Planetary Invasion in Waves

themocaw

Join Date 06/2007

+16

Planetary Invasion in Waves

Or how to have your cake and eat it too.

So you've got a fleet of four troop transports parked outside an enemy planet. Your frigates wipe out the rest of his orbital fleet, leaving that nice, juicy, PQ 20 ready for invasion.

You take a look at the options for invasion. You have 2,000 troops. They have 12,000 defenders. Your advantage factor is 5 to 1, not quite enough to be assured of a win. It would be great if you could use mass drivers or tidal disruption, but you don't really want to ruin those nice improvements your enemy had set up for you already. Maybe you could use mini soldiers, or information warfare, but that's so expensive, not to mention it's less effective to lower the enemy's advantage number when it's already so low.

Then it hits you: metagaming can help.

You've noticed that the game only records planetary damage after your invasion succeeds: on a failed invasion, you haven't really seen any planetary damage incurred. You split your fleet of four transports into one fleet of three and a singleton in reserve. You go for mass drivers and send in your 1,500 troops. Against 12,000 defenders, there's not much of a chance to win, but they reduce the planet's defenses to about 2,000 troops (that 100-200% boost to attacker advantage helps a lot.) Against 2,000 defenders, your 5-to-1 advantage with 500 troops is more than sufficient. You switch to Traditional Warfare for the second wave. Your 500 troops invade and wipe out the defenders: there are only 50 or so survivors in the invading force, but that's more than enough to secure the colony.

Best of all, you now have your very own PQ 20 in all its glory to call your own. And look! It was the enemy's research capital! Time to go for Huge Hulls. . .

Aren't you glad you exploited a game mechanic to your own twisted ends?

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MarvinKosh

Join Date 08/2005

+87

As far as the loophole is concerned, perhaps the best way to deal with that is to make it a feature that if you fail to invade with planetary bombardment then no matter what option you pick with the next transport, the defenders get a bonus because you've basically smashed up the battlefield and any remaining resistance will find fortified positions. Your choice of tactics won't include information warfare because let's face it, you just dropped a whole bunch of rocks on the planet, nobody is going to read your propaganda. Tidal disruption might not work so well because the planetary surface is now so uneven that the rising water might miss some bits.

In other words, your invasion tactics have knock-on effects if you don't commit the necessary troops to eradicate all the defenders in one go.

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I don't like this kind of cheese (avoiding doing a real invasion by either using a last second spy on a farm to magically wipe out half the population or abusing this broken game mechanic described by the OP), so the solution for me is simple - I just don't do it. If I played metaverse games I might be a bit more concerned though since you can bet people abuse this kind of stuff regularly and it IS nothing but cheese.

I would prefer to see a solution that involved you having to build "bomber" types of ships. We gain technologies like "information warfare", "tidal disrupters" and the like but we never have to actually put them on ships - they just magically come into play.

I'd be a little more interesting if you had to build bombers to use these types of techs to soften up invasion targets. And with this type of setup the "damage" you inflict on a planet would be unavoidable. You choose to bomb - damage is done.

Or if that's too much hassle then make it so we have to add modules for these attack types to our transports - so using them would be taken more seriously - and make their effectiveness scale to the number of troops being deployed.

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Another point. If you are "evil" attacking a "good" planet, most of the structures are " destroyed because you cannot use them ". So, you might as well destroy them during invasion tactics.
I assume it works the other way as well. Good invading evil.

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It has nothing to do with good and evil. The buildings are destroyed when you conquer a planet if you do not have the required tech to build them yourself.

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...snip... Your choice of tactics won't include information warfare because let's face it, you just dropped a whole bunch of rocks on the planet, nobody is going to read your propaganda. ...snip...

Well, Um. It actually might be a lot more useful if the information was "Join our side or we will do it some more."

Tidal disruption might not work so well because the planetary surface is now so uneven that the rising water might miss some bits.

Um, after Katrina (among far too many others) I think we can pretty much say that "If the ocean rises up to get you, a bunch of rocks aren't going to stop it."

Seriously though, some modified tactics might be of value to prevent spamming tactics that are greater than the sum of the whole.

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