Ok, I'm still new at this. So hopefully, I'm not missing something in this rich and deep game.
As a noob, I'm starting to think about planetary defenses. And what I'm thinking is that unarmored planetary installations should be pretty easy targets to knock out in an attack.
The one's I'm thinking about are the ones related to a battle or campaign. Thus, the Deep Space Tracking Stations, and whereever it is all those planetary stocks of Ordinance, Fuel and Supply are stored. If these things are sitting around in unarmored facilities, then a strike on a planet should be able to take these things out pretty easily. And with potentially major impacts on a strategic situation if you do.
Of course, the problem would be how do you spot these things. The DTS should be pretty hard to spot. Its just a set of passive sensors. But not impossible, as its probably build on the surface with some pretty big antenna arrays or something. If you flew over one of earth's radio telescope arrays, how hard would it be to spot? Its not going to stand out like a sore thumb from across the system like a big active sensor. But if you get a chance to do any mapping/recon of a planet, it should be visible.
The Ordinance, Fuel and Supply stocks are all presumably stored near whatever landing field the ships are using. So, while it would be hard to find one warehouse on the planet that has a bunch of missiles stacked in it, it wouldn't be if you could easily spot from space the big burned and cleared areas where spaceships land and take off from. Its not a bad assumption for the game that the Population stocks of Ordinance, Fuel and Supply are just an unarmored/unprotected part of this facility. You could also add Maintenence Facilities to the list of campaign-related facilities that could be targeted in a strike.
The easiest way to implement this in the current game would probably be to give each of these facilities a TH or EM signature so existing detectors could pick them up ... since the game doesn't really have the concept of doing a recon mission on a planet. Not big signatures that you could pick up from across the system, but significant enough that ships in orbit with sensors could identify these targets. You could give a DTS or a Maintenence Facility a HTK. Or, for stuff like Fuel, Supplies and Ordinance, a point of damage from a weapon reduces the Population Stocks by a certain amount. Maybe 1 damage takes out 100 Supplies, 10,000 Liters of Fuel, or 100 size pts of missiles .. something relatively simple like that could work.
Or, maybe there's a 'spaceport' on every colony (level zero if you haven't built one yet) that has an EM and TH signature, and hits on the 'spaceport' automatically reduce the Population Stocks of Fuel, MSPs and Ordinance by some number per pt of damage.
There's a defensive counter-measure already build in the game in that all of these types of facilities can be built into PDC's. Magazines, Fuel Storage, Maintenance Storage Bays and Passive Sensors can already be built into PDCs. These would then represent military storage depots that are more hidden from an enemy as well as capable of being heavily armored. Maybe these still get TH and/or EM signatures, but noticeably smaller than the open facilities on the surface. The idea would be that if you were in orbit with a good sensor package, you probably still could follow the fuel trucks that keep leaving the spaceport and driving over to the entrance to the secret underground fuel depot. Not impossible to spot from orbit, but much harder than the more obvious facilities on the surface at the spaceport/landing field. Maintenence Facilities could be considered so large that they can't be made part of a PDC. Or, at the very least, it should be very expensive to build a giant underground facility that can maintain your space frigates and the like. Hangers are already in PDCs for fighter-sized units.
Right now, as a noob player, I don't really see much of a reason to build underground fuel depots, or big magazines to back up my PDC's. This would give the player a reason to build these sorts of facilities.
A role for intelligence teams could be the spotting of PDCs like fuel depots that would otherwise have a low or non-existent signature and thus be hard to spot. In the game, the outcome of an Intelligence team could be to add a penalty signature bonus to the TH or EM signature of such a PDC. Or maybe just any PDC before an attack. You intel people could try to map out all the defenses, including things like that underground passive sensor post with its antennas camouflaged into the crater of a volcano.
Could maybe add a new Military unit to the game here too. This would be a Special Forces unit. The Special Forces unit could have the same 'recon' intel missions as an intel team. With the result being that when the fleet arrives some PDC targets are 'painted' much more brightly on the sensors by the toys the SF unit used to mark the targets. Or, you could give SF units a sabotage attack mission in the game. That way, a SF unit might be able to take out a defensive base as a pre-emptive first strike as a part of a planetary attack.
SF units could move to a planet camouflaged on a civilian ship. What looks like another rusty trade freighter lands, but in the middle of the night some of the crew carrying duffle bags of their 'toys' disappear off the ship and hide on the planet. Or, maybe the SF units make some sort of HALO drop from either a stealthy ship, or again maybe from what looks like a commercial trade ship that's in orbit or on approach to landing.
Your own Intel teams or SF units on a planet in a defensive role could act like a block to such actions by an enemy. Maybe just causing missions to fail. Or, maybe causing casualties on the side that was attempting the intel missions or the SF insertions/raids. If you want to get really fancy with this little area, you could have some tech tree items that effect this, or racial characteristics where some races are better at this sort of covert war than others. Or, have differences between species act as a negative to the intel or SF attempt. If there aren't any species that look like humans that have the reason to be trading on the planet, then its harder for a SF or intel team to blend in. Then again, if its a big planet and there's either no civilian pop or a small civilian pop, then there's a lot of empty ground out there for people to hide.
But, even without the Intel or SF bells and whistles, being able to attack these sorts of planetary facilities, especially the presumably relatively unprotected stocks on the surface at a spaceport/landing field, would be an interesting wrinkle to throw into the game. That sudden surprise raid that takes out all the fuel and spare ammo you had stored on the surface could have a major effect on your ability to campaign in that system. Or, a raid taking out that DTS that you thought was giving you eyes on what's going on around the planet could have a big impact on a battle.
