Aurora 4x
C# Aurora => General Discussion => Topic started by: Zeebie on June 14, 2020, 11:13:39 AM
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Hi folks -
I just tried to invade an enemy planet and my entire force was annihilated within a couple of days, and I'm hoping you can help me figure out what went wrong. I had a numerical advantage (250k to 130k) and a slight tech advantage. I'm guessing my troops need some special environmental capability, but I'm not sure which ones - is there any way to see what environmental penalties are in play? The planet is tundra, 0.13 g, at -37 C, with 1.11 atm. My species is vanilla human, and my troops have extreme temperature capability. Is there something else I need? There's no tundra specialty, is there?
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Hi folks -
I just tried to invade an enemy planet and my entire force was annihilated within a couple of days, and I'm hoping you can help me figure out what went wrong. I had a numerical advantage (250k to 130k) and a slight tech advantage. I'm guessing my troops need some special environmental capability, but I'm not sure which ones - is there any way to see what environmental penalties are in play? The planet is tundra, 0.13 g, at -37 C, with 1.11 atm. My species is vanilla human, and my troops have extreme temperature capability. Is there something else I need? There's no tundra specialty, is there?
Extreme temperature and (maybe) low gravity seem to be in play as far as environmental goes. You have the temperature so probably low grav is screwing you.
Edit: Actually I think human g tolerance is 0.1g which would mean that low gravity is not in play.
However I do not think that the lack of environmental capability is the problem here. Assume that the defenders have passive fortification - you immediately already have a 50% accuracy on vehicles and 34% accuracy on infantry. Infantry can have upto 6 fortification in the presence of construction vehicles which IMO is guaranteed so that 17% accuracy on their infantry.
You brought around 2:1 odds against the enemy which is generally speaking not good enough unless you have a significant tech advantage. Try bringing 6:1 or more and see what happens.
Edit: Given overall low ground accuracy consider armour. I found that armour ridiculously increases survival rates. For infantry consider gene enchancement which increases their hp.
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Probably not low gravity. Default gravity tolerance is 0.1-1.9 AFAICT.
Most likely it is just that double the tonnage isn't good enough to win as the attacker given the tech ratio involved.
It's also possible that the invasion force organization or makeup is ineffective, but we don't have any information that would let us diagnose that.
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It's also possible that the invasion force organization or makeup is ineffective, but we don't have any information that would let us diagnose that.
I think this would be nice to see as well but I can understand why showing unit designs can be tedious. At least seeing what the invading OOB was would be nice.
General advice - do not just put everything on front-line attack, I always have some troops on front-line defense as well. The defending formations are generally comprised of cheaper but defensible units like infantry. As the combat continues defending units will fortify (assuming CON units exist) and become even tougher. Regardless they will soak up most of the casualties and shield your attackers and most importantly, support level units like artillery, high level HQs.
Also note that artillery isn't invincible just because it is not on the frontline - you will lose arty to counterbattery fire from enemy arty. Which is why if you have HQ units and want to put artillery on them - use heavy or long range and put the formation in the rear echelon, this limits counterbattery fire to enemy heavy arty.
Also we are assuming that your units had proper supply otherwise the force you sent was going to be at 25% effectiveness.
If you want orbital support you will want some sort of FFD in your formations - for orbital bombardment generally speaking larger caliber energy weapons work well - do not use missiles if you want to use the planet, radiation dissipates much slower than dust. I like to use bombardment cruisers with 50cm railguns. I find these weapons have a good compromise between being able to kill units and having enough shots to actually hit units. However 20cm and larger laser weapons also tend to do well which is why my heavy cruisers also can help.
Just make sure that you ships have some sort of shielding in case of STO counter-fire.
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do not just put everything on front-line attack, I always have some troops on front-line defense as well. The defending formations are generally comprised of cheaper but defensible units like infantry. As the combat continues defending units will fortify (assuming CON units exist) and become even tougher. Regardless they will soak up most of the casualties and shield your attackers and most importantly, support level units like artillery, high level HQs.
If you have units on front line defence, do they fight enemy units which are also on front line defence or are you relying on the enemy putting some units on front line attack?
