So quality and size are not separated.

Would it be possible to associate buildable terrain with land?

Gal Civ 2 already has a mechanic for displaying the technological disparity of two races in a ground invasion, you can already use less troops when your technology is vastly superior, thanks to the baseline soldiering skill buff applied with most of the planetary invasion techs.

Fate,:beer:

I like the invasion mechanic in GalCiv 2 but it allows for some cheesy stuff, and I am sure you all do it.

I am talking about using first transport with planetary bombardment, reduce enemy pop to like 1.5b then second transport use standard warfare and conquer it.  Net result is you greatly benefit from planetary bombardment but do not suffer the infrastructure damage penalty.

Max shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, promise me that when you find exploits like that in GC3 you won't write them on the forums! That's how things get patched haha!

In fairness though that became a lot less useful in TA, as most of the improvements would be destroyed because you don't have the required tech anyway.

Fate,:beer:

I could be wrong, but for the most part you are not going to have a planetary bombardment while you have a planetary invasion. Maybe they can creae a mechanic for marines. As far as modern warfare goes first you send in spot bombers to take out defenses then you send the carpet bombers this alone can take months. I'm not sure what the marines are doing. Then you send in the army.

That "exploit" has been around a loooong time. It's pretty common knowledge.

But really, what was the alternative? Applying the PQ loss even on losing invasions would have led to exploits the other way, using multiple one-person transports to fail at invasions and wreck really tough worlds down to PQ1 without ever even attempting to take them. 5-6 empty transports would reduce any planet to uselessness. And since the AI wouldn't build over it's buildings, all you would really have to do is hit them until the starport was destroyed, then leave them with a planet they couldn't build ships on.

Let's not forget that Iraq at that point was in no condition to resist any invasion. Desert Storm had turned their army into hollow shell and so forth.

Same with Soviets in Afganistan.

But still, in the end... USA is losing the whole thing. They were able to beat the army but could not keep the country. Costs skyrocketing and making US command look for any excuse to escape the mess. That is due to too few boots.

Invasion is one part of battle, keeping what you took is the second. If we take for example Earth. Dry surface area is about 150 million square kilometers. Population 7 billion. Any number of troops below billions is going to be unable to prevent the situation from deteriorating from bad to horrible, because all territory you cannot control is area which enemy can use for their purposes.

You would need godlike power compared to the enemy to be able to take and control something as big as a planet with amount of troops where millions do not qualify for rounding error.

But in the end, most important thing is that I just want to imagine sky being on fire from one end to the other due to fiery entry of my assault pods as they charge to the surface and underline that I am the biggest, meanest SOB in this corner of the galaxy.

I agree, but you forgot to add that in the game we have to rebuild every time.

It could be written in such a way so that if:

Planet A controlled by player X is bombed by player Y but player X retains planet A then the bombardment PQ penalty isn't applied but is instead stored in the games memory.

If player Y then attacks again, be it that turn or the last turn of the game and takes planet A from player X then the previous bombardment penalty is applied

Or if planet A is successfully invaded by player Z then the penalty from player X's previous bombardment would not apply.

All of this is moot because I'd place money on planetary invasions receiving a large overhaul for GC3 and this is just my thoughts for a work around. The point is the general rule on the forums should be report multiplayer exploits, but keep the relatively minor ones like this to yourself for fun and let other players figure it out 

Fate,:beer:

Better IMO than both the existing and your proposed plan is removing permanent damage altogether, and replacing it with something like the terraforming mechanic. Put in another level of terraforming tech called "clear debris" or something, and any tiles lost to the invasion have to be cleaned up before they can be built over again. Maybe not even lock it behind a tech, but have a tech that reduces the cost and time requirements. They could even have repair mechanics: if you successfully defended against an invasion, your structures would be damaged roughly in proportion to the fraction of population the planet lost. That way people couldn't just rely on a high population to protect against invasion, and of course a successful invasion would leave the new owner with a mess to clean up before the planet returned to full production.

What about this idea?

1. the penalty for say, planetary bombardment, is always applied whether planet ends up conquered or not.

