Planet Assualt

Does the planet have rings? Is the strategy set to Maximum Range?

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Are you using the standard Capture Planet formation from the mod? I thought I had set all strategies to break formation, but I might have forgot some.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

I have seen this, also.

It's almost as if the ships without troops are backing off; "We're trying to capture the planet, so we'd better not shoot it up and damage the goods."

I've also noticed that the target types for planets, facilities, buildings, and platforms are useless...ships either fire on the planet with their damages being nearly equally distributed among pop, facilities, and platforms, or they don't fire on the planet at all. "Planet with colony" (or whatever it is) is the only one that seems to matter.

Kwok, last I checked you did indeed set all strats to break.

antirelic, I suggest multiple TF's in your fleet. Or find a formation where the escorts are set out front, and assign your shooters as escorts.

Without intervention, you'll never get a perfect set-up. As I recall, ships will shoot at the planet until the troops land, but once the troops are down they'll never shoot. Even if combat is "held over" for a turn and you bring in shooters, they still know friendlies are on the surface and will decline to shoot.

Now using either method to segregate your shooters, you can at least drag a box around them and order them as a group, so that should save a little time.

The worst situation I've found is when a few sats are on the far side of the planet and the troops have landed. Combat ships get nailed trying to cross the planet to get at the sats. If you have them in the same TF as the troop carriers, they should withdraw when the leader (oldest ship) withdraws, but sometimes "escorts" get carried away. I haven't used them much, and not recently.

If you want competent behavior under all circumstances, manual control is the only choice at present. It is not possible to craft a strat that will serve in all situations. And if you use formations that don't break, the formation strats frequently override ship strats (as they must) so it gets tricky sorting out which is the cause of some behaviors.

The first step here is to make sure no strats have "Do Not Engage" set for Weapon Platforms. Ships without eligible weapons won't engage them anyhow, and the others should do so as they can.

Well, I just got surprised again. Assaulted a planet with a 3 TF fleet. Textbook setup; no detail overlooked.

The only ships that advanced were the troop transports. Even bombardment ships in the same TF set to assault the planet turned and left. There were 2 weapon platforms on the planet, and not one of my ships cared about them. 3 troop pods managed to land, but all transports were lost.

After the battle I found 3 troop transports with troops aboard that had retreated into another hex.

Everyone please disregard anything I may have said about setting up planet assaults - it seems I know nothing. Think of me as Sgt. Schultz.

I can only guess that in the past when things have gone right it was due to the presence of satellites. They can be hard to spot, and some say they can hide within the planets.

Boy, I sure hope this retreat mania gets fixed soon.

This problem probably coms from patch 1.27:
20. Fixed - In space combat, if your side has a transport with troops to drop on a planet, and the transport is targeting the planet to drop troops, then your side will not fire any weapons on the planet.
Probably the unintended consequence was that when ships don't have a target they retreat, that's why when the planet had sats they tried to attack them and didn't retreat.

Thankfully in the next patch you'll have:
6. Fixed - Ships were retreating when they shouldn't.
7. Fixed - If a strategy has a target type damage amount for a planet as "All Weapons Gone", then when the planet has no weapons left in combat, no ships will fire on it. The behavior for other targets with this damage amount setting is that they will be targeted last after all other targets are destroyed.

I really hope the patch will be out tomorrow!