Building a simple army to conquer the planet NPR

[Entaro (OP)]

Hello. As a beginner, I don't want to spend too much time and resources building a ground army. Is it possible to conquer the world of NPR with simple infantry?

And what is the optimal size of "divisions"? What size (approximately) armies usually conquer foreign "home planets"?

[Jorgen_CAB]

Hello. As a beginner, I don't want to spend too much time and resources building a ground army. Is it possible to conquer the world of NPR with simple infantry?

And what is the optimal size of "divisions"? What size (approximately) armies usually conquer foreign "home planets"?

In general you can use Infantry to win... make sure you use allot of infantry with CAP weapons which are the most effective. For anti-armour duty you build pure anti-armour units which you hold in rear echelon or in space on the ships in orbit until most of the enemy infantry has been dealt with.

A good size of formation is probably somewhere about 25kt of troops as it suites the number of ground combat commanders. A good size for division are then about 100kt, roughly. Artillery is not really that useful, that is more for role-play than anything. But it all come down to role-play and what is fun in the end... this is against the AI though, against other player controlled forces it is more complicated.

But the main idea is that you combat the infantry first and their other units second. Some tanks formations with only CAP weapons are good to for the breakthrough value, but tanks cost way more than infantry so you get more killing power using infantry but some cheap tanks are good to take some of the enemy fire-power.

[nuclearslurpee]

Hello. As a beginner, I don't want to spend too much time and resources building a ground army. Is it possible to conquer the world of NPR with simple infantry?

Yes, if you want to be boring about it. 

In Aurora nearly any combination of ground units which is not too silly (if you send 500,000 infantry with nothing but SAM launchers into battle you have only yourself to blame) will be able to win a battle. The far more important factors are relative size of forces (quadratic effect) and relative technology levels (fourth-power effect). Infantry armies are actually quite efficient due to being able to deploy a lot of light weapons without overhead from using a heavier base class, but they will take a lot of losses so you will be building a lot of replacements.

And what is the optimal size of "divisions"? What size (approximately) armies usually conquer foreign "home planets"?

The best size for a basic front-line formation is probably 20k or 25k tons, mainly due to the need for a lot of commanders. If you want to use multiple HQ levels (not required, but good for flavor and to use the support weapons), each HQ formation should be the same size and have a large enough HQ to control about 3 sub-formations. For example, if you consider 25k ton Brigades as your base unit, then a "Division" formation would have 25k tons (of support weapons, supplies, etc.) and a HQ able to control 100k tons, and you would attach 3x Brigades to that Division. A Corps could then control three Divisions (HQ size 325k tons), and an Army formation might control a million tons (3 Corps).

Usually to conquer an NPR home world you will need several million tons of ground forces at a minimum, possibly even in excess of 10 million in some cases. This requires building up a large number of ground force training centers and researching the ground forces training techs ideally.

A reasonable kind of line infantry formation might look like:

   1x STA+HQ25
   3000x INF+PW
   300x INF+CAP
   150x INF+LAV
   100x INF+LB
   186x INF+LOG-S

This is a reasonable 25k ton infantry brigade (actually 24,997 tons) with a good mix of support weapons but a focus on killing enemy infantry first and foremost. It is important to have a high proportion of basic rifles (PW component) so that combat losses will not mount up too quickly among the heavier support weapons. If you want to use higher HQ formations, the key components to use are bombardment (LB and MB are fine) and if you research Construction Equipment it is good to include some of these as well to improve your fortification levels. Note that NPRs do not use ground support fighters so the AA components are unnecessary unless for roleplay or use in multiple-player-race games.

It is also important to consider your logistics solutions, simply put to mount a successful planetary invasion you will need a lot of extra supplies. The best way to do this right now is to make formations with nothing but INF+LOG-S units, place these in the rear echelon, and set to "Use As Replacements" with the checkbox in the main ground forces window. These will replace the organic LOG-S in your front line formations as they are consumed (or, occasionally, suffer combat losses).

