Invading a planet?

[jaz2121]

I have a massive fleet around a planet that's defended. Every round I bomb the planet and shoot down any defensive missiles that come at my fleet. I wear the planet's population of soldiers and civilians down every round but they and the planet's shield or integrity seem to replenish almost fully every around. Is my fleet just not big enough? I have ground troops and transporters waiting to invade the planet but can't seem to crack the defences. Any ideas?

[Zaimat]

You shouldn't have to destroy the infrastructure/population. Just their defenses (ships/starbase/planet defenses).

If the planet isn't firing back at you, has no starbase and they have no ships in orbit the planet is no longer defended and when you return to the galaxy map you should be able to order an Invasion (all your taskforces will invade even if you order just one as long as they are in orbit).

Unless they get new reinforcements the invasion should happen at the end of next turn. There is currently no way to stop your forces from firing and destroying the planet except manually clicking done with each so they don't fire automatically (we're going to fix this soon) so if that happens the invasion won't work but the planet will be destroyed (you can colonize it).

If something else is happening please use the 'report an issue' link from the launcher and we can check your saved games.

[DimitriFilichkin]

I seem to have the same problem, it doesn't look like an actual bug from what I can tell, I think that the planet is simply building more defenses in a single turn, before my fleet invades. Personally, I think it would be nice to have the invasion start at the end of that turn, instead of the end of the next turn. I usually have to kill the infrastructure of a planet just to keep it from rebuilding the defenses before I can invade.

On a slightly related note, it would be nice to have a "bombard" order from the star map, so that I don't have to engage the sector to attack a planet, only available after the planet is defenseless, of course. Options on what to bombard would be a bonus, like targeting industry, government, military, or civilian centers, or have different options on how to invade, like in Galactic Civilizations where you could bombard with bio-toxins, or drop asteroids from orbit and stuff like that.

[Lithari]

I suggest a little option for bombardments, a targeting option for the planetary defences, like the missile base or the beam station.

Cause there have been many times I have lost the chance to invade a colony because there is no indication of if I took out the ground defences.

I personally liked how MoO2 did it, you could do bombard the colony while fighting other ships, but when all space-based defences were gone (ships, starbase), a window to begin bombardment would come up and you could just let it bomb the planet, it shows everything that's on the planet and it also shows them being removed when they are destroyed.

You could have have an option to drop ALL bombs and also a start and stop bombardment.

Why not have something like that?

[Spaceman_Spiff]

Haven't got my head around ground combat yet.
I dropped nukes hitting 'done' for each ship in the fleet until I ran out of nukes. interestingly with 6-8 ships in the fleet it roughly halved the total number of remaining ground troops each round. I would get down to about 20 from 7500 then run out of nukes. So I added more ships to the fleet. 2 transporters with 4000 troops each sat in orbit. We did 4 turns (of 20 rounds each) and got the troops down to about 16 on the last turn when the race simply surrendered after that turn.
I've got all the snazzy tech for ground troops but where do I build them and how does one deploy them on a hostile planet?

[johanwanderer]

Haven't got my head around ground combat yet.
I dropped nukes hitting 'done' for each ship in the fleet until I ran out of nukes. interestingly with 6-8 ships in the fleet it roughly halved the total number of remaining ground troops each round. I would get down to about 20 from 7500 then run out of nukes. So I added more ships to the fleet. 2 transporters with 4000 troops each sat in orbit. We did 4 turns (of 20 rounds each) and got the troops down to about 16 on the last turn when the race simply surrendered after that turn.
I've got all the snazzy tech for ground troops but where do I build them and how does one deploy them on a hostile planet?

To invade a planet you need to build ships with troop pods (and I believe assault shuttles). Each troop pod carries 2000 troops. Build a fleet of those, send them to the system, and order them to "Invade" the target planet. After it's done, order the fleet to "Redeploy Troops" to pick troops back up.

However, due to the (potentially a) bug mentioned above, if the target planet has small ships queued, they will get produced at the end of the tactical turn, rendering the planet "defended", which means you can't invade. I don't have a solution for that except for orbital bombardments.

[Zaimat]

Regarding a colony pumping out enough ships to pass the "defended" threshold (1sml+1med or 3 sml or 1 large+). If you completely destroy their factories via bombardment it would cripple their ability to build a medium ship in 1 turn for good.

But you shouldn't have to completely destroy once we fix this. The building production will be affected by the condition of the building so a damaged industry building will no longer provide the full bonus (in this case ship building capacity) and take care of this issue.

Cause there have been many times I have lost the chance to invade a colony because there is no indication of if I took out the ground defenses.

I have noted to make this more obvious in a future patch. Also ships automatically stop now if the planet defenses are destroyed unless bombard (destroy colony) order is given.

