Hello, and welcome to an idea I have to improve the ground combat system in GalCiv2.

Basically, I think the current idea is rather silly. You can take a huge percentage of a planet's population, chuck them on a starship, and have them invade an enemy's planet. And they don't stop until every last man, woman and child is dead. Furthermore, the kill-death ratio of invader versus defender is completely ridiculous. Therefore, I propose this change:

Recruitment
Instead of just putting your population on a transport, I suggest each planet should have an "available troops" pool. This is a certain percentage of the planet's population, depending on your approval rate (and maybe your loyalty bonus). The normal percentage should be about 10 to 20. These are the troops available to put on a transport. When you deploy these troops, they are taken from the planet's population, and you have to wait for normal population growth to replenish this pool.

Draft
As an alternative, you can decide to draft recruits. This will recruit the maximum possible percentage of troops (the same amount you would get if the planet had 100% approval), but the planet takes a heavy hit to morale. The morale penalty will slowly decrease over time. The decision to draft troops is taken whenever troops are loaded onto a transport, or called upon to defend their colony.

Defenders
A planet's defense forces are taken from the available troops pool, plus an additional percentage of the population worth of militia. Neither defenders or attackers gain any sort of bonus just for being the attacking/defending force. Only normal technological/soldiering bonuses apply.

Conquering a Planet
Once all the defenders are dead, you take control of the planet. The planet's remaining population comes under your control (minus a percentage of collateral damage, depending on your invasion tactic), and your remaining troops are directly transferred to the available troops pool (or put back on to their transport, player's option).

Effect of these changes
I expect that conquering a planet will be more difficult with this system. It will probably take troops from several planets to conquer a single colony. The eceonomic hit of an invasion will be reduced - you use only a small percentage of your population, instead of over half of them.


So, what do you think? Would this work? Any problems I didn't see?