uberknight72
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Joined: 7/25/2011
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Troop Invasion Overhaul Suggestions
One thing I would love to be added is planetary invasions that can also be manually controlled at a strategyic level. Every planet texture would also have a similar looking stretched-out global map version of it that you can see anytime by clicking on a button that would cause a window to come up showing the strategic map overlay.
The map will randomly placed cities, towns, or villages on the ground of the planet (unless you are an aquatic race in-which it will randomly place cities in the oceans.) around the map depending on the population of the planet and when the city itself was built. Like if the planet was just colonized, the game will randomly place a village sized settlement on the map and when the population goes up quite a bit it will soon develop into a town also causing another village to pop up somewhere else on the map and whenever the pop goes up even more that town will soon develop into a city causing another village to pop up randomly and the previous village to develop into a town also causing another village to pop up and this process will continue until a maximum settlement limit is reached like 20-40 settlements or something depending on the size of the planet.
The development levels would be:
* Village - just starting out. Don't take much population to develop into a town
* Town - Starting to look like civilization. Takes a decent amount of population to develop into a city
* City - 6-10 story buildings turn into 60-100 story buildings and city borders begin to stretch for miles. Requires a very large planet population to even think about developing into a metropolis, most likely the planet would have hit its settlement limit and have 0 villages and very few towns most already developed into citys before the first city even develops into a metroplolis.
* Metropolis - These 60-100 story buildings slowly grew into these sprawling 600-1000 story skyscrapers with nothing but hundreds of miles of endless steel and concrete jungle. As big as it gets, you know the planet is soon reaching its pop cap when all the cities have reached metropolis level, only around several 10 million pop left till cap reached.
Basics
Now that I have explained the settlement system to accompany this overhaul and give some areas of strategical value on the strategy maps now I will go into detail on how invasions will work and what role these settlements will play in these optionally controlled battles that will play out in real time like everything else except this time you can control and oversee the progress without simply relying on who has the highest numbers and watching two scales slowly deplete.
Since these ground battles and invasions could become very common in late-game wars, whenever a planet will currently under attack or being attacked a permanent tab could appear on the right side of the screen that you can pull out and show you all the ground battles currently taking place with a few simple stats like amount of yours and the enemy's forces that are still present and any other useful but brief information to give you an idea on how its currently doing with an option to go check and directly control any specific one if you wish. The AI can handle the battles by them selves unless you decide to switch off the AI in a certain battle if you would rather take control of the whole planetary conquest. Any newly started groundbattles will automatically start with AI on and will pause the screen just in case there are a few options you would like to activate and control yourself as I will go into further detail later.
Another main element of ground battles that applies to all sides of a conflict is to make sure that your battalions are not flanked by enemy battalions. The individual battalions each have 4 sides. Whenever an enemy battalion is engaged the side is the enemy is attacking the battalion is flagged as "busy". But if another enemy battalion moves in and starts attacking another side, your battalion will get a defensive penalty due to flanking. The more of the 4 battalion's sides that are flagged as "busy" the more larger the defensive penalty will become and the chance of that entire battalion will be wiped out due to overwhelming forces. Having another friendly battalion near a side that you fear has a risk of being flanked is a smart defensive precaution to practice and could even allow you to set up your own forces to flank the enemy too. This all just to add to the strategic value of ground battles.
* Defending
If you are the defending side your forces will be divided between all your settlements with most being in your largest settlements and the least being in your smallest depending on what option you set in the empire policy screen or can be personally hand placed before battle if you wish, but remember, it will still take a day or two to move units around to another depending on how far the area you are moving to on the planet is, but is sped up just a little when not under attack since you don't have to worry about defense or any other necessary procedures and logistics required during an invasion. But your main priority is protecting your settlements, although true that without your forces anyway your defenseless, the cities provide some defensive bonuses to any Battalions controlling them although depending on the size of the settlement there is a limit to how many battalions you can have stationed in a settlement. Battalions also placed near a certain radius of a city will have a little tiny bit of a defensive bonus due to being closer to supplies and equipment if needed, but only if the city is under your control. If you have any ships in orbit above the planet, you can go back to main view, click on one of them, tell them to tactically bombard a planet (A different option besides your usual, reckless, Bombared Planet option.) and then click on the planet you wish to tactically bombared causing the planetary strategy map to pop up and let you select a target area to bombared, but the damage would be great and if to close to friendly cities or forces, can cause a very negative effect on your alignment and planet approval, although the planets approval will be hurt a little regardless if you hit any friendlies of not.
If its your homeworld then you will have a chance of having one of your battalions turning into a hero battalion when the battle starts or sometime during the battle. Heros have a chance of being generated from battalions on worlds other than your homeworld but the chance is very small, like 3-5%. Hero units will twice the strength and effectivness of a normal battalion and will stay with you for the durations of the game until its is destroyed in battle or 50-80 years have past since the hero battalion was transformed from a normal or milita unit with milita units having a higher chance to become a hero.
