Bombardment Weaponss Whats the point???

With strategy settings to avoid targeting facilities....

Try taking on a planet with 15 Weapons platforms, you'll see the point to bombardment weapons.

NB the Kwok balance mod has upped the damage to kill pop, btw, and its A/I is also much better about building weapons platforms.

I use Cruisers (lvl 10) eith solar sails, as much shielding and pd as I can squeeze on (the balance depends on what the AI is using on its WPs) with everything that I can help to make it difficult to hit and 1 or 2 cargo holds with the best troops I can get in them.

These I charge at the planet being supported by pure PD ships (using all a mixture of each of the different types of PD *very important*). This gives my attacking ship plenty of covering fire and generaly the ability to fly a tangent across the face of the planet and drop its troops with barely having to turn or slow down.

The technique might well work against minor outposts which cant hold that much off a defence net who ever is trying to defend them. I tend to do major invasions in two phases first clearing out the defences with serious warships or drones before launching a ground attack. That said against the stock basic AI you will win unless you screw it up

I have long advocated an improvement of planetry defences, as in increasing the amount of effectiveness of milita troops (I like the idea of making milita troops 10x the size they are now) and making it so that every colony has at least 1 milta.

At the moment over running planets is painfully simple, WPs are already a good line of defence if the AI uses them properly, but unfortunatly it doesn't. Mind you neither do I as a player, its simply to time consuming to micro mange every colony and its defences. Troops and Fighters are great in theory in defence its just that an AI that uses them only comes along once every 3rd blue moon.

My suggestion to improve this situation without having to massively alter the AI (which will be a pain) is to give every colony both milita troops and WPs. My idea is giving 1 milita WP for every 250 million population (minimum 1, maximum 6), and 1 milita troop (with 10x the tonnage of regular troops) for every 100 million population (minimum 1, no maximum). By doing them as milita it will bypass the AI having to build these things (but they should be told to suppliment them when they are consolidating or under attack) and will make us and the AI think harder about attacking planets. Obviously the AI will need to be told to make bigger fleets to attack and capture planets.

Ask yourself, what would you do if you came across an AI planet and wanted to invade it, but found a few hundred troops waiting for you on the surface? Would you bother trying to build hundreds of your own, or would you just bomb the damn thing, then invade him anyway?

Well I would invade, but then I am just a contary old bugger that way. To be honest it would depend on a load of factors, what size is the planet, what facs has it got buil on it, have they been upgraded, are they worth it (have they built 25 mineral facs on a planet with 20% mineral).

At the moment I always invade and capture planets because I can then use the infrastructure from the very next turn, which gives a double whammy to the AI, not only has it lost that planet and its resources but its enemy has gained them, if I was forced to destroy the colony before I could capture it then that "should" slow me down (if the planet is properly defended which milta WPs would help to do). Improving milta troops would make players have to choose between spending time and resources to capture a planet or destroy it.

Please remember that this converstation is also taking place in a discussion about how planetry bombardment works, and saying that using "conventional" weapons are far too over powered agaisnt planets.

Given the current AI you are right, but make the AI (and the game mechanics that supports it) better at this and the game will change and colonies will play a far greater roll. Look at military history, cities and other strategic places are where huge major battles took place and wars where turned one way or another. At the moment its only warp points where this happens, colonies should be the same. Yes you can knock fleets out fairly easy and take the fight out of the enemy, but if you can't attack the planets becasue you don't have the forces then you can't take the enemy out of the fight.

Making militia troops bigger is quite reasonable, since militia is too weak.
But I don´t agree with giving WP to militia. That would mean a very powerful defence for free. 6 WP armed with CSM can do huge amounts of damage to an invading fleet, specially in multiplayer, when the battle is played in strategical mode, with fleets controlled by the AI and without micromanagement. And you can allways build 10+ extra WP in addition... try to capture a planet that way.

Making militia is easy, you just give guns to the population and throw that armed people to the enemy, so its logical to have a huge militia if you have a huge population. WP are structures, and should be treated like defensive facilities IMO, not given for free.

Another option to have in mind is to allow WP to fight in ground combat. This is discussed in another thread. But is logical to think that an orbital defence facility will have troops garrisoned in it, and bunker (or similar) defences. I think that WP sould be treated as "bunkers" in ground combat, with small versions of the weapons/armos/shields of the weapons in them.

A WP with 3 DUC and 4 armour slots could be treated as a bunker with 3 small DUC and 4 small armour slots of the same lvl. Weapon mounts could increase the range of the weapons by 1, and CSM should be useless in ground combat (no point in using nuclear warheads at point blank range unless you want to destroy your homeworld too).

