I have been thinkin recently, why is the only way to capture a plant, by bombing the heck out of it. I would think that after sending huge asteroid like missles to the surface, you would also destroy the planets population, geographic surface and natural resources, leavin the planet basically useless (Like when the covenent glassed the human colonies, leavin none alive in Halo.)
So i came up with the idea, "Why not make ships, that can send infantry, like ODST's, to the surface of the planet to kill the population and claim it. " In realy life, we dont just bomb the heck out of a country we are at war with, we also invade and take control forcibly, so why not make it for SINs.
I was personally thinking that we could make troop transports for each race, that you could send to the surface of and enemy planet/asteroid, which would engage in ground battles, decreasing the population. Of course, then there should also be some way to counter act such invasions, either by stationing ur own troops on the planet, or having the population turn into a militia, or, having a planet upgrade, like a military base. Then when an enemy invades the planet, he would need to have enough invading men to kill the militia/soldiers and then secure the planet for emidiate colonizate, while bombing the planet by capital ship, which would be faster of course then invading, would make it so colonization would be stunted, or create a timer clock until the planet can be colonized.
Personally, i think this idea will add extra gameplay and excitment, because while battleing the ships in orbit, u would also have to watch the planet on the ground, and make sure your forces can defend the planet.
For details on the Transport ships themselves, i think they should be like a Colonizer Vessle, with very low attack, but the difference i think should be that they are faster, but have weaker health, (like a bomber but not as faster, and a bit stronger) so you (as an invader) will have to distract the enemies planetary, orbital defences, while your transports make a mad dash for the surface. As a defender, with some simple microing and use of strike craft/(Interceptors if the idea makes it to the next expansion) or frigates. Of course, transport vessles should also be a one time affair, making it so once after they drop there load, they either make it so that they must go back to a carrier(if thats what they would be) or that u see them go off the planet, and dissapear, while the infantry remain on the ground battlin it out.
So baically as an overview, Unit Invasion Transports. They are like strikecraft(like bombers), but with no really attack or strength, they are a bit stronger than a bomber, but also pretty much slower. They go to the planet, and invade, slowly killin the population and colonizing the planet once all ground population is destroyed. Then, i think they sould making the planet bombing go much faster than invading, but also put a timer clock on when again the planet can be claimed, (say, 3-5 mins). Of course, the population on the planet sould beable to fight back, wether it be by infantry you have to garrison, by planet upgrade, or by the population turin into a militia, making it so the the invading troops loose there numbers as well say at a scale of mabey 3-5 millitia men to every 1 invader. So, if u have enough infantry invading, you should be able to take any planet, unless they have upgraded like infantry defense on the ground which would make it 1 invader to every 1 defender + the 1 invader to every 3-5 militia/population.
So, tell me what you think, good idea ? Bad, i wish Stardock would add this, it would be amazing, mabey for just even a mod)
(Mabey we could even make transports invade enemy capital ships or firigates, like in starwars and Halo, but that just could be with with my ranting and dreaming )
I like it
Essentially ou are proposing making planets more in depth. That would be fine and all, but it would increase game complexity by a lot which is a concern for a realtime game.
this idea has been batted around before, both the concept of other forms of planet capture and this one in particular.
there are a number of factors to consider here, does it fit in with the bible (i mean the story bible, you can calm down now =P), does it add to the game and does the added complexity make it worthwhile, after all, if you're fighting for your life in space, do you really want to spend time monitoring planet capture, just because you opted to bring dropships instead of seige frigates.
by the way, we do bomb the heck out of our enemies before hand, we just dont need to do it on the scale we see in sins (nukes etc)
one of the factors i was talking about wat story bible. first off, the vasari may not have sufficient population to field enough troops to attack and capture A PLANET. TEC would have the troops, but the Advent would be much more likely to just drill the crap out of the occupying forces by bombing or psychic manipulation or whatever and mop up afterwards.
