Did the Yor happen to use any invasion tactics?

Defenders do indeed have a big disadvantage, that is, when it comes down to ground combat. In real life, I would assume that the same thing would happen. The invader can invade you because there is no ship defending the planet. This implies that they have air superiority and that would help the invasion force a lot.

A pure defensive game is possible, just not one that relies on soldiering and ground battle. Ground battle should be a last desperate attempt. If you had guarded your planets with sufficient ships, ground battle will never taken place.

And.. heck, just send a transport and claim that world back. If an invasion force is too powerful due to game design, it will be powerful when you use it against the AI too.

Defenders do indeed have a big disadvantage, that is, when it comes down to ground combat. In real life, I would assume that the same thing would happen. The invader can invade you because there is no ship defending the planet. This implies that they have air superiority and that would help the invasion force a lot.

Air superiority is without any doubt the most important thing on modern combat but usually number of troops is also very important.Just for example if you see recent battles at fallujah marines had more troops than insurgents and they have better "tech level" and "soldiering" and also air superiority.While insurgents were finally wiped out it was very costly in terms of casualties and needed a lot of time.In the game also happened to me that i had a worst soldiering and tech level and with traditional warfare i was able to win a war with less than 1/5 of the number of the defenders.It's comparable like having insurgents which try to conquest a city controlled by marines with 1/5 of their force and with air superiority.I'm sure that marines would wipe out insurgents wihout any problem.Comparing gc2 to fallujah or real life is not really a good example but it's just to say that "soldiering" and "tech level" have their importance, while air superiority remains the most important thing in modern battles.

You know, I recently changed my racial traits to significantly up my soldiering ability. This coupled with high population makes your worlds near invulnerable. Playing against the Dreadlords was a real change when they couldnt take my planets (even though they controlled the area around it). Bet they felt stupid for only bringing 10 soldiers then

Dreadlords in my opinion were hardcoded to be very weak during planetary invasions (good choice in my opinion) because it was very hard to conquer one planet from them imagine if after 1 hour to try to conquer a planet your invasion fails it could be very very annoying .Anyway i didn't have any problem with traditional warfare and 1000 troops to conquer dreadlords.I say that soldiering is a bit weak because invaders have too much advantages and also with very good soldiering is very hard to defend a planet.Mass driver choice assure you everytime victory also if the defender has the best soldiering.Economy or research at least give you a long period advantage.

Marioflag - I did specifically say that *they* couldn't take planets from *me*. That's a big change if you dont have soldiering bonuses where 10 troops come along and kill 8bn of your people.

I wasn't really talking about invading them because for me, invading them meant crippling their planet in every way possible, using the dirtiest invasion tactics and then deleting all improvements and destroying the colony afterwards. The only way to fight a cancer is to cut it out!

The Soldiering bonus is a must have in my opinion, although I also take some econ and tech ones too