Aurora 4x
C# Aurora => C# Suggestions => Topic started by: Ektor on April 23, 2020, 11:47:02 PM
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So I wanted to try out some things today and fired up a test game in order to test different aspects of the ground combat mechanics. The thing I wanted to try out was a theoretical homeworld invasion scenario, where the enemy is heavily dug in and you have to overcome the challenge of attacking their fortified position. I asked around on the Discord about what could be done to counter fortification and was given the options of usng artillery and air bombardment. Let me tell you, that didn't work.
I built two player races with equal formations of 800 PW Infantry and 80 Light Supply Infantry, making a battalion of 160 cost. At first I tested them against each other whilst one was at its self-fortification limit, and it had a pretty severe advantage, managing to kill twice as many enemies than it lost. This is to be expected, and I thought it was fine, basically, you'd need double the amount of troops to take a position. By the way, according to what I checked, units don't actually have ten rounds of innate supply, they fire as if they had zero supplies if they don't have supply elements to provide them supplies immediately.
Then I reset everything and gave the first player race 10 construction vehicles with two construction modules. They took about two years to get the battalion to fortification level 6. By the way, those only work for the formation they are part of, so doing what some Discord people said they did and putting your construction vehicles on your division level formations doesn't work.
Then I tried a bunch of things, resetting time after time. First I tried Infantry vc Infantry, it was a massacre, the attackers in this scenario lost 40-60 units per round while the defenders lost 0-10. So it became pretty obvious that fortification is very strong.
The second time I tried medium bombardment, I took the extra cost the construction units had given to the defenders and added the same cost of light armour medium bombardment static units to the support line of the attackers. It was pretty much useless, I had around 120 bombardment units, but they collectively barely managed to hit a single enemy troop. Their combined casualties were in the same order as the casualties inflicted by the attacking infantry, 0-10 every combat round. Then I tried heavy bombardment, which did even worse. Given the cost constraints of my test, I could only field about 64 heavy bombardment units compared to the medium ones. Their added damage and penetration was useless, and they fared even worse than the medium bombardment.
Then I tried fighters with groud bombardment pods. First I tried to keep true to the cost constraint, and built two, which couldn't hit a single enemy troop. Then I went crazy, doubled the size of the pods, put ten times as many fighters as I had previously, a total of 2912 BP worth of fighters agains 327 BP worth of infantry, and it fared spectacularly poorly. They managed to get 3 kills if I recall correctly.
The last thing I tried was crew-served anti-personnel. I figured the constraining factor in all of this was amount of shots fired, and you can get a hell lot more shots with CSAP than anything else. So I did the same cost constraints, which allowed me to field an additional 500 CSAP Infantry. This was what worked the best by far, and the attackers were consistently managing to inflict half as many casualties as they took. Still, I think, even if medium and heavy vehicles have lower thresholds for fortification, it would be hard to find something that can counter dug in vehicles, maybe autocannons could, given their high rate of fire.
All being said, fortification has shown itself, to me at least, to be entirely impossible to counter. The absurd amounts of missed shots that it causes lead to one, theoretically, having to invade a dug in force with several times as many equivalent troops to be able to fight on equal grounds, even more if they hope to win with high casualties. Now, I don't mind this, I really don't, what I find weird is that the weapons that would intuitively help to counter fortifications, such as artillery and air assault, are completely useless against it, and the only actual way to defeat heavily dug in units would be by human wave tactics.
What do I suggest? Make fortification be a modifier on damage dealt instead of shots that hit or armour value. That way high rates of fire with low damage and penetration would do nothing against fortified troops, but high damage dealers like tanks and super heavies would be able to bypass this modifier, and deal damage, which would force attackers to invest in more expensive armament to deal with fortification, instead of just massing infantry.
You guys are welcome to try and disprove my statements if you can come up with tests with a better methodology - I'd love to be proven wrong. However, it seems to me that the current state of heavy fortification is unbalanced.
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So I wanted to try out some things today and fired up a test game in order to test different aspects of the ground combat mechanics. The thing I wanted to try out was a theoretical homeworld invasion scenario, where the enemy is heavily dug in and you have to overcome the challenge of attacking their fortified position. I asked around on the Discord about what could be done to counter fortification and was given the options of usng artillery and air bombardment. Let me tell you, that didn't work.
I built two player races with equal formations of 800 PW Infantry and 80 Light Supply Infantry, making a battalion of 160 cost. At first I tested them against each other whilst one was at its self-fortification limit, and it had a pretty severe advantage, managing to kill twice as many enemies than it lost. This is to be expected, and I thought it was fine, basically, you'd need double the amount of troops to take a position. By the way, according to what I checked, units don't actually have ten rounds of innate supply, they fire as if they had zero supplies if they don't have supply elements to provide them supplies immediately.
Then I reset everything and gave the first player race 10 construction vehicles with two construction modules. They took about two years to get the battalion to fortification level 6. By the way, those only work for the formation they are part of, so doing what some Discord people said they did and putting your construction vehicles on your division level formations doesn't work.
Then I tried a bunch of things, resetting time after time. First I tried Infantry vc Infantry, it was a massacre, the attackers in this scenario lost 40-60 units per round while the defenders lost 0-10. So it became pretty obvious that fortification is very strong.
The second time I tried medium bombardment, I took the extra cost the construction units had given to the defenders and added the same cost of light armour medium bombardment static units to the support line of the attackers. It was pretty much useless, I had around 120 bombardment units, but they collectively barely managed to hit a single enemy troop. Their combined casualties were in the same order as the casualties inflicted by the attacking infantry, 0-10 every combat round. Then I tried heavy bombardment, which did even worse. Given the cost constraints of my test, I could only field about 64 heavy bombardment units compared to the medium ones. Their added damage and penetration was useless, and they fared even worse than the medium bombardment.
Then I tried fighters with groud bombardment pods. First I tried to keep true to the cost constraint, and built two, which couldn't hit a single enemy troop. Then I went crazy, doubled the size of the pods, put ten times as many fighters as I had previously, a total of 2912 BP worth of fighters agains 327 BP worth of infantry, and it fared spectacularly poorly. They managed to get 3 kills if I recall correctly.
The last thing I tried was crew-served anti-personnel. I figured the constraining factor in all of this was amount of shots fired, and you can get a hell lot more shots with CSAP than anything else. So I did the same cost constraints, which allowed me to field an additional 500 CSAP Infantry. This was what worked the best by far, and the attackers were consistently managing to inflict half as many casualties as they took. Still, I think, even if medium and heavy vehicles have lower thresholds for fortification, it would be hard to find something that can counter dug in vehicles, maybe autocannons could, given their high rate of fire.
All being said, fortification has shown itself, to me at least, to be entirely impossible to counter. The absurd amounts of missed shots that it causes lead to one, theoretically, having to invade a dug in force with several times as many equivalent troops to be able to fight on equal grounds, even more if they hope to win with high casualties. Now, I don't mind this, I really don't, what I find weird is that the weapons that would intuitively help to counter fortifications, such as artillery and air assault, are completely useless against it, and the only actual way to defeat heavily dug in units would be by human wave tactics.
What do I suggest? Make fortification be a modifier on damage dealt instead of shots that hit or armour value. That way high rates of fire with low damage and penetration would do nothing against fortified troops, but high damage dealers like tanks and super heavies would be able to bypass this modifier, and deal damage, which would force attackers to invest in more expensive armament to deal with fortification, instead of just massing infantry.
You guys are welcome to try and disprove my statements if you can come up with tests with a better methodology - I'd love to be proven wrong. However, it seems to me that the current state of heavy fortification is unbalanced.
Lots of the things you tried and explained are interesting and wondering if there are some bugs around. Especially on the construction thing on Division level.
Also the supply would be interesting to know if it's WAI or there is some sort of issues/bugs not noticed yet by tge players.
I have a question though: were the units with the appropriate level of training?
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You should pretty much never attack with infantry from my understanding of the combat rules.
Try MED Vehicles with Medium armor and Medium Autocannons and Medium anti-tank or Anti-personal depending on enemy. Then support them with a formation with a lot of medium bombardment and maybe some AA if you think enemy will have air (but NPR's don't from what I've seen so you never really need them).
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You should pretty much never attack with infantry from my understanding of the combat rules.
Try MED Vehicles with Medium armor and Medium Autocannons and Medium anti-tank or Anti-personal depending on enemy. Then support them with a formation with a lot of medium bombardment and maybe some AA if you think enemy will have air (but NPR's don't from what I've seen so you never really need them).
So u are saying that infantry is pretty much only for defense? Would be a bit sad as I thought the point of the ground revamp was to avoid the rock scissors paper structure of VB6.
It's also not realistic as if it was like that US would have finished off the kong in 10 days but due to heavy fortifications and jungles you could not simply use vehicles.
EDIT: I still like the new ground units, looks like there is going to be lots of blood spilled for the cause.
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Just throwing ideas out there
Orbital Support?
Nukes?
STOs put on a moon in range providing fire support?
Your own defensive line protecting heavy &Long Range Bombardment?
All of the Above
So your own infantry and CSW in front line defensive, dug in as quickly as possible themselves
with Bombardment supporting, along with Orbital Bombardment and CAS from Fighter Pods. and an armoured element in reserve
The defender can reinforce, or resupply so the aim is to wear them down and once they seem to be out of supply attack with the armour.
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The side that doesn't have fortification tends to be the side with orbital support and fighters. The whole mechanic is designed to favor defenders for cost, because otherwise it is supremely easy to assault a world by concentrating forces. A civilian garrison of infantry can easily have a heavy armor division dropped on its head, with orbital bombardment support to boot.
CSAP spam working well doesnt indicate its good against fortification so much as it might indicate they are too good for cost/tonnage. Or maybe WAI from being good against infantry, I suppose.
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My take away from this is that Steve has coded the ground mechanics to resemble the battle of the Somme. And I'm alright with that.
Some more tests using the Mark IV and proper combined arms tactics would be appreciated. I'll see if General Monash is available to command the Corps.
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It is suppose to be difficult to attack a fortified enemy, otherwise it would be pointless to even try defend any place at all as you just use reactionary invasion forces to take them back.
Infantry is not useless for attack, they actually get the same evasion from attack as vehicles does. Light vehicles have the best evasion during attack.
There also is a mechanical loophole against NPR where you land your troops and set them all in support line. As the AI will likely not put anything in Attacking Line nothing will happen and you can fortify your infantry and static units until you are as fortified as the enemy is and then you put your forces in Defensive Line and were them down. It will take longer but you spare your troops... if you think you will be able to hold space that long you could do that. Personally I don't like that it work like that and would not exploit it like that. Two fortified sides should no fight on equal ground either... if you want to actually attack with a fortified unit you should need to sacrifice your fortified structure.
But anyway... ground combat work really well in general... there are a few tweaks I would like to see implemented. There should be a maximum number of troops that can engage an enemy at the same time... say 4-5 times the size is max... this could make combat a bit slower overall and more realistic. I mean if I have 50.000ton front-line troops the enemy can at most engage them with 250.000 frontline troops at any one time, if they have more the game will simply randomize which 250.000 at the front that engages. This will reduce the unrealistic snowball of higher strength attackers and keep losses more realistic for the attacker in cases of overwhelming odds.
The other change would be that you need to have attacking and defending stances on the armies in the planet, two defending armies don't fight and if you attack then units will have to temporarily give up fortification bonuses on all units in defensive line. Otherwise you end up in balancing problem when you have multiple factions on planets that goes to war at a later date, fortifications should still matter in those situations in terms of defence versus attack.
Other than those two things above I thin that the new combat mechanic is pretty solid in general.