2. The penalty Is however proportional to the amount of enemy casualties during the assault.

  That means that using transport with 1 troop would not works because it would cause no significant enemy casualties, even with a 200% planetary bombardment bonus.

Sounds good to me. Long meat grinders with huge losses would leave you with near wasteland. And catching enemy fleets before they get to planets would become more important.

So you had an alternative all along?

Both interesting ideas, although yours extends a bit too far towards realism and fun-ruining, in my opinion.

Fate,:beer:

Taking it and keeping it are different things, though. We've got things like approval and revolt events to model the keeping it part, and invasion for the taking it part.

I'd say that if you can take it with a small but vastly superior millitary, then can't actually get it to do what you want due to things like unrest because you can't pacify the population, the system is working correctly.

Scale is often going to be off, because the game requires me to be able to conquer planets without depopulating my own by making 10 billion soldiers.

It's really almost too far the other way, if I was invading a lush planet of 8 billion people then I'd use 2-4 billion troops in GC2 depending of the tech disparity, which is one soldier to every four inhabitants in the minimum scenario..... That's a crazily small ratio compared to most 'real world' invasions!

Fate,:beer:

I actually came up with that as I was typing.

I prefer the damage-and-rebuild model over permanent damage. How believable is it that we can terraform swamped planets, desert planets, toxic planets, even planets where everything is radioactive, but invasion tactics damage the planet beyond reclamation? What possible degree of combat damage could be worse that what we already face on a regular basis?

Well, for one, dropping a massive asteroid into the planet, basically simulating the dinosaur extinction. This might weaken the crust and stimulate volcanic activity for a long time.  Not something you could fix by ''draining swamps into deserts''

Our highest level weapons in present day are already capable of rendering the planet completely uninhabitable if we were to use them, imagine when we have technologies that grant access to space! Low level picks like a basic conventional invasion might just create vast amounts of rubble, but then there's no nil damage option for invasion if you don't want to hurt the infrastructure. We're getting too close to realism and wrecking the fun....

Fate,:beer:

Read the techs. Stimulating volcanoes to create new land is exactly what Advanced Aquatic Colonization does. It's something the current techs allows us to do on command, and we already know how to deal with the consequences and use the results.

If we are talking about bombing. I would opt not to nuke the planet. I think both would be an option. Lets not forget about spot bombing just bombing the defenses not none thing else. The asteroid idea should have a chance of destroying the whole ecosystem. If the ecosystem is destroyed then their is no point in an invasion you won. I don't do anything that lowers planet quality. I would like an option to rebuild. I like the option to invade without killing everyone. If I don't kill everyone their would be a resistance in the beginning. I think that at least the structures that are left standing the people before the invasion would know how to run them even if you can't build them.

Keeping and invading are not really that different. You have to remember that it is not clear cut case to say that invasion went smoothly but occupation did not. And tech does not equal ability either. 10 supermen still are 10 supermen who cannot be everywhere at once. 

If we look at Iraq invasion, invader force had 250k troops, Iraq had around 450k counting in paramilitaries. Reserves were never activated en masse.

And this is with technological gap which is massive. If Iraq had been able to put their entire reserve force into war footing, 250k would have been insufficient.

Think of it as lost growth all over your empire. You are not necessarily breeding the troopers on planet you are recruiting them but assembling their equipment, providing training and mustering the collected manpower from multiple planets. 

With the benefit of hindsight, we could have just had the consequences of a particular invasion attempt happen after the attempt rather than only take consideration in the case where the planet was conquered.

But I used the exploit myself all the time and didn't want it to go away.

Haha, so did we. It cuts the amount of transports you need for conquest in about half. Greatly reducing the tediousness of the steamroll phase. An other alternative might have been about being able to reuse transports somehow, instead of spamming new ones all the time.

This is why I love Stardock!

Fate,:beer:

I feel like someone should make Scumbag Steve meme "Game dev notices exploit in the game" "Does not fix it in order to keep abusing"

Jokes aside its not a big deal tbh. If anything it actually added to the game, because if a new player discovers this on his own, he can really feel smart-like using it onward.