Finally, consider how you will get your multiple millions of tons of ground units into the battle zone. You need transports, especially drop-capable transports, and you also will probably need to deal with STO weapons on the ground - either by nuking them from orbit, or by using heavily-armored (8-12 layers of armor at least) drop-capable transports to absorb the ground fire and deploy your troops as quickly as possible. Either way, you need to build a lot of transports, so get started early.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Actually, from a math perspective though CAP infantry reduce losses better by destroying the enemy troops that fire on them. So from a pure math perspective an all CAP infantry army is preferable. Tanks with CAP is also OK, medium tanks is best for this from a cost perspective as they are good at soaking up hits from the enemy infantry for a relatively cheap price, you can even give them light armour to make them half the cost and still doing pretty much the same job equally well.

The system works pretty well when not alll you meet is infantry, but NPR are a bit too infantry heavy for combined arms to be very effective.

Infantry with PW is mainly a way to drag combat out to soak losses so you may perhaps be able to send reinforcements to an invasion, infantry is not that good at winning combat. Infantry with PWL is even better at dragging out combat as they are pretty cheap to train, but you are not being very nice from a humanitarian perspective...

To put it into some perspective... a medium tank with two CAP and light armour cost you 1.68 BP, an infantry with CAP has a cost of 0.24 BP and infantry with PW the cost is 0.1 BP. So for 17 infantry you get one medium tank that fires 12 shots, this is hands down very effective... so against NPR they are very effective... I would say about 40-60% tanks and rest CAP infantry for wave one and then some anti-armour formations to mop up once a large chunk of the enemy infantry is destroyed. The tank also only take up half the space on your assault transport versus those 17 infantry.
This is pretty boring and gamey and not how it works in the real world, but that is how the mechanic works. You also should never mix weapons in vehicles either so you can deploy them when you need them based on the enemies composition and battle fatigue.

[Andrew]

Emphasis you need to land those millions of tons of troops quickly. If you land half a million tons and then another half a million tons every 2 weeks each invasion wave will be wiped out before the reinforcements arrive. So build lots of transports and stage your troops through a forward base close to the target planet preferably a moon so the gap between waves on target is a minimum.
Also unless you can land most of your troops in one wave you have to kill those STO weapons or they will eventually attrit your transports to death with repeated hits each time they land troops.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Emphasis you need to land those millions of tons of troops quickly. If you land half a million tons and then another half a million tons every 2 weeks each invasion wave will be wiped out before the reinforcements arrive. So build lots of transports and stage your troops through a forward base close to the target planet preferably a moon so the gap between waves on target is a minimum.
Also unless you can land most of your troops in one wave you have to kill those STO weapons or they will eventually attrit your transports to death with repeated hits each time they land troops.

I would probably never assault a planet without getting rid of those STO weapons first through bombardment and then you can use cheap transport to land your entire army at once... probably cheaper in the long run as once a transport is built you don't need to pay for it ever again, so you can build up a large capacity of troops transports if you really need it. You also can't rely in the fact there will be a good staging area nearby either and using ships with drop pods is extremely expensive. I only use assault transports on smaller colonies where I don't need multiple million of troops to conquer them. For the price of one heavily armoured, fast assault transport with drop pods you probably can have three or four regular cheap transports who are slow, cheap and fragile. They only show up once an area is secured.

[nuclearslurpee]

Actually, from a math perspective though CAP infantry reduce losses better by destroying the enemy troops that fire on them. So from a pure math perspective an all CAP infantry army is preferable.

I'm not sure this is correct. I have not run the numbers for a large planetary army, but when we had a mathy thread about ship combat some time ago the conclusion was that while CAP marines have the faster killing rate, they also suffer more loss of tonnage (which is what matters for replacing losses after a battle) per boarding assault than the same tonnage of PWL marines. The optimum was conjectured to be some combination of PWL and CAP marines but the exact balance was not known.

