Orbital bombardment

[Narmio]

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.

[EarthquakeDamage]

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.

[Charlie Beeler]

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.

[Shadow]

Easy. Have the ground troops' xenocidal effectiveness be positively modified by their race's Xenophobia.

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?

[Steve Walmsley]

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

[Steve Walmsley]

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

[Sheb]

Right, I've got hundreds of millions of useless workers. :p

[Charlie Beeler]

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.

[Thiosk]

Hamburger factories!

Produces a trade good that lowers the requirement for agricultural worlds on other planets.  Costs pop.  A lot of pop.

[Shadow]

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!

[sloanjh]

Steve possession!

I suspect he accidentally hit the "Modify" button instead of "Quote".  I've done that in the past.... 

John

[Charlie Beeler]

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.

[Rastaman]

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.