another issue is this. when we bomb a planet, we're not actually bombing the planet. those nukes, arent actually nukes, they are just a bunch of numbers with pretty lights attached to make it feel interesting. you can bomb a planet 100 times over in sins, and, eventually, it will still give you the same resources/benefits as the first time it was colonised. yes, in reality, bombing a planet with as many nukes you see the TEC using would be stupid and counter productive for anything other than a scortched earth policy, but in the game, all it does, is reduce the enemy control of the planet until you can colonise it yourself. so, i dont mean to sound arrogant or anything, but the basis for your entire post is flawed.
that said, there is merit in it. and the ability to capture a planet with some infrastructure intact is very valuable. perhaps in the diplomcy expansion, the populace of the 3 races will become disallusioned by the bombing of civilians, so troops are called in to prevent as many deaths as possible. this way, we could change the current mechanic to increase the speed of planet capture via bombing, although all upgrades have to be purchased again and resources etc come in slower for a while etc, while capture by ground forces is MUCH slower, and counterable, but gives bonuses such as instantly maxed resource output (resources, not credits) and some infrastructure intact.
it needs alot of tweaking and fleshing out, but im all for a new way to capture planets, even if i do just resort to bombing for a quick capture and mop up the pieces later.
Well, i think the increase in complexity would be better. Personally, i think, sure, SIN's is a game bascally based around minerals and huge fleet battles, and just bombing planets to kill them. I want some variety to capturing the planet. I also think it wouldnt make the game that much more complex, i mean, all of your planets wouldnet be invaded, mabey the only one would be the one being invaded by a whole enemy fleet, but your not gonna have to watch every planet to check on invasions. And if this idea came to furition, there would probably also be a warning pop up say "Planet Terra is being invaded by Enemy infanty." Then you should just be able to build your reinforce the reigion. Also, those transpots would be easy kills with some focus fire, and only a small amount of infantry would be deployed with each Transport. So, i think it would just add to the fun with people being "ahhh, there is a huge ground battle going on and orbital battle!)
See, I know that you can keep bombing a planet and i know you get the same number of resources still, because the resources come from asteroids, but im just say, i am tryin to give the game a real world perspective. No one would bomb the heck of a planet to take control of it, cause inreal life, there would be nothing left a but a swiss cheeze looking, infurno of a planet, uninhabitable by anything, even the vasarii. Plus, you say the vasrarii wouldnt have enough to population to have an army. Bull. They have the men to man large fleets of spacecraft and thousands of fighters, and they have planets with populations, so, why not spare a few to take the planet.
I do like the idea though that the invasion would capture the infustructure/ building when the planet is taken. Seems like a good tradeoff. Longer time and hardship of battle on the ground for bounus captured on the planet, while I still think that bombing should make it much easier to eliminate the population of a planet, disabling the buildings in orbit, while also leaving fallout, making it so that there would be a time to wait for the planet to recover before colonization.
Stuff to think about...
Maybe there could also be a culture and allegiance perspective. Like, if you just bomb a planet to hell its maximum allegiance will be lower and enemy culture will have a stronger effect on that planet while your own culture will have less of an impact. On the other hand, if you invade with troops, you don't get these negative effects. That would make using troops a much more attractive option.
As for infrastructure, how about you don't just get to keep some of it if you use troops, but it will also be less expensive and take less time to upgrade that planet then if you just bomb it.Both of these effects i've mentioned will mean some trade-offs. In the short-term, its much easier to just bomb the planet, takes less time then using troops, and by the time the enemy gets reinforcements there you can already have control of the planet. However, in the long term, bombing will be very detrimental to your new planet, meaning it will never be as productive if you had used troops instead of nukes.
Realisticaly bombing should be changed so that it does ad some long term dammage to a planet that builds with each subsequent bombing (the way that the TEC superweapon does now). This could allow them too introduce planet invasions.