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My take away from this is that Steve has coded the ground mechanics to resemble the battle of the Somme. And I'm alright with that.
Some more tests using the Mark IV and proper combined arms tactics would be appreciated. I'll see if General Monash is available to command the Corps.
Ah, so that's why there is an option to use sone nasty stuff as "terraforming" gas. :)
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Jorgan is right, Doom stacking may be an issue. With the example I used just throwing 20 times as many troops at the enemy than he had was just 20 times deadlier to your own soldiers.
In Aurora thats probably an acceptable strategy.
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Two thoughts:
Aren't Combat Engineers the counter to fortifications? I thought they were already in the game.
Modern real world military doctrine calls for a ratio advantage of 3:1 as the minimum effective strength when attacking prepared positions. In other words, it is risky to attack unless you have a substantial advantage in starting forces. This already assumes a Combined Arms doctrine where air superiority, if not supremacy, has already been achieved.
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Aren't Combat Engineers the counter to fortifications? I thought they were already in the game.
There are no direct "combat" engineers.... just construction units which help your units to fortify themselves. These troops are none combat troops.
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The side that doesn't have fortification tends to be the side with orbital support and fighters. The whole mechanic is designed to favor defenders for cost, because otherwise it is supremely easy to assault a world by concentrating forces. A civilian garrison of infantry can easily have a heavy armor division dropped on its head, with orbital bombardment support to boot.
CSAP spam working well doesnt indicate its good against fortification so much as it might indicate they are too good for cost/tonnage. Or maybe WAI from being good against infantry, I suppose.
Pretty much.
If you can carry out planetary invasion it also means you got orbital superiority, therefore you can rain hell on down below for as long as you want. Sprinkle some nuclear warheads if you're feeling particularly spiteful.
So I completely disagree with Ektor on the subject of fortification and defense performance. However I agree on the supply, construction and support behavior. The fact that battalion-, regimental-, and divisional-level supply or artillery support doesn't work really gets my gears grinding.
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Thanks Jorgen, I haven't summoned up the courage to try the C# version yet. I thought I'd read Steve mention Combat Engineers for attacking fortifications somewhere, but can't find it now, so maybe it was just wishful thinking :)
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Thanks Jorgen, I haven't summoned up the courage to try the C# version yet. I thought I'd read Steve mention Combat Engineers for attacking fortifications somewhere, but can't find it now, so maybe it was just wishful thinking :)
I have not played the game for real either... I just muck about trying stuff out for fun using Space Master for most testing... ;)
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Yes, the rate at which the GodEmperor produces updates dissuades me from starting a serious game yet :)
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Thanks Jorgen, I haven't summoned up the courage to try the C# version yet. I thought I'd read Steve mention Combat Engineers for attacking fortifications somewhere, but can't find it now, so maybe it was just wishful thinking :)
VB has Combat Engineers for attacking PDCs so Combat Engineers in C# having some role in Fortification busting one day might not be too much a stretch
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Thanks Jorgen, I haven't summoned up the courage to try the C# version yet. I thought I'd read Steve mention Combat Engineers for attacking fortifications somewhere, but can't find it now, so maybe it was just wishful thinking :)
I have not played the game for real either... I just muck about trying stuff out for fun using Space Master for most testing... ;)
Somebody has to do it.
We can't all spend 90% of our time messing around with creating ground units but without ever getting round to using them.
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Thanks Jorgen, I haven't summoned up the courage to try the C# version yet. I thought I'd read Steve mention Combat Engineers for attacking fortifications somewhere, but can't find it now, so maybe it was just wishful thinking :)
I have not played the game for real either... I just muck about trying stuff out for fun using Space Master for most testing... ;)
Somebody has to do it.
We can't all spend 90% of our time messing around with creating ground units but without ever getting round to using them.
Who said I'm not using them... I have... ;)
I play against myself doing all sorts of test and mock up battles... it is quite fun until the game are stable and feature complete for me to feel comfortable spending a few month or even a year on a single campaign.
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Bumping this thread, I also think fortification are too powerfull right now. Even RP-wise it's not that great, as I can't beleive any amount of entrenching will allow soldiers from the 2200 to protect themself from powered infantry, future tech bombers and ultra heavy tanks.
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Bumping this thread, I also think fortification are too powerfull right now. Even RP-wise it's not that great, as I can't beleive any amount of entrenching will allow soldiers from the 2200 to protect themself from powered infantry, future tech bombers and ultra heavy tanks.
I wouldn't go as far as to say that - 'Fortifications' in this case I have always interpreted to mean the full range of protections measures that a unit could employ to make themselves harder to hit rather than just physical fortifications like bunkers and pillboxes. Certainly those would be easy to defeat - they're relatively easy to defeat now in 2020 with the right ordnance. BUT, what does make it difficult now are camouflage (some of it is actually quite advanced now), GPS jammers, self-protection cannons like the CRAM employed today by the US Army,- then you start getting into the future stuff like personal shields, super-dense materials, nano-drones, etc....it will be the whole build a better sword, somebody builds a better shield, prompting someone to build a better sword argument of military technology.
All that being said, I think from a game perspective it isn't good to have such a tough nut to crack that space bombardment is the ONLY option. Planetary invasions against a similar tech force SHOULD be very hard to pull off unless you have complete space superiority, outnumber them by at least 3:1, and have a good commander leading them....and even then it should be a bloody affair. One suggestion I would forward to Steve and already mentioned here is combat engineers. I think it would work better as a capability you could add to units rather than a separate unit category like construction engineers. There could even be a tech line associated with it at each level negates a certain fortification amount - base tech negates 10% of fortification bonus or reduces effective enemy fortification by 3 points or something like that. I think I like it as a capability better because it allows me to design a broader array of units - put it on a medium vehicle and I now got an Engineering Assault Vehicle for breaching fortifications. Put the capability on a powered infantry unit and now you got a special operations force. You would have to work out how much of a formation has to be comprised of engineering capability in order to confer the bonus to the unit and/or if the bonus gets conferred in a support relationship situation like a direct support artillery unit supporting a infantry unit.
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I have not really messed with this yet.
Conceptually however, I feel that conquering planets should be very hard if the defenders are sufficiently entrenched.
If the enemy has high fortification, either through terrain or construction etc, it's very likely that a 3:1 attack could fail. Even horribly so.
I would say that it's entirely reasonable to expect, in that situation, that the attacker requires heavy support from orbit. Or a balance of forces much higher than 3:1.
Modern warfare is in fact very much dependent on external (air or naval) support, and it's reasonable to expect that a future tech war would require this even more.
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The way that is works right now and everything are equal on both sides and the world is a normal one where max fortification for infantry are 6 then a 3:1 advantage in strength would be a quite even match with a slight advantage to the attacker.
The attacker will hit 1/6 shots but also have x3 the number of hit points and that evens out to be roughly equal... But the attacker also get some evasion so a 3:1 strength advantage should in general win given all else equal.
Say you attack with 6000 units of infantry and the defender have 2000 of equally good and trained infantry to defend with.
Before you say that it is too difficult to attack you have to look at what the difficulties actually is and how good the enemy forces composition is versus yours etc... there are so many factors that can influence this outcome both positive and negative.
As I said before... if defences are not strong enough then there is no point in defending and using resources to do so in the first place. I think that defences is OK, certainly not too strong in any way. If you think that and you have experienced it you need to look at what factors made this experience in the first place.
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Yeah, the historical rule of thumb is that you need a 3:1 force ratio to defeat a fortified line. Assuming for simple numbers that you're using forces that consist entirely of on-tech PW infantry (so every hit kills), and that every shot hits in the absence of fortification, consider a 3:1 advantage against fort-6 infantry:
Start: Attacker 3000, Defender 1000. 3000 shots=500 hits=500 deaths, 1000 shots=1000 hits=1000 deaths.
After 1 round: Attacker 2000, Defender 500. (omitting for brevity)
After 2 rounds: Attacker 1500, Defender 167.
After 3 rounds: Attacker 1333, Defender defeated.
So the attacker loses 56% of their forces to take the planet, with a 3:1 advantage. The defenders fall, but they take out 167% of their own weight in the process.
Let's try again with 2.5:1 advantage:
Start: Attacker 2500, Defender 1000.
After 1 round: Attacker 1500, Defender 584.
After 2 rounds: Attacker 916, Defender 334.
After 3 rounds: Attacker 582, Defender 182.
After 4 rounds: Attacker 400, Defender 85.
After 5 rounds: Attacker 315, Defender 19.
After 6 rounds: Attacker 296, Defender defeated.So 2.5:1 forces still win, but they're almost destroyed in the process, and the defender killed 270% of their own weight in the process.
Let's say the defenders are only self-fortified, so x3, but the attackers are only 2:1 advantaged.
Start: Attacker 2000, Defender 1000.
After 1 round: Attacker 1000, Defender 334.
After 2 rounds: Attacker 666, Defender 1.
After 3 rounds: Attacker 665, Defender defeated.
So basically, an attack of equal force composition, without orbital/fighter support, should be 3:1 advantaged against CON-fortified troops, and 2:1 advantaged against self-fortified troops. You'll lose a bit more than you kill, even so, but you'll take the planet. That seems pretty fair to me.
Don't forget the great advantage of the attacker - force concentration. You can pick your targets and pile up forces at them. The defender needs to be strong everywhere, and thereby spreads their forces into penny packets that can be gobbled up by attackers. Tests which don't consider that are inherently incomplete. (They can still have a lot of value tactically, of course, but they don't cover the strategic side).
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The way that is works right now and everything are equal on both sides and the world is a normal one where max fortification for infantry are 6 then a 3:1 advantage in strength would be a quite even match with a slight advantage to the attacker.
The attacker will hit 1/6 shots but also have x3 the number of hit points and that evens out to be roughly equal... But the attacker also get some evasion so a 3:1 strength advantage should in general win given all else equal.
Say you attack with 6000 units of infantry and the defender have 2000 of equally good and trained infantry to defend with.
Before you say that it is too difficult to attack you have to look at what the difficulties actually is and how good the enemy forces composition is versus yours etc... there are so many factors that can influence this outcome both positive and negative.
As I said before... if defences are not strong enough then there is no point in defending and using resources to do so in the first place. I think that defences is OK, certainly not too strong in any way. If you think that and you have experienced it you need to look at what factors made this experience in the first place.
Except that is not correct formula, given your "everything else equal" no terrain modifiers for anything, no environmental modifiers for anything...
Chance to hit a fortified target is 20%*(Morale/100)/Fortification level
Chance to hit a unfortified target is 20%*(Morale/100)*to hit modifier
So the attacking infantry 6.67% versus self-fortified defending infantry 12% with equal morale. Attacking infantry 3.33% versus full fortified defending infantry 12%.
Except that there is a Terrain Fortification factor which the attacking force CANNOT overcome. Only three of these are penalties to the defenders, so makes the attacker's job easier. If we look at lowest positive modifier and the highest we get the following:
Attacking against full fortified Chapparal infantry 2.78% hit chance.
Attacking against full fortified Jungle Mountain infantry 1.11% hit chance.
Meanwhile, those defending infantry are hitting the attackers still at 12%.
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I have a question though: were the units with the appropriate level of training?
There were no commander bonuses assigned to any of the units, so the tests wouldn't be fouled by exceptional commanders.
You should pretty much never attack with infantry from my understanding of the combat rules.
Try MED Vehicles with Medium armor and Medium Autocannons and Medium anti-tank or Anti-personal depending on enemy. Then support them with a formation with a lot of medium bombardment and maybe some AA if you think enemy will have air (but NPR's don't from what I've seen so you never really need them).
