Aurora 4x
New Players => The Academy => Topic started by: Foolcow on April 07, 2011, 09:57:01 AM
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What ship-based weapons do you need to bombard a planet from orbit? Can it be done with laser-based weapons? Do you need missiles?
I found the home planet of a pre-industrial civilization, and I want them dead. I'm trying to find an easier/quicker way than conquering them with ground forces and then transporting them to an uninhabitable moon.
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Um, why are you wasting a resource? Conquer them, garrison them and let them pay taxes!
Anyway, to your question:
Lasers (and Particle Beams, for that matter) work for planetary bombardement, but their damage is reduced by the atmosphere (Actual Damage = Weapons Damage x (1 - Atmosphere Density), rounded down.
Example: A laser dealing 4 pts of damage will only do 2 pts of damage to a ground target through a 0.5 atmosphere (4 x 0.5 = 2), if the atmosphere would be 0.6, it would only do 1 pt of damage (4 x 0.4 = 1.6, rounded down to 1) This also means, atmospheres of 1.0+ make lasers/Particle Beams useless.
Mesons and Gauss are useless in a bombardement role (gauss, because even a very thin atmosphere reduces their damage to 0 and mesons can´t be used against ground targets at all)
Missiles work best, but leave you with a radioactive wasteland buried under meters of snow (nuclear winter
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Thanks for the help.
Do plasma carronades work for orbital bombardment?
As for why I'm wasting "a resource," I guess you could say it is for role-playing purposes. Resources are only useful if they serve my purpose, which in this case is to secure more habitat-space for humans.
I am aware that population-growth of one species is not affected by the presence of another species, but I choose to disregard that; I think it should be changed, because resources are not unlimited. If my human population grows at 10% per year on a newly colonized low-pop world, it shouldn't be able to achieve that same 10% on a world full of aliens no matter how friendly they are.
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Plasma Carronades should work like lasers and particle beams.
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With the exception of Meson Cannons, all beam weapons are subject to damage reduction do to atmospheric density. While you can target ground troops with beams they are in-effectual, you'll get a message to the effect that beams are to precise a weapon.
Missiles have the inherent issues that hinder your colonizing the planet post genocide event.
Your best bet is pounding PDC's from orbit with mesons, and landing a lot of ground troops. My experience is that having at least 2 divisions that can be dropped is a good start.
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Simple question: when you conquer and garrison a planet, can you exterminate their populace, or are you now a multiracial empire?
Aliens are best studied through a rifle scope.
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If you want them dead, your best bet is to put a bunch of terraformers in orbit and pump toxic gasses into the atmosphere. That'll allow you to keep their installations intact as well.
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Isn't there an enslavement option?
Another frequently quoted idea is the addition of toxic gases to the atmosphere via terraforming. Flourine or Chlorine for example.
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If you want them dead, your best bet is to put a bunch of terraformers in orbit and pump toxic gasses into the atmosphere. That'll allow you to keep their installations intact as well.
Might as well launch a planetary invasion. A developed world would take ages to be chemically "cleansed", and then you'll have to extract all those toxic gasses from the atmosphere for the sake of your own colonists.
Conquered populations go through four political phases of productive inefficiency before they're finally integrated into your culture. I think it takes them at least a year to go through each phase. But I guess you can gradually ship the aliens off to some inhospitable planet if you have enough colony ships. Said planet might not, well, have enough infrastructure. ::)
But then again I don't know if you can merge an empty alien population (and all its structures and things) with a human one on the same planet.
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Aliens are best studied through a rifle scope.
I want them gone.
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Even a developed work will have a problem building the infrastructure to protect the population. It only takes a .01atm amount of a gas in the atmosphere to jump the habibility index up to 2 or 3. For this I would go for Bromine which i think is a 3. This will give you a -75% growth rate. In addition their ag sector is going to grow from 5% to 20% of the total population which is going to shrink the population available for building things from 20% down to 5%. This means they will probably only be getting 1/2 thier industry working effectivly, and this only if they shut their shipyards, reasearch facilites ect down. If they go the infrastructure route they need 300 infrastructure to save 1 million population. Or they need to have a faster terraforming rate than the terraformers in orbit have.