Bombing
pro -faster, and easier and less expensive to pull off (less micro)
con- causes long term dammage to a planet (some sort of effect on pop growth and/or development costs and planet upgrades start at zero. also cant colonize if hostil culture is present
Invasion
pro- Doesnt do permanent dammage to planet. You could have the planet upgrades start at all or part of what they were pre invasion and colonization is unaffected by hostil culture (still prevented by starbase upgrade. finaly that upgrade will be usefull) or automatic with upgrades possibly.
con- make the invasion ships fragil and expensive and the process takes longer. Ship must be very close to planet. more micro intensive and require alot of protection.
vasari would have tougher troops (augmented by nanites and advanced wepons), Advent would have ground based anima to fight for them, and TEC would have higher troop numbers. haveing both systems of planet takeover make sense from a realism standpoint, because countries now a days use both stratagies. You could even have bonuses or detrements to combining them. They also make sense in a stratagy standpoint because you can have the les micro way wich has consequenses and the more micro way wich can have great rewards, just like fleet combat is now. This could even be an oportunity to introduce planet ground based deffences, as you could have a very short range (but longer than invasion range) expensive wepon fire from the planet from a planetary upgrade. Too short to affect fleet combat in orbit, which leaves that ballance alone, but would be perfect for shooting down invasion ships that are left unattended. This could be a great new stratigic layer that wouldnt necesarily increase complexity because you dont have to use it and it not that hard to defend against it, but if your willing to use it it can be a very advatagous
I disagree with only one part of that Star. I think there should be ground defenses that can target fleets. Of course the weapons couldn't be very powerful, because of gravity acting against the weapons, air resistance, things like that, but they should be able to fire something. Wouldn't be very powerful, but it could be useful to help pick off siege ships while your fleet deals with the rest of the enemy fleet. Besides that I agree with everything you said.
Heh funny, I was just about to start writing about boarding actions in space battles.
Exactly what i was saying though. Invasions would give whole new option to take planets, and make the game so much more fun than "Kill the fleet around the planet, bomb the planet, take it, and repeat." And tamren, i think space bording would also be cool, imagen, sending a group of transport to a capital ship, mabey 10. 6 get shot down in the battle going round em, while the other make and lead there troops into the ship. They could probably sabatage the ship, or do damage to it slowly, untill all the men are killed.
There i am again goin on a random tangent though. Before we go into anything that would be as confusing as boring ships, i think planet invasions would be better to get first. Ship bording might be too complicated.
You could also do new research to make your troops more powerful. Like, upgrading their body armor, giving them better weapons, making the landing craft faster and better armored, things like that. Also, perhaps culture could make the planet inhabinants not fight as hard. The inhabinents of the planet could have the option to surrender, so instead of your troops having to sluaghter all of them, they could just slaughter some of them, making it so the popultion wouldn;t take as long to recover. Culture could increase the liklihood of them surrendering.
I always wondered what that portal door towards the back of the Kol was , it was a shuttecraft dropship to land marines. One ship can drop them per race.
Sounds cool.
Would be cool if we could capture other ships as well.
The idea is great, and I agree with planet invasions, but ship invasions can make the game way too complicated. Battles get very complicated somtimes, and you can't moniter every single aspect of your fleet. "Hey, why is my capitol ship attacking my fleet" would probably become a frequent occurence. Maby making ships abandoned/derelect befour they explode, and capture them after their 'dead'? Also, there is a problem with the whole idea of infantry units. How could you manage, prevent, command, and moniter somthing happening on a scale that you cant even see? Lastly, troop invations are a very powerfull tool, that can make things over complicated. If you can capture a ship or a planet, why not a structure? Or a planet defence? Or a Star Base? I agree with the idea, but on a vary basic level.
I would like to see ground invasions too, but I think Sins would have to take it in a new direction for it to work in a RTS environment. Most 4X space games have planetary invasions occur very quickly - the troops invade and either they win or they dont; it is resolved almost instantaneously. I think Sins, because it is a RTS game that needs to avoid micromanagement like the plague, needs to have lenghty invasions. In other words, give the defender plenty of time to react and call in reinforcements, etc. In short, invading a planet should be lengthy and resource consuming.
