Conquering planets.

[Fyron]

1) If your enemy has weapons with a range greater than 1, the AI will do the intelligent thing and attack your vulnerable troops with weapons rather than your harmless shielded troops; and

Range in troop combat is completely irrelevant. So is rate of fire. All damage done is based off of the range 1 value, and is done every turn.

[Kamog]

Why doesn't the empire just put a big bomb on one of their transport ships so it could get past the shields, and then blow up the rebels with it?

Also, in the Episode I The Phantom Menace, those Gungan shields stopped the shots being fired by the droid army, but couldn't stop the droids themselves from walking through the shield?

[Phoenix-D]

Again, bLaster bolts and the bots are two different things. Low speed vs high, and mass vs not. Setting the shield to stop bots might mean it stopping too much (eg DUST), overloading, and burning out.

As for the bombs? Well, if the movies used decent tactics they'd be a bit boring How many times has a major ship blown to a single fighter in that series, again?

[Colonel]

why would u waste the time to take the planets i would just destroy it and re colnize it later so i wouldnt have to lag those damn transports around with my awesome most spactacule FLEET which kills all in its path DREADNOUGHTS maybe 300 or 400 of them and a 100 drone carriers muhahahahahahahah U LOSE and they are gone big booma

[Abdiel]

LOL read back to the previous Posts, and you'll see the immense advantages of taking a planet over. Not to mention the planet yields fall greatly whenever you glass it.

Abd.

[dogscoff]

if the first transport you put in the fleet is the first transport to drop troops.

The first ship to reach the planet is the first to drop troops. In tactical you can send them all in in whatever order you like. In strategic, you will have to consider formation, orders and relative ship-speeds.
Also, in strategic the AI has a nasty habit of sending troop transports scurrying into the corners until all the planet's weapon platforms are down, and/or as soon as the first transport has unloaded. It's often a good idea to put a single meson bLaster or something on your transports, so they will actually stay on the offensive.

I read somewhere that loading troops with shields first will cause Militia to attack them first, but it hasn't worked in my 1.91 games. No matter the order I load them, the troops with weapons get destroyed still. So does anyone know if troops armed fully with shields are obsolete now?
...
Can you build troops with only shields, and by loading them into the transport in some order, make them get hit first by the militias? I read that it was possible, but haven't managed to do it yet.

OK, What I think you're referring to is the tactic of having one transport full of heavily shielded/ lightly armed troops and another one full of heavily armed troops.

You drop the shielded troops first, then fly in the second transport and drop the rest.

The reason for this is the way the game handles militia: If you have a planet with a heavy militia defence, it can be very difficult to take, because every time the attacking troop forces get reduced to zero the militia gets fully replenished. This means if your attacking forces can't survive a full ground combat session (the length of which can be altered in the txt files) then sending more transports of the same size is utterly futile. You need to get a bigger transport in there.

The way to get around this is to send in heavily shielded forces first, capable of staying alive planetside long enough to let you get re-inforcements in, thus allowing you to meaningfully drop more than one transport full of troops.

This is ridiculously difficult to achieve in strategic, BTW, but trivial in tactical.

Try placing a single weapon on the shield troops. There might be something that makes unarmed troops always hit Last
...
1) If your enemy has weapons with a range greater than 1, the AI will do the intelligent thing and attack your vulnerable troops with weapons rather than your harmless shielded troops; and
2) If you don't have many troops, then the "front lines" might contain some weaponed troops, which the AI will kill first, and then continue killing as the weaponed reserves patch the hole.

Hmm. I could be wrong, but my understanding and my own experience has shown that troops are attacked in the order they are loaded onto the transport. If you load troops of type ABC they will be destroyed in that order. Or maybe it's C,B,A... I can't remember so i always load my (proportions mod) transports with a few hundred heavy infantry first, then a handful of high bonus elite infantry and then some heavy artillery at the back. That way, whichever end the enemy attacks from, they have to chew through a few hundred kt of crunchy grunts before they can get to the soft, bonus-giving centre of the elite forces.

For all those ppl who prefer to just glass and rebuild- you should play a few games of proportions, you'll soon realise the benefits of conquering intact.

[ June 29, 2004, 08:49: Message edited by: dogscoff ]

[Paul1980au]

Conquering planets in tact is stock of my game (except for moons with 1 mining or resource gathering facility) if its a shipyard or resupply base take it otherwise glass it - bigger planets are where you need to take first. population is everything so maximise their movements.

We have discussed if yu have 2 or 3 different atmosphere races and a domed planet with a urban pacification facility and captured races that can breathe the atmostphere to move all the domed pop off and replace with the atmosphere breathers on the lareger planets it goes from 6 facilties (domed) up to 20 or 30 and you can build much more facilities on non domed planets - and if you are capturing planets - take along a transport with a few WP for larger planets (saves building them and youre outward invasion can go much quicker) instead of having to wait for defenses to be built before moving outwards.

[Abdiel]

How do you tell what facilities a planet has? Will a scanner do? I haven't tried, sorry.

So far the only way I can think of is going into combat, checking out the facs, then deciding. But obviously that's going to be useless for strategeic.

Abd.

[dogscoff]

How do you tell what facilities a planet has? Will a scanner do? I haven't tried, sorry.

Nope.

So far the only way I can think of is going into combat, checking out the facs, then deciding. But obviously that's going to be useless for strategeic.

You can find out from intel, and you can often spot the resupply depot by watching enemy ship movements. ditto for spaceyards, actually. Human players will generally put their spaceport on the first planet they colonise in any given system, which is usually that huge, breathable one over there with the high mineral value and the most population on it- unless there used to be ruins in the system, of course. Not sure how AIs make their choices.

Best just to capture everything and sort it out after=-)

[Paul1980au]

I go after the small planets - search no value destroy - then capture big population centres then mop up the resistance.