Posted by: nuclearslurpee
« on: July 11, 2023, 10:15:11 PM »This is the stuff Aurora is made of! Thanks for sharing, Kurt.
A few little details that might be useful in future endeavors:
In general, if you start as a pacifist race it will be an uphill battle to construct enough ground units to credibly win planetary invasions, it just takes so long to build the multiple millions of tons you need... this ain't VB6 anymore!
A few little details that might be useful in future endeavors:
- Per Steve's dev posts, Shipboard weapons deal point-blank damage to ground units regardless of range, although I'm not sure why and I admittedly haven't tested this in a while to be sure. This should mean you can fire from your maximum range, as I believe range also doesn't matter for accuracy in orbital bombardment cases.
- The ground force signature you detect is reduced by the fortification level, so usually the signature you detect from orbit is 1/3 to 1/6 of the actual amount on the planet surface. Basically, if you detected 50,000 tons, prepare for something closer to 200,000 tons and be pleasantly surprised if you over-prepared.
- Furthermore, on top of this you will need at least a 3:1 advantage and probably more, especially if the terrain is very favorable to defenders. I have an overly wordy EffortPost™ that explores some of these aspects in a very simplified manner if you're curious, but basically plan on a 4:1 or 5:1 numbers advantage after accounting for the effect of fortification on the sensor signature. So in your case, at least 600,000 tons of troops and perhaps even a million tons or more if you want to be sure. Checking an old campaign notes file, to defeat a 17,000-ton signature of spoiler ground troops I used something like 250,000 tons of ground forces and lost about 40,000 tons in the battle - so scale that up by a factor of three and you get the sense of the challenge here.
- On top of everything else, the spoiler races will usually have you beat on armor and attack tech until you're well into the midgame, especially with a Conventional start. So plan accordingly with even more troops.
- A reasonably effective way to deal with STOs is to use heavily-armored drop transports, 100,000 or 200,000 tons each with numerous armor layers, to deliver an invasion army and pull back. This can get tricky since slow transports might get shot at several times on the approach, but is probably in the long run less costly than getting your navy blown to pieces repeatedly and with great vigor. Unfortunately, the old VB6 method of fast, small dropships is not really useful anymore since we can't fit 5,000 tons of main battle tanks into a 250-ton drop module. One way to help yourself out here is to use heavy armor for your drop assault wave, since you get a lot more punch per ton at the cost of...well, cost, armor isn't cheap you know.
In general, if you start as a pacifist race it will be an uphill battle to construct enough ground units to credibly win planetary invasions, it just takes so long to build the multiple millions of tons you need... this ain't VB6 anymore!