Ground combat cheat?

from Stardock Forums
I noticed that when I attacked a planet with 2 separate troop transports I would use mass drivers or whatever nasty attack method to thin out the planets population and then conquer the planet with the second ship with a normal attack, and nothing would be destroyed! Also the planet value would remain the same!

It is VERY helpful to use this but I think it would also be nice to be able to bombard an enemy planet without conquering it, leaving a smouldering husk for your enemy to enjoy.

What do you think?

~SDC~
568 views 9 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
Hm... interesting issue. Perhaps, but the cost should be commesurate (sp) with the development of the planet, so effectively bombing a well developed planet owuld cost US a lot of money while bombing some poor farm planet wouldn't cost much.

~SDC~
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
Maybe. I would say the damage would be proportional to the number of people you kill.
So attacking 10B people with 1M troops will not do much but if you send a nice taskforce to attack and you nearly kill all of them (but just not conquer them) then I'd say you should have as much collateral damage as you would have when you did conquer the planet.

~SDC~
Elemental: Reforged
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
Ah, that's a good solution too.

~SDC~
Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top
I think this should be reported as a bug. Are your two transports in a fleet?

~SDC~
Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top
Yeah. this is definitely a bug.

But I do like the idea of planetary bombardment. Right now we have two extremes. No bombardment or using a terror star for total destruction. It'd be cool to bombard a planet back to the 20th century. :D
Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top
Have you seen the attack strategies yet? There are several of them.

~SDC~
Reply #7 from Stardock Forums Top
No I haven't seen the attack strategies? Where can I find them?

btw: I used two transports but NOT in a single fleet. So I used two separate attacks. One to decimate the population with mass drivers and the second one to conquer the planet without any damage.

~SDC~
Reply #8 from Stardock Forums Top
I think what's happening is that damage is applied to the target population according to the chosen attack strategy, but when the invasion fails, the damage is NOT applied to the target planet's infrastructure.

Planetary bombardment makes sense and could obviously be implemented (since that's the effect of this bug), but I'd be worried that the evil AIs would find this too good to pass up. I can just imagine leading one turn and resigning three turns later because none of my planets was over class 12. (:( The cost would have to be artificially high, since in "reality" planetary bombardment would be easier to do. Especially if you were simply trying to wipe out a rival and weren't interested in conquering planets.

End transmission.

~SDC~
Reply #9 from Stardock Forums Top
You can only do planetary invasion now if the defenses are gone. What difference does it make if an enemy takes over your planets or destroys then into uselesness? You should just not allow him to get close ;)

Right now it's just too easy to abuse to use planetary bombardment in a way that it doesn't damage the planet but you still gain the advantages of it.

~SDC~