I seem to recall some people indicating that units on front line defence don't fight against other units in front line defence, although I might be mistaken?
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do not just put everything on front-line attack, I always have some troops on front-line defense as well. The defending formations are generally comprised of cheaper but defensible units like infantry. As the combat continues defending units will fortify (assuming CON units exist) and become even tougher. Regardless they will soak up most of the casualties and shield your attackers and most importantly, support level units like artillery, high level HQs.
If you have units on front line defence, do they fight enemy units which are also on front line defence or are you relying on the enemy putting some units on front line attack?
I seem to recall some people indicating that units on front line defence don't fight against other units in front line defence, although I might be mistaken?
Front-line defense will only fight enemies that are on front-line attack, this is still important since your units on front-line attack are focused more on enemies on the defense. Generally speaking you can rely on the fact that at least some of the enemy is going to attack you. Even if they don't, if for some reason combat is favourable, your now-fortified defenders will be able to hold a beachhead while you bring reinforcements or allow you to at least withdraw some of your forces and cut your losses.
In my case I had a massive tech advantage over an NPR homeworld so I sent and invasion of around 1.7m tons against 1.7m tons. I found that most of my casualties were focused around my troops that were on front-line defence. To me this indicates that having some forces focus on defence gives your attacking forces important breathing space by drawing fire away from them.
Also don't forget that your defending troops will fortify over time, making them become more efficient in combat as the fighting drags on.
Note: My 1.7m tons excludes logistics whereas the enemies 1.7m tons includes their logistics and I had OBS support, so even with massive tech advantage to ensure a landslide victory I brought an overall numerical superiority.
Edit: Officers are also important because their training increases morale, morale increases accuracy and evasion and elements that take massive losses will lose morale.
Edit2: For artillery focus their support on units that are attacking the enemy, I read somewhere on this form that FFD increases rear echelon artillery accuracy. By the end of my invasion I had medium and heavy artillery formations with 100k tons destroyed. They were mostly supporting mechanized and motorized elements that were on the offensive.
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For artillery focus their support on units that are attacking the enemy, I read somewhere on this form that FFD increases rear echelon artillery accuracy.
They are not in current version, or at least it's not what is described by Steve, and not what is evident from testing battles.
It was proposed in sugestions thread to make such a thing, though.
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For artillery focus their support on units that are attacking the enemy, I read somewhere on this form that FFD increases rear echelon artillery accuracy.
They are not in current version, or at least it's not what is described by Steve, and not what is evident from testing battles.
It was proposed in sugestions thread to make such a thing, though.
Oh I must have misunderstood that comment then, good to know.
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In my case I had a massive tech advantage over an NPR homeworld so I sent and invasion of around 1.7m tons against 1.7m tons. I found that most of my casualties were focused around my troops that were on front-line defence. To me this indicates that having some forces focus on defence gives your attacking forces important breathing space by drawing fire away from them.
Seems to me that it might just indicate that your defense formations were more susceptible to damage. The heavy combat vehicles that would have populated your assault formations are a lot harder to kill than the infantry that fill out more defensive formations. And that's amplified if the enemy is technologically inferior, and if they have a significant amount of small arms in their forces rather than maximizing heavy anti-armor weapons.
Targeting is supposed to be by formation size. It doesn't matter what they're doing, so long as they're in the front line. Of course, that does mean that defensive front line formations will draw away fire from the offensive ones, but being defensive doesn't make them better at that. http://aurorawiki.pentarch.org/index.php?title=C-Ground_Combat#Targeting
The advantage of being front line non-attack is you can have fortification. The downside is you have no chance of hitting enemy support or rear formations in regular combat and are less likely to cause a breakthrough round.
I don't think you need to worry about your command units getting fragged by counter-battery fire, unless you actually made your command unit also a bombardment unit. Counter-battery support fire is supposed to only target a specific bombardment element that's providing support, not the entire formation that it belongs to. However, being in a support position makes it much likely that you'll take hits from enemy Front Line Attack formations compared to lurking the rear echelon. So it's probably best to keep your top command formations (which are likely crammed with squishy logistics trucks) as far back as possible.
