Ground Combat Lessons

[Suicide Junkie]

#1. You cannot win if your troops do not land.

I had 9 warships and a small transport full of 230 "WobblyBob" walkers. The enemy sats were on the far side of the planet, out of range.
I moved in, and the planet launched missiles at my warships.
While they were reloading, I sent in my troop transport... and it got torn to shreds by the short range DU autocannons on the surface.
Unable to complete the mission, I had to retreat.

-Always destroy the weapon platforms first.

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#2 Know your unit's capabilities
After the loss above, I designed a Super DeathHawk. As a medium transport, I got 2x the cargo, 4 movement and more armor. This one should survive the planet's WPs long enough to drop troops.
My fleet of 13 LCs moved in, and dropped antimatter torpedoes onto the surface, wiping out the WPs, and only taking light damage to one ship.
The transport moved in, and dropped 375 WobblyBobs.
But, Oops! My 50% ground combat ability hurts, and 400 small troops are whittled down by 300 Militia.
They hold out for 4 turns, and are defeated on the 5th, having destroyed only 60% of the defenders.
They did Last long enough to report the construction of PPB platforms, though.

-[i]50% ground combat really hurts! You don't need twice the number of troops, you need quadruple! (-50% to attack and defense?)
-Always use insanely overwhelming force
-Militia don't come back every turn! They only come back when they defeat the attackers.

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Third attempt:
13LCs, and a new cruiser. One year later, and over 800 WobblyBobs amongst two Supers and one original DeathHawk.
The fleet comes in range, and the ships move in to pummel the planet with torpedoes.
2WPs are destroyed, but the planet bLasts the cruiser with PPBs. Its 150 shields are skipped, and 720 damage burns away its armor.
The cruiser retreats, and the planet fires again, bLasting through the armor of an LC, destroying the ship instantly.
Torpedoes fly, and slam the planet, turning platforms into rubble.
A few beams lash out to scratch at the armor on another LC, but a third volley of torpedoes quickly silences them.
The SuperDeathHawks deploy two attack forces, and 800 troops sweep the planet in under a month.

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[LeTharg]

Just a comment about using multiple troopships in simulataneous play. When I tried this, the ships fought independently. That is, the first ship landed troops and they fought the militia and lost. Then the second ship landed troops but the militia had regenerated so they fought and lost.

So I don't split up my troops in simultaneous play.

[Suicide Junkie]

quote:

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Just a comment about using multiple troopships in simulataneous play. When I tried this, the ships fought independently. That is, the first ship landed troops and they fought the militia and lost. Then the second ship landed troops but the militia had regenerated so they fought and lost.
So I don't split up my troops in simultaneous play.

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Your troops were totally defeated in the 10 ground combat turns, right?

In this case, I only lost 20% of my forces each 10 round GC. Since my troops were still fighting a stalemate, the second troopship added to the battle, and the militia did not get to regenerate.

During attempt #2, my troops survived 4&1/2 turns of combat, and I know for sure that the militia did not regenerate while the combat was still going on. They started at 300 Militia units, and I killed an average of 50 per round. There were only 102 on the 5th month of GC, and they ended with ~75.

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[Baron Munchausen]

There's a flaw in the use of troops that I've just recently recognized. Since troops are CARGO they get destroyed in bombardment. So you hardly ever get troops vs. troops combat. It's always troops vs. militia. Why couldn't troops be hidden well enough to be as hard to kill as population? Apparently the Serbs in Kosovo faked NATO out pretty effectively with wooden mockups. They hardly got any real tanks. It must be far harder to identify small vehicles from orbit. Somehow, troops need to be harder to kill than WPs so there is a real reason to build defensive troops. Then we can have some really classic ground battles!

This would complement the other desperately needed change: The change to the 'damage to kill population' ratio. Right now, it's too easy for standard weapons to wipe out the surface of a planet. We need to set this ratio very high. 50 to 1 or better. Then "planetary weapons" need the special ability to cancel this ratio. That way, you would really need a special ship to bombard a planet once the WPs were destroyed. Or, you would have to resort to troops!

[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 05 August 2001).]

[geoschmo]

I think troops being destroyed in orbital bombardment is fairly accurate. The scale of orbital bombardment would be far larger than anything done in Kosovo. Those were at least intended to be surigcal strikes (however inept they were) that eliminated the troops and did as little collataral damage as possible. That is far easier to hide from than an orbital bombardment taking out whole facilities and populations by the millions.

Sure a large number of tropps could be disperesed and hidden, but they would be so dispersed they would be unable to fight effectivly against organized units of invading troops. So in actuality they would be no better than militia anyway.

Don't try to equate the units in SE4 as literal tanks and tropps and it makes more sense. Think of them as divisions or batallions. You may not kill all the individual units, but take out the command and control and you eliminate their effective fighting force.

