The practical issue with "smart" munitions is that their smartness is limited by the level at which you can identify and resolve the targets you want to blast. With typical actual battlefield target intelligence, as long as you have rifling in your artillery barrels, your fire support is probably about as smart as it's gonna get.
Of course but C# is bringing us forward observers as part of ground units so we have the in-game justification for battlefield intelligence alongside intelligence modules for ships as in-game justification for long-distance surveillance and reconnaissance. But my point is that while it instinctively feels "right" to weaken the destructive power of smart munitions to explain why they are not causing as much collateral damage as dumb munitions, it's blatantly false move to make. Well, it's correct for nukes but that's another argument. For conventional munitions, a Paveway IV missile is just as destructive as Mk 84 bomb, the difference is that you only need a single Paveway IV to wreck that command centre, whereas you need 50-100 Mk 84 bombs to make sure you hit it and in that process you flatten the whole neighbourhood.
So if Steve implements smart munitions that progressively get smarter (and even include ECCM to counter defender ECM), then I would very much prefer that the munitions are vastly more expensive rather than weaker. Plus, that means that a cheapskate power would just continue using cheap dumb munitions because while they might not want to glass a planet completely, they don't care about collateral damage as long as there is something to salvage.
A Paveway bomb will also occupy about the same amount of space as as a Mk 84 bomb in inventory, which makes it odd when either supply consumption skyrockets (to account for the greater cost) or remains the same for the same amount of damage in a round.
Actually, smart munitions would probably be best handled as a to-hit modifier and otherwise let it remain the same, potentially with a sufficiently large ECCM advantage over a smart munition modified weapons platform actually
degrading the effectiveness of the smart munition beyond that of a dumb munition. You can tell me a lot of things, but a dumb bomb is a lot harder to fool than a smart bomb into landing anywhere but where it should hit.
That's a good point because while it feels like OH would protect portion of the population from collateral damage, it actually doesn't because of how Steve coded them to work. Mechanically, the population doesn't live in the OH, but on the body the OH orbits. It's just that the OH magically allows this to happen regardless of colony cost. So if you glass the planet, the population will be completely wiped out regardless of the number of OH's in orbit.
It gets even worse; populations in orbital habitats can be forced out of the habitats by boarding them, forcing them into highly hostile environments without any protection. Habitats have a number of logic inconsistencies that are very understandable given the fact we're dealing with a game, but still.
I mean, an orbital habitat would include things like manufacturing complexes and everything else other than the raw materials acquisition and immediate processing because, well, why would you force your population to work the construction facilities and fuel refineries down on the planet of imminent death when you can just station them in a close orbit that is much more easily reached from a habitat, especially when it's so much easier to keep them safe in such circumstances?
That's a good idea and would be another wealth sink. We don't know if the other new wealth sinks in C# are sufficient, but such a feature - that would then provide protection against collateral damage - could be a cool feature. Although, it might face the problem of electronic hardening, in that it would be useful in only such niche cases that nobody would ever actually use it.
It would be nice if this was implemented and we could set an 'empire wide' and a 'population wide' setting for this. Because of course you would harden your border worlds much more than you would harden your core worlds when you are faced with a threat on the border.
Doesn't Infrastructure currently fulfill this purpose? If I build a thousand extra LGI (or just 'I') on a colony, other installations are that much less likely to be hit, and the increase in ColCost due to bombardment is mitigated if not entirely compensated for. And some (perhaps significant) portion of the collateral damage causes zero reduction of my industry.
Sure, it has the believability drawback of being able to ship your 'armour' to any colony you like -- and the civilians will do so if you're not careful -- but it's already in the game, costs money & minerals & time to build, and while it scales infinitely it can never be 100% effective.
No, because collateral damage tracks population damage and infrastructure damage differently IIRC. Or rather, they track them the same, but points of collateral damage always do population damage, while they may end up sinking into already ruined facilities and thus do no further damage to the planetary facilities.
Also, infrastructure shipping is only done by civilians to places that need infrastructure from places that have infrastructure in the market.