Ground unit/war tips?

So within a dozen or so turns I will have the planetary invasion tech and can start building ground troops, but I have a few questions:

1. Since ground troops cost pops, how many troops should be recruited from each world before it starts to harm the economy too much?

2. If pops are recruited into troops and send into space in a transport ship, will the planet regrow the lost pop even though the original pop hasn't been killed yet?

3. If 2 is true, then how wise is it to maintain a standing ground army during peace time? And how large should such an army be?

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Population on transports and colony ships interacts in no way at all if it isn't hitting a planet. Anything you load them with essentially vanishes, and growth will proceed as normal without regard to anything else as long as pop isn't at the cap. So there is no downside to maintaining except ship maint costs. Pop reductions are temporary and will return to normal over time.

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I always put one transport module on a cargo hull and add on all the engines it can carry - that lets them move rapidly to the front. When I load them up I always go for the maximum - I think it's 3 billion. I never load up more than one transport per planet until the population recovers - and I try to load transports in systems that have more than one planet to draw from. Invading with two of these fully-loaded transports may be overkill, but it means I can certainly take the planet and have a transport survive. The next turn I can load up the transport and move on to the next planet.

The planet you recruit from will pretty quickly expand its population to the limit - which is a limit for the people actually on the planet. Colonists or troops taken away no longer count toward that limit. Once you invade a planet, the survivors of your invasion troops and the surviving civilians form the population of your new planet.

You cannot have a standing army. If your world is invaded the entire civilian population will fight.

I never bother with defensive buildings on a planet, or with leaving a ship or fleet to garrison a planet. My fleets kill any enemy transports and then lead my transports forward.

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Quoting Director,

reply 2

Invading with two of these fully-loaded transports may be overkill, but it means I can certainly take the planet and have a transport survive. The next turn I can load up the transport and move on to the next planet.

Speaking of that, isn't it possible to turn populations of captured enemy planets as soldiers? I think I remember that being possible when I last played the game. It makes no sense whatsoever realism wise, and in terms of game balance it's also totally broken because it means that when you invade the enemy instead of getting weaker as you advance you actually get stronger instead since you can just turn the enemy's captured populations against him.

I think I heard somewhere that the concept of citizenship will be added in the future. If it does happen then they should make it so that captured enemy populations can't be turned into soldiers for the invader.

Quoting Director,

reply 2

You cannot have a standing army. If your world is invaded the entire civilian population will fight.

That's not what I meant. What I asked was if it was wise to have transports full of troops in space even during peacetime even though they cost money to maintain.

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Sorry, I misunderstood.

First, once you occupy a planet all of its citizens are yours to do with as you wish, whether they were your invading soldiers or citizens of the previous regime. There is some justification for this - history is full of armies sweeping up all the able bodies behind their lines and either impressing them into the army or adding them to forced-labor gangs.

Second, I always keep a large fleet of transports floating at a point well back from any enemy ships, ready to carry a war forward at a moment's notice. Modern armies have stockpiles of ammunition; in GalCiv3 my transports are my ammunition, and I can rapidly flatten opposition if I have enough 'bullets'. Transports are expensive (if you build them fast, as I do) so the number I keep around grows as the game goes on. In larger, late game situations it's not unusual for me to have 8-16 ready to go. That makes a noticeable dent in ANY opponent's productivity.

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Quoting Director,

reply 4

Using them for economic purposes is one thing, but using them as soldiers is just not realistic. This game isn't taking place during the middle ages where a strong sense of nationhood had not yet developed. Germany wasn't able to recruit massive numbers of people from every nation it took over during WW2 was it? The number that actually aided them was a fringe. You should not be able to just conscript troops everywhere. This problem is made even worse by the fact that all you need to make new troops are transports and populations. You don't even need to train them or anything. Take a planet and you have an instant free army. It's not balacned.

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Perhaps we'll get something better when the invasion system is finalized/fixed.

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