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In my case I had a massive tech advantage over an NPR homeworld so I sent and invasion of around 1.7m tons against 1.7m tons. I found that most of my casualties were focused around my troops that were on front-line defence. To me this indicates that having some forces focus on defence gives your attacking forces important breathing space by drawing fire away from them.
Seems to me that it might just indicate that your defense formations were more susceptible to damage. The heavy combat vehicles that would have populated your assault formations are a lot harder to kill than the infantry that fill out more defensive formations. And that's amplified if the enemy is technologically inferior, and if they have a significant amount of small arms in their forces rather than maximizing heavy anti-armor weapons.
Targeting is supposed to be by formation size. It doesn't matter what they're doing, so long as they're in the front line. Of course, that does mean that defensive front line formations will draw away fire from the offensive ones, but being defensive doesn't make them better at that. http://aurorawiki.pentarch.org/index.php?title=C-Ground_Combat#Targeting
The advantage of being front line non-attack is you can have fortification. The downside is you have no chance of hitting enemy support or rear formations in regular combat and are less likely to cause a breakthrough round.
I don't think you need to worry about your command units getting fragged by counter-battery fire, unless you actually made your command unit also a bombardment unit. Counter-battery support fire is supposed to only target a specific bombardment element that's providing support, not the entire formation that it belongs to. However, being in a support position makes it much likely that you'll take hits from enemy Front Line Attack formations compared to lurking the rear echelon. So it's probably best to keep your top command formations (which are likely crammed with squishy logistics trucks) as far back as possible.
To be fair I should have mentioned that most of my assaulting force was assault infantry. Its true that my mechanized/motorized formations took way less in terms of damage.
The assault infantry also took way less damage but as you said that might be a result of their gene modification giving them more hp to work with.
My intuition with having defensive formations was mainly fortification during combat. My question is - Do formations on front-line attack prevent the enemy from attacking support positions? (ignoring breakthrough). For me it made sense that formations on attack wouldn't be as effective at protecting support positions.
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My intuition with having defensive formations was mainly fortification during combat. My question is - Do formations on front-line attack prevent the enemy from attacking support positions? (ignoring breakthrough). For me it made sense that formations on attack wouldn't be as effective at protecting support positions.
According to what I linked, front line attack and defense should be equally good at drawing fire.
However, a front line formation that is defending and benefiting from fortification should be much less likely to suffer heavy losses and allow a breakthrough, so in that respect it's better at protecting the rear-ward formations.
From the wiki, I would expect that fortification would generally take too long to be helpful for an invading force before the planet is conquered. Getting properly dug in takes months, and there's 8 combat rounds per day. I don't think you'll see any benefits from fortification in less than 10 days. But I haven't had an occasion to test that in action - I've had a boarding action and an uncontested ground invasion, no proper planetary battles.
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My intuition with having defensive formations was mainly fortification during combat. My question is - Do formations on front-line attack prevent the enemy from attacking support positions? (ignoring breakthrough). For me it made sense that formations on attack wouldn't be as effective at protecting support positions.
According to what I linked, front line attack and defense should be equally good at drawing fire.
However, a front line formation that is defending and benefiting from fortification should be much less likely to suffer heavy losses and allow a breakthrough, so in that respect it's better at protecting the rear-ward formations.
From the wiki, I would expect that fortification would generally take too long to be helpful for an invading force before the planet is conquered. Getting properly dug in takes months, and there's 8 combat rounds per day. I don't think you'll see any benefits from fortification in less than 10 days. But I haven't had an occasion to test that in action - I've had a boarding action and an uncontested ground invasion, no proper planetary battles.
You almost certainly wont fully dig in during combat, in my case the invasion didn't even last long but with a total of 60 construction components per 150k ton brigade my troops were at about 1.1 fortification. So assuming linear fortification rate thats about 5% more evasion on my defenders. IMO thats not negligible especially considering that there are 100s of thousands of shots being fired per combat round. But yeah it is by no means a significant factor. I think it helps in large scale conflicts more because it allows one to get more out of their cheaper soldiers like in my case.
Its also nice RP to have the elite soldiers spear-heading the assaults and the grunts to fill in the holes in the front as they open up.
