The Fortunes of War

To the Victor Go the Spoils

Currently when a race surrenders to another, the second race gets their planets. In addition they should also get their starbases, ships, technology, and star maps. Also the fortunes of war should play a role in your race's moral. If you are doing well your moral goes up and if you are losing it goes down; surely losing key planets (homeworld, capitals, and high PQ planets) should lower your moral.
11,708 views 10 replies
Reply #1 Top
I agree that perhaps techs and ships should be passed on, but morale shouldn't change depending on the fortunes of war in my opinion. It may be more realistic, but the last thing the game needs is to give even more momentum to the invading race! If you've lost a couple of planets (or more likely, if the AI has ) then they are already disadvantaged. They'd have even less chance of fighting back.
Reply #2 Top
Treasury. I want the money. the only way now is to trade with the race before invasion.
Reply #3 Top
Besides, its not always accurate to say that losses lower morale. To use a Historical example, Free French soldiers and resistance fighters continued to campaign against the Germans even after the fall of Paris and the overall French surrender. The Germans fought maniacally for three years in the face of appalling civilian casualties from allied air-raids...

Sometimes setbacks just deepen conviction to see the war through, or die trying. To model morale shifts from war properly, you would have to account the effects of setbacks and sucesses in positive AND negative ways for each, and I'm not sure how you could set that up. Which losses would hurt morale, and which would help? Which gains would help morale, and which ones might not (though how the latter works I'm not sure... everyone likes a short, victorious war).
Reply #4 Top
Well said Maj. Disaster, in addition to the points you bring up, a large part of it is cultural. As we can assume that each race in the game has a fairly different culture, I think you would see differing effects of war (both winning and losing).
Reply #5 Top
all i want is a death star, a star forge, and a genesis project. oh well.


anyways, maj. disaster's got a good point.


well, that's my two cents worth. maybe oh, say, one cent, but who cares?

Reply #6 Top
>In addition they should also get their starbases, ships, technology, and star maps.

I would love to see that!
Reply #7 Top
>In addition they should also get their starbases, ships, technology, and star maps

I don't know. Often a force facing defeat will begin take great efforts to prevent the "goods" from falling into the victor's hands ... e.g. scuttling ships, destroying intel. Getting all of a civilization's techs, especially, would give the victor far too much, and from a gameplay point of view likely unbalance things drastically. And how would we like it if a nearly defeated empire surrendered all of the above to a third party, along with the remaining planets?!

After all, the victor already gets the conquererd planets and their surviving population and, depending upon the invasion tactics used, can get all of the planetary improvements up and running as well. I think it probably works pretty well as it is.
Reply #8 Top
I don't think you should get their treasury. In most cases the Treasury would be Exausted by the time you take them over anyway. All that would be left are assets, which you do get if you invade their planets. Most ships I would scrap anyway, or would be by the surviving captians.

In most wars you take over a broken down people and economy and this is the way it should be.. Look at history. Germany, japan, Iraq.. Etc.
Reply #9 Top
Often a force facing defeat will begin take great efforts to prevent the "goods" from falling into the victor's hands... e.g., scuttling ships, destroying intel.

Usually they surrender to a third race in the hopes they will protect them. That race only receives planets open to invasion (since they don't get the surrendering race's remaining ships) and while invading those planets you will steal tech from them! By the time a race surrenders, the attacking race already has most if not all of their techs. I agree morale might not always go down but I still think when a race surrenders to another, the second race gets all their assets (planets, starbases, ships, technology, star maps, and treasury).