For CAP and PW infantry in planetary combat I expect that it is a much closer comparison. CAP is 250% as effective per ton in terms of killing power (PW: 0.2 shots per ton, CAP: 0.5 shots per ton), however when INF is the base class CAP costs 240% as much tonnage per kill scored by the enemy - so it is very close, at least close enough that I would consider each type roughly equally viable (certainly, weight of numbers or technology will easily eclipse the effect of PW/CAP choice). In this case I would again conjecture that there is some optimal mix of PW/CAP infantry but I do not have any numerical analysis to prove this. Of course once we start thinking about mounting CAP on other base types (static or vehicle, both have advantages) then we get into a more complex analysis as such CAP-armed units are more resilient but also improve the effectiveness of the enemy's heavy weapons such as LAV/MAV.

Given the closeness of these weapon types I also would suggest that the ability of PW infantry to outlast the enemy is often valuable, for example when your transport capacity is small enough that you require multiple waves of combat drops to land all of your forces then you may want your first waves to survive longer and then support the following waves. Longer-lasting front line formations are also essential for maximizing the effect of artillery and other force multipliers if you choose to use these which I think most players who do not cheese everything with SHV/UHV do because big guns that explode things are fun.

[Entaro (OP)]

Usually to conquer an NPR home world you will need several million tons of ground forces at a minimum, possibly even in excess of 10 million in some cases. This requires building up a large number of ground force training centers and researching the ground forces training techs ideally.

A reasonable kind of line infantry formation might look like:

   1x STA+HQ25
   3000x INF+PW
   300x INF+CAP
   150x INF+LAV
   100x INF+LB
   186x INF+LOG-S

This is a reasonable 25k ton infantry brigade (actually 24,997 tons) with a good mix of support weapons but a focus on killing enemy infantry first and foremost. It is important to have a high proportion of basic rifles (PW component) so that combat losses will not mount up too quickly among the heavier support weapons. If you want to use higher HQ formations, the key components to use are bombardment (LB and MB are fine) and if you research Construction Equipment it is good to include some of these as well to improve your fortification levels. Note that NPRs do not use ground support fighters so the AA components are unnecessary unless for roleplay or use in multiple-player-race games.

This is exactly what I needed, thank you very much! I'll try to do something, but I'm not at all sure that I can beat NPR - so far he has much more than mine!)

Do I understand correctly that I must completely destroy all the fortresses of the planetary defense from orbit?

Is there any other way to help the troops from orbit? What weapons do you need for this?
I would like, ideally, not to damage the industry of the captured planet too much ...

[nuclearslurpee]

Do I understand correctly that I must completely destroy all the fortresses of the planetary defense from orbit?

You don't have to but it is probably the best strategy in most cases.

Is there any other way to help the troops from orbit? What weapons do you need for this?
I would like, ideally, not to damage the industry of the captured planet too much ...

You can use the FFD component to allow ships in orbit to support ground forces, if and only if they are armed with beam weapons. In this case you might want a formation more like:

   1x STA+HQ25
   3000x INF+PW
   300x INF+CAP
   150x INF+LAV
   100x INF+LB
   4x INF+FFD
   162x INF+LOG-S

A bit less supplies but with a good replacement formations strategy this is not a problem.

However, using this method the ships in orbit will only fire once per ground combat increment (8 hours). Since beam weapons can fire much more rapidly, it may be more effective to target the enemy ground troops directly to do naval bombardment - in this case, ships with missiles can also participate. While this method is more effective, it will also cause far more collateral damage due to the much lower accuracy of each shot.

The advantage to using FFD and the orbital support mechanic, rather than naval bombardment (these sound similar but reference quite different tactics!), is the relatively light collateral damage. Orbital support also makes better use of your limited MSPs which will be consumed as you fire your weapons to do repairs - at 1% chance of failure per weapon firing, you will chew through your MSPs quite quickly in either case, but orbital support is more accurate so you will score more hits per MSP consumed.

Again, however, missile-only ships or fleets cannot do orbital support, and must do naval bombardment or stand off entirely.

I would probably recommend the following procedure:

• Naval bombardment to eliminate all STOs (STOs are revealed only once they fire, so you must bait them into shooting at you - firing a wave of missiles is a good way to accomplish this with low risk).
• Optionally, naval bombardment until you have reduced the enemy forces to a size that you think you can handle with ground combat. This ideally strikes a balance between securing victory and limiting collateral damage. Note that the amount of ground forces you detect by your active sensors may be anywhere from 2x to 6x as much in reality, since fortification reduces the sensor signature of ground units.
• Land troops and use orbital support if applicable and desired.