Edit: I can't be sure but I think my invasion lasted around a month
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If it lasted a month, you should have gotten infantry up to fortification 3 by the end of it. One month is supposed to be the time to reach full self-fortification. (Also, prior to that point the construction vehicles aren't supposed to be able to help.)
Interesting that it took that long to resolve, that does suggest that an invasion force can usefully dig in.
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If it lasted a month, you should have gotten infantry up to fortification 3 by the end of it. One month is supposed to be the time to reach full self-fortification. (Also, prior to that point the construction vehicles aren't supposed to be able to help.)
Interesting that it took that long to resolve, that does suggest that an invasion force can usefully dig in.
You might actually have a point, problem is I was going by 8 hour increments so although it felt like ages to me there's a good chance I was wrong with the time since I didn't count time. I also may have been quoting the fortification level of some of the support artillery 1.1 was the value I remembered. If I can be bothered to load the event menu back into the past I'll post a reply to see how long it lasted.
My force was 2 divisions organized into a corps, so if under the corps I were to place some combat engineer regiments I could probably get some really fast fortification going. Right now every 150t of forces has 30 construction vehicles at the brigade level which I don't think is very much.
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According to what's layed out in the wiki, no matter how much engineering capacity you include you're not going to actually speed up fortification beyond the maximum speed: 30 days to full self-fortification, 90 days from there to maximum fortification. And for those first 30 days, the construction elements aren't actually doing anything, they only set to work after the self-fortification is complete.
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If you are landing troops on a planet you are way better of putting all your line troops on attack rather than holding some back in defensive line.
The reason is that attacking formation get to use their evasion stat while the defensive only use their fortification stat instead. That means that if you put your infantry in defence they are killed faster rather then if you attack for a very long time before the fortification level becomes stronger than the evasion stat. This will likely take about two weeks of fighting.
Also... defensive line will engage both enemy offensive and defensive line... so too armies that are entrenched can still fight each other without putting any unit on the offensive line.
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And for those first 30 days, the construction elements aren't actually doing anything, they only set to work after the self-fortification is complete.
That's rather unintuitive but useful to know.
Also... defensive line will engage both enemy offensive and defensive line... so too armies that are entrenched can still fight each other without putting any unit on the offensive line.
Is it possible to get a situation where both sides stare at each other and don't attack? IIRC that situation occurred in Steve's Crusade game.
Would one side being in front line defence and the other in support/rear make that happen?
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And for those first 30 days, the construction elements aren't actually doing anything, they only set to work after the self-fortification is complete.
That's rather unintuitive but useful to know.
Also... defensive line will engage both enemy offensive and defensive line... so too armies that are entrenched can still fight each other without putting any unit on the offensive line.
Is it possible to get a situation where both sides stare at each other and don't attack? IIRC that situation occurred in Steve's Crusade game.
Would one side being in front line defence and the other in support/rear make that happen?
I once landed a company of marines on a precursor world. All were set to front line defense and there was no combat action whatsoever until I set my marines to front line attack.
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Were there any combat action on the precursor world after you started the attack? When I captured one it had no ground troops.
Is it possible to get a situation where both sides stare at each other and don't attack? IIRC that situation occurred in Steve's Crusade game.
Would one side being in front line defence and the other in support/rear make that happen?
Well, if you've booth got diplomacy set to neutral or better I assume you don't fight...
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Were there any combat action on the precursor world after you started the attack? When I captured one it had no ground troops.
Is it possible to get a situation where both sides stare at each other and don't attack? IIRC that situation occurred in Steve's Crusade game.
Would one side being in front line defence and the other in support/rear make that happen?
Well, if you've booth got diplomacy set to neutral or better I assume you don't fight...
Yes, my marines suffered approximately 50% casualties while combating entrenched hostile combatants.
They were set to hostile also.
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And for those first 30 days, the construction elements aren't actually doing anything, they only set to work after the self-fortification is complete.
That's rather unintuitive but useful to know.
Also... defensive line will engage both enemy offensive and defensive line... so too armies that are entrenched can still fight each other without putting any unit on the offensive line.
Is it possible to get a situation where both sides stare at each other and don't attack? IIRC that situation occurred in Steve's Crusade game.
Would one side being in front line defence and the other in support/rear make that happen?