No. That won't work, for the same reason attacking with artillery didn't work. Vehicles can't provide enough shots per round to be effective, a standard "tank" vehicle with one CSAP and one MAV would have 7 shots per round, but would cost around 4 BP. That would mean, in the standards of my test, around 30 tanks that would fire 210 times, compared to the 3500 times an equivalent CSAP armed infantry element would. They were getting about 30-40 kills per round with 3500 shots, that's a 1.16% chance to kill, with 210 shots that would amount to only 2 or so kills. If you read my post you'll see I actually tried medium bombardment, it's useless.
Just throwing ideas out there
Orbital Support?
Nukes?
STOs put on a moon in range providing fire support?
Your own defensive line protecting heavy &Long Range Bombardment?
All of the Above
So your own infantry and CSW in front line defensive, dug in as quickly as possible themselves
with Bombardment supporting, along with Orbital Bombardment and CAS from Fighter Pods. and an armoured element in reserve
The defender can reinforce, or resupply so the aim is to wear them down and once they seem to be out of supply attack with the armour.
I tried orbital support, it didn't work. A single ship to use orbital bombardment would cost more than the entire infantry formation being bombarded on the first place. I can just built twice and many and then they'll be even harder to uproot. There's also the question of collateral damage, which also is the reason I didn't try nukes. I'm assuming a homeworld invasion where you actually want to maintain the infrastructure and population instead of wrecking everything. You have always been able to nuke everything from orbit in Aurora, I'm just exploring what happens when you don't want to do that.
As for the second part of your post, it really seems like you didn't properly read what I wrote. It took a 160 cost infantry battalion with a 127 cost element of construction vehicles roughly two years to fully dig in. In any realistic scenarios, your infantry will be dead and buried long before they can dig in themselves. I literally tried CAS from fighter pods, it's right there in my post. It doesn't work. Attacking with armour won't work either for the same reasons I've talked about to the poster above you.
A civilian garrison of infantry can easily have a heavy armor division dropped on its head, with orbital bombardment support to boot.
Which won't do anything to them if they had full 6 points of fortification because the heavy armour and the bombardment would only have about a 1% chance to hit.
My take away from this is that Steve has coded the ground mechanics to resemble the battle of the Somme. And I'm alright with that.
Some more tests using the Mark IV and proper combined arms tactics would be appreciated. I'll see if General Monash is available to command the Corps.
I'll be doing that later today.
The way that is works right now and everything are equal on both sides and the world is a normal one where max fortification for infantry are 6 then a 3:1 advantage in strength would be a quite even match with a slight advantage to the attacker.
I'll test this properly today, but from what I've seen, it would take lot more than 3:1 advantage to win, I'd wager on around 9:1 and that would still be with heavy casualties.
Yeah, the historical rule of thumb is that you need a 3:1 force ratio to defeat a fortified line. Assuming for simple numbers that you're using forces that consist entirely of on-tech PW infantry (so every hit kills), and that every shot hits in the absence of fortification, consider a 3:1 advantage against fort-6 infantry:
That's not how it works. Two unfortified infantry units will only hit with about 10% of the shots they fire. Instead of just talking out of my arse, I'll run a test with the ratios you've proposed to see whether that actually works or not.
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That's not how it works. Two unfortified infantry units will only hit with about 10% of the shots they fire. Instead of just talking out of my arse, I'll run a test with the ratios you've proposed to see whether that actually works or not.
It doesn't make a difference, for what it's worth.
As a quick rule of thumb, taking 1/x damage will mean the enemy needs SQRT(x) times more units to defeat you, if all other factors are equal. So if we assume the attacker received no defensive bonus and the defender received a fortification of 6, then the attacker needs 2.45 units per every defender to win (or rather, at that point they would statistically eliminate each other). This is true whether the base chance to hit is 10% or 100%.
However, that's not the case. Unfortified infantry have a hit modifier of .6, which means an additional 40% of incoming attacks miss. This is equivalent to a fortification of 1.67. So fully fortified infantry are only 3.59 (6/1.67) times harder to hit than attacking infantry. This means that you need 1.9 times as many infantry on the attack as on the defense.
If you attempt to verify these numbers in game, also remember that planetary terrain gives additional benefits/penalties to fortification.
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No. That won't work, for the same reason attacking with artillery didn't work. Vehicles can't provide enough shots per round to be effective, a standard "tank" vehicle with one CSAP and one MAV would have 7 shots per round, but would cost around 4 BP. That would mean, in the standards of my test, around 30 tanks that would fire 210 times, compared to the 3500 times an equivalent CSAP armed infantry element would. They were getting about 30-40 kills per round with 3500 shots, that's a 1.16% chance to kill, with 210 shots that would amount to only 2 or so kills. If you read my post you'll see I actually tried medium bombardment, it's useless.
Perhaps, but the tank forces are also 256x as survivable against PW and CAP, which is what the infantry will largely be using, and they'll last much longer. Additionally, you're far more likely to be limited by troop transport capacity in any invasion, considering transport bays cost four times as much as the infantry formations they can move. So it will realistically be more like 210 shots to ~1500 shots. Plus you could always swap out the MAV for anther CAP, giving you ~500 shots for that equivalent cost.
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Perhaps, but the tank forces are also 256x as survivable against PW and CAP, which is what the infantry will largely be using, and they'll last much longer. Additionally, you're far more likely to be limited by troop transport capacity in any invasion, considering transport bays cost four times as much as the infantry formations they can move. So it will realistically be more like 210 shots to ~1500 shots. Plus you could always swap out the MAV for anther CAP, giving you ~500 shots for that equivalent cost.
I'll test both heavily armoured forces and infantry forces, then. Not accounting armoured survivability is a hole in my methodology.
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Yeah, the historical rule of thumb is that you need a 3:1 force ratio to defeat a fortified line. Assuming for simple numbers that you're using forces that consist entirely of on-tech PW infantry (so every hit kills), and that every shot hits in the absence of fortification, consider a 3:1 advantage against fort-6 infantry:
That's not how it works. Two unfortified infantry units will only hit with about 10% of the shots they fire. Instead of just talking out of my arse, I'll run a test with the ratios you've proposed to see whether that actually works or not.
There's a reason I said "for simple numbers". If we assume a 10% chance to hit baseline(thus 1/6 of that, or 1.67% chance for the attacker to hit), and run the same test as my first one, you get similar enough numbers. I used Excel, so fractions just carry through, but it shows 1692.08 remaining attacking forces out of 3000. This is actually much better for the attacker - compare to the 1333 survivors in my above example. Using those numbers, 2450 attackers is the minimum needed to beat 1000 defenders, FWIW.
Of course, this is a model, and a model is only as good as the assumptions. Perhaps my assumptions are crap. But a 6:1 hit ratio demands about a 2.5:1 force ratio - it's the square root of 6, actually, which is a good clean mathematical result.
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I also realize now I ran these tests on Earth, with has a 25% bonus to fortification and a 50% penalty to-hit. So next time I'll run the tests on the moon.
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I also realize now I ran these tests on Earth, with has a 25% bonus to fortification and a 50% penalty to-hit. So next time I'll run the tests on the moon.
what do you mean 50% penalty to hit? from where?
I know that this makes infantry able to have an effective fortification of about 7.5.
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I also realize now I ran these tests on Earth, with has a 25% bonus to fortification and a 50% penalty to-hit. So next time I'll run the tests on the moon.
It will make it worse because Environmental Factors multiple the Fortification Level in the denominator of the equation...
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I think there is reason why Steve have chosen the numbers he have... in general if you have a 3:1 advantage you will have a reasonable chance the win if the terrain is not too problematic.
Obviously it is very difficult to know WHEN you reach that so bringing an even greater odds is almost a must, the same as in real life.
I know how the math of the combat work and how the terrain work... we had these discussions on these forums dozens of times in the past doing all sorts of theory crafting battles... ;)
I was rather simple and explaining things in a broad stroke... as there are so many factors that can influence a battle it is VERY difficult to know before hand how strong you are and how strong the enemy really is before you actually engage.
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I also realize now I ran these tests on Earth, with has a 25% bonus to fortification and a 50% penalty to-hit. So next time I'll run the tests on the moon.
It will make it worse because Environmental Factors multiple the Fortification Level in the denominator of the equation...
not to mention you are also using garrison troops that are especially trained to fight in the terrain... this will increase the value of those troop quite allot too. ;)
We can't judge a system based on the extremes either, that makes very little sense.
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Yes, there shoud definitely be a reduction in the level of fortification due to combat, bombardment, and air/space strikes even if no units are destroyed. It should be possible to whittle down the enemy's entrenchments (to some minimum level) with preparatory strikes before the main attack goes in.
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not to mention you are also using garrison troops that are especially trained to fight in the terrain... this will increase the value of those troop quite allot too. ;)
I'm... not?
First test was run, on equal terrain.
Total Defender Cost: 312
Total Attacker Cost: 317
Total Defender Troops: 800 PW Infantry + 10 Construction Vehicles + some Supply Vehicles that stayed on the rear.
Total Attacker Troops: 1600 PW Infantry + some Supply Vehicles that stayed on the rear.
The combat test was ran for 52 rounds, these were the results:
Defenders: 1428 kills
Attackers: 426 kills
We can see here that the fortified defenders killed at lot more enemies, even if heavily outnumbered. The attackers would need roughly double the inflicted casualties to win, so I'd extrapolate this data and say you need a 4:1 advantage at the least to overcome completely fortified positions. This isn't taking in account terrain nor vehicles, though, just an infantry vs infantry battle.
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But the numbers DO reflect the environment, which is unfair on the moon, even if troops are trained identically.
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Why is it unfair on the moon? It's barren terrain with no modifiers. It's also not low gravity for human standards, neither does it have extreme pressure. I don't see why the moon wouldn't be an ideal testing ground.
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Low Grav/No Atmo are not modifiers?
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The moon is not low grav. And I don't think there's a modifier for no atmosphere. I'm going to add one just in case. Even if this were the case, it would affect both armies equally, and thus mean nothing.
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not to mention you are also using garrison troops that are especially trained to fight in the terrain... this will increase the value of those troop quite allot too. ;)
I'm... not?
First test was run, on equal terrain.
Total Defender Cost: 312
Total Attacker Cost: 317
Total Defender Troops: 800 PW Infantry + 10 Construction Vehicles + some Supply Vehicles that stayed on the rear.
Total Attacker Troops: 1600 PW Infantry + some Supply Vehicles that stayed on the rear.
The combat test was ran for 52 rounds, these were the results:
Defenders: 1428 kills
Attackers: 426 kills
We can see here that the fortified defenders killed at lot more enemies, even if heavily outnumbered. The attackers would need roughly double the inflicted casualties to win, so I'd extrapolate this data and say you need a 4:1 advantage at the least to overcome completely fortified positions. This isn't taking in account terrain nor vehicles, though, just an infantry vs infantry battle.
That's not how the numbers work. Remember, it's a square root function; if the attackers are dealing half as much damage as needed, then they need SQRT(2) times as many units to win; that's only 42% more. So 2,272 infantry in your example, and that still seems higher than it should be.
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Second test using 4:1 attackers to defenders. This one was over very very quickly, due to the large amount of attackers, breakthroughs happened, which killed a lot of fortified infantry very fast.
The combat lasted 6 rounds
Attackers: 774 kills
Defenders: 367 kills
I also noticed that the attackers seemed to have an accuracy of ~0.5% whilst the defenders had an accuracy of ~10%.
That's not how the numbers work. Remember, it's a square root function; if the attackers are taking double the damage, then they need SQRT(2) times as many units to win; that's only 1.42:1 advantage.
