You know, using Tidal Disruptors (40-70% loss in enemy advantage factor and a couple of buildings destroyed) and Mini Soldiers (40-70% gain in your advantage factor and maybe just maybe one building destroyed) are my favorite attack strategies. Information Warfare is nice as well (sometimes).

Hope this gives you something to think about.
ROCK ON!!!  

I gather you've never had to sustain an X-Worlds set of invasion tactics - cuz, you'd pay the hell out of gimmicks so hard, a full load of highly coordinated attacks is always a tricky decision to take.

Should see an AI use that much BCs -- and fail!

I've generally gone Tidal Disruptors in my early days, followed by Mini Soldiers in later games.

I tried Mass Drivers before, but found that I had to plan it out and if my strategy changed mid-flight, I no longer had the flexibility to go another route. (Having to make a low-pop transport for the initial attack, plus a fully loaded one for the subsequent one). When it works, it's great. When flexibility is needed, it might or might not put a wrench in the works.


Another way of softening the target is to put a spy on the farm. Wait one turn for the population to die off and remove your spy before attacking. I think Firebender came up with that one in the very early DA days.

The alternative to the 'spy invasion technique' is to place the spy on a morale resource and then do a information warfare invasion taking advantage to the lowered morale. I'd only use this if there were no farms (homeworld) or if after doing the farm starvation, a morale hit would further give an advantage.

I have to say that these are all very interesting posts. Quite a good topic to comment on as well.

Another mod idea, is to make a ship that is designed entirely for the purpouse of bombing planets. It would sorta work like a Spore Ship (except that it won't turn the planet Toxic), and a spy put together (allowing you to choose the building/buildings you'd like to bombard. To prevent players from using this ship like cheap-asses and wiping out all of the planet's structures in one turn, a set of "rules" can be implemented:

1.-An expensive Bombardment module can be made, acting like the Troop Transport module, where you have to place down multipule modules each containing one Mass Driver charge. These charges of course will be replenished each week, but you would only be able to carry one per ship at the begining due to a high level of Miniaturization (size 40-50 perhaps). And the ship itself would cost a lot to Rush Buy, and on top of that take a long time to build. It should be located at or close to the end of the Planetary Invasion branch of the Tech Tree.

2.-It can be taxed like a Starbase, where the first one is free, but the rest cost more and more to launch, the same way that you have to pay for each extra Starbase that you build. Only that the extra BC you'd have to pay for the second ship would be 500-1000 BC instead of the 200 BC you pay for your second Starbase.

3.-You'd be unable to put it into a fleet (at all).

Till next time.....
ROCK ON!!!!!  

If you have superior soldiering/tech and use information warfare you can sometimes get enough population of theirs on your side, and wipe them out so badly that you take few losses, and end up with more "invaders" than you started with (their population that joined you via information warfare and that survive the attack).

If you don't wipe out their population via the spy farm cheese you have more potential to gain pop (I think it's cheese because it's pure silliness that putting a spy on a farm would wipe out 6b people in a turn - I don't use it or the mass driver multi-wave cheese attack).

I think you always lose at 1 transport when you invade regardless so you can end up with a pop over 1b on a freshly taken planet this way too, which is bonus.

You're ignoring the effect of those 4-6 billion people on morale. A morale invasion tactic might drop the morale into the 50-60 range for 8b population, but the same spies on the same buildings would drop a 14b population to the 40s or lower. This gives you a higher percentage of defenders joining your side, and that percentage is on a higher population to boot. You're not gaining a few extra people, you're gaining a few billion extras. If you have a significantly higher tech than they do, you will almost always end with more people than you started with.

The reason I point out the time factor is I often invade with a pile of fast transports. One might be able to take a planet out, but I'm prepared to use two or three if necessary. The "use the same week" feature of the morale-only attack means that I can use my remaining transports on additional targets if my first few invasions go better than expected. Not to mention the part about invading a dozen planets using the same 4 spies all in the same turn   

So, use spies against Planetary Defenses OR morale improvement, then, deploy a fleet of 2-3 Transports (sometimes, my custome transports have 4 to 6 advance Troop modules )) then use Mini Soldier OR Information Warfare?

And...If you use so many Transports, each has 2000 troops, your troops' casuaties were less than 2000 then your other transports will remain? (you only lose 1 transport)?

I tried something similar recently in DL. I attacked a planet that had a pop of almost 8k with a transport that carried 5k troops. I used Information Warfare and defeated the planet with just over 5.4k troops left after the battle.

DL doesn't have spies, but my influence was affecting them pretty strongly.

I can't find Minisoldiers tactic in twilight.
BTW, average Soldering of mine is 80. Is it normal (played as the Acean in TA)

Disabling both would probably work better if the enemy has much higher tech and soldiering ratings than you do. You would not use information warfare then though.

Probably not. I'm not sure why so many joined me, but I assumed it was because of the skull and crossbones symbol at the planet. Maybe there's another mechanic working there. Besides influence, I also had a lot more soldiering ability and was attacking at something like 30 to 3.

The bottom line was that I came out of the battle with a tad over 8% more troops than I started with. It's a nice boost to the starting pop of the planet.