Ground combat mod

What I was trying to achieve was a more combined-arms thing. It's somewhat of a 20th century feel (I started off with a WWII feel, but then decided that was a bit too low tech...) with infantry, tanks, field artillery, and air support. Because every ground combat takes place on a city background, I went for the feel of fighting in a built up area. Infantry can take full advantage of all the cover, and as such are very hard to shift except by other infantry. OTOH they need tanks or big guns of their own to hold off enemy tanks. Fighter can be built up as bombers to take out enemy troops, or fighters to take out enemy fighters.

All that said, however, it still needs some work.

I've just updated the mod. The big change is adding the new units to the strategies.txt file - now they'll attack each other instead of running away.

I've done a lot more delving in an attempt to improve this mod, and from what I've discovered it's going to be very difficult if not impossible to get it to work the way I want. See, from what I can figure, a lot of "Troop" based stuff must be in the code rather than the moddable files. Like the "Troops in cargo" icon. It's in the bitmap effects file, but changing the word "Troops" to "Infantry" doesn't give you an icon if you have "Infantry" units in cargo. That's just an example - there are other, similar problems.

I have an idea about how to work around the whole problem by making all ground units come under the "Troops" unit type, but it's going to make the component list in the design window very ugly.

In answer to the first - yes. The current setup is that basic infantry can't hurt tanks (unless the tanks rather foolishly don't take any armour components). You can give them an RPG component so that they can hurt tanks, but then they can't hurt other infantry. OTOH, I made infantry hard to hit (because they can take cover in the rubble) so tanks can't necessarily overwhelm them, you need infantry of your own to dig them out.

As to the second, well, given the combat engine, that's not so easy to do. But it does tend to force you into taking combined arms. If you drop a bunch of tanks on a planet defended only by AT guns, you'll probably lose. If you drop a bunch of tanks on a planet defended only by planes, you'll almost certainly lose. If you drop a bunch of AT guns on a planet defended only by infantry, you'll definately lose. If you drop a mixture of troop types, you have a better chance. Rock - paper - scissors...

Well, assuming for the sake of argument an intelligent defender, of course. After I get the basic balance right, I'll see what I can do with the AI.

I make no guarantees, but it should load an existing game. I didn't muck around with the order of things in components.txt, for example - it's all added to the end of the file.

Version 2.0alpha is now available for download here