This is actually pretty terrifying to look at. I moddeled the effects using a standard 500m population start on earth and adding .01 atmosphere of Bromine.
Brian
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<snip>you can gradually ship the aliens off to some inhospitable planet if you have enough colony ships. Said planet might not, well, have enough infrastructure. ::)<snip>
Closest solution to GFFP in Aurora
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Closest solution to GFFP in Aurora
GFFP?
Greater Flagstaff Forest Partnership?
Gumby's Final Fantasy Page?
General Fund Food Program?
Gates Formed Fibre Products?
Grace Factory Farm Project?
Global First Financial Partners?
...
...
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GFFP?
Greater Flagstaff Forest Partnership?
Gumby's Final Fantasy Page?
General Fund Food Program?
Gates Formed Fibre Products?
Grace Factory Farm Project?
Global First Financial Partners?
...
...
Genocide For Fun and Profit
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Genocide For Fun and Profit
A popular, though very exploity tactic in Starfire
Matt
(Beaten to the punch!)
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How terrible. ;D
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I should be able to turn my military divisions on the populace if I should so choose. My game of solitaire demands that the only cards left at the end are the diamonds.
Perhaps that would piss off all the other races in the galaxy should they have contact with the race I'm exterminating.
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I should be able to turn my military divisions on the populace if I should so choose. My game of solitaire demands that the only cards left at the end are the diamonds.
Perhaps that would piss off all the other races in the galaxy should they have contact with the race I'm exterminating.
If you've conquered them, you should be able to access their population in SM mod. You should then be able to set the population to whatever you want.
I would decide on a kill rate for each attack point of your ground units (with a penalty for low population, since they'll be harder to find), then drop the pop by the calculated amount every so often. You could also put a suggestion in for Steve to put in an "attack civilian population" option for ground forces. I'm not sure how he'd react. On the one hand, it seems realistic to allow ground troops to commit genocide; on the other it smacks of GFFP. I suspect that if he does put something in it will make it hard to actually eradicate the population (a planet is a big place).
John
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(...)on the other it smacks of GFFP.
How is that a bad thing, as long as it's balanced? As you said, it could take a long while (depending on available ground forces) to eradicate a significant alien population. Thing is, how do you integrate all the facilities assigned to it to your own population afterwards?
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Could you just put a cargo fleet in orbit and use them to transfer everything? I've never had two different populations on the same planet so I don't know.
Do Plasma Torpedoes cause problems like missiles do?
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Could you just put a cargo fleet in orbit and use them to transfer everything? I've never had two different populations on the same planet so I don't know.
Do Plasma Torpedoes cause problems like missiles do?
Afaik that depends on what kind of peace agreement you have, the nature of which determines how much of the loser's industry you take over.
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Could you just put a cargo fleet in orbit and use them to transfer everything? I've never had two different populations on the same planet so I don't know.
Hmm. That'd probably work, actually. Not for all buildings, but most.
EDIT: Now that I think about it, you can probably do that and then abandon the alien side of the colony once you've extracted everything of value. That'll eliminate the alien inhabitants. I'd naturally prefer a less gamey solution, but you work with what's at hand.
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(...)on the other it smacks of GFFP.
How is that a bad thing, as long as it's balanced? As you said, it could take a long while (depending on available ground forces) to eradicate a significant alien population. Thing is, how do you integrate all the facilities assigned to it to your own population afterwards?
Because if the mechanics aren't designed properly, you end up cheaply taking out their population without doing damage to their industrial base - this is the imbalance.
Now that I think of it, if I were Steve I would probably give a pure defence combat factor to civilian populations under attack (based on population size). As you attacked the civies and got hits, they would die. However, you would also get collateral hits on their industrial base. If the defence factor were set properly, it would work out that all the industry would be destroyed by the time you got done killing the population. So you'd get your empty planet, but wouldn't have all that nice alien equipment left over.
As for transferring between populations, I would just use SM mode - subtract from one and add to the other....
John
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A long and laborious ground war should be less devastating to the planet's industrial base than sterilizing it from orbit. But it shouldn't be a freebie. As ground forces advance they occupy facilities, thus no longer shooting at them. Destruction only happens when they push into a new region.
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Well, I'd say the best course for genocide would be invading them, sending some bromine in the atmosphere to kill most of them (if they're pre-TN, they won't be able tod o much), then deport the rest of them to an asteroid somewhere.
