Troops are useless

[Fyron]

You can make such a change in your local copy (preferably in a mod folder, such as copying the file into the "GameTypes\Standard SE5" folder), by editing VehicleUnitTypes.txt.

[GuyOfDoom]

Alas it happened on a PBW game with some friends.

[AstralWanderer]

It seems that the "best" answer would lie with Aaron here...

Ground troops should be a requirement to conquer a planet - a fighter-only force should be restricted to inflicting casualties and/or destroying facilities.

It would also be nice to have the option of using a fleet's main arnament in an orbital fire support role - increasing attacker firepower at the cost of greater planetary destruction (happiness, facilities, etc) and blue-on-blue casualties (which could be reduced with Advanced Military Science research).

[narf poit chez BOOM]

First shouldn't be to hard.

Second would require whole new code sections.

Third option (blue-on-blue casualties) may or may not require new code sections. Shouldn't be too hard with proper programming in place (Just modify the bombardment code (The new code sections) so it occasionally picks a friendly).

Two is the sticking point.

[Fyron]

Yeah, but how many troops would you require? Is a contingent of 1 sufficient?

[se5a]

it would be modable. also the partucular "unit" required to capture a planet would be modable too. (I hope)

at the moment though, giving troops a 'seeker' which can only target fighters would do the trick - also give more things from the troop weapons tech branch.


I'd make it big enough so that you can't easly fit any other weapons on small troops too, that should help with balancing troops vs fighters.

[Fyron]

The problem is, any amount higher than 1 is completely arbitrary and will lead to stupid mechanics. Say you set it to 50 troops. What if my invasion force is reduced to 49? Even though I've slaughtered all enemy units and militia, I suddenly can't conquer the planet, for lack of 1 troop... makes no sense. If you set it to 1, then its completely meaningless. Just put one heavily armored, unarmed troop unit with your fighter invasion force and you haven't really solved any problem. Any other low number has the same effect.

[Baron Munchausen]

That sounds like we need a hard-coded setting complementary to the "Ground Combat Militia Troop Population Amount" settings. This would be the Troop Occupation Level -- the number of troops necessary to control a population. It's a perfectly realistic idea, as anyone paying attention to the Iraq war would already know. If you don't have enough troops to keep up a sufficient presence, the occupied population will revolt. Maybe the original empire doesn't control the planet anymore, but neither do you.

Alternatively, MM could just use the militia setting as the occupation level. Which also makes some sense.

[Captain Kwok]

Alternatively, MM could also making the militia setting amounts actually work as well.

But I like the idea. The amount of troops required could also decrease as the enemy population is assimilated - making more use of that aspect of the game.

[Fyron]

Randomly triggering revolts with some generated militia units on an occupied planet is fine; making it impossible to conquer the planet after all defending troops are defeated, just because you have 1 less troop than some arbitrary threshold, is bad game design IMO. Remember, gameplay trumps realism.