Recently, IvanK said something that really struck a chord with me. A very interesting point (in my mind at least) was raised here. Building ground forces for any reason beyond planning an invasion is often unnecessary and unrewarding for exactly the reasons IvanK's stated. I'd been purely looking at ground combat from the angle of how we can improve it when it takes place, but now I'm started thinking about how we can make preparing for it and actually initiating it more engaging. I really think there's a lot of unexplored space in that regard. So, here's a simple question... What if just having space fleets patrolling your systems wasn't a foolproof way to prevent invasions? Well, if it were easier for military transports to deploy on enemy planets with less/no regard for enemy ship patrols, a whole new threat would be introduced to the game. Ideally, if a race really wanted to focus on it, they could use a very strong ground combat game, as opposed to the traditional strong military fleet game, to achieve their goals. So, how do we do that? How we get military troop transports to deploy more consistently when key planets are almost always guarded by defensive fleets? I've been tossing ideas around in my mind and came up with some ideas that I feel have potential. I'm sure as a community we could come up with many more. 1) Using covert technology perhaps? Perhaps specialized stealth transports that can bypass most detection methods until its too late. Chameleon technology that allows your ship and troops to look like the native population of the race they're invading. Mechanized infantry that can masquerade as other technology. For instance, a seemingly harmless shipment of electronics that comes to life (along the line of robot transformers) and starts attacking the populace once they've landed. 2) Espionage? Spy option to diplomatically convince the planetary governor that the approaching transport(s) are carrying "goods" or a "gift" when in reality they are filled with troops poised to strike. A Trojan Horse of the future if you will. Spy option to convince (bribes) dock workers at the space port to alert the orbiting fleets that the incoming ships are allowed to land and not to fire on and destroy them. Spy option to incite a riot in the city causing a breakdown of normal protocol thereby creating a window of time where troop ships can land without being intercepted. 3) Brute Force & Technology? Incoming transports have a chance to land despite orbiting defensive ships, but each transport also has a chance to be destroyed instantly. The chance of this happening would be modified based on tech on the transports, the number of orbiting defensive ships, and possibly the size/speed of the defensive ships. Large ships used for defense could be less effective at intercepting than smaller ships (thereby giving another reason for having small ships around all game long). This allows attackers to still try a ground invasion if they are willing to risk losing the ship and troops entirely. (For this to work I'd say troops would have to be in a somewhat limited supply and/or the costs have to be high enough overall to create a REAL risk for the invader) Teleporter technology that allows some troops to land even if the troop transport is blown up before the whole ship can land. 4) Your ideas? In closing, obviously, any ideas in this regard would require ample amounts of testing and further design work. They may or may not fit the scope of the game, but I do think they are feasible to implement. There would certainly need to be ways to mitigate in some regard against being surprise invaded/conquered, but whether or not a player/AI chooses to allocate precious (limited hopefully) resources to do so, would be a strategic choice. If I knew a particular race known for ground invasions was in my neighborhood, or that some race has recently been hit by such an invasion fleet (perhaps even based on info shared in a diplomatic discussion with them), I'd certainly be doing whatever I could to secure myself quick. I'd seek out enemy spies, build ground defenses, build specific counter-invasion patrol fleets, etc.
Fascinating subject. A starting basis might be the introduction of a new class of ship analogous to the Amphibious assault ships of wet navies. Ships that can fight their way through defences with a good chance of survival, would not be able to go toe to toe with a pure warship of the same size but could hold their own against many classes of ships or ground assets. They would need to be expensive to build and maintain.
Hmm, I see some MoO 1 ideas. There troop transports had some amount of HP and if unescorted with warships there was some sort of runing the gauntlet calculation. If defender didn't have enough firepower to kill invaders off, surviving ones would proceed to ground combat. There were late game technologies which gave transporters a chance to bypass gauntlet (combat transporters) and partial counter for it (sub-space interdictor). Troop were valuable because they were literately empire's population so sending bunch of troops left factories unmanned and diminished economy. Interestingly, during early access MoO CtS had troop scarcity mechanic too. Troops were separate figures from population and grew with their own pace, much like in MoO 2 but building transporter subtracted them from planet. So if there was not enough troops on planet you couldn't build invasion ships. I don't know if they mechanic is still there because were a lot of complaints about how it slow conquest down considerably. First player have to find a colony which can build a transport (solvable on UI level) and then drag the transporter from the hearth of the empire through starlane endpoints (wasting a turn on each lane switch) to the front line.
I like the idea of a new class of ship specifically built to be able to take a beating in order to complete its mission. I wasn't that familiar with the amphibious assault ship concept, but you inspired me to do some reading about them. Similar to how the amphibious assault ships use transport helicopters to land troops, I could see this new star ship class being used to carry smaller, faster, and more fragile assault vessels. Once the new star ship class gets into orbit, these smaller vessels, perhaps a fighter-class module designed specifically for troop transport, would eject and land these troops on the surface at a high speed that enemy patrols can't easily intercept. The carrier may ultimately get destroyed, but the troops (or at least some of them) would already be on the ground. Defensively, I'd propose some technology and structures such as surface to air missiles designed to intercept the smaller transports that are ejected. Continuing to research in this area would introduce more effective missiles. High cost, limited "slots" for these types of defenses, tech choices (choosing these means not never unlocking some other cool technology), or some other method would need to be in place to keep these from being a "no brainer" decision to include on every planet. Admittedly it has been a long time since I've played MoO 1, so I've forgotten some of the mechanisms it has in place. It sounds like I'd like to see a similar system return only with even more options and refinements. I'm a bit tired of troop transports being relegated to cleanup crews I need to build after the enemy fleets have been wiped out. I'd rather they become a viable method of conquest if a player choose to focus on it.