Where you will get troop to troop ground combat is when you have an invading force that really wants to take the population and facilities intact. Then they will avoid orbital bombardment entirely. It's more of a role play thing.

Geoschmo

[Taqwus]

Here's a data point for those interested in ground combat...

In one single-player game with a +10% ground combat bonus, I've been able to capture planets of 8 *billion* people with all ground defenses (e.g. 13-15 million tons of weapons platforms) without orbital bombardment of any kind.

Traits relevant include the aforementioned GC bonus, plus a +10% defensiveness bonus -- which will help a LOT.

Transport design is a heavily shielded (maybe 2400 pts or so -- most of my warships lean towards firepower, instead) battleship, with full training (+20%/+20% fleet/ship), ECM III (+60%), Stealth Armor and Scattering Armor (+25% from those two, IIRC). That's a total of... +135% defense if I do my math right; there's no size penalty for being a BB. Subtract 65% figuring the weapon platforms may have a Combat Sensors III; that's still +70% to defense net, *plus* range penalty (since these transports have QE IIIs plus Solar Sail, they can stop at range 7 before closing next round). Net effect is that enemy hit rate on transports appears to be 1% (warning: not against Deeply Religious races...). Units can't gain experience, which cripples them (again, non-Religious) when attacking a prepared fleet, so in practice these transports have yet to sustain more than perhaps 2-3 hits to shields even against huge amounts of ground fire.

Note: Refitting a Legendary warship in a Legendary fleet to a combat transport can bring total defense bonus to +195%; +130% less CS III. Subtract 10% for a race with normal defensiveness; at that point, it's not particularly necessary...

Each transport (perhaps up to 4 in any given task force, each of which contains several warships, plus sweepers, shipyards, scanner, and warpships; they're detachments from the Grand Armada) can transport 162 Large Troops, each of which has ECM, Sensors, 2xShields, and 3xGround Cannon.

A single wave of 162 troops, in my experience, will trivially conqueror (1 round, no return fire) many lightly populated planets. For an completely full, 8B world (400 militia; in test case, pretty much full of weapons platforms, 'tho I don't know if that affects GC), the first wave sustains heavy casualties, but survives the 10 turns; a total of three drops overwhelms the militia, with perhaps ~240 losses among the attackers. Two waves might suffice, but probably with greater losses, and also it may take more than one game turn. Multiple transport landings should take place simultaneously if at all, to minimize time spent under fire. Moons should be taken simultaneously as well, if they have WPs that could fire at your new acquisition...

Incidentally, the planetary WPs can be fired the same combat turn you capture 'em. Assimilation is quick.


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-- The thing that goes bump in the night

[dmm]

Info that's been posted before but is worth recalling:
In a transport, first in = first out, and first out = front line. So put all-shield troops into a transport first, then put in all-weapon troops for counterattacks. This is extremely effective for storming smaller colonies. Remember that the defenders get to fire first. For large colonies (high pop), your first transport might need to be ONLY all-shield troops, so that your attack can Last >10 turns and not let the planetary militia "regroup".

[dogscoff]

I *never* bombard population from orbit. It's just not nice. I've been trying to capture the crysonlite homeworlds recently (Devnullmod, V1.35) and I think soon I will also be able to take an 8000m world intact.

First up, getting troops in to land is easy. Destroy most of the weapons platforms from orbit without damaging the population. Then either use a heavily shielded troop transport, or a heavily shielded/ expendible "decoy" ship to soak up what's left of the weapons platform fire.

One shipfull of troops just won't be enough, so you need to make sure your first wave will survive at least 10 ground combat rounds. Othrwise, you can't get any reinforcements in.

For this reason I developped the Scuffle III vanguard troop. These are all shields and no weapons, so won't do much (any?) damage, but based on my experiences with 4000m worlds, 1200ktonnes of these will Last long enough to deploy a second wave of troops. Once I have 2 or 3 loads of vanguard troops down, I don't have to worry about the 10 ground combat turns while I deploy as many ships full of heavily armed troops as I need to take down the militia.

I'll let you know how I get on.

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"Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?"
"I think so Brain but, if you replace the P with an O, my name would be Oinky, wouldn't it?"

[capnq]

On a related note, does weapons range matter in ground combat? In other words, do troops with range 2 weapons have an advantage over troops with range 1 weapons?

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Cap'n Q

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all of its contents. We live on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was
not meant that we should go far. -- HP Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

[Baron Munchausen]

quote:

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Originally posted by capnq:
On a related note, does weapons range matter in ground combat? In other words, do troops with range 2 weapons have an advantage over troops with range 1 weapons?

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You could probably test this easily. Setup a situation in a savegame where you are just ready to drop troops on a planet. Drop them one way and see the result, then edit the components.txt file to change the range for the weapon use in the troops and then reload the savegame and see if the result changes. Short range first, long range first... Whatever order you want.