How do i land troops to take over a planet ?

You need to have a ship with cargo capacity and load it with troops & or fighters and give it capture the planet orders in tactical combat. If you have a specific troop ship built you can set the ships strategy to capture the planet when you design it but any cargo ship will do.

The ship will fly close to the planet and lunch a troop shuttle which will cause ground combat to start during the next end of turn process.

It is a good idea to have armed ships to distract and destroy defences whilst the ship does this and to put a lot of armour and shields on any specifically designed assault transport as you don’t want it shot down by the defenders on the approach. I also mount PD we3apons on these ships for the same reason.

0n the system display you have to attack the planet to enter space combat. Select tactical combat and once it starts select your troop transport you should see a button on the panel at the bottom RHS of the screen which has a picture of soldiers on it. Click on that then on the planet and the ship should fly towards it and land troops when it gets close enough.

To do it with strategic combat I believe the transport or the task force its with has to have the capture the planet strategy set, not totally certain as I tend to only use tactical combat.

I hope that helps

The trigger that activates that button is whether or not the selected ship has troops and/or fighters on board. I've used dreadnoughts as troop carriers before with no problems. In point of fact I specced them up as regular attack ships with a single cargo bay and could drop troops no worries.

Agreed that’s odd as you should be able to use any hull size to build a landing ship on. I regularly use battle ship hulls for this as they are more likely to survive to drop troops on heavily defended worlds

If you put any weaponns on the the dreadnouhgt it will attack the planet first. Just put PDs and Cargo space for the troops.

Also, after the troops successfully land, it's best to stop shooting at the planet, otherwise your troops will get decimated by the not-so friendly fire At the same time it helps to soften up defences (weapon platforms, enemy units) before the assault.