http://forum.l3o.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1301A planet is considered defended if it has any one of the following:
- Starbase
- Missile defense
- Beam defense
- 3 small sized ships or more
- 1 small, 1 medium ships or more
- 1 large ship or more
This means that a single small ship isn't capable of protecting a colony without ground defenses from invasion. Since I think this is an interesting game mechanic I thought I'd start a discussion about it. Here are some ideas for different ways to handle it. I've tried to quantify both how they may impact gameplay (crunch) and why they seem like an "intuitive" way to model invasions (fluff). I'd love to hear other people's ideas and opinions.
(Note that I've focused on the use of ships to defend since the high cost and long build times of static defenses means that new colonies will need fleet defenses for quite a while.)
1. Keep it as is:
+ Permits the rather novel tactic of "raiding". Lightly defended worlds can be taken by lighting strikes from armies alone. Maybe you lured their main battle fleet away with a clever feint. Maybe the enemy fleet is just weak. Either way the Imperial Guard will have its day!
+ Makes sense because planets are HUGE. How can one wimpy little ship deny ALL enemy landings?
- 3 R.P.s worth of ships is a ton of resources to devote to defending a brand new colony. If you enemies are really close at the beginning you could be devoting 50% of your R.P. allotment just to protecting Mars and Pluto (for example).
- Seems a bit counter-intuitive to me. Why 3 R.P.? Why not 4? Or some number based on tech levels?
? Forces players to expand much more cautiously.
2. Change it so you only need a single requisition point worth of ships to defend:
+ Has the benefit of being pretty familiar since this is how most games handle it.
+ IMHO it's easier to think about (ANY defenders is enough)
+ Makes sense because presumably even a single ship in orbit can RUIN a ground army's day.
- Obviates the aforementioned raider strategy.
? Makes explosive expansion strategies safer.
3. As #1 but incorporate the ships into the invasion math. This would mean that up to 2 R.P.s of ships could assist the defenders against the landers the fleet couldn't prevent from disgorging troops. There could be some kind of bonus added to the defenders' skill or maybe the ships could periodically kill some fixed number of invaders (based on weapons # & tech) as ground commanders call in orbital strikes at key moments.
+/- Same as #1 but a little easier for players to expand/defend colonies
+ Would really breathe life into modelling "the contested border world".
- Awfully complex for something that doesn't happen very often.
4. Open it up. Let any world be invaded. Say you make landing troops on a planet more like boarding ships. Once the transports get into range they can dump some number of troops on the planet each tactical turn. Base tech might take all 20 tactical turns to do it while tech like transporters could speed it up. After the space combat phase ends the entirety of both surviving fleets help with the ground war (as in #3).
+ Permits lots of new strategies. Even token defenders could deny a portion of an invasion force while powerful fleets could help steamroll low tech empires with lousy fleets but lots of soldiers. Hit and run raids would become even more viable.
+ Ground combat tends to be a pro forma affair in 4X games. You just load a big pile of dudes into transports and barf them onto planets after the REAL battle in space is done. This change would make defending and conquering more dynamic than that.
- Pretty crazy. Would change the game ALOT and have far reaching implications as ground combat became much more important.
So what say you guys?
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