Even if engineering units helped with self-fortification they could only reduce the time by one production cycle for infantry and static units (7.5 days rounded down). Vehicles could only benefit by at most ~4.3 days, which rounds down to 0.
I once landed a company of marines on a precursor world. All were set to front line defense and there was no combat action whatsoever until I set my marines to front line attack.
That seems reasonable. If both sides are dug in and hunkered down then there shouldn't be much for either side to shoot at. It also means that there is a way to end the fighting without one side needing to be annihilated or driven off-world.
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And for those first 30 days, the construction elements aren't actually doing anything, they only set to work after the self-fortification is complete.
That's rather unintuitive but useful to know.
Also... defensive line will engage both enemy offensive and defensive line... so too armies that are entrenched can still fight each other without putting any unit on the offensive line.
Is it possible to get a situation where both sides stare at each other and don't attack? IIRC that situation occurred in Steve's Crusade game.
Would one side being in front line defence and the other in support/rear make that happen?
Even if engineering units helped with self-fortification they could only reduce the time by one production cycle for infantry and static units (7.5 days rounded down). Vehicles could only benefit by at most ~4.3 days, which rounds down to 0.
I once landed a company of marines on a precursor world. All were set to front line defense and there was no combat action whatsoever until I set my marines to front line attack.
That seems reasonable. If both sides are dug in and hunkered down then there shouldn't be much for either side to shoot at. It also means that there is a way to end the fighting without one side needing to be annihilated or driven off-world.
Seems reasonable yes.
BUT. They weren't interested in talking and I was annoyed by their cultural tradition of using my commercial ships for target practice. So they were removed.
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According to what's layed out in the wiki, no matter how much engineering capacity you include you're not going to actually speed up fortification beyond the maximum speed: 30 days to full self-fortification, 90 days from there to maximum fortification. And for those first 30 days, the construction elements aren't actually doing anything, they only set to work after the self-fortification is complete.
Well thats absolute balls.
I can understand that massive lumbering CON vehicles may not be very useful when you are still at the digging holes and placing sandbags phase but I feel like there needs to be a combat engineer capability or something that can help speed it up.
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According to what's layed out in the wiki, no matter how much engineering capacity you include you're not going to actually speed up fortification beyond the maximum speed: 30 days to full self-fortification, 90 days from there to maximum fortification. And for those first 30 days, the construction elements aren't actually doing anything, they only set to work after the self-fortification is complete.
Well thats absolute balls.
I can understand that massive lumbering CON vehicles may not be very useful when you are still at the digging holes and placing sandbags phase but I feel like there needs to be a combat engineer capability or something that can help speed it up.
It would be interesting if there was a commander bonus that affected this. Something like 'reduced fortification time X%' perhaps?
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Is it possible to get a situation where both sides stare at each other and don't attack? IIRC that situation occurred in Steve's Crusade game.
Would one side being in front line defence and the other in support/rear make that happen?
This can happen if neither side have any troops on Offensive line and one side have all their troops in either rear echelon or support line as Defensive line troops can only attack troops that are at either Defensive or Offensive line.
We have raised this issue before and Steve have acknowledge that this can be a problem, especial for factions that have colonies on the same planet as combat can become way too one sided if both sides start from a defensive dug in position, there are no real way to defend yourself in that case as there are not really any difference between attack and defend in general.
If you play in a multi-faction game where many sides are controlled by you or any other human you can have rules that simulate defensive stance by not allowing troops in defensive line to attack unless both sides attack. If only one side attack they can't have any troops in defensive line (they have to be in support line) while the opponent can't have any in offensive line. That would effectively simulate offensive and defensive conflicts.
When you land on a planet this rarely is a problem... but you might abuse the AI if they don't use any troops in offensive line as you can just wait and have your troops entrench before attacking. It is not unrealistic to do that but it is unrealistic you can use your entrenched units to then devastate the opponent. Instead you should end up in a cold war situation if neither side have the offensive strength to win against the other.
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Is it possible to get a situation where both sides stare at each other and don't attack? IIRC that situation occurred in Steve's Crusade game.
Would one side being in front line defence and the other in support/rear make that happen?
