Militia and troops.

[Q]

This is not a bug but quite unbalanced:

The miltia is extremely weak. You can conquer a full sized homeworld (4000M population) with a few small low tech troops.
That can easily be modded of course.

[Barnacle Bill]

Q said:
This is not a bug but quite unbalanced:

The miltia is extremely weak. You can conquer a full sized homeworld (4000M population) with a few small low tech troops.
That can easily be modded of course.

I'm not sure that it's unrealistic if militia are "free". If you had to pay ongoing maintenence on them and the number you got was proportional to both the population size and how much you'd been paying, you could postulate that they are something like the Swiss army. However, if they are free then it is basically a bunch of untrained volonteers with whatever weapons can be scrapped up. Looking at the real world, in locations where private ownership of firearms is common and military service is popular (so lots of those firearms owners will be veterans), an ad hoc militia might be fairly effective. If you postulate a location with no private firearms and very few veterans, though, an army from the US Civil War era could probably conquer an otherwise undefended modern country without too much trouble (trained troops with muzzleloaders are going to beat a mob of civilians with garden tools, even if the civilians have technical skills that are 150 years higher).

[Ragnarok-X]

its just in stock SEIV. Even there a full homeworld with 8, or even 12 million people only readied very few militas.
Think about it. If earth was invaded by aliens, wouldnt 50 % of the population, excluding chidren and old people help fighting ? I bet so. There is enough weaponry, do doubt about it.

[Suicide Junkie]

I forget what the exact settings I used were, but for GGmod, I believe I used a formula something like "# militia = population ^ 0.5"

Healthly numbers of militia on a big planet, without covering the whole map

[Phoenix-D]

Ragnarok-X said:
its just in stock SEIV. Even there a full homeworld with 8, or even 12 million people only readied very few militas.
Think about it. If earth was invaded by aliens, wouldnt 50 % of the population, excluding chidren and old people help fighting ? I bet so. There is enough weaponry, do doubt about it.

Aliens have anti-proton beams and shields.

Farmer bob has a rail-rifle.

Who wins?

[tmcc]

I think basically that stock militia should be very weak against well equiped and well trained military units. Look at real world Earth. Even the difference between very well equipped and trained military forces vs. average military forces is absolutely decisive.

One option would be to mod in Militia training facilities. This way you would have to make an investment in research and valuable real estate to improve the war fighting capability of you militia. The results could be in the area of damage done and to hit modifiers for militia units.

[Q]

I don't like to talk about realism in a game like SE (although you could argue about the difficulties the number one military power on earth today has in certain countries against very rudimentery equipped "militias").

I just think that it is not good if you can conquer a homeworld with 20-30 small troops without shields and one louzy depleted uranium cannon. That makes the first strike option against any encountered empire in the beginning of the game too strong. I like it better if in the early game destroying or conquering a homeworld is almost impossible.

But everone has his taste of the game and the beauty is you can mod it accordingly.

[Devnullicus]

Phoenix-D said:

Aliens have anti-proton beams and shields.

Farmer bob has a rail-rifle.

Who wins?

The one that shoots first

[AAshbery76]

What does a small troop mean at this scale.Is a small troop an infantry army or just one trooper?

[PvK]

Ya, though it looks pretty preposterously out of scale if you take it literally, like a lot of stuff in stock (says the guy who made Proportions mod because he couldn't stand it quite so severe). I guess the "troops" must all be enormous hovering battleships or something. The ground combat in SEV is of course vastly more interesting from a tactics and gameplay perspective than in SEIV, but the literal representation is like conquering a planet, even a homeworld, involves one small urban section with some buildings on it, and dozens or at most hundreds of fighting craft on each side (and again no infantry), having a pitched shoot-out.

I'm trying to think how it would be possible to mod SEV ground combat to seem like a planetary-scale battle, and am having trouble. I think it would involve a lot of 3D modelling, for one thing...

PvK