceleration in a certain direction for 0.01 of a second), this rock stuff is completely absurd and flat out wrong, not to mention completely unrelated.

please stick to gameplay arguments, especially if the non-gameplay based ones are so completely out of any kind of context

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I dunno, planetary-based defenses would be a real PITA to pull off. You'd be talking multiple emplacements all around the world; otherwise people could avoid them by just entering on the "Dark Side" of the planet. You'd lose massive amounts of power due to the atmosphere or gravity, in the case of mass driver and missle weapons.

From a "cost effectiveness" standpoint, a small fleet of slow fighters is probably the best way to handle planetary defense, both in the game and in a hypothetical space travelling civilization.

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Then call the building a 'planetary fighter base'. by all means. GAMEPLAY is the important part.

But for the sake of argument, satellite defense would be much more effective, requiring little maintenance and able to preform evasive manouvres with acceleration as high as its thrusters would be capable of, since there's no human aboard to be pulped and mashed by sudden high acceleration.

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What pisses me off is when i put a fleet into orbit around the planet it auto disbands the fleet? What my ships can coordinate in space but not space closer to a planet? So now it's even more difficult to stop say a single DL battleship *shutter*. So instead of attacking 3 ships it only attacks one at a time.

That was argued over in Beta. I can't agree with their logic, but if they do it for game balance, then that's that.

Rocks are cheap, expendable, and a typical star system comes with a nearly unlimited supply. Ground-based defense platforms, on the other hand, are expensive, hard to replace, and in very limited supply. Rocks win.

The rocks are in nearly unlimited supply, the means to move them onto the desired trajectory isn't. Basically, the only way this works is if you assume that given equal technologies that either the target won't see the rocks coming (debatable, given that the sensors saw your ships coming for days or weeks, so they'll probably be able to track you in system quite well) or that it takes less effort to move the rocks into an intercept vector than to deflect them from an intercept vector, which goes against physics.

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Gameplay-wise, defensive fortifications on a planet reduce the gameplay dynamics, not increase them. The reason is that if they're effective (i.e., they will defend the planet against a meaningful fleet), there's little reason to not build them. You slap one down and forget about it. Very little strategic thought it required.

If they're not effective, all they're good for is knocking off undefended transports. In that case there's little point in having them, as a ship or two a couple generations behind the curve will do the same thing and not take up a planet slot. For defense against transports, a cheap ship works better.

As things stand right now, you have to actually make meaningful strategic decisions: What planets get defended heavily? Which just have a minimal garrison? Which are left completely clear? Are they all on minimal garrisons, but you have a fast fleet or two to take down other large fleets? Do I break off some of my offensive capability to defend this newly conquered planet? Do I build fast ships in the rear specifically so I can send them up to defend conquered territory?

Crappy defensive installations don't really change anything, and good defensive installations just dumb down the strategy of the game. If you have a problem keeping ships updated without excessive micromanagement, maybe a reconsideration of the way ship upgrades work is in order. Defensive installations are not the solution.

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If you want your ships in orbit to defend as a fleet you can research the tech for the Orbital Fleet Manager. They are cheap to insta-buy or only a few turns to build. If you want to improve your land defenses, research soldiering and increase your population... I understand your other arguments, just thought I would throw this out there.

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I never go out of my way to defend a planet but IF I had to, there are readily available things to do so!

#1 you can get more soldier tech and build defenssive structures.

#2 You can build ships with no engines that will fit more weapons, these are perfect for dense and don't even need sensors. Also add in the building that has fleet control.

Nothing else was implemented because either Frogboy didn't want it int he game, or it wasn't in the budget. In either event that's how it will stay in the enar future.

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You can build ships with no engines but you'll still have to have them upgraded/scuttled as tech advances, and consider that not all planets have a starport or anywhere near the kind of industry necessary to build a defensive fleet, so you have to create them in other planets, then send them everywhere around your empire.. now if you have 5 planets, its an annoying bother.
if you have 50, well, thats why I don't play on big galaxies..
Orbital fleet manager does squat in terms of reducing that tedium..

And you're wrong about good defensive installation not contributing to the dynamic of the game.
they contribute by minimizing a huge part of the more tedius type of micromanagement you have in the game, especially on larger galaxies.
Remember that they take precious planetary tiles, and the most important bit: that not every planet (in fact very few) have the kind of industry necessary to pump out defensive ships, which you then have to keep sending to all other planets.. tedious in the extreme

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You can build ships with no engines but you'll still have to have them upgraded/scuttled as tech advances, and consider that not all planets have a starport or anywhere near the kind of industry necessary to build a defensive fleet, so you have to create them in other planets, then send them everywhere around your empire.. now if you have 5 planets, its an annoying bother.
if you have 50, well, thats why I don't play on big galaxies..
Orbital fleet manager does squat in terms of reducing that tedium..

And you're wrong about good defensive installation not contributing to the dynamic of the game.
they contribute by minimizing a huge part of the more tedius type of micromanagement you have in the game, especially on larger galaxies.
Remember that they take precious planetary tiles, and the most important bit: that not every planet (in fact very few) have the kind of industry necessary to pump out defensive ships, which you then have to keep sending to all other planets.. tedious in the extreme

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