Don't hit me for bringing up that game but in MoO 3 troop transporters were equal to ordinary military ships. Troop capacity was simply one of the modules you could put on ship along with beam weapons, missiles and fighter bays. No imagine the same idea but in MoO 2 setting where you could drop troops like you would bombs and "infect" planet with them. After space battle ground combat happens between defender and landed invaders, no matter if attacker has or has not space supremacy. Would that fit you bill?
Touche mon ami, tres bien! Assault carriers. It could be either a dedicated class or done through a module as Ivan K suggests as long as certain parameters are kept. An assault carrier would carry fast drop pods instead of fighters and should be restricted to larger hull types. Think of a battleship size ship, with the same defensive capability as one but only the offensive armament of a cruiser. Additionaly, if you are to include bombers in the game, the assault carrier could get a squadron of them to help soften targets (and actually give the bombers some kind of role) A light assault carrier could be the size of a cruiser with the same defences and virtually no offensive capability. (The idea is that if you use a module, the module has to be big and take up a lot of hull space) Smaller sizes for planetary assault make little sense as I see it unlikely that a company or battalion size unit could take a planet Defences would be as you suggest with possibly an inherent defensive capability given to fighters as well which would augment the usefulness of fighter garrisons. As long as additional research is available to both increase defensive capabilities and make the assault pods harder to kill, you would not need to worry much if players installed defensive capabilities on all their worlds, this would make it easier to implement I think and perhaps also qualify as an additional "no brainer". (sorry, I just couldn't resist) Ivan K mentioned the evil that should not be named but was right in doing so, there were some very good ideas there, the execution of those ideas however was lacking.
I like the 3rd option, especially if you have troop landing modules for the military ships instead of the usual MOO2 transports. Its also quite easy to visualize in the tactical game because if the cruisers with the landing module reach a planet on the tactical map, it could drop (from a gameplay and graphical pov) its troops like it drops other stuff like bombs. And then the ground combat with existing defense troops could be duked out parallel to the rest of the space turns, meaning that 1 turn on the tactical map portrays the space combat turn and the planetary ground combat turn. It also means that you have to think about the design of your troop module ships. Are they fast to be able to approach rapidly on the enemy planet? Or should they be heavily armored to counter planetary rocket fire? Or should they be cheap and small with only a few troop module? Or maybe they should be multipurpose ships with bombing bays too? The possibilities of creative design is quite nice here. Such a solution also means of course that there is no need for a MOO2 style bombardement/invasion screen after the end of tactical space combat because the bombing/invasion combat is handled at the same time of the space combat.
Thanks for all the feedback. There are a lot of intriguing ideas here, and I can already envision them coming together to form the basis for a strategically deep and engaging ground combat system. This is definitely something I'm going to be thinking about over the next few days as you've given me a lot to consider.
I like the ‘running the gauntlet’ idea, especially if it plays out on the tactical map and you have to physically get your troop transports through the blockade and onto the planet. It’d be fun to have a ‘mission’ on the tactical map that wasn’t just ‘wipe out the enemy’. You could drop off your troops and then make a run for it, if your fleet was inferior, and it’d still be a strategic success. Of course you wouldn’t then be able to support your ground troops with orbital bombardment, but perhaps you wouldn’t need to if you had high-quality armies. The gauntlet idea would also correlate well with multi-turn planetary invasions (where the takeover was based on a % bar that progressed each turn according to conditions on the ground). It could lead to interesting situations where the enemy has dropped troops on one of your planets and parked its fleet in orbit... but on the next turn you could run the gauntlet with your own transport ships, and drop off reinforcements for the defenders, ultimately driving the invaders back into the sea (or whatever the space equivalent of that phrase is).
"Running the gauntlet" was a thing from Distant Worlds, too. In that game, you didn't HAVE to clear the defending fleet - you could run your transports right at the planet in the hopes of landing troops before they could be blown to sightless atoms. This also helped the pirate factions still be able to conduct raids (in most campaigns, the pirates rarely had enough military to outright conquer a main race).
Indeed may not be easy to ensure perfect protection of an entire planet, I'm thinking for instance of assault made by pod disguised as meteor shower. But the range of choice can be varied (points 1,2,3 are a good example). A possible protection consists of a network of mines (concealed or not). This protection, however, may be ineffective against an attack disguised as a meteor, because the first meteors (real or not) would create a relative safe corridor for the next wave. A possible countermeasure would be the use of a network of mines connected to an intelligent self-distribution system. Against teleportation guess the only possible defense is a planetary shield. maybe even a cheaper version that "ionizes" incoming signals making teleportation impossible or at least subject to serious errors in re-materialization. A more sophisticated invading mechanism could be a "folder device", that is, a device that could create a "physical" connection from two distant places allowing the instantaneous transfer of troops or vehicles from one place to another bypassing completely the shields. A sort of wormhole that does not need a receiving station. (I doubt this type of device can somehow be successfully combated). For invading vehicles I thought to anything of this kind. 1) expensive assault vehicle that has its own defenses, leading marines and assault craft. 2) small drop pod (eg. Warhammer 40000 Space Marine Drop Pod) with very few Marines or a single assault vehicle. naturally they have production and maintenance costs, ever lower. You could also think of a technology that creates baits, small gushi they have a track of landing craft (drop pod assault) in order to saturate the enemy defenses of objectives. (This is a bit like happens today for missiles) that could help the survival of the troops. These are some of the ideas that come to mind.