Sorry, I'm not good enough with mathematics to understand what you're trying to say, but I trust you. The thing is, though, the attackers aren't taking double damage. Given the hit rates of fortified infantry vs non fortified infantry, they're taking ~20x as much damage.
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Second test using 4:1 attackers to defenders. This one was over very very quickly, due to the large amount of attackers, breakthroughs happened, which killed a lot of fortified infantry very fast.
The combat lasted 6 rounds
Attackers: 774 kills
Defenders: 367 kills
I also noticed that the attackers seemed to have an accuracy of ~0.5% whilst the defenders had an accuracy of ~10%.
That's not how the numbers work. Remember, it's a square root function; if the attackers are taking double the damage, then they need SQRT(2) times as many units to win; that's only 1.42:1 advantage.
Sorry, I'm not good enough with mathematics to understand what you're trying to say, but I trust you. The thing is, though, the attackers aren't taking double damage. Given the hit rates of fortified infantry vs non fortified infantry, they're taking ~20x as much damage.
Well, 42% more than you had. Still seems higher than it should be, I'm not sure why, but vs fortification 6 with no terrain bonus twice as many infantry attackers should win (barely)
Fortification 6 shouldn't be resulting in 20x as much damage without some enormous terrain modifications; I don't know what's up with your testbed.
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Yeah, sorry, that's a miscalculation on my part.
Here's the same 2:1 test done on Earth instead of the moon:
The combat lasted 60 rounds
Attackers: 142 kills
Defenders: 753 kills
So here the defends damage the attackers around 5x as much, but the total casualties are much lower than the test on the moon because of the rougher terrain.
I still have to test 4:1 on Earth and combats using armour, but I'll leave that for later.
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I don't think there's a modifier for no atmosphere.
There is - its called the extreme pressure or lack thereof.
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As far as I know, extreme pressure only works for planets with pressure above racial maximum.
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not to mention you are also using garrison troops that are especially trained to fight in the terrain... this will increase the value of those troop quite allot too. ;)
I'm... not?
Did I say that you did in the first place... I was not responding to your post... ;)
I have done some tests in the game and they seem to conclude roughly what the math say... if there are no specific other factors then 3:1 is a roughly even fight with a slight advantage to the attacker because of the evasion chance of the attackers. The math are pretty accurate and the results that I have seen confirms it pretty well...
I have moved on to more interesting ground combat tests.
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I honestly think that fortification reduction due to combat should be a thing as was already mentioned. The combat engineers that was suggested could also be used as reverse construction vehicles - not directly attacking enemies but "deconstructing" their forts, or maybe just reducing their fortification bonus according to some engineer to enemy CON vehicle ratio.
It also prevents the attacker from just landing with shedloads of con vehicles and rapid fortifying their own army while incentivising the defenders to try and pressure the attackers so they do not have time to establish a fortified beachhead themselves.
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I honestly think that fortification reduction due to combat should be a thing as was already mentioned. The combat engineers that was suggested could also be used as reverse construction vehicles - not directly attacking enemies but "deconstructing" their forts, or maybe just reducing their fortification bonus according to some engineer to enemy CON vehicle ratio.
It also prevents the attacker from just landing with shedloads of con vehicles and rapid fortifying their own army while incentivising the defenders to try and pressure the attackers so they do not have time to establish a fortified beachhead themselves.
I would not be against any such mechanics as long as the defensive nature of the game remain relatively strong. If it is too easy to break and invade enemy fortified positions then it will not make any sense to defend anything to begin with and using resources on defences become pretty meaningless.
It also should be possible for a defensive army to maintain and repair fortification if enough effort is put into it.
Fortification in the game is an abstraction for ANY kind of defence and does not have to be just passive defences in the form of bunkers and minefields.
In general I think that it is a bigger problem that all troops gets to fight so effectively all the time. The larger the armies that fight on a planet the more time battles should play out... allot more than it does now. The current mechanic will almost never turn a battle into a natural stalemate... that is because there is no natural attack or defender currently in the game.
In VB6 you could reach more natural stalemate during invasions.
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It also should be possible for a defensive army to maintain and repair fortification if enough effort is put into it.
I think you could easily make it so that CON vehicles in addition to fortifying soldiers also counteract hostile engineers or something like that.
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The side that doesn't have fortification tends to be the side with orbital support and fighters. The whole mechanic is designed to favor defenders for cost, because otherwise it is supremely easy to assault a world by concentrating forces. A civilian garrison of infantry can easily have a heavy armor division dropped on its head, with orbital bombardment support to boot.
CSAP spam working well doesnt indicate its good against fortification so much as it might indicate they are too good for cost/tonnage. Or maybe WAI from being good against infantry, I suppose.
Pretty much.
If you can carry out planetary invasion it also means you got orbital superiority, therefore you can rain hell on down below for as long as you want. Sprinkle some nuclear warheads if you're feeling particularly spiteful.
So I completely disagree with Ektor on the subject of fortification and defense performance. However I agree on the supply, construction and support behavior. The fact that battalion-, regimental-, and divisional-level supply or artillery support doesn't work really gets my gears grinding.
All forms of orbital bombardment kick up dust and in the case of missiles radiation as well. If defensive fortification is too powerful than the idea of planetary conquest becomes a pipe dream as the only cost-effective way to get rid of hostile planets is to render them inhospitable. On the flip side I agree - nerf forts too much and now its just not worth building defence on planets, at least on the ground.
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I'm sorry guys but I don't see the problem here. Ektor's test is very useful confirmation of what was assumed before - but its hindrance is the same that plagued the earlier theorycrafting: it's assuming equal tech and equal build points. Fortification being very strong when tech levels are equal and BP is equal is not an issue IMHO at all - that's exactly how it should be. Aurora is not a game to be balanced on the knife's edge.
And remember, lack of FFD makes both air support and orbital support almost pointless as they get massive to-hit maluses. Always include the proper amount of FFD.
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I'm sorry guys but I don't see the problem here. Ektor's test is very useful confirmation of what was assumed before - but its hindrance is the same that plagued the earlier theorycrafting: it's assuming equal tech and equal build points. Fortification being very strong when tech levels are equal and BP is equal is not an issue IMHO at all - that's exactly how it should be. Aurora is not a game to be balanced on the knife's edge.
And remember, lack of FFD makes both air support and orbital support almost pointless as they get massive to-hit maluses. Always include the proper amount of FFD.
I mean, I don't even think it's particularly strong in ideal circumstances. 3:1 odds sounds powerful, but it overlooks a lot of aspects of being on the defensive that don't show up well in playtests.
Orbital bombardment is an obvious one that will almost always favor the attackers, but there's also the simple fact that if you have 3 or more colonies, your garrisons are split up into smaller chunks while the attacker can bring his entire assault force against your colonies one at a time. And of course there's the fact that if your colony is too tough a nut to crack they can just nuke it from orbit, in which case you're down the colony *and* the extensive ground forces you spent time and materials on.
3:1 in favor of the defender is really what I'd call the absolute minimum to make it worth garrisoning colonies at all.
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I honestly think that fortification reduction due to combat should be a thing as was already mentioned. The combat engineers that was suggested could also be used as reverse construction vehicles - not directly attacking enemies but "deconstructing" their forts, or maybe just reducing their fortification bonus according to some engineer to enemy CON vehicle ratio.
I think this would be a pretty good solution.
And remember, lack of FFD makes both air support and orbital support almost pointless as they get massive to-hit maluses. Always include the proper amount of FFD.
I tested with proper amounts of FFD. Bombardment and Fighters aren't very useful because their volume of fire is simply too low. The chance of missing is very high, as shown in previous experiments, troops have a ~5% (I said 0.5% before, but it was a miscalculation) chance to hit in good terrain conditions.
I mean, I don't even think it's particularly strong in ideal circumstances. 3:1 odds sounds powerful, but it overlooks a lot of aspects of being on the defensive that don't show up well in playtests.
Orbital bombardment is an obvious one that will almost always favor the attackers, but there's also the simple fact that if you have 3 or more colonies, your garrisons are split up into smaller chunks while the attacker can bring his entire assault force against your colonies one at a time. And of course there's the fact that if your colony is too tough a nut to crack they can just nuke it from orbit, in which case you're down the colony *and* the extensive ground forces you spent time and materials on.
3:1 in favor of the defender is really what I'd call the absolute minimum to make it worth garrisoning colonies at all.
That's the thing, though, you'd have to bring massive amounts of ships - hundreds of them, if you wanted bombardment to be effective.
but its hindrance is the same that plagued the earlier theorycrafting: it's assuming equal tech and equal build points
How else to conduct tests, then? This ensures a purely mathematical advantage to be shown. If you attack with ten times the bp, for example, probably most of what you do will work due to sheet volume.
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I'm sorry guys but I don't see the problem here. Ektor's test is very useful confirmation of what was assumed before - but its hindrance is the same that plagued the earlier theorycrafting: it's assuming equal tech and equal build points. Fortification being very strong when tech levels are equal and BP is equal is not an issue IMHO at all - that's exactly how it should be. Aurora is not a game to be balanced on the knife's edge.
And remember, lack of FFD makes both air support and orbital support almost pointless as they get massive to-hit maluses. Always include the proper amount of FFD.
I mean, I don't even think it's particularly strong in ideal circumstances. 3:1 odds sounds powerful, but it overlooks a lot of aspects of being on the defensive that don't show up well in playtests.
Orbital bombardment is an obvious one that will almost always favor the attackers, but there's also the simple fact that if you have 3 or more colonies, your garrisons are split up into smaller chunks while the attacker can bring his entire assault force against your colonies one at a time. And of course there's the fact that if your colony is too tough a nut to crack they can just nuke it from orbit, in which case you're down the colony *and* the extensive ground forces you spent time and materials on.
3:1 in favor of the defender is really what I'd call the absolute minimum to make it worth garrisoning colonies at all.
Well... we can't forget all the other resources that goes into getting the troops in place on the planet that also have to be included in any offensive war. The logistics surrounding invasions... everything from beating the space forces, suppressing and destroying any STO and then the ships, supplies, fuel and all that other stuff to actually get the offensive troops on the ground will count.
You then have the thing about never really knowing how strong an opponent Garrison really is as there are many factors that will have an impact on them.
If we could know exactly how much force is necessary to win with minimal loss then I do think the current system would be too weak, but we never really know until the day we try the invasions. And in most cases we will probably try to bring allot more than a 3:1 advantage to be absolutely sure to win.
We then don't know if an enemy will be able to respond to any aggression and how that response will look like, in a real scenario there should be allot of unknown factors that make the decision making allot harder.
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I really think there should be some sort of intelligence mechanic, though, a way to find out how many of what the enemy has before comitting to a full invasion. IDK if ELINT does that.
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That's the thing, though, you'd have to bring massive amounts of ships - hundreds of them, if you wanted bombardment to be effective.
You can build specialised bombardment ships with Miniaturised weapons... they will be allot cheaper to fire and you can bring much larger volumes of them for the same ship tonnage.
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I really think there should be some sort of intelligence mechanic, though, a way to find out how many of what the enemy has before comitting to a full invasion. IDK if ELINT does that.
There is... you can get a rough estimation for what the enemy strength is before invading... but you will not know for sure how strong they are or what type of troops they have. But you will be able to see roughly how many troops there is.
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Oh, fine then.
Right now I'm trying bombardment, I started with carronades because they deal the most raw damage, I put 90HS of carronades into a design and then spawned it. It had the same rough 10% hit chance, killing about 0-1 units per round. Then I changed this to 30x4 Railguns, this worked very well, and that single ship could now reliably kill around 8 units every round. Still not a lot, though. I'll try even smaller weapons.