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A little background. Keep in mind that I'm trying to recall mailing list conversations from several years ago so the I'm probably going to have the details wrong.
When Steve was starting Aurora the base mailing list were diehard Starfire 3rdR players for the most part. One of the things that had always been considered an imbalance was planetary conquest. It was way to easy and profitable. Don't get me wrong, most of us used variations on GFFP to further our Imperial expansion goals, it was still considered gaming the system. The agreed upon goal for Aurora was that orbital bombardment for the purpose of genocide should have major negative benefits to future use.
Out of those discussions it was determined that planetary invasion by ground troops was the preferred method of planetary conquest. It helped that this was Steves' preferred method as well. The result is that you can "bomb" a population into submission and have a planet your people don't want to live on, or invade and garrisson and have a useful planet and an increase (eventually) in imperial population for workforce and tax base.
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The only other thing i can think of that would be cool ( but unsure if mechanics allow) is to use genetic modification to turn them into humans...
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Well, I conquered five alien races, three of them are Imperial Populations, and the other two are
Candidate Populations. Two of them have Populations at least twice the size of old Terra. They
increased my Tax Base and Productivity enormously, and enabled me to field two massive Battle
Fleets, and four Fast Reaction Fleets. Research is zipping along, and two of those alien populations
can colonize worlds that are uncolonizable by humans. So while I have utilized the "Shiva Option"
and left some planets as radioactive wastelands, my prefered method is conquering them, and
eventually converting them to the worship of the Immortal God-Emperor....er, sorry, wrong game. :)
Eric
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In fact, I think the GFFP solution is already massively discouraged due to the time it takes to expand your economy.
A major limiting factor for expansion is population. I can build construction factories and research labs and components for ships faster than my population grows to support that expansion.
- 25bp per CF tech and a 50% governor + 45% sector governor bonus = 2.85 years construction doubling time = 35% annual construction growth (splitting equally between CF, mines and labs gives you 11.6% growth = 23.4% growth that requires population)
- Maximum population growth is 10% for smallest populations, around 2% after bonuses for capital planets. Your population growth *always* loses.
- Therefore you have roughly 20% of your production base growth unused because your populations can't grow fast enough.
- And this already assumes you have a large proportion of your population in the high growth 25mil colonies. Which can't do anything effectively except mine. (and if you're going for population growth, you need lots of colonies, which is difficult to find, much less find on planets with minerals worth extracting)
Integrating a second homeworld size population, with their attendant facilities, production and research, effectively increases your production base one fold.
I would normally use GFFP in most 4Xs, simply because I cannot spare the attention span needed to build troops, transport, and invade. And then deal with subsequent uprisings and other problems. In Aurora, this is easy since your attention span is effectively as much as you want.
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A little background. Keep in mind that I'm trying to recall mailing list conversations from several years ago so the I'm probably going to have the details wrong.
When Steve was starting Aurora the base mailing list were diehard Starfire 3rdR players for the most part. One of the things that had always been considered an imbalance was planetary conquest. It was way to easy and profitable. Don't get me wrong, most of us used variations on GFFP to further our Imperial expansion goals, it was still considered gaming the system. The agreed upon goal for Aurora was that orbital bombardment for the purpose of genocide should have major negative benefits to future use.
Out of those discussions it was determined that planetary invasion by ground troops was the preferred method of planetary conquest. It helped that this was Steves' preferred method as well. The result is that you can "bomb" a population into submission and have a planet your people don't want to live on, or invade and garrisson and have a useful planet and an increase (eventually) in imperial population for workforce and tax base.
Thanks Charlie - this is what I was sort of remembering in my last post. My "smacks of GFFP" comment was trying to say that using your ground troops to wipe them out after you've already conquered them might push things back into the "way too easy" category, even though you're using ground troops. It should be hard to wipe out a planetary population - especially if it's a planetary population of cockroaches :-)
John
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Eh, I don't see the attraction in killing them all. Bombing any military installations into glass, installing a puppet government propped up by a police state and then shipping everything of value off-world is my preferred solution. Essentially you reduce the aliens to pre-TN tech and keep them there. I'd understand why you might want to eradicate them if you're RPing a "filthy xenos must die" empire, but otherwise the rational decision is always subjugate-and-tax.
