The answer is quite simple.

You can not invade a planet if a ship is in orbit. You have to destroy all ships in orbit before you can invade.

The solution is equally simple.

Either send a ship, or a fleet, to destroy any ships in orbit before you send in the troop transport - or send the troop transport fleeted with enough ships to take out whatever ships are orbiting the target planet. A third option is to equip your troop transport(s) with weapons capable of destroying the orbiting ship(s). The third option is less cost efficient, however.

This rule can work to your advantage as well. If you place a simple hull of a ship (no engines, weapons or defenses) in orbit around one of your planets, the enemy can not invade the planet before that ship is destroyed. It is cheap insurance against invasion by an unarmed enemy troop ship.

It is a game mechanic, nothing more.

It is not 'real world'. It is based on its own rules, which you must accept and work with.

And sure, cheats can gain you an advantage. You want to change 30 turns into 5? Just mod a certain value in a certain file. (or research the required techs)

You want to be untouchable? Just change certain things in certain files. (or research the required techs)

You want to learn and play the game like it was meant to be played? Then learn the rules, and abide by them.

Your first post suggested an honest question. Your second just seems to be 'cry-baby-time'.

Invoking cheats will stop the game from being posted to the Metaverse, but that is about it.

As for the 'stupidity' of not being able to invade if they have something in orbit, what if that space miner would ram your troop ship?  Blame it on the Transport Pilots Union of the Galaxy for creating these rules that their members must follow.

That 'story' could cover a miner blocking a troop ship, but not the empty-hull 'guard' thing that Moosetek mentioned. I agree with him that part of playing a game is learning its rules and deciding how you want to deal with them.But they aren't sacred just because they're the current rules.

I also think it is a bit silly that an unarmed single ship could somehow protect an *entire world* from invading troop ships. And I wonder what was so hard about tweaking that rule so that troop ships could ignore unarmed ships in orbit. Couldn't they just be booted out into an adjacent square if the invasion is successful?

You can arm transports.  If your 30 turns away, try an upgrade.

btw..I'm just curious..why are you invading a planet 30 TURNS AWAY?

I have to agree with you.  Saying the rules are the rules isn't enough if the rules don't make sense.  Especially in a strategy game.

 

Sure.  Ground to air missles could do a very good job taking those transports out too, but they aren't in the game either

Ground-to-air missiles against possibly stealthed ships and/or against jamming = high tech.  Also, if one misses, the transports are safely down.

Dropping ore chunks from orbit on grounded transports = very low tech  Also, one need not hit exactly, and can drop more chunks as needed.  (Remember "Moon Is a Harsh Mistress"?)

BTW, games have often had problems with unarmed units.  I recall some (Panzerblitz and Panzer Leader are two) allowed horse cart and truck units to be useful in unexpected ways.  One was to deny any unit easy entry to a forest or cover hex.  Another, was to surround any unit, including a tank one, to essentially prevent movement for a turn, and let them get blown away by AT guns.  The one here is minor by comparison.  After all, one need only put a single gun, beam, or missile in the million-plus soldier invasion ship to avoid the problem!

Wellll, I like mine better!  So, there! 

Besides, space miners may or may not be able to move fast, but they are certainly likely to have ore chunks nearby, or have access to ones.  Also, the space miner can prevent more than one transport, so kamikaze tactics are out as an excuse there!

I still think that any powered spaceship in orbit would have access to something they can drop into a gravity well on just-landed transports. Like hand grenades and nukes, close would count. SEIV has many features like ramming (armor is your friend), planet defenses, tactical combat, etc. It has its own problems, of course, but you might take a look at it if those features are important to you. I fondly recall rush-building defenses and cheap ships in some SEIV games when AI fleets showed up on planetary doorsteps. Playing against only AIs, one has the option in SEIV to play/control the combat turn by turn. I had to choose which missiles would be aimed at which ships, which beam weapons, what my out-gunned defenders would do, etc. MOO2 also had this feature.

No, it wouldn't. You really have not thought it through.

Most things would simply burn to nothing on the way down. And you need to consider 'aiming' them. You can't just drop something from orbit and expect it to hit a specific target. It is not a simple straight-line target. And by the time you got to the drop point and deployed your 'hand grenade' the troops would already be out, so destroying the ship has little value.

(sigh)

 Calculations have nothing to do with this. The miner lacks equipment to do such a thing, hence it is called a "miner" and not a "bomber". You seem to vastly underestimate the complexity of such undertaking.

 

To bomb them (and own population btw too) a simple plane would suffice, hence it is to assume they are expecting bombing and protected against it. A couple of stones more will not make a difference(ignoring for a second that those will not land precisely, or at all anyway.)

Just ran the math: it only takes about 35 metric tons hitting the surface at excape velocity to make a 1 kt nuclear-level blast. That is assuming it is just allowed to fall from space without being accellerated at all. For reference, 35 metric tons would be about the size of a small truck.

Guys, you're attacking your own planet.

In The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, the Loonies were (sort of) attacking an enemy planet.

And, once again, this bombardment idea is not something designed into the game, it's a fan-fiction level attempt at rationalizing the poorly implemented concept of defended airspace. Worse, it doesn't even manage to rationalize it, because the transports aren't being destroyed, they're being prevented from entering orbit. 

On the first step of an invasion attempt, the transport is in orbit, not on the ground, while you decide what type of attack you're going to use.  If anything, if you've researched the tech, it's the transports that are equipped with mass drivers to shoot rocks at the planet, not the freighter or scout ship idling in orbit.  And if you haven't researched bombardment, even transports can't use those rocks as weapons.  So your explanation doesn't even work as fan-fiction.

If I had to guess at the reality behind this decision, I'd say that at some phase of game development, transports on auto pilot were getting destroyed when trying to attack a planet that rush built a defender during the time between turns, and the developers decided that the easiest way to stop this would be simply preventing them from moving into the tile if any ships were in orbit.  This would be needed because an attack ship is not allowed to enter orbit around an undefended enemy planet, so you couldn't send an escort ship in with the transports if the planet wasn't defended at the time.

Hopefully they'll add a routine to check if the ship is armed when GalCiv 4 comes out.