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While the numbers vary (and thanks to the exponential function, any sort of force multiplier is hugely beneficial / disadvantageous), it seems pretty solidly that defense has a significant advantage right up until the point when attackers bring overwhelming numbers and/or strength to bear and start scoring breakthroughs. . . which seems to me exactly what we want to see.
Now, if it turns out that the defensive advantages of the "average" planet's terrain mean that the attacker needs twelve-to-one instead of three-to-one, I'm okay with that.
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In terms of fighter support you can make pretty effective fighters down to about 70-80t in size. Each can have about two auto-cannon with 6 shots, that is not too bad in my opinion.
I have not done allot of tests with support fighters to date and I'm unsure if ground fighters need to have an engine and fuel, if you can skip that you can get them down to below 70t for a decent ground support fighter.
Hunter class Ground Fighter 66 tons 0 Crew 20.3 BP TCS 1 TH 0 EM 0
1 km/s Armour 2-1 Shields 0-0 HTK 0 Sensors 0/0/0/0 DCR 0 PPV 16
Maint Life 0 Years MSP 0 AFR 13% IFR 0.2% 1YR 0 5YR 6 Max Repair 8.0 MSP
Magazine 16
Lieutenant Commander Control Rating 1
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months Morale Check Required
Size 8.00 Fighter Pod Bay (2) Pod Size: 8.00 Hangar Reload 141 minutes MF Reload 23 hours
Missile Fire Control FC11-R100 (1) Range 11.7m km Resolution 100
Fighter Autocannon Pod (2) Armour Penetration: 10 Damage: 20 Shots: 3
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Their speed affects their vulnerability to AA, so I'd guess they need some. I'm seeing a trend with bombardment with about 10% accuracy, so let's say all your shots penetrate and kill, you'd need about 60 of them to kill around 36 infantry a turn. I'm going to just test that.
Also, I've tested a bunch of stuff with bombardment, it seems pretty clearly to me that massed 10cm railguns are by far the best in bombardment.
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I'm agreeing that Fortification needs to have some rebalancing. Speaking from in game experience here (so it's not as scientific/cut and dry as OP) but based on what I've noted in game:
For context, I'd previously battled over and secured the Orbit of a NPR planet (It was Barren, for future reference). I suspect they do have slightly better tech than me, so it was expected their troops would be better on a 1:1 basis.
Since I had secured Orbit of their planet, and being my first time I tried invading, I decided to go Overkill, since around the time, I didn't have much Logistics capability for Troop Transport. I had my fleet (Around 20 Ships, approximately 75,000T of Military power. Admittedly, they weren't all beam, and I was low on missiles from securing the planet so I didn't want to waste em) start bombarding the planet (Unguided, there wasn't any FFD) with Massed Railgun fire.
I had figured that since the main challenge of Orbital Bombardment was going to be actually hitting the Target, rather than not having enough Damage per shot, 15cm Railgun Spam would see me through.
I bombarded that planet until I drained all the MSP out of my fleet from repairing my Guns.
I don't have the exact numbers (Wasn't doing this Scientifically), but I think I killed about 500T of Ground Forces.
Round 2 with NPR Planet (After topping off my MSP & repairing my ships) and I decided to Invade, even though with my limited invasion capacity I probably going to be Equal in tonnage to the NPR Forces (I didn't know how much they had exactly). I figured that Bombardments previous poor performance was due to my lack of FFD, and so would Invade and have my ships perform Orbital Bombardment Support.
Long Story Short: It didn't go well. I kinda deserved that from half-assing it with my Troop numbers.
Annoyingly though, my Orbital Bombardment didn't perform anywhere as close as to what I was expecting from it.
I think over that entire invasion, I killed about 1,000T of their forces, for nearly 16,000T of mine. They started with approximately 15,000T, by the way.
Orbital Bombardment killed maybe 3-5 Infantry per round, with me throwing easily over 200+ shots from my Railgun spam per Ground Combat turn. If I hit something, it died, but I just could not hit a goddamn thing.
I call the invasion off, and started to build more Invasion ships, as planet has officially annoyed me.
Timeskip until I get more invasion ships, and I start things off by bringing in a second fleet along with my 1st (if a bit smaller than my First fleet) to Bombard the planet before my second invasion.
Same story as before, kill a handful of Infantry for an entire fleets worth of MSP and associated maintenance costs.
I then launch another invasion, now outnumbering the NPR's troops nearly 3:1.
They're (NPR) all Infantry of various levels of equipment, no Artillery support or nothing. I'd say 70% of them with Personal weapons, the remainder being AA, AT, Logi and Command troops.
I brought my Heavy armor Formations to counter their Infantry (and hopefully Low penetration) spam, I've also got Artillery support specifically supporting each of my Frontline Formations, and each Frontline formation has FFD Capabilities to let my Fleet hammer them.
Exact same thing as before happens, all 32,000T of my troops die in exchange for about 2,000T of theirs (Progress, I guess).
I may have noticed a bug where my FFD could still direct ship fire even after their unfortunate demise, but I'm not on the latest build even as of this post so it's kinda expected.
Even with all my ships firing (When they probably shouldn't be), I still could kill barely anything. To my Orbital Bombardment's credit, they did account for a significant portion of my kills in that invasion attempt, but since my entire fleet displaced more than all of the Ground Forces involved (Including both armies from both of my attempts and the NPR's) I really would have expected more.
Out of spite at this point, I had my fleet blindly bombard until they ran out of MSP again, and killed a small amount of infantry for my trouble.
TL,DR: Even with 3:1 advantage, on the terrain that gives the least defense to the defender (Barren), with an entire fleet bombarding them both before and during the invasion(s), the Defender got away practically unscathed (aside from the collateral damage).
I really dread to think about invading a Fortified jungle without 10:1 odds, a perfect counter to their army composition, a fleet of 100+ Railgun Barges and enough MSP that you have to Strip Mine Sol to build enough ships to carry it all to the planet.
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I'm agreeing that Fortification needs to have some rebalancing. Speaking from in game experience here (so it's not as scientific/cut and dry as OP) but based on what I've noted in game:
For context, I'd previously battled over and secured the Orbit of a NPR planet (It was Barren, for future reference). I suspect they do have slightly better tech than me, so it was expected their troops would be better on a 1:1 basis.
Since I had secured Orbit of their planet, and being my first time I tried invading, I decided to go Overkill, since around the time, I didn't have much Logistics capability for Troop Transport. I had my fleet (Around 20 Ships, approximately 75,000T of Military power. Admittedly, they weren't all beam, and I was low on missiles from securing the planet so I didn't want to waste em) start bombarding the planet (Unguided, there wasn't any FFD) with Massed Railgun fire.
I had figured that since the main challenge of Orbital Bombardment was going to be actually hitting the Target, rather than not having enough Damage per shot, 15cm Railgun Spam would see me through.
I bombarded that planet until I drained all the MSP out of my fleet from repairing my Guns.
I don't have the exact numbers (Wasn't doing this Scientifically), but I think I killed about 500T of Ground Forces.
Round 2 with NPR Planet (After topping off my MSP & repairing my ships) and I decided to Invade, even though with my limited invasion capacity I probably going to be Equal in tonnage to the NPR Forces (I didn't know how much they had exactly). I figured that Bombardments previous poor performance was due to my lack of FFD, and so would Invade and have my ships perform Orbital Bombardment Support.
Long Story Short: It didn't go well. I kinda deserved that from half-assing it with my Troop numbers.
Annoyingly though, my Orbital Bombardment didn't perform anywhere as close as to what I was expecting from it.
I think over that entire invasion, I killed about 1,000T of their forces, for nearly 16,000T of mine. They started with approximately 15,000T, by the way.
Orbital Bombardment killed maybe 3-5 Infantry per round, with me throwing easily over 200+ shots from my Railgun spam per Ground Combat turn. If I hit something, it died, but I just could not hit a goddamn thing.
I call the invasion off, and started to build more Invasion ships, as planet has officially annoyed me.
Timeskip until I get more invasion ships, and I start things off by bringing in a second fleet along with my 1st (if a bit smaller than my First fleet) to Bombard the planet before my second invasion.
Same story as before, kill a handful of Infantry for an entire fleets worth of MSP and associated maintenance costs.
I then launch another invasion, now outnumbering the NPR's troops nearly 3:1.
They're (NPR) all Infantry of various levels of equipment, no Artillery support or nothing. I'd say 70% of them with Personal weapons, the remainder being AA, AT, Logi and Command troops.
I brought my Heavy armor Formations to counter their Infantry (and hopefully Low penetration) spam, I've also got Artillery support specifically supporting each of my Frontline Formations, and each Frontline formation has FFD Capabilities to let my Fleet hammer them.
Exact same thing as before happens, all 32,000T of my troops die in exchange for about 2,000T of theirs (Progress, I guess).
I may have noticed a bug where my FFD could still direct ship fire even after their unfortunate demise, but I'm not on the latest build even as of this post so it's kinda expected.
Even with all my ships firing (When they probably shouldn't be), I still could kill barely anything. To my Orbital Bombardment's credit, they did account for a significant portion of my kills in that invasion attempt, but since my entire fleet displaced more than all of the Ground Forces involved (Including both armies from both of my attempts and the NPR's) I really would have expected more.
Out of spite at this point, I had my fleet blindly bombard until they ran out of MSP again, and killed a small amount of infantry for my trouble.
TL,DR: Even with 3:1 advantage, on the terrain that gives the least defense to the defender (Barren), with an entire fleet bombarding them both before and during the invasion(s), the Defender got away practically unscathed (aside from the collateral damage).
I really dread to think about invading a Fortified jungle without 10:1 odds, a perfect counter to their army composition, a fleet of 100+ Railgun Barges and enough MSP that you have to Strip Mine Sol to build enough ships to carry it all to the planet.
In my opinion it sounds as if the enemy actually have a significant technological advantage, enough to make a pretty big difference. The way the mechanic work is that even a slight advantage i technology can make a huge impact on the general strength of your troops in combat. They also could have had better leaders and general Moral then your troops.
Unless you account for all of those things first you can't say that it was too hard.
In my opinion you probably used way too little troops, especially if you knew your technology was a bit behind theirs to begin with.
I think your story is a good example on how effective a defence can be and why it should be effective. Invading a planet should be a huge undertaking perhaps require hundreds of thousands of tons of troops, ships and fighter cover to perform. That in my opinion is epic and fun... you should have to work for it and not just get it handed to you.
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. . . I think over that entire invasion, I killed about 1,000T of their forces, for nearly 16,000T of mine. They started with approximately 15,000T, by the way. . .
. . .I then launch another invasion, now outnumbering the NPR's troops nearly 3:1. . .
In my opinion it sounds as if the enemy actually have a significant technological advantage, enough to make a pretty big difference. The way the mechanic work is that even a slight advantage i technology can make a huge impact on the general strength of your troops in combat. They also could have had better leaders and general Moral then your troops.
Unless you account for all of those things first you can't say that it was too hard.
In my opinion you probably used way too little troops, especially if you knew your technology was a bit behind theirs to begin with.
I think your story is a good example on how effective a defence can be and why it should be effective. Invading a planet should be a huge undertaking perhaps require hundreds of thousands of tons of troops, ships and fighter cover to perform. That in my opinion is epic and fun... you should have to work for it and not just get it handed to you.
To me, it sounds like Tactical_Torpedo decided three-to-one was sufficent odds, and found out it wasn't.
Until I hear tales of ten-, or twelve-, or even twenty-to-one invasions I'm not willing to condemn fortifications (though I do still think they need to be reduced by combat -- again down to some lower limit as rubble makes half-decent cover).