If there were population limits on planets, and therefore colonisable real-estate was at a real premium, I might consider wiping out a population to put humans there instead.
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I don't see why anyone gives a damn how easy it is to genocide a population. There is no GFFP in Aurora because, as jseah noted, population growth is your primary limiting factor (so long as you get past any early mineral crunches, which must be true if you're off conquering planets). Genocide almost completely neuters growth by conquest. Don't forget that generated NPR populations scale with your total population, so each new homeworld you conquer substantially increases your total pop.
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To be brutally honest, the ability to turn ground troops against a population should be an option... for a race that is xenophobic. Not really for a player race. But I can easily see this for the hivemind and machine races like we had in Starfire. The real problem with implementing this is that Steve does not have the AI and the deplomacy rules advanced enough to support this kind of variation in NPR behavior.
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Easy. Have the ground troops' xenocidal effectiveness be positively modified by their race's Xenophobia. :P
And it needn't be an NPR-exclusive option. Not everyone plays a goody two-shoes race. Who says we can't play hivemind or machine species ourselves?
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I have thought about having ground troops be able to attempt to kill off a population. This isn't as straightforward as it sounds though. Firstly, the population might resist and form some type of poorly-armed militia, although based on Earth history this isn't necessarily certain. Secondly, it would be a huge undertaking. The Holocaust is the prime example of an industrialized society attempting to do this. Putting aside for a moment the abhorrent nature of the attempt and looking at the logistics, the ####s apparently believed that their own troops would simply not be capable of simply shooting so many people, for both logistical reasons and because of the psychological effect on those troops. Eventually they turned to what was really industrialized genocide, rather than military-led genocide. Also, even though the holocaust is generally regarded as the worst crime in human history and killing six million people is almost unimaginable, that is only a tiny fraction of an entire planetary population. Can you imagine trying to wipe out six billion people and keep it a secret to avoid massive resistance?
If you really wanted to kill the population then you really need WMD, which means nuclear, biological or chemical. In this case nuclear means collateral damage, chemical is probably the terraforming option and biological isn't in the game yet, although it will be at some point. In summary, getting your troops to simply kill everyone is probably the most difficult option and I doubt it could be done in reality.
Steve
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I don't see why anyone gives a damn how easy it is to genocide a population. There is no GFFP in Aurora because, as jseah noted, population growth is your primary limiting factor (so long as you get past any early mineral crunches, which must be true if you're off conquering planets). Genocide almost completely neuters growth by conquest. Don't forget that generated NPR populations scale with your total population, so each new homeworld you conquer substantially increases your total pop.
While pop growth might be a limiting factor in some campaigns, there are many others where you have plenty of population and suffer constraints in other areas.
Steve
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Right, I've got hundreds of millions of useless workers. :p
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I meant keeping it a secret from the other six billion you intend to kill. Once they find out, they aren't going to calmly wait their turn to be massacred.
Steve
And I also feel that the #### reference is flawed. A properly xenophobic race would have no reason to try to hide the genocide from it's own racial population.
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Hamburger factories!
Produces a trade good that lowers the requirement for agricultural worlds on other planets. Costs pop. A lot of pop.
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I meant keeping it a secret from the other six billion you intend to kill. Once they find out, they aren't going to calmly wait their turn to be massacred.
Steve
Steve possession! :o
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Steve possession! :o
I suspect he accidentally hit the "Modify" button instead of "Quote". I've done that in the past.... :-[
John
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I suspect he accidentally hit the "Modify" button instead of "Quote". I've done that in the past.... :-[
John
Not quite sure what happened there....fixed.
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The #### reference is also flawed in the sense that the victims did indeed wait in line to be massacred, even though in general they knew what that waiting line was all about. The reasons for this are not really understood to this day. The founders of modern Israel were very aware of this, didn't want it to repeat itself, which is why they armed themselves to the teeth with all the contemporary consequences.
Other species might handle it differently of course. But that's why you can gas them wholesale with carbon monoxide, SS Einsatzgruppen style. But that reference is also flawed because this is space fantasy in 2011, and the SS didn't know nothing about terraforming. #### references seem to be flawed always, damn.