This can happen if neither side have any troops on Offensive line and one side have all their troops in either rear echelon or support line as Defensive line troops can only attack troops that are at either Defensive or Offensive line.
We have raised this issue before and Steve have acknowledge that this can be a problem, especial for factions that have colonies on the same planet as combat can become way too one sided if both sides start from a defensive dug in position, there are no real way to defend yourself in that case as there are not really any difference between attack and defend in general.
If you play in a multi-faction game where many sides are controlled by you or any other human you can have rules that simulate defensive stance by not allowing troops in defensive line to attack unless both sides attack. If only one side attack they can't have any troops in defensive line (they have to be in support line) while the opponent can't have any in offensive line. That would effectively simulate offensive and defensive conflicts.
When you land on a planet this rarely is a problem... but you might abuse the AI if they don't use any troops in offensive line as you can just wait and have your troops entrench before attacking. It is not unrealistic to do that but it is unrealistic you can use your entrenched units to then devastate the opponent. Instead you should end up in a cold war situation if neither side have the offensive strength to win against the other.
The AI not putting troops on the offensive line while an invasion is in progress could be considered a bug. Inability to de-escalate in a shared homeworld situation without pulling troops off the defensive line could also be considered a bug.
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Is it possible to get a situation where both sides stare at each other and don't attack? IIRC that situation occurred in Steve's Crusade game.
Would one side being in front line defence and the other in support/rear make that happen?
This can happen if neither side have any troops on Offensive line and one side have all their troops in either rear echelon or support line as Defensive line troops can only attack troops that are at either Defensive or Offensive line.
We have raised this issue before and Steve have acknowledge that this can be a problem, especial for factions that have colonies on the same planet as combat can become way too one sided if both sides start from a defensive dug in position, there are no real way to defend yourself in that case as there are not really any difference between attack and defend in general.
If you play in a multi-faction game where many sides are controlled by you or any other human you can have rules that simulate defensive stance by not allowing troops in defensive line to attack unless both sides attack. If only one side attack they can't have any troops in defensive line (they have to be in support line) while the opponent can't have any in offensive line. That would effectively simulate offensive and defensive conflicts.
When you land on a planet this rarely is a problem... but you might abuse the AI if they don't use any troops in offensive line as you can just wait and have your troops entrench before attacking. It is not unrealistic to do that but it is unrealistic you can use your entrenched units to then devastate the opponent. Instead you should end up in a cold war situation if neither side have the offensive strength to win against the other.
The AI not putting troops on the offensive line while an invasion is in progress could be considered a bug. Inability to de-escalate in a shared homeworld situation without pulling troops off the defensive line could also be considered a bug.
It is not as much a bug as it is a design flaw with the system... the system have no real concept of attack and defence as it is just all pure "fighting" as both sides always fight on equal terms given they had enough time to fortify their forces.
If two sides have their troops fortified then the one with just a slight advantage will win in a fight between them, you don't need a considerable advantage to attack someone who just want's to defend their territory. If the ground combat was designed from more realistic perspective you should probably need somewhere between 2-3 times the force disparity to beat someone on equal terms even if you both are fortified. But that is not how the game work unless you control both sides, then you can make the game behave like that.
In my opinion the easiest fix would be that defensive line only engages enemy attacking line unless you have a certain proportion of your line units on attack rather than defence.
Let's say that you and your enemy need to have at least 1/3 of both sides line troops on attack line before any of your defensive line troops can engage the enemy defensive troops at all. Otherwise they only engage troops in attacking line. So you can have a small proportion of your troops attacking without endanger your whole army but if you commit enough then both sides get drawn into a huge melee. If you then withdraw all your attacking forces into defensive stance you remove the option for enemy defensive line to do any damage at you at all and they have to rely on attacking forces only.
This way you would get a more natural attack versus defence feel in the game that make more sense... attacking would also need an overwhelmingly large numbers or technological advantage to succeed (or both).
In addition to this I only think that a certain size of troops only should be able to face of against a maximum enemy size and this should depend on both terrain and colony size. The more developed a planet is the more difficult it should be to overwhelm a garrison force as the infrastructure will prevent it in it self.
