Invasion tactics help

I'm guessing that the higher the number, the fewer casualties you have (i.e. the higher the population will be after the invasion is done). Since I rarely have money to blow on invasions, I stick with traditional attack (just make sure you have lots of soldier or tech bonuses).


~SDC~

The ratio of those numbers represents roughly how strong your troops are compared to your opponents. If you have a 21:6 advantage over the Drengins, then about every 6 of your soldiers will be able to kill 21 defenders. For the early parts of the game, you can generally win a battle against 5 defenders with 1 attacker, so make sure you check the target planet's population and send enough troops. Due to the high price of using non-tradiontal attacks, you are generally better off saving those for extreme circumstances. In other words, you'll probably never use them in a normal game

Really I found out those numbers are how much luck you have. That is what the manual said anyways after finally finding it. I tried traditional attack and it kept failing. Detonation and tidal surge or whatever is the only thing that works quickly to take planets. Otherwise I used up about 5 transports on one world. I am sure I am not doing something right. Thanks for the help guys.

~SDC~

I doubt the numbers are just pure luck, but they're a good sign of how the battle casualties will turn out with one exception. If you have a large number of attackers almost equal to or more than the defenders, you will receive very little losses. Other than that, casualty counts generally follow those advantage ratios I think.

Fleet your transports - that way you can attack with all your troops at once and only use up some of your transports (the ones carrying the troops who dies, I think).

You Want the highest number possible but if you look on the boxes in the corners they give you other information like Tech Advantage and Morale bonuses. Its important to check those numbers out, the first time you hit a planet your going in blind, but be shure to check thier morale and tech bonues out as they play a huge role in the invasion its self. Its really hard to invade a planet from a race with a large ground warfare tech advantage. Just think what it would be like if your using WW2 tech while the defender has Modern tech, even if you have control of the system getting the planets under control would be a nightmare and cause lots of casualties. They do a fairly good job with this in the game with tech bonuses.

~SDC~

My thoughts on invasions.

I would really like it if there was a way to cancel an invasion, or at least a way to get your relative advantage factor without sacrificing a transport. I usually have a pretty high advantage even over the other major race and I hate waiting all the time necessary to amass 100 billon troops, then finding out I could have gotten by with half that number or something like that. Maybe there is a way to do this, and I haven’t found it. Does anyone know? Like I said I usually just sacrifice a transport to get the details.

Another strategy I have may be considered cheesy or not depending on who you are and I’m sure is widely known to experienced players. This involves purposely losing invasions to erode enemy resistance effectively and getting the wanted plant at a minimum cost of troops and loss to planet quality and improvements. After I sacrifice the first transport, I use the numbers to make a rough calculation on how many troops total it will take to conquer the planet using the invasion tactic that gives me the highest advantage. I take only a fraction, say 50-75% of troops I think are necessary and invade the planet, losing those troops in the process, but drastically reducing the number of defenders. I then take the planet with a clean-up assault using traditional warfare. Apparently the damaging invasion tactics aren’t damaging unless they succeed, so I save troops and get an undamaged planet for the cost of an untraditional assault tactic. The troops I save go to conquering further enemy planets so I can establish a foothold, a forward base of operations if you will, behind enemy lines to launch further assaults from.

What I do is to use Espionage to see if I have superior soldering ability as compared to my target. Have not really figured out how those bonuses translate into the combat ratios but I try to get a good advantage before I invade.

Yes, I'm also exploiting the loophole currently of not having disruptive invasion tactics take effect if the transport did not conquer the system. The developers are aware of it so use it while it lasts

I don't think morale has any direct effect on invasion strengths. The reason morale is there is for information warfare.