I personally liked how MoO2 did it, you could do bombard the colony while fighting other ships, but when all space-based defenses were gone (ships, starbase), a window to begin bombardment would come up and you could just let it bomb the planet, it shows everything that's on the planet and it also shows them being removed when they are destroyed. Why not have something like that?

It was suitable for MOO2's style of non-persistent instanced combat. I think the way we have it can add further to the gameplay. You can bombard a planet all the while there is the possibility for reinforcements and other ships to arrive and change things. If any rough edges to the mechanics remain, we can improve it within the current system.

[Cailean556]

Hey all, new here.

Liking the game so far brings back so many memories. I'm trying to develop a game/novella series myself that's actually along a similar vein (dammit! =P). After my first play through I'm liking the game so far. I haven't had any bug like described above. Though I have had a unusual ground combat instance experience. I dropped 2000 troops on a Tantik outpost, the next turn the troops are off the ship, there was no combat screen and the outpost still belonged to the Tantiks. Either I can't capture outposts and just found a 'kill all your troops in the attempt' bug or that outpost had more than 2000 trained soldiers could handle - with a mothership and 2 cruisers in orbit - which I had ordered to bombard the planet but also didn't seem to do anything either. What gives?

In the end, that was only minor. Is there scope to have a mini battle-scene playing during the invasion, like in MOO2? Two armies advancing towards each other, shooting and killing until one side ran out of troops? Including fighters, bombers, hovercraft, tanks and battledroids in that mix would be pretty cool to watch. Completely out of your control (like in MOO2), just nice to watch. And perhaps a little clip showing your army occupying the planet in a 'military liberation parade'?

[True_poser]

At the moment invading planets is pretty much grind.

First, you must manually ensure (hey, are my captains that dumb, why have I appointed them?) that troops on-planet are decimated enough with population and buildings pretty intact.
That means, heavy ship weaponry and missiles/torpedoes, bombs will kill 'em all after the intial defences are penetrated.

Actually, when you have many ships orbiting enemy's planet, it's kinda frustrating both:
1) To understand, where should you place your bomber ships with all that perspective shifts
2) To order a ship to attack the planet, while 90% of the planet's viewed surface is covered by your ships (why would you want to attack your own ships, by the way?)

Second, you must wait a turn (a year in-game, ok, with your ships totally dominating the skies of that xenos' planet) during which the quantity of enemy's troops obviously ramps up.
Personally, I don't blame them, if I was a governor of that planet, I'd lower the conscription age to 14 or even 12, but that's not the point.

Ok, the point is, to succesfully invade a planet it's ok to have two motherships with four ground troop pods in - 16k grunts total - and to scorch the planet in prevoous turn to 600-1000 enemy guys with guns.
Then it's guaranteed to be ok with relatively minor losses.

Though it would be better:
1) to issue an order for your ships to soften enemy's defences (possibly, with selecting, how much enemy soldiers left on ground is acceptable)
2) at least to have an option to "board" the planet in the same turn
and to have these options both in the same "Invade planet" package.

But, I must admit, having to feed all those billions of revolting population who don't want to work even on farms, covering their rations with BC after BC from my treasury - it's a nice touch.

[Zaimat]

Hey all, new here.
<snipped>Though I have had a unusual ground combat instance experience. <snipped> What gives?

Welcome aboard! If you have the saved game or come across this issue again please send us a report from the launcher with the steps to reproduce it. We can take a look at it.

In the end, that was only minor. Is there scope to have a mini battle-scene playing during the invasion, like in MOO2? <snipped> And perhaps a little clip showing your army occupying the planet in a 'military liberation parade'?

Not for the release but in an add-on or expansion we could consider expanding on it..

[Zaimat]

Actually, when you have many ships orbiting enemy's planet, it's kinda frustrating both:
1) To understand, where should you place your bomber ships with all that perspective shifts
2) To order a ship to attack the planet, while 90% of the planet's viewed surface is covered by your ships (why would you want to attack your own ships, by the way?)

#1 - Bombs currently only have a range of 20 units vs. 40 for beam weapons. We could extend the range on bombs but it cuts both ways (AI ships will be able to bombard from further away too).
#2 - I'll see about changing that.

In regards to streamlining the invasion steps, once we adjust population growth, colony development will be slower. Non-major colonies will be a lot easier to take but we don't want to make homeworlds or highly populated planets easy to take. We are looking at adding some taskforce orders in tactical so invasion could be one of those orders so you can do it in the same turn. Thanks for the suggestions we will consider them.

[True_poser]

Bomb range is ok.

It may be even shorter, for instance, to reflect differences between missiles, torpedoes and bombs, like:
- misisles - payload is sacrificed for fuel for the missile to accelerate fast and be agile
- torpedoes - agility is sacrificed for payload as their intended targets aren't able to accelerate quickly
- bombs - payload is everything, very limited fuel for some athmospheric maneuvering capability

The problem is to determine, where the ship should be placed to drop the bombs, as when the planet is near the side of the screen, it appears closer than it actually is.