[Jorgen_CAB]

I'm not sure this is correct. I have not run the numbers for a large planetary army, but when we had a mathy thread about ship combat some time ago the conclusion was that while CAP marines have the faster killing rate, they also suffer more loss of tonnage (which is what matters for replacing losses after a battle) per boarding assault than the same tonnage of PWL marines. The optimum was conjectured to be some combination of PWL and CAP marines but the exact balance was not known.

For CAP and PW infantry in planetary combat I expect that it is a much closer comparison. CAP is 250% as effective per ton in terms of killing power (PW: 0.2 shots per ton, CAP: 0.5 shots per ton), however when INF is the base class CAP costs 240% as much tonnage per kill scored by the enemy - so it is very close, at least close enough that I would consider each type roughly equally viable (certainly, weight of numbers or technology will easily eclipse the effect of PW/CAP choice). In this case I would again conjecture that there is some optimal mix of PW/CAP infantry but I do not have any numerical analysis to prove this. Of course once we start thinking about mounting CAP on other base types (static or vehicle, both have advantages) then we get into a more complex analysis as such CAP-armed units are more resilient but also improve the effectiveness of the enemy's heavy weapons such as LAV/MAV.

Given the closeness of these weapon types I also would suggest that the ability of PW infantry to outlast the enemy is often valuable, for example when your transport capacity is small enough that you require multiple waves of combat drops to land all of your forces then you may want your first waves to survive longer and then support the following waves. Longer-lasting front line formations are also essential for maximizing the effect of artillery and other force multipliers if you choose to use these which I think most players who do not cheese everything with SHV/UHV do because big guns that explode things are fun.

It is trust me... I have run the numbers...

100 CAP infantry = 240 PW infantry

I will assume 10% hits per turn just for sake of the demonstration...

Turn 1
100 CAP = 600 shots
240 PW = 240 shots

CAP kill 25% and the PW only kill 24%... so it spirals from there...

Turn 2
76 CAP = 456 shots
180 PW = 180 shots

Turn 3
58 CAP = 348 shots
134 PW = 134 shots

CAP have received 42% losses and the PW have received 48% losses....

You are better to use the tanks to soak damage from the CAP infantry than other infantry so you can kill the enemy infantry faster. The amount of anti-vehicle weapons is almost insignificant in the overall picture against NPR forces for this purpose, they rarely have enough to make this important anyway. The important way is to have their infantry target your tanks and not your infantry. Some people would probably argue that an all medium tank army is all you need, but I think a combination of tanks and CAP infantry is the best at the end of the day, the CAP deliver more infantry killing power per ton shipped as well.

For boarding it is different as you can often use PWL weapons not PW weapons, so it is different. But that is only against NPR which don't have security forces on their ships... right?!?

[Jorgen_CAB]

In terms of bombardment you can build specific bombardment cruisers and use either reduced sized lasers or rail-guns, doesn't matter which. Don't use too large weapons as your intention with indiscriminate bombardment is to cause as little collateral damage as possible and you want to eliminate infantry anyway. Just cram as many cheap lasers or rail-guns in them as possible and you will keep your MSP cost down to the bare minimum.

You can have them do both indiscriminate bombardment and precision bombardment as well... no need to choose between the two.

Don't use your regular ship for indiscriminate bombardment, that is just too expensive and will not produce a good result.

[Entaro (OP)]

How do I know how long it will take for my troops to land (without drop capsules, in a simple way)?
What landing speed should I aim for?

As far as I understand, I need to first move my entire army to the system closest to NPR, and then, as soon as a battle begins in the enemy's system, quickly transport the entire army to the nearest to the main enemy planet in order to quickly organize an invasion from there.

[Jorgen_CAB]

How do I know how long it will take for my troops to land (without drop capsules, in a simple way)?
What landing speed should I aim for?

As far as I understand, I need to first move my entire army to the system closest to NPR, and then, as soon as a battle begins in the enemy's system, quickly transport the entire army to the nearest to the main enemy planet in order to quickly organize an invasion from there.