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In my opinion it sounds as if the enemy actually have a significant technological advantage, enough to make a pretty big difference. The way the mechanic work is that even a slight advantage i technology can make a huge impact on the general strength of your troops in combat. They also could have had better leaders and general Moral then your troops.
Unless you account for all of those things first you can't say that it was too hard.
In my opinion you probably used way too little troops, especially if you knew your technology was a bit behind theirs to begin with.
I think your story is a good example on how effective a defence can be and why it should be effective. Invading a planet should be a huge undertaking perhaps require hundreds of thousands of tons of troops, ships and fighter cover to perform. That in my opinion is epic and fun. . . you should have to work for it and not just get it handed to you.
I get that an invasion is's meant to be a challenge to undertake, and that my experiences certainly weren't scientific, but at what point does it become less of a challenge and more an impracticality?
If an invasion isn't going to be successful when you outnumber the enemy 3:1, with both Preliminary bombardment and full Fleet Support during the invasion itself, how much can you reasonably commit to invading a planet to make it feasible?
I don't suspect the Technological Difference made much of a difference anyway, since I was perfectly able to kill their forces, when one of my troops landed a hit.
I don't think it's very feasible for an entire Fleet, firing several hundred rounds, to not make an appreciable dent on their forces. As mentioned, when I hit with Bombardment, I killed them, but the problem was that my ships simply could not land consistent enough hits to affect the greater course of the battle.
Since there isn't any kind of Technology for increasing the CTH of Ground Combat/Bombardment, with said CTH being the limiting factor on any damage I could inflict, the only means I have to further increase my CTH is shear volume of fire, also known as bringing in even more ships.
At that point, you end up comparing about 600BP of Infantry (with about 200BP of Construction vehicles to fortify them) against 10,000+ BP of Naval Might, and turns out that the Naval force can make no appreciable damage to the Infantry.
Hell, if we still had to produce MSP manually, I'd suspect it'd be a close thing if the cost to Bombard (and subsequent maintenance failures/MSP cost) lost against the average cost of the Ground Forces destroyed.
Personally, I'd like for there to be a mechanism where Fortification gets reduced as the Ground Units get attacked, perhaps with Fortifications reducing the higher the Penetration/Damage of the weapon that is attacking. Have it happen gradually, so the Defender still has a Advantage, and prevent fortification from being reduced below a certain amount (50% their Self Fortification? Spitballing here).
That way, the defender always retains an advantage over the attacker, but the attacker can actually do something to mitigate said advantage, if they have the time/support to do so. It would mean you don't have to perform Human Wave tactics to beat a fortified defender and take horrific casualties, if you can wear them down first.
It also makes a bit more sense to me, since the prepared fortifications would be getting worn down as the Battle rages on (similar to the Civilian Installations/Population), not remaining impervious to anything the Attacker uses up until the Element dies.
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Here is a decent multi-role fighter... it is good as either a dogfighter or to support ground troops.
Hunter class Ground Fighter 79 tons 1 Crew 25.9 BP TCS 2 TH 8 EM 0
4783 km/s Armour 2-1 Shields 0-0 HTK 1 Sensors 0/0/0/0 DCR 0 PPV 16
Maint Life 0 Years MSP 0 AFR 15% IFR 0.2% 1YR 0 5YR 7 Max Repair 8.0 MSP
Magazine 16
Lieutenant Commander Control Rating 1
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months Morale Check Required
Ion Drive EP7.50 (1) Power 7.5 Fuel Use 7715.89% Signature 7.50 Explosion 30%
Fuel Capacity 1 000 Litres Range 0 billion km (1 hours at full power)
Size 8.00 Fighter Pod Bay (2) Pod Size: 8.00 Hangar Reload 141 minutes MF Reload 23 hours
Missile Fire Control FC11-R100 (1) Range 11.7m km Resolution 100
Fighter Autocannon Pod (2) Armour Penetration: 10 Damage: 20 Shots: 3
OR
Light Fighter Air-to-Air Pod (2) Armour Penetration: 10.0 Damage: 20.0 Shots: 1
OR
Heavy Fighter Air-to-Air Pod (1) Armour Penetration: 20.0 Damage: 40.0 Shots: 1
For ground work you might want a slightly bigger variant but not too big so AA are too effective against them.
Raven class Ground Fighter 109 tons 1 Crew 35.3 BP TCS 2 TH 11 EM 0
5193 km/s Armour 2-2 Shields 0-0 HTK 1 Sensors 0/0/0/0 DCR 0 PPV 24
Maint Life 0 Years MSP 0 AFR 21% IFR 0.3% 1YR 1 5YR 13 Max Repair 8.0 MSP
Magazine 24
Lieutenant Commander Control Rating 1
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months Morale Check Required
Ion Drive EP11.25 (1) Power 11.2 Fuel Use 6300.00% Signature 11.25 Explosion 30%
Fuel Capacity 1 000 Litres Range 0 billion km (1 hours at full power)
Size 8.00 Fighter Pod Bay (3) Pod Size: 8.00 Hangar Reload 141 minutes MF Reload 23 hours
Missile Fire Control FC11-R100 (1) Range 11.7m km Resolution 100
Heavy Fighter Autocannon Pod (2) Armour Penetration: 17 Damage: 20 Shots: 3
OR
Fighter Autocannon Pod (3) Armour Penetration: 10 Damage: 20 Shots: 3
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In my opinion it sounds as if the enemy actually have a significant technological advantage, enough to make a pretty big difference. The way the mechanic work is that even a slight advantage i technology can make a huge impact on the general strength of your troops in combat. They also could have had better leaders and general Moral then your troops.
Unless you account for all of those things first you can't say that it was too hard.
In my opinion you probably used way too little troops, especially if you knew your technology was a bit behind theirs to begin with.
I think your story is a good example on how effective a defence can be and why it should be effective. Invading a planet should be a huge undertaking perhaps require hundreds of thousands of tons of troops, ships and fighter cover to perform. That in my opinion is epic and fun. . . you should have to work for it and not just get it handed to you.
I get that an invasion is's meant to be a challenge to undertake, and that my experiences certainly weren't scientific, but at what point does it become less of a challenge and more an impracticality?
If an invasion isn't going to be successful when you outnumber the enemy 3:1, with both Preliminary bombardment and full Fleet Support during the invasion itself, how much can you reasonably commit to invading a planet to make it feasible?
I don't suspect the Technological Difference made much of a difference anyway, since I was perfectly able to kill their forces, when one of my troops landed a hit.
I don't think it's very feasible for an entire Fleet, firing several hundred rounds, to not make an appreciable dent on their forces. As mentioned, when I hit with Bombardment, I killed them, but the problem was that my ships simply could not land consistent enough hits to affect the greater course of the battle.
Since there isn't any kind of Technology for increasing the CTH of Ground Combat/Bombardment, with said CTH being the limiting factor on any damage I could inflict, the only means I have to further increase my CTH is shear volume of fire, also known as bringing in even more ships.
At that point, you end up comparing about 600BP of Infantry (with about 200BP of Construction vehicles to fortify them) against 10,000+ BP of Naval Might, and turns out that the Naval force can make no appreciable damage to the Infantry.
Hell, if we still had to produce MSP manually, I'd suspect it'd be a close thing if the cost to Bombard (and subsequent maintenance failures/MSP cost) lost against the average cost of the Ground Forces destroyed.
Personally, I'd like for there to be a mechanism where Fortification gets reduced as the Ground Units get attacked, perhaps with Fortifications reducing the higher the Penetration/Damage of the weapon that is attacking. Have it happen gradually, so the Defender still has a Advantage, and prevent fortification from being reduced below a certain amount (50% their Self Fortification? Spitballing here).
That way, the defender always retains an advantage over the attacker, but the attacker can actually do something to mitigate said advantage, if they have the time/support to do so. It would mean you don't have to perform Human Wave tactics to beat a fortified defender and take horrific casualties, if you can wear them down first.
It also makes a bit more sense to me, since the prepared fortifications would be getting worn down as the Battle rages on (similar to the Civilian Installations/Population), not remaining impervious to anything the Attacker uses up until the Element dies.
As things are right now I don't think it should be easier to invade... it really should be that difficult and it should require a huge investment of resources to invade something. I don't think what you experienced seem unreasonable at all.
If we could erode fortification then fortification need to be allot stronger... it would be too easy to just sit and wait for defences to be weakens so you can waltz in a destroy the ground troops with ease.
I would not be against a way to reduce fortification levels but it should not be easier to invade than what it already is... time will tell if it is too easy or hard... but I want it to be difficult because it is almost always the attacker who are the one that benefit in the end and who have the upper hand and can decide how much and where to concentrate their troops and resources.
I see no problem with attacking a planet needing 10-20 times the resources it took to build the defences there, that is reasonable from a strategic balance point of view to expect.
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Also, I've tested a bunch of stuff with bombardment, it seems pretty clearly to me that massed 10cm railguns are by far the best in bombardment.
Have you tried gauss cannon spam as a bombardment alternative? There are potentially 8 shots per barrel at max tech level.
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In my opinion it sounds as if the enemy actually have a significant technological advantage, enough to make a pretty big difference. The way the mechanic work is that even a slight advantage i technology can make a huge impact on the general strength of your troops in combat. They also could have had better leaders and general Moral then your troops.
Unless you account for all of those things first you can't say that it was too hard.
In my opinion you probably used way too little troops, especially if you knew your technology was a bit behind theirs to begin with.
I think your story is a good example on how effective a defence can be and why it should be effective. Invading a planet should be a huge undertaking perhaps require hundreds of thousands of tons of troops, ships and fighter cover to perform. That in my opinion is epic and fun. . . you should have to work for it and not just get it handed to you.
I get that an invasion is's meant to be a challenge to undertake, and that my experiences certainly weren't scientific, but at what point does it become less of a challenge and more an impracticality?
If an invasion isn't going to be successful when you outnumber the enemy 3:1, with both Preliminary bombardment and full Fleet Support during the invasion itself, how much can you reasonably commit to invading a planet to make it feasible?
I don't suspect the Technological Difference made much of a difference anyway, since I was perfectly able to kill their forces, when one of my troops landed a hit.
I don't think it's very feasible for an entire Fleet, firing several hundred rounds, to not make an appreciable dent on their forces. As mentioned, when I hit with Bombardment, I killed them, but the problem was that my ships simply could not land consistent enough hits to affect the greater course of the battle.
Since there isn't any kind of Technology for increasing the CTH of Ground Combat/Bombardment, with said CTH being the limiting factor on any damage I could inflict, the only means I have to further increase my CTH is shear volume of fire, also known as bringing in even more ships.
At that point, you end up comparing about 600BP of Infantry (with about 200BP of Construction vehicles to fortify them) against 10,000+ BP of Naval Might, and turns out that the Naval force can make no appreciable damage to the Infantry.
Hell, if we still had to produce MSP manually, I'd suspect it'd be a close thing if the cost to Bombard (and subsequent maintenance failures/MSP cost) lost against the average cost of the Ground Forces destroyed.
Personally, I'd like for there to be a mechanism where Fortification gets reduced as the Ground Units get attacked, perhaps with Fortifications reducing the higher the Penetration/Damage of the weapon that is attacking. Have it happen gradually, so the Defender still has a Advantage, and prevent fortification from being reduced below a certain amount (50% their Self Fortification? Spitballing here).
That way, the defender always retains an advantage over the attacker, but the attacker can actually do something to mitigate said advantage, if they have the time/support to do so. It would mean you don't have to perform Human Wave tactics to beat a fortified defender and take horrific casualties, if you can wear them down first.
It also makes a bit more sense to me, since the prepared fortifications would be getting worn down as the Battle rages on (similar to the Civilian Installations/Population), not remaining impervious to anything the Attacker uses up until the Element dies.
