Planetary population only includes the taxpayers, so you're not fighting everybody. In any case, I'd rather see them focus their efforts elsewhere.

Holy shit, Blass, I don't think english is your first language!

LoL, just messing with you.

I agree, I would like to see a more advanced ground combat module...but I am not frothing at the mouth for it. Nothing strategic, just maybe something that takes the various Civ races and makes them a touch different.

But taxpayer is almost all of the citizenship, is it not? is that means in GCII that all who pay tax have to go war duty? The wost fanatic people in history won't be like this --all fight to death way, I belive. and the GCII have a group of civilizations, militarism some of them maybe, but not animal. Does a fight to the death to all of ...ok, not all of them, but all who pay the tax, is surely not a war should be.

Our only experience with warfare is within our own human species. GalCiv2 is about war between different intelligent alien species, basically different "animals." Some like the Yor are even more distinctly alien, not even sharing the same basic biological form.

Judgements based on our own human history don't work so well in that context. We have no idea how savage this kind of warfare would be, once it started. It's very easy to characterize the enemy as "subhuman" and worthy of extinction, if the enemy actually isn't human in the first place.

Anyway, the ground battles are basically just the same mechanics as space battles. It's a fight to the death, it happens in one turn, and then you move on. It keeps the game moving so you can focus on the larger stragic issues. And it's probably easier to program good AI when planetary attack or defense isn't a prolonged process.

I wouldn't mind seeing planetary invasions fleshed out a little more. But I'm not sure that turning it into a multi-step process with reinforcements arriving in later turns, or two species living together side by side for a while, is the best way to do that.

Maybe your civilization never researched a technology that lets them land their ships?

Good heavens, there's a hole in the tech tree if I ever saw one. Here's how things would happen:


Sarge: "Ok men, we've got planetary invasion and this ship we're on has got troop pods, so lets go kick some ass!"
*The transport ship crashes into the enemy planet at orbital speeds in excess of 10,000 mph*
Space Command: "Crap."

If they changed it so that you only fight a fraction of the population, they would also have to change how many troops can be transported by each ship. Otherwise the attacker would gain a huge advantage by such a change. Then it wont matter as much how many transports you send out, because you are no longer draining your population in the same degree and suddenly that aspect of the game is gone. The 1.1 chances to pop growth were made to force players (and the AI) to focus more on keeping the populations safe and not throw them away.

I rather like the concept that you have to manage how many people you have available totally and that you cant just mobilize the forces needed to invade a huge number of planets unless you have a huge population.

One thing I think needs to chance is that the attacker does seem to have a huge advantage even if tech levels are similar and no special invasion tactics are used. I think that makes it a little too easy to take over planets with much smaller numbers than are living on them. The odds should be even if tech levels are even, but with the attacker getting the benefit of being able to use special tactics (which also seem a bit overpowered to me and should be toned down a little).

Regarding the lost transport ships I consider this to be due most of the transport ship being used in the actual invasion, in the form of planetary drop-ships and other landing crafts. Maybe troop transports are designed to be split up into a large number of drop-ships when they invade, and you cant just re-assemble those after they have been used.

Is the current system realistic? No. Is it simple, and fun? Yes.

I've never had a problem with the idea of losing troop transports. That they are lost in the combat makes perfect sense to me. It makes sense that the first ships to land, get destroyed or are too badly damaged to take off.

What I would like to see, although it should hardly be at the top of the developers to-do list, is some visual indication of what invasion tactic you are using when the fighting starts e.g. there is a green smoky tinge to the screen if you're using gas attacks, or the odd meteorite raining down if you've used mass drivers. Nothing fancy really, but it all adds to the immersive experience.

I have seen this type of post too many times. No it doesn't need to be changed. It's not a bug when it was designed that way.

If you say brought 3000 legions on 3 ships and lost less than 1000, two of the ships would remain.

If you are facing an opponent with low (<60ish) morale, you can actually take over planets without losing ANY transports. In my game just now, I used two transports to take 3 planets, and I still have both transports left. Soldiery and Tir Quan training FTW!

If you are facing an opponent with low (<60ish) morale, you can actually take over planets without losing ANY transports. In my game just now, I used two transports to take 3 planets, and I still have both transports left. Soldiery and Tir Quan training FTW!

Morale has a huge role in combat? I did not know... any chance of a link to an equation (anyone)?