You should use drop capable transports if you do this and have allot of Cargo Handling systems on them to reduce the time it takes to load the troops.

If you do the other route you just load up ALL the troops into one large transport fleet and the time it takes to unload them does not really matter as you have secured the orbit of the planet before hand.

In my opinion it is more economically viable to invade home worlds with cheap transports that can take one 10 million army in one go rather than one drop capable fleet that take them in chunks of perhaps a few million at a time. The latter can cause huge problems and depends on that there is a world close by to stage an invasion, the first options really don't.

I usually maintain capabilities in both so I have some options. Perhaps 500.000 to 1.000.000 in dropping some elite forces and then whatever capability I need to drop a large multi-million force against large populated colonies.

When you look at the cost of a cheap transport versus a capable assault transport the cost of the latter usually are about 4-5 times the cost... it also produce more cost over time as you will feel inclined to replace them as you develop better armour, CIWS and engine technology. The regular transports you really don't need to upgrade very often as whatever mission they perform are very rarely time sensitive or need any armour what so ever.

To give some perspective in cost... a cheap transport usually cost about half of what the troops they carry cost while an assault carrier usually are about the same cost as the elite forces they carry, especially as those elite forces are much more expensive than my regular army forces is. You don't want to build 10 million elite forces, that is super expensive and will take a huge time to build and require a stupendous amount of ground force construction capabilities, probably better used for other purposes. Also think about all the upgrades you need to do to make them still relevant as well.

You can go with whatever doctrine you like, as long as you look at the costs and decide if the benefit or drawbacks are worth it.

[Entaro (OP)]

To give some perspective in cost... a cheap transport usually cost about half of what the troops they carry cost while an assault carrier usually are about the same cost as the elite forces they carry, especially as those elite forces are much more expensive than my regular army forces is. You don't want to build 10 million elite forces, that is super expensive and will take a huge time to build and require a stupendous amount of ground force construction capabilities, probably better used for other purposes. Also think about all the upgrades you need to do to make them still relevant as well.

You can go with whatever doctrine you like, as long as you look at the costs and decide if the benefit or drawbacks are worth it.

I totally agree that it makes more sense to use large, cheap, simple transports.
My question is how much do I need compared to the size of my army ...

Let's say I create an army of 3 million. And transports - for 1 million people. I will transport (after victory in space) the entire army to the planet or even the moon closest to the enemy ... And then I will start to land 1 million people. How much of a problem will be the time of the direct disembarkation and landing of troops from transports?

[Jorgen_CAB]

To give some perspective in cost... a cheap transport usually cost about half of what the troops they carry cost while an assault carrier usually are about the same cost as the elite forces they carry, especially as those elite forces are much more expensive than my regular army forces is. You don't want to build 10 million elite forces, that is super expensive and will take a huge time to build and require a stupendous amount of ground force construction capabilities, probably better used for other purposes. Also think about all the upgrades you need to do to make them still relevant as well.

You can go with whatever doctrine you like, as long as you look at the costs and decide if the benefit or drawbacks are worth it.

I totally agree that it makes more sense to use large, cheap, simple transports.
My question is how much do I need compared to the size of my army ...

Let's say I create an army of 3 million. And transports - for 1 million people. I will transport (after victory in space) the entire army to the planet or even the moon closest to the enemy ... And then I will start to land 1 million people. How much of a problem will be the time of the direct disembarkation and landing of troops from transports?

That is what I tried to say... if you use cheap transports you build as many transports as you need to transport all the troops you would ever expect to partake in a single invasion. No need to find a place to stage them from. If you stage troops somewhere you need to use drop capable troop ships. I never would do that for large scale invasions in general.

Loading time is something you will have to test out... it depends on the amount of cargo transport and the size of the transport hold. So it depends... Even for drop capable ships you need allot of cargo handling system to pick up the troops but you will drop the instantly so you cut the time in half for loading/unloading the troops.

As an example it would take me one day to load a 25kt formation onto one of my transport using 4 levels of Cargo Handling... just to give you some estimations.

You probably can optimise thing with Logistic officers and fleets and naval admin commands.