As things are right now I don't think it should be easier to invade... it really should be that difficult and it should require a huge investment of resources to invade something. I don't think what you experienced seem unreasonable at all.
If we could erode fortification then fortification need to be allot stronger... it would be too easy to just sit and wait for defences to be weakens so you can waltz in a destroy the ground troops with ease.
I would not be against a way to reduce fortification levels but it should not be easier to invade than what it already is... time will tell if it is too easy or hard... but I want it to be difficult because it is almost always the attacker who are the one that benefit in the end and who have the upper hand and can decide how much and where to concentrate their troops and resources.
I see no problem with attacking a planet needing 10-20 times the resources it took to build the defences there, that is reasonable from a strategic balance point of view to expect.
I think the fear that people are having is that almost everyone will just render planets uninhabitable - its almost as if ground combat is optional given how damn good missiles are at systemwide genocide. Hell if its a long campaign you could wait until the dust settles and radiation dissipates for the planet to become usable.
As I've said before it would be nice to have mechanics that can lead to fortification being reduced while also allowing the defender to somewhat combat it. Maybe some sort of capability that nullifies fortification during a breakthrough. Or combat engineers who don't damage units but fortifications. While construction vehicles (and maybe CON infantry - think engineers vs sappers) are frantically trying to keep fortifications up.
I do not know how fortification degradation should work with respect to orbital bombardment. At worst for the defender it should take years upon years of bombardment to unfortify units - creating scenarios where the planet may be rendered uninhabitable before the garrison breaks.
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. . . I think over that entire invasion, I killed about 1,000T of their forces, for nearly 16,000T of mine. They started with approximately 15,000T, by the way. . .
. . .I then launch another invasion, now outnumbering the NPR's troops nearly 3:1. . .
In my opinion it sounds as if the enemy actually have a significant technological advantage, enough to make a pretty big difference. The way the mechanic work is that even a slight advantage i technology can make a huge impact on the general strength of your troops in combat. They also could have had better leaders and general Moral then your troops.
Unless you account for all of those things first you can't say that it was too hard.
In my opinion you probably used way too little troops, especially if you knew your technology was a bit behind theirs to begin with.
I think your story is a good example on how effective a defence can be and why it should be effective. Invading a planet should be a huge undertaking perhaps require hundreds of thousands of tons of troops, ships and fighter cover to perform. That in my opinion is epic and fun... you should have to work for it and not just get it handed to you.
To me, it sounds like Tactical_Torpedo decided three-to-one was sufficent odds, and found out it wasn't.
Until I hear tales of ten-, or twelve-, or even twenty-to-one invasions I'm not willing to condemn fortifications (though I do still think they need to be reduced by combat -- again down to some lower limit as rubble makes half-decent cover).
Something else to keep in mind is that, IIRC, fortification also reduces the sensor return of ground forces. So even if Tactical Torpedo thought there were 15,000 tons of units there, there might have actually been 50,000 or more. Also, 1000 tons of basic infantry is not equivalent to, say, 1000 tons of heavy tank.
At the end of the day, I think the question that needs to be asked is this: What advantage in tonnage/cost does everyone think you should need to easily triumph over fortified defenders?
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I think the fear that people are having is that almost everyone will just render planets uninhabitable - its almost as if ground combat is optional given how damn good missiles are at systemwide genocide. Hell if its a long campaign you could wait until the dust settles and radiation dissipates for the planet to become usable.
As I've said before it would be nice to have mechanics that can lead to fortification being reduced while also allowing the defender to somewhat combat it. Maybe some sort of capability that nullifies fortification during a breakthrough. Or combat engineers who don't damage units but fortifications. While construction vehicles (and maybe CON infantry - think engineers vs sappers) are frantically trying to keep fortifications up.
I do not know how fortification degradation should work with respect to orbital bombardment. At worst for the defender it should take years upon years of bombardment to unfortify units - creating scenarios where the planet may be rendered uninhabitable before the garrison breaks.
To be honest I really don't see what completely destroying a planet have to do with invading it. If performing total genocide of whatever enemy you are fighting is your thing then by all means do that instead.
Aurora 4x does not care about game balance in that way and you could do that in VB6 as well. But if you want to invade, capture and use a planet then you will need to put down the resources needed to do so.
Aurora 4x is a heavily role-play driven game so the choice between glassing and invading a planet is not important in this context.
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At the end of the day, I think the question that needs to be asked is this: What advantage in tonnage/cost does everyone think you should need to easily triumph over fortified defenders?
Easily? At least twenty-to-one. Probably more like thirty- or fifty-to-one.
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. . .Personally, I'd like for there to be a mechanism where Fortification gets reduced as the Ground Units get attacked, perhaps with Fortifications reducing the higher the Penetration/Damage of the weapon that is attacking. Have it happen gradually, so the Defender still has a Advantage, and prevent fortification from being reduced below a certain amount (50% their Self Fortification? Spitballing here).
That way, the defender always retains an advantage over the attacker, but the attacker can actually do something to mitigate said advantage, if they have the time/support to do so. It would mean you don't have to perform Human Wave tactics to beat a fortified defender and take horrific casualties, if you can wear them down first.
It also makes a bit more sense to me, since the prepared fortifications would be getting worn down as the Battle rages on (similar to the Civilian Installations/Population), not remaining impervious to anything the Attacker uses up until the Element dies.
Given that firing a thousand shots to hit six times isn't particularly fun, perhaps Fortifications should change from a penalty 'to hit' to an increase in the fortified unit's effective Armour rating.
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Have you tried gauss cannon spam as a bombardment alternative? There are potentially 8 shots per barrel at max tech level.
I tried it, albeit not at maximum level. The way I see it is: a 4-shot 10cm railgun is 3 HS whilst a (at maximum technology) 8 shot gauss weapon is 6 HS. I tried using reduced gauss to increase volume of fire but they couldn't hit a thing, the lowest HS gauss guns literally had around 0.2% hit rate.
Given that firing a thousand shots to hit six times isn't particularly fun, perhaps Fortifications should change from a penalty 'to hit' to an increase in the fortified unit's effective Armour rating.
What do I suggest? Make fortification be a modifier on damage dealt instead of shots that hit or armour value. That way high rates of fire with low damage and penetration would do nothing against fortified troops, but high damage dealers like tanks and super heavies would be able to bypass this modifier, and deal damage, which would force attackers to invest in more expensive armament to deal with fortification, instead of just massing infantry.
Guys, please, at least read my post before commenting.
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If we want anti-fort units, I think a unit-training option, much like there is with jungle warfare or boarding combat, is the obvious fix.
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It seems that perhaps at least MSP cost for orbital bombardment needs reducing.
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It seems that perhaps at least MSP cost for orbital bombardment needs reducing.
Indiscriminate bombarding are not suppose to be very effective so I think we should wait and see if the balance is right or not.
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In my opinion... the ground combat game have a problem with scaling... and I have said that before.
Using indisciminate bombarding on a world with 5 billion people and 1.000.000t of trooops should be way more effective than on a 100m population colony with 10.000t worth of troops.
Ground combat in general should take these things into consideration as well... a world "War" on a planet with 5 billion inhabitants and a few million tons of troops should take years to complete while a 50m population colony with a single regiment defending it could fall in a dew days.
But there then need to be a mechanic where you can shuttle in troops of very large planets over time without the first ones being wiped on on day one... there need to be limitation on how troops can engage and interact when ground combat grow to silly sizes. Large ground combat engagement end way too fast as it is without intervention of the player in GM and playing multiple faction, then it can be done through RP. But the game mechanics don't support it.
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Remember that an attacker can bring their entire military to one planet whilst the defender has to spread their force between all of their planets. This doesn't seem unreasonable torequire far more troops for the attack than the defense. It's also generally realistic.
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Maybe the fortification should decrease over time while in combat. More rapidly if fortification is high. It would make sense that prolonged combat would deteriorate fortification. Maybe one could still keep quite high fortification if they had a lot of construction units as those could still be target of attacks and would eat room and training time from other possible units
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Been having a think about this. I reckon the best solutions might be to let the armour value/health/unit type/breakthrough value of a unit/formation negate part or all of the fortification value of an entrenched unit/formation, have ineffective weapons not make the defensive unit's tonnage count for the purposes of breakthroughs, and/or have breakthrough attacks not count fortification bonuses.
Explanation: Right now, we have a WW1 scenario of fully entrenched everything. Ignoring the fact that the attackers can choose their landing spot when they choose to invade, how do you beat a massively entrenched position? Go around, be armoured enough that their weapons are ineffective, cause a breakthrough and negate the defensive advantage of the whole position, and bring guns that can break the fortifications.
Drilling down to the core of the problem: I can make a force of nothing but CAP pillboxes, entrench them in a steppe, and stall a heavy tank division for months because the heavy tanks can't hit the pillboxes. It makes little sense that a HAV weapon can't render fortifications effectively meaningless, but it makes even less sense that the pillboxes are 99% effective in stopping a breakthrough. Why can't the tanks just steamroll it, or go around? It's not like the CAP can threaten the tanks very much.
Better worded answer: Let the breakthrough value of a unit counteract hostile fortification bonuses, allow support units to increase the breakthrough value of the supported unit to simulate airstrikes/orbital strikes opening holes in a line, perhaps throw in a training for infantry to increase the breakthrough value for infantry units, then make breakthroughs totally ignore fortification bonuses.
Results: Heavy armour now slays steppe pillboxes. The bigger the tank, the better it is at flattening them. Entrenching infantry in a field WW1 style now has limited effect against tanks, as it should. Vietnam can still happen, thanks to the hitrate modifiers for infantry focused terrains making vehicles suck in those environments.
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I think that the main problem is that of scale... the fortification bonus does NOT have to mean bunkers and minefields... they are simply increased defensive value of whatever forces are entrenched on the planet. It means they fight better as they have prepared the planetary defences to better suite the troops that are there. It can be as much active defences as it can be ways to move around defences to increase its defensive nature in a more mobile setting. Even static units can move around if necessary using prime movers which in this age probably are don through their air or it can be through some elaborate tunnelling system or whatever.
The fortification does not have to mean static formations and defences only, even if static fortification probably is part of it. But advanced shield system also can mean that static defences actually can be easily moved when a battle shift in character.
This is why I'm sceptical that we necessarily need something that reduce the fortification level just to complicate matters. The system is on a strategic operational/theatre level not tactical.
The important thing is to make defences so strong that it does require considerable forces to take them out, otherwise they are rendered entirely moot and pointless from a strategic consideration. If the defences can't possibly hold an enemy at bay long enough for reinforcement to arrive they make no sense to build in the first place. Defences should even be able to repel most attempts of invasion if you focus enough, for example if you create a huge fortress world.
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Yeah, I have to agree. The system as it is works fine. A way to reduce fortification really doesn't accomplish anything other than being an overly complicated way of making fortification weaker, and personally I think fortification is already balanced reasonably well.
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The important thing is to make defences so strong that it does require considerable forces to take them out, otherwise they are rendered entirely moot and pointless from a strategic consideration. If the defences can't possibly hold an enemy at bay long enough for reinforcement to arrive they make no sense to build in the first place. Defences should even be able to repel most attempts of invasion if you focus enough, for example if you create a huge fortress world.
No, the important thing is that conquering a colony via ground assault causes less collateral damage than orbital bombardment. Otherwise, why (would an empire)* even land troops in the first place?
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*Sure, we'll do it at least a few times 'cause fighting is fun. But after that?
