Want strategies for seiging a planet

[Silent Sorrow]

Hi, all. After a long hiatus not playing the game I've just recently started up a TDM against the AI. What are your strategies for laying seige to a planet? I mean in the sense of being able to invade with ground troops.

I find that by mid to late game the AI has formidable ground batteries (literally dozens of heavy mount weapons) on its large planets that will chew through fleets of ships in seconds, often without my fleet being able to do any real damage, let alone land troops.

In the past I've had to come up with exotic strats like building large ships packed with armour and shields to serve as a screen that leads a fleet to a planet. They soak up the damage, getting pummeled into oblivion and that MAYBE gives my other ships a chance to pound the planet and erase the defences. But as you can imagine, when there are dozens of planets like these this takes ages. I usually then just get bored and use the above tactics but instead drop a plague bomb and let the planet die that way. Not too fun, though. (The AI has no clue about med labs, oddly enough.)

So is there anything I'm missing about how to take on these extremely heavily defended planets?

[Slick]

The mechanics of this are covered in great detail in the Newbie FAQ:

http://www.shrapnelgames.com/cgi-bin...;f=23;t=005518

See section 7.2

As for how to overcome massive defenses, I am sure others will post their ideas.

Slick.

[ June 24, 2003, 18:31: Message edited by: Slick ]

[Fyron]

There are no such thing as massive defenses in this game (unmodded, ofc). You can always get enough ships to overwhelm any planetary defense.

[Silent Sorrow]

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
There are no such thing as massive defenses in this game (unmodded, ofc). You can always get enough ships to overwhelm any planetary defense.

Yes, I know that. And that's often what I do. But I find it's not all that fun. You just kind of get a huge fleet together, go in and calculate that you've got enough ships left over after you've destroyed the defences. But when you have to do that for 20 or 30 planets, it gets old real fast. And that doesn't take into account having enough ships for my own defence and battling other enemy fleets.

Just wondering if there were other finesse ways of handling this.

[Suicide Junkie]

If you're facing massed massive guns, try fighters.

They should be able to get in under the guns, as long as there isn't too much point defense.

[Silent Sorrow]

Originally posted by Suicide Junkie:
If you're facing massed massive guns, try fighters.

They should be able to get in under the guns, as long as there isn't too much point defense.

Interesting, but those well defended planets I spoke of always have tons of PD as well. Plus some of the regular guns can target fighters anyway so I have a strong feeling the fighters would get chewed up real bad.

Still, I haven't tried that before so I'll defintiely give it a shot.

[geoschmo]

One suggestion that might help is to set your fleet to point blank range. If the planets weapons outrange you anyways there is not really a point in keeping to optimal distance or anything. And doing so will sometimes cause your formation to "stack up" and leave half your fleet out of range of the planet. You end up attackign with 6 or 8 ships at a time and getting chewed up when you could swarm him with your entire fleet at once.

Geoschmo

[Scipio]

Originally posted by Suicide Junkie:
If you're facing massed massive guns, try fighters.

They should be able to get in under the guns, as long as there isn't too much point defense.

I didn`t saw it in the FaQ or perhaps I oversaw it. Does mount weapons like heavy or huge mount means they can not target fighters as good as normal mount? Does they have a negative to hit modifer?

[Phoenix-D]

No, they don't. But barring the Talisman, most ship-to-ship weapons don't hit fighters all that well. Especially on planets, where you can't get a training bonus.

[Mephisto]

Then again ground based weapons with mounts get very high to-hit boni. They will eat your fighters at close range.