If you're defending on a planet against a force that is inside your solar system, you have in essence already lost. You are standing under a spotlight in a dark room, peering into the darkness for the coming fist. Hence the advantage to the attacker.
need a reason before i'm willing to accept this.
dlapine provided some.
Ships in orbit aren't afloat, they are falling towards the earth, and continually missing, as I heard one author glibly claim.
but transport ships aren't in orbit, they're landing, for falling gracefully at best. but controlled reentry isn't exactly easy; it involves very precise trajectories that aren't really condusive to manuevering. ships in orbit, true, aren't expending any energy. but in that case, all they've achieved is a blockade.
They get to see everything you do above ground
people in the future don't have tents? if we're assuming all this advanced technology, who's to say sensor scrablers aren't commonplace?
they'll see it coming as well
so they shoot it down or stear out of the way. missiles launched at ships in orbit might be easy enough to shoot down, but i'm also thinking about a dog fight situation. also, just 'cause they see it coming doesn't mean they can do much about it. you used a fictive example, and so will i: on Stargate when Earth was defending against Anubus, a sea of drones that could be seen miles from their target were still capable of totally destroying that target. sure, the drones were of a level of technology far beyond what Anubus had, but i think all the meant is that Earth needed fewer of them to get the job done.
also those crowbar things must have been a very special material to not disintegrate in the atmosphere. sounds like an interesting plot device.
You can see that might be advantageous for the attacker.
fair enough: the things you mentioned could certainly be used to an attacker's advantage, and i'm pretty fairly convinced. if they wanted to utterly decimate the defending planet, it could be done very easily from orbit; even landing invasion forces wouldn't be too difficult.
i guess what i find unrealistic isn't the attacker's advantage, but the lack of options for defending, and how simplistic the whole process is in GC2. the biggest orbiting defense fleets can only have 9 ships without shutting down the planet's starport. no mines. no planetary shields. no defense staelites. no ground-based cannons. none of it. it just gets abstracted to a simple invasion with major attacker advantages. there is the planetary defense structure, but it doesn't do enough to be worthwhile.