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The important thing is to make defences so strong that it does require considerable forces to take them out, otherwise they are rendered entirely moot and pointless from a strategic consideration. If the defences can't possibly hold an enemy at bay long enough for reinforcement to arrive they make no sense to build in the first place. Defences should even be able to repel most attempts of invasion if you focus enough, for example if you create a huge fortress world.
No, the important thing is that conquering a colony via ground assault causes less collateral damage than orbital bombardment. Otherwise, why (would an empire)* even land troops in the first place?
I would not say that is the main reason... but it is another good reason I did not think of as an important one... ;)
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The important thing is to make defences so strong that it does require considerable forces to take them out, otherwise they are rendered entirely moot and pointless from a strategic consideration. If the defences can't possibly hold an enemy at bay long enough for reinforcement to arrive they make no sense to build in the first place. Defences should even be able to repel most attempts of invasion if you focus enough, for example if you create a huge fortress world.
No, the important thing is that conquering a colony via ground assault causes less collateral damage than orbital bombardment. Otherwise, why (would an empire)* even land troops in the first place?
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*Sure, we'll do it at least a few times 'cause fighting is fun. But after that?
Its not even about collateral damage to installation and population - for me its about keeping the planet useable/habitable. Missiles already completely nullify ground units completely, they just also turn the planet into an irradiated wasteland while doing so.
Honestly if you lose the space war, no amount of ground forces and forts are going to help you. Maybe thats okay for people but it does make ground combat a bit of an opt in feature.
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The important thing is to make defences so strong that it does require considerable forces to take them out, otherwise they are rendered entirely moot and pointless from a strategic consideration. If the defences can't possibly hold an enemy at bay long enough for reinforcement to arrive they make no sense to build in the first place. Defences should even be able to repel most attempts of invasion if you focus enough, for example if you create a huge fortress world.
No, the important thing is that conquering a colony via ground assault causes less collateral damage than orbital bombardment. Otherwise, why (would an empire)* even land troops in the first place?
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*Sure, we'll do it at least a few times 'cause fighting is fun. But after that?
If the planet is so heavily fortified that it isn't worth taking except as a blow to the enemy, 1. they will have no doubt invested quite heavily in it and happened to make use of the strategic advantages in terrain and 2. this isn't necessarily unrealistic. Turtling to the point where the only reason for the enemy to attempt an invasion is simply to crush you should be a thing you can do, in the best traditions of the imperial guard. It should of course be expensive and only feasible in certain locations with certain terrains, but the idea of being able to negate fortification would simply make fortification worthless really. If you think it isn't worth the fight, then don't attack.
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As I said, I don't mind fortifications being hard to take, what I mind is heavy artillery and such being useless against it.
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As I said, I don't mind fortifications being hard to take, what I mind is heavy artillery and such being useless against it.
That's less heavy artillery being bad against fortification than it is heavy artillery being bad against infantry. If you're up against a lot of fortified static units medium and heavy bombardment will work just fine.
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It won't. I've tested this. Also Heavy Artillery should be strong against infantry, if it isn't, then to me that's a problem.
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It won't. I've tested this. Also Heavy Artillery should be strong against infantry, if it isn't, then to me that's a problem.
How is heavy artillery damage applied? Each bombardment component is 3 shots - but does that mean that it can only kill 3 infantry per fire? Maybe it should work like how missile damage is spread out in an "area"
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i mean heavy artillery obliterates infantry. it's just not efficient against them, which is as it should be.
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Artillery in Aurora are not terribly good against regular infantry from a resource perspective, especially the heavier sort. I don't see this as some sort of problem... they are good against Static units though and vehicle of all types.
I don't see why a artillery need to be better against fortified units either as a unit being fortified in Aurora is a huge abstraction for having a defensive advantage. Artillery should not be better against fortified units than anything else as fortification in Aurora does not need to mean bunkers and stuff like that entirely.
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Artillery in Aurora are not terribly good against regular infantry from a resource perspective, especially the heavier sort. I don't see this as some sort of problem... they are good against Static units though and vehicle of all types.
Static units have the same fortification stats as infantry (base 3, max 6), so they should be equally hard to hit, why is a bombardment weapon (or any low ROF weapon) good against them but not against infantry?
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It's not just fortification level, it's also armour. Static can use stronger armour than infantry, which then requires AP to penetrate and destroy reliably.
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How is heavy artillery damage applied? Each bombardment component is 3 shots - but does that mean that it can only kill 3 infantry per fire? Maybe it should work like how missile damage is spread out in an "area"
Realistically? Much less. Since accuracy hovers at around ~10%, you'd need on average 3 artillery to hit one fortified infantry. But yeah, one shot would be one kill.
Artillery in Aurora are not terribly good against regular infantry from a resource perspective, especially the heavier sort. I don't see this as some sort of problem... they are good against Static units though and vehicle of all types.
No they're not. As per my tests, they don't have a rate of fire significant enough to hit infantry unless heavily massed. Since static has the same fortification leven than infantry, it's also not very effective against it.
i mean heavy artillery obliterates infantry. it's just not efficient against them, which is as it should be.
You can test this for yourself, just set up a fully fortified formation of infantry and try to kill them with Heavy Artillery and you'll see they don't obliterate them at all.
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How is heavy artillery damage applied? Each bombardment component is 3 shots - but does that mean that it can only kill 3 infantry per fire? Maybe it should work like how missile damage is spread out in an "area"
Realistically? Much less. Since accuracy hovers at around ~10%, you'd need on average 3 artillery to hit one fortified infantry. But yeah, one shot would be one kill.
Artillery in Aurora are not terribly good against regular infantry from a resource perspective, especially the heavier sort. I don't see this as some sort of problem... they are good against Static units though and vehicle of all types.
No they're not. As per my tests, they don't have a rate of fire significant enough to hit infantry unless heavily massed. Since static has the same fortification leven than infantry, it's also not very effective against it.
i mean heavy artillery obliterates infantry. it's just not efficient against them, which is as it should be.
You can test this for yourself, just set up a fully fortified formation of infantry and try to kill them with Heavy Artillery and you'll see they don't obliterate them at all.
I think artillery is an easy fix - just make it work like missiles where damage is "spread", since the whole point of artillery is the spread of shrapnel over an area. This would make it so that each artillery component based on initial damage will get many more shots overall - but each shot will still be subject to hit chance and the reduced penetration of the shrapnel will make sure that armor isnt as affected by arty as infantry is.
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I would like that.
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At this point the discussion is about buffing bombardment weapons (which don't need the buff, IMHO), nothing to do with fortification.
The Aurora system is that one shot can only kill one unit. This means that a heavy anti-vehicle weapon and a personal weapon will both kill the same number of unarmored infantry each hit - 1. Artillery works the same way, but gets 3 shots, so a heavy bombardment weapon is three times as effective against infantry as a personal weapon, but half as effective as a crew served anti-personnel weapon (which gets 6 shots). Meanwhile static units cost more but have 3 hp, so a hit from a personal weapon or CAP has only an 11% chance to kill an unarmored static, but a heavy bombardment will kill it every time, so heavy bombardment is much more effective against statics than personal weapons or CAP.
The various weapon sizes and costs are balanced around this mechanic, so I assume the justification for saying heavy bombardment should have area effect against infantry is some sort of realism concern, and I'm firmly of the opinion that gameplay trumps realism.
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I think the lesson from this thread is to use large numbers of CAP teams in ground invasions rather than massing large numbers of infantry, and you probably want medium/heavy autocannons or bombardment for heavy targets because of hit rates.
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At this point the discussion is about buffing bombardment weapons (which don't need the buff, IMHO), nothing to do with fortification.
The Aurora system is that one shot can only kill one unit. This means that a heavy anti-vehicle weapon and a personal weapon will both kill the same number of unarmored infantry each hit - 1. Artillery works the same way, but gets 3 shots, so a heavy bombardment weapon is three times as effective against infantry as a personal weapon, but half as effective as a crew served anti-personnel weapon (which gets 6 shots). Meanwhile static units cost more but have 3 hp, so a hit from a personal weapon or CAP has only an 11% chance to kill an unarmored static, but a heavy bombardment will kill it every time, so heavy bombardment is much more effective against statics than personal weapons or CAP.
The various weapon sizes and costs are balanced around this mechanic, so I assume the justification for saying heavy bombardment should have area effect against infantry is some sort of realism concern, and I'm firmly of the opinion that gameplay trumps realism.
TBF the area of effect solution probably wouldn't affect the performance of bombardment that much in practice anyways - the AP decay on the "shrapnel" would mean that armoured statics wouldn't really be affected by the additional hits and the hit chance reduction of fortification would make it so that fortified infantry are also quite resistant to artillery shrapnel as the hit chance of every "free" shot would be really low.
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How is heavy artillery damage applied? Each bombardment component is 3 shots - but does that mean that it can only kill 3 infantry per fire? Maybe it should work like how missile damage is spread out in an "area"
Realistically? Much less. Since accuracy hovers at around ~10%, you'd need on average 3 artillery to hit one fortified infantry. But yeah, one shot would be one kill.
Artillery in Aurora are not terribly good against regular infantry from a resource perspective, especially the heavier sort. I don't see this as some sort of problem... they are good against Static units though and vehicle of all types.
No they're not. As per my tests, they don't have a rate of fire significant enough to hit infantry unless heavily massed. Since static has the same fortification leven than infantry, it's also not very effective against it.
i mean heavy artillery obliterates infantry. it's just not efficient against them, which is as it should be.
You can test this for yourself, just set up a fully fortified formation of infantry and try to kill them with Heavy Artillery and you'll see they don't obliterate them at all.
I think artillery is an easy fix - just make it work like missiles where damage is "spread", since the whole point of artillery is the spread of shrapnel over an area. This would make it so that each artillery component based on initial damage will get many more shots overall - but each shot will still be subject to hit chance and the reduced penetration of the shrapnel will make sure that armor isnt as affected by arty as infantry is.
In effect artillery already do "spread" as it has 3 shots and not one... which is kind of representing the wide are of effect of artillery and other bombardment weapons.
The game are abstracting combat and I feel that allot of the wants and interpretation have more to do with a tactical use of these weapons systems which the game really does not try to simulate. It simulate a military conflict on a planetary scale.
The different weapons strength and weaknesses are to simulate the rough usage of those weapon system.
In real life for example the main gun of a tanks are quite effective against infantry and have a big area of impact while in the game it only fire one shot and can only kill a maximum of ONE soldier per combat phase... this is an abstraction as the main use of that weapon is against armoured targets.
Other weapons such as CAP are mostly representing heavy grenade launchers or heavy machine gun type weapons and in real life these weapons are quite lethal to infantry but they often are used more as suppressing weapons rather than to kill stuff, just like most weapons are. In the real world weapons are used in tandem with each other to be more effective as a whole than they are individually, the game really don't consider such tactical usage of weapons but only look from a strategic perspective.
This is why weapons are a bit stereotypical in what they do because of game balance. If you had one weapons that was good against everything then everyone would take just that weapon.
The only thing that fortification does is to help troops to avoid being hit... this can be through electronic interference, camouflage, bunkers, force fields, perfect knowledge of the terrain, pre constructed mine fields, underground tunnels to hide troop movement or a combination of them all more likely. Anything to give the defending army a large advantage over the enemy.
This is why I don't like that you can simply destroy the fortification outright... I also don't believe it is necessary as it is not that hard to invade as it is. The initiative will almost always be in favour of the the invading as they control the battlefield and if they engage or not, they can bring more forces if necessary and most likely they defeated the space forces to get there. If it is not decently hard and difficult to invade then using defensive forces simply is pointless.
In my opinion it is WAY to early to judge if it is too easy or too hard to invade planets... we have to give it time and see how it goes.