Giving this option to weapon platforms should make them a nice reinforcement to militia, making a planet harder to capture.

The figure I used was fairly arbitary, I still think that milta WPs are a good idea, we could also lower the storage available on the planet to account for some of this as well, and put limits on the weapon systems that are available to these (say 5 lvls behind the races current tech to minimum level 1). After all starting a new colony is a relatively huge endevour and not something that you would do undefended, when the Europeans started colonies in the New World they armed their outposts with cannons as well as muskets.

Nice idea about giving WPs dual weapons, although I am not sure if the game system will do that (leave them with the armour they have as these are huge great things and meant to take huge amounts of punishment), one idea that has been sugeested elsewhere that I also like is to simply give point defence weapons the ability to target troops as well, this is something that is very easy to implement and will be effective, afterall PD guns chuck out huge amounts of damage in terms of dealing with troops.

Adding milita WPs (with upgraded weapons) with more (or larger) milita troops would be over kill, afterall the attacker does need some hope of capturing planets, I just feel that it should be an aweful lot more difficult than it is currently.

Just giving ideas

The alternate thought I had was to allow Weapon Platforms to equip small weapons (I'm playing Balance Mod btw, so I'm not sure how overpowered small weapons are at endgame tech in stock). Or at the very least, the Ground Cannon. This way, it's up to the player to decide how much firepower a platform has for space and for ground combat.

The other thing that really needs to be fixed is planetary weapon range. Distance is measured from the centre of the planet, whereas ships just need to hit the surface. This is why troops can never ever shoot at ships. It's unreasonable to just extend all small weapon space-combat ranges to compensate, as then fighters would be terribly overpowered (unless we make a separate copy of these for troops and jsut boost those, but that's a big hassle).

Sure it might be slightly unrealistic that weapon platforms and troops can instantly move along the planet surface to shoot at the best position possible range-wise. But it's better than not having them shoot at all.

As for AI being able to put up proper colony defences - let's hope the modders write the appropriate scripts soon. Personally, I feel this is a lower priority to fixing certain other bugs and implementing certain features - most notably the ship movement algorithm and getting the AI to intelligently attack waypoints and colonies.

Thats the ticket I like to argue and I like the sound of my key presses, and hopefully my comments help modders to improve their mods Just keep shouting back (politely).

I thought that was intentional, after all its really quite unrealistic for Red Neck Bill with his plasma rifle to be firing it from the planets surface into space and damaging space ships with it....

How can this be a low priority when you want the AI to attack colonies as well.... I will admit that getting them to deal with way points is of critical importance, but I think that has to wait for a change in the game to give the AI a memory. It seems to me just a couple of easy changes to ground combat could make it and the game a lot better.

Unless I'm mistaken, troops don't have the code to be able to fire from the planet -- unittypes.txt allows weapon platforms and nothing else to fire from a planets surface to space.
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Ah I see, troops can't fire into space by code. Very well, I was thinking waay back on SE III where 'mechs' and 'tanks' could.

Ah... but the latter would mean having to come up with complicated AI design types to make it build these Weapon Platforms. Well then, instead mod the direct fire weapons to be able to target troops and give them "Ground combat" damage formulae that is significantly nerfed in accuracy and/or damage.

I've made a change in my mod so that WPs can have small weapons (think bunkers). This was pretty easy, but now I have to figure out how to get AI to put the weapons on. Like Evilginger, I'd like the space combat with AI's to be a little more 'groundy.'
There was an SEIV 'IV' mod which upped the militia per population in a big way and that made ground combat much more work and more thrilling.

Kerry-

"...I say we must move forward, not backward, upward, but forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!"
-Kodos for President

I've put PD cannons on Weapons platforms because I notice that troops are on their target list.

I am looking at my components.txt files and I don't see Troop on the 'Weapon Target Type List'.

Did you change it to include 'Troop' yourself?

Kerry-

"...I say we must move forward, not backward, upward, but forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!"
-Kodos for President

Ooops.. I guess it's another feature of the balance mod. Good thinkin' Kwok...

Give direct fire weapons the range/damage/accuracy of small weapons. All formulae are already done and tested. Same for armor/shields.

Unfortunately changing militia amounts in settings.txt is being overwritten by something that's hard-coded...

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Damn thats a pain, I wonder why only some AI races seem to get access to milita units and others don't. If this is a bug then fixing the bug (or findign out why some races do and others don't get them) might show how to change this.

Another way around it is to try defining milita troops as a seperate unit type to normal troops and increasing the weight allowance for milita troops.... (However this won't help the races that don't get milita troops)