Also, if the battalion, whether its normal, milita, or hero, is fighting on a planet perfect to the races prefered conditions like water worlds, desert worlds, and such.
* Invading
If your on the invading side things are a little different. When the first of your troops first land on the planet the game will pause and give you a few options unless you want the AI to do this part for you...
You will get to tell where you want your first battalion to land by placing a rally point, a rally point can be placed only outside of a certain radius of a settlement, any more forces will land at this rally point and more rally points can be placed with certain priority ranging from 1-3 that will determine whether or not a battalion lands there over another. Up to 4 of these rally points can be placed with the priority easily changed by clicking on the rallypoint and selecting its priority with a drop-down menu. Once on the planets surface, your main priority is to start taking a few cities to obtain a strong foothold on the planet, defending forces will have a small defense bonus even if not in a city since they know the terrain better than the attackers so having a foothold would be important, and signifigant numbers are always important anyway in an invasion.
Taking over the planet will also no longer give the victorious ground forces absolute immediate control of the planets entire orbital defenses anymore either, it will only shut down all the defense platforms and only give the invaders control to the space-port but only with 3/4th the original firepower and only after a good 7-10 days after the entire planet was seized and a bit more if the space-port is medium and even more days if its large, and it wont be until a month after the space-port and the defense platforms has been captured before control is giving to the victorous invadors to the remaining defense platforms, and given full firepower to the captured space-port. Also since the ground battles themselves can last longer than originally, unless you have an absolutely overwhelming force, the chances of you capturing the planet before the space battle going on above is over and before the space-ports and defense platforms themselves are destroyed is much, much smaller.
If you have the ability, you can use bombardments just like the defenders can, although not as accurate as it would be if it was the defenders calling the bombardment, can be used significantly to help dwindle down defenses if you aren't worried about population casualties. If the invaders previously controlled the planet before the defending side took it prior, the defending side will not have its bonus to defense outside of settlements due to not being familiar with the terrain and locals. Thus putting the invaders or even rebels at an equal or advantagious position.
If its the enemy empire's homeworld you are attacking, the defenders while having all the bonuses to defense outside of settlements and other advantages to being the original controllers of the planet and due to being familiar with the terrian, but they also will have a 10% or 20% chance that a battalion will turn into a Hero battalion that will be double the strength and effectiveness of an normal battalion of the battlions race of origin. This happens on homeworlds exclusivly due to the whole "defend the homeland" mentality that the population will obtain. There is as higher chance of the hero being originated from a milita battalion than a normal battalion.
The normal, milita, or the new hero battalions will also recieve a small bonus if the battalion is fighting on a planet perfect to the aliens race's prefered condition like water worlds, desert worlds, and such. Possibly equally matching the bonuses of the original defender at times, making the battle equal, this does not stack on top of the defense bonus on familiar worlds. Also the only way a world will become familiar to the race is it will need to be under the control of the planet for at least 20 years, or be the empires original homeworld giving the race perfect familiarism to the planet from the start.
Final Thoughts
Although I loved how they had introduced ground combat to the game not long ago, I hated how little control or information you had with groundbattles and wished that there was a way to allow ground combat to be optionally controlled without adding much more micro management if any since you can just let the AI do it, and since it progresses slow, even slower than some space battles, you won't need to be switching back and forth between groundbattles over and over agian if you decide to controll all of them since it takes a little bit for forces to move across the planets terrain and battles between two battalions themselves can last a several days especially if the battle is taking place in a settlement with lots of defending Battalions that is a high development level.
Although my ideas that I have thrown out here may not be perfect, or completely thought out, I did take alot of time to get my information and do plenty of pre-reading to make sure I had it all as clear and as little conflicting elements as possible. I would love to see these elements added for it will significantly add some more depth and interest in an already deep and interesting game. I didn't bother talking about adding different types of units since I think that what it has now is enough to be satisfiying and what I have wrote down here will already be complex enough to work out without having to throw in anymore different kinds of units. Since, I like to pretend that the battalions themselves are actually mixed consisting of all the other divisions of a military force like infantry, artillery, air, transportation, and armor. But simplified down to a single, easy to manage unit that the officers and field commanders of each battalion themselves control the small tactical skirmishes between all these forces in the battalion's battles for you, all going on behind the scenes, but simplified down to statistics for units left (health), and battle readyness, and defensive bonuses that you can see to see how the battalion is doing. The imagination can at times explain things better than the game developers themselves can with actual gameplay features. Especially if visuals aren't important, or neccesary.
Feel free to post your agreements or disagreements with what I have and tell me if there is anything that needs to be fixed due to conflicting factors with my descriptions, or anything that needs to be explained better above. :)
< Message edited by uberknight72 -- 9/20/2011 8:35:32 PM >
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