Militia and troops.

[Captain Kwok]

I'd consider a small troop to be some sort of armored tank type vehicle.

[Kana]

Captain Kwok said:
I'd consider a small troop to some sort of armored tank type vehicle.

Or possibly a platoon of them...

[tmcc]

I don't think that it says anywhere specifically but everything else, like ship combat and ships themeselves, are modeled on a per vehicle status not at a platoon / squadron, or whatever larger unit, level.

[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

[Captain Kwok]

The combat map size can be increased in size and additional buildings and landscape added. I think the facilities themselves can also be dispersed and so on... it'd at least increase the scale. If you add elements like automated ground turrets (ie Ground WPs) and more unit types, it could be really fun.

I think TampaGamer is kind of working on a more comprehensive ground combat mod...

[PvK]

It already looks fun to me! And that's good to know about the battlefield size mod option!

I'm sure there's potential there to make it more like an invasion and less like a urban skirmish. Should be nice to see - I'm looking forward to seeing what people do with modding this game.

[Baal]

A good quick solution to troop invasions is make it so that All weapon types can attack troops as well as fighters/ships/etc. Troops only ever appear in ground combat so then the weapons platforms would serve as ground defense as well. Or you could make ground defense specific WPs that only carry anti troop weapons. In any case. It is more realistic to think that an enemy homeworld will have defensive emplacements against invasion.

[Barnacle Bill]

Ragnarok-X said:
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.

Did the entire population of every country invaded by Germany in WWII turn out in mass to face the German army in open battle with whatever they could scrape up? What's the difference in getting invaded by aliens and getting invaded by Germans. Unless the aliens are bent on extermination rather than conquest, not much. People will do what they did then - whatever the occupation forces tell them, at least as long as the occupation troops are looking. And, no, there won't be enough militarily useful weaponry if there isn't any around - like in just about any European country today. Early in WWII, there was a major program to get American civilians to donate hunting weapons to be shipped to the UK to arm the Home Guard - and if Sea Lion had come out of the blue in 1940 there wouldn't have been time for that.

Q said:
I don't like to talk about realism in a game like SE

"It's just Sci-Fi, it isn't real - anything goes" is what gets us, for example about half the episodes of the original 1970's Battlestar Galactica.

Q said:
(although you could argue about the difficulties the number one military power on earth today has in certain countries against very rudimentery equipped "militias").

There you are talking about insurgents with outside support, in countries where private possession of military small arms is darned near universal - not an ad hoc militia with improvided weapons facing an invading army in open battle. Even then, the kill ratio is something like 10-1 against the "militia" and they don't appear to have any chance of actually militarily driving the occupation force out.

Q said:
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.

Depends on what a "small troop" represents. It could be that a small troop is Hammer's Slammers, a medium troop is a regiment of Ogres, and a large troop is a regiment of Bolos. I've certainly never taken them to represent individual vehicles. I mean, it takes up 10 tons of cargo storage - which would hold how many colonists (and colonists have to include all their gear including pre-fab housing)?

Q said:
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.

The real problem here is that unless it is the Planet of the Amish there is going to be a defending army of regular troops on the homeworld, so the AI should be programmed to maintain one.

Devnullicus said:

The one that shoots first

Not if the Alien is in Mobile Infantry powered armor a la Starship Troopers (the book, not the movie).

[AAshbery76]

I'm sure if Aliens invaded far less than 25% would fight to the death,and most of the worlds governments would be trying to get a deal pretty fast.Humans are cowards.

[dmm]

AAshbery76 said:
I'm sure if Aliens invaded far less than 25% would fight to the death,and most of the worlds governments would be trying to get a deal pretty fast.Humans are cowards.

This brings up an interesting point. If the aliens were humanoid oxygen breathers with a vast, well-run empire with a similar type of government, and if they had superior tech and good worlds for migration, then they might very well be received with token resistance at worst. Think of examples from human history, like the Persians and Romans and (sad to say) the Nazis. But if all the opposites were true, then resistance might be fanatical, even if pointless -- the invaders might have to wipe out the planet dwellers. There would at least be a scorched Earth policy. That last option is actually available to the human player. He can abandon a planet if he sees that its conquest is inevitable next turn. But really one shouldn't be allowed to do that, willy-nilly, without severe repercussions. Where did those two billion people go; did they all drink Jim Jones Kool-Aid?

Another point is that the type of inhabitants should partially determine their reaction. To use StarTrek examples: Humans might fight a suicidal war to prevent becoming part of a Borg collective, but probably wouldn't in most cases. Klingons would be more likely to fight a hopeless war; Vulcans might accept defeat as logically unavoidable. Ferengi probably wouldn't care at all as long as trade continued. Etc.

Anyway, some awesome possibilities, but what is actually achievable in SEV (without re-coding it)?