It would produce more realistic large wars that could potentially drag out for a really long time as it should. Both terrain and infrastructure might make large scale wars less bloody as well and simple take allot more time to conclude. The more forces involved on both sides the longer the conflict should take. Storming a military outpost on a barren moon in a few days is one thing but invading a 4 billion population world defended with half or more a dozen divisions is a completely different scenario.
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In addition to this I only think that a certain size of troops only should be able to face of against a maximum enemy size and this should depend on both terrain and colony size. The more developed a planet is the more difficult it should be to overwhelm a garrison force as the infrastructure will prevent it in it self.
A combat width mechanic based on tonnage (affected by stuff like terrain still) would be very interesting, It would also put more emphasis on having a more in-depth OOB since small formations would have an easier time joining/reinforcing the fight.
I also think that a counter to the attacker fortification problem is to use fortification levels below 1.
Consider using orbital drop pods in your transports - this option exists to protect your transports as it allows them to just dump all ground units at once, however you could make it so that every unit that is dropped this way starts at 0.5 fortification due to how disorganized the troops are in the initial landing, you could also have a commander skill for landing which makes these units start at higher fortification.
This does 2 things:
The defender is incentivized to put some of their units on frontline attack as now is the time where the attackers are at their most vulnerable and where most of their casualties will be.
The attacker is incentivized to not immediately charge in and wait for their troops to establish an actual "beachhead", getting their fortification up to at least 1 before pushing on.
This also means that there is an additional emphasis on STO protection. You could make it so that the fortification penalty does not apply when troops are unloaded from the transport bays normally. Ofc this means that the transports have to linger around STO range for much longer and troops might be coming in piece-meal.
So now defenders are encouraged to have more STO units in order to force an attacker to face the fortification penalty or for them weather the STO storm on their transports.
IMO right now planetary landings are just made too easy because of the drop pods, fast, armored/shielded transports almost completely nullify any benefit STOs give to a defense beyond preventing orbital bombardment. The initial landing should be the bloodiest part of the fight for the attacker and right now it isn't any deadlier than the rest of the fight.
Since this is a very defender-centric suggestion I think there should be some form of combat engineer capability for infantry that speeds up the rate of self-fortification which helps the attacker get over the initial drop phase quicker.
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In addition to this I only think that a certain size of troops only should be able to face of against a maximum enemy size and this should depend on both terrain and colony size. The more developed a planet is the more difficult it should be to overwhelm a garrison force as the infrastructure will prevent it in it self.
A combat width mechanic based on tonnage (affected by stuff like terrain still) would be very interesting, It would also put more emphasis on having a more in-depth OOB since small formations would have an easier time joining/reinforcing the fight.
I also think that a counter to the attacker fortification problem is to use fortification levels below 1.
Consider using orbital drop pods in your transports - this option exists to protect your transports as it allows them to just dump all ground units at once, however you could make it so that every unit that is dropped this way starts at 0.5 fortification due to how disorganized the troops are in the initial landing, you could also have a commander skill for landing which makes these units start at higher fortification.
This does 2 things:
The defender is incentivized to put some of their units on frontline attack as now is the time where the attackers are at their most vulnerable and where most of their casualties will be.
The attacker is incentivized to not immediately charge in and wait for their troops to establish an actual "beachhead", getting their fortification up to at least 1 before pushing on.
This also means that there is an additional emphasis on STO protection. You could make it so that the fortification penalty does not apply when troops are unloaded from the transport bays normally. Ofc this means that the transports have to linger around STO range for much longer and troops might be coming in piece-meal.
So now defenders are encouraged to have more STO units in order to force an attacker to face the fortification penalty or for them weather the STO storm on their transports.
IMO right now planetary landings are just made too easy because of the drop pods, fast, armored/shielded transports almost completely nullify any benefit STOs give to a defense beyond preventing orbital bombardment. The initial landing should be the bloodiest part of the fight for the attacker and right now it isn't any deadlier than the rest of the fight.
Since this is a very defender-centric suggestion I think there should be some form of combat engineer capability for infantry that speeds up the rate of self-fortification which helps the attacker get over the initial drop phase quicker.
I like both the combat width based on tonnage concept and the reduced fortification for attacking troops concept as stated here. You should add this to the suggestions thread/forum.