Also, it should be largely automated. Perhaps you could designate a planet from whence the troops will depart and the rest is automated, i.e., troop ships are automatically built, filled with troops, and sent to the proper planet - a task that monopolizes all activities for that planet. The player will only need to ensure that the shipping lanes remain free from enemy vessels. Ultimately, the victor is the one that manages to overwhelm all opposition. In effect, a ground invasion is a resource war. Just how much of a planet's pop/resources are you willing to lose to conquer another planet? If the war is going badly, is the attacker/defender willing to dedicate a second or third planet's resources to the war to keep it going? The more planets involved, the less you have on hand for other activities, such as research and ship building - that's the trade off.
Since this will be an expensive process, the pay off needs to be worth it. Perhaps ground invasions, when successful, leave you with a planet that is still largely developed, etc. And perhaps you can recover alien tech that otherwise wouldn't be available to you.
Have to disagree with both invading planets and boarding ships.
Subjugating a *nation*, even with complete domination of airspace, even if the previous government was widely reviled, is a difficult and *long* operation. Subjugating a *planet*, at least naturally hospitable worlds potentially holding billions of humans (inhospitable worlds e.g. toxic atmosphere forcing small concentrated populations in above-ground domes would generally be more vulnerable), would take an incredible amount of manpower and machinery and many, many years. You would not only need to tie down massive forces there for many years, but to maintain supply lines across extremely long distances until the planet was essentially yours.
It would be much more efficient and logical to apply a high-tech version of the Mongol solution: submit to our authority immediately and be spared, or resist and relive a high-tech reenactment of Baghdad ca. 1258, featuring fusion bombs instead of cavalry. You'd want to not jam communications so that frantic messages could be relayed, so that other colonies would hear the anguish, realize the utter lack of mercy, and consider that perhaps surrendering *is* the better option. Ties up your fleet for far less time (after all, your invaders would be in trouble if you lost space superiority...), conservers manpower, doesn't require nearly the logistical support, is far harder to screw up.
Boarding ships is also not particularly realistic, simply for more extreme versions that no modern navy plans to board other navy's carriers anymore; weapon ranges, speed and lethality combined with long detection make it extremely improbable that you can arrive in any force. Lasers, missiles, et al force long engagement ranges, and travel at speeds that are impossible (for lasers) or lethal (missiles) to crew. Unless a ship is already essentially a derelict (engines dead, weapons out of action) boarding does not make much sense.
Boarding facilities that lack their own serious defences is more plausible, since you would expect them to be relatively small scale and relatively stationary.
The idea sounds cool ...
But it sounds way to complicated, even for a regular expansoin. Plus it seams out of the Sins theme.
I don't think its to complicated. The ship to ship invasions yes, that would make things much too complicated. But planet invasions would be much easier to implement. And read the whole thread, we've layed out alot of ways it could work.
I cant really imagine any of the forces in sins wanting to capture planets intact at all. I imagine that full terran lockdown has a lot more death camps than High density zoning for instance. Most of the stuff you'd want intact is in space anyway. All in all it's a nice thought, but it just doesn't fit in my mind
If you honestly want to add in an invasion method, the easiest way is to use what we have already as a base. The Siege Ship. Give them an ability to use 'Troop Trasnports" instead of whatever bombardment method they current use. When you use the 'invasion' method you see the siege ships send out shuttles to the surface much like you see a colony ship use when colonizing. It will continue to send down troops untill the planet is no longer under enemy control. Much like bombing does now. Then you can also have an ability that ties into the 'Troop Transport' one, that allows you to recieve a huge benifit for using the 'invasion' method. So instead of rewritting the wheel on planetary capture, you can just mod a couple of abilites so you can 'invade' a planet and reap some kind of reward for it.
In Sins it is just assumed that every planet and asteroid out there has a huge civilian population that never dies out. According to the lore this is because Sins takes place in TEC space and every planet has a human population. That would also explain why all the militia ships are TEC.
I guess colonizing a planet is not so much about founding cities as it is controlling native populations for tax purposes.
I was think that troop transport would mean resupply ships. As I see it, it would be like if you go into battle and then your ships will keep losing hitting capacity because you are losing people in the ships to man the guns so a troop transport would bring in fresh troops and regain the ship's hitting capacity.
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