Wars are just waste of resources

[RawCode]

Without taking in account some kind of roleplay, player will not actually wage any wars or use any nukes, keeping multiple armies also waste, single army per entire faction is sufficient.

We need "pillage" option, equals to like ~200 points of spoils instantly, in other cases you just burn resources and slowdown entire humanity for no good reason.

[Icare]

Originally posted by RawCode:

slowdown entire humanity

Seems like the whole point of the servants

[ArcticISAF]

I don't think so. When you win you replace the government with a friendly one, e.g. yourself in the control points, at which point you can do whatever with it. Just dump all their investments on spoils if you want. Or just do it to kick out whoever was controlling it before. Multiple armies may be necessary if your enemies start popping out armies allies with each other, and building up nukes, like the servants like to do. Also what Dyktator said.

[Ixal]

Originally posted by ArcticISAF:

I don't think so. When you win you replace the government with a friendly one, e.g. yourself in the control points, at which point you can do whatever with it. Just dump all their investments on spoils if you want. Or just do it to kick out whoever was controlling it before. Multiple armies may be necessary if your enemies start popping out armies allies with each other, and building up nukes, like the servants like to do. Also what Dyktator said.

Pretty much all nations where crackdown/purge is so hard for wars to be a viable alternative also have nukes making overthrowing them by force suicide.

[hossbigcountry]

Waging war is useful to help merge nations into mega nations with having to spend time with 1% crackdown/purge/coup chances and depending on tech level you need more then 1 army to do it.

[Akameka]

War is one of the two ways to merge countries despite the fact you cannot normally or don't yet have the technologies to do so.

Merging Europe and Russia : both have claims on Ukraine. Take control of Europe and Russia, conquer ukraine as russia, then gift it to europe, then leave the Eurasian union. After a while, Russia can join Europe.

Merging USA and Russia, then Europe : Take control of both countries, disarm nukes of one of them and send its armies in an allied country (to keep them intact). Conquer the Capital territory (Moskov for exemple). Moskov become parts of USA. The rest of Russia becomes an allied state under your control and USA now has claims upon this new state. Then, after a year or two, you can federate both territories.
If Russia took Ukraine, Europe still has claims upon it, which now belongs to USA, so USA/russia and Europe can federate, then merge.

BAM ! Nothern Blob FTW
First one is tested and worked for me, second one is only theorical but if rules are correct in the codex, it should works.

[Monk]

After forming the USA-EU-Russian-Chinese mega state, I used wars to overthrow servant nations a lot. Like, a lot, alot.


During my final game, all my counselors were either in space or fighting against subversion ? PR campaigns inside my own nations. Well.. those that were not fighting acres of spreading xenofauna the Congo kept ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ out every other month, that is.

Halfway though my army's annual purge and pillage of South America, the servants kicked the initiative out of India with a coop, joined the war on the S.A. servants side, and started chucking nukes everywhere.

I had to nuke India COMPLETELY off the map as my armies were engaged elsewhere to save the major cities of my holdings. I even double tapped the capital, just to be sure.

Millions died, nuclear winter ensued, and a good chunk of the world's economy was converted to ash.

8/10

[Caiocas]

Armies are also very much necessary to combat Alien megafauna and when they inevitably land troops on earth, I don't think we get an xcom to save our contries from alien invasion in this game.

[Akameka]

Originally posted by Caiocas:

Armies are also very much necessary to combat Alien megafauna and when they inevitably land troops on earth, I don't think we get an xcom to save our contries from alien invasion in this game.

I always found silly the fact states cannot defend themselves in XCOM and xenonauts games. I mean, yeah your cities are raided, maybe call the freaking army instead of only relying on a small paramilitary group ?

[RawCode]

just tested - disbanding all armies (but one per faction to deal with "fauna") and using agents for conquest is much more effective that waging wars, that drain resources like crazy.

[Ixal]

Why disband armies?

[Aranador]

"Wars are a waste of resources." If only the leaders of the world would learn this lesson :)

[🎀Hara🎀]

yep armies are a complete waste unless control russia and then the servants in control of china and the usa launch a combined attack on you

[Galroche]

Originally posted by Ixal:

Why disband armies?

well, you have an upkeep cost of infrastructure point (or whatever the name is for the 'point' that are put into eco/welfare/boost etc ... each turn) so you would want to only keep the minimum necessary army so that those point wasted into upkeep are used to grow your country. each army on home ground cost 0.5 upkeep, each deployed is 1 so if you have a country with lot of them like USA/Russia it cost you a few point.

though imo disbanding all of them is viable only if you are not planning on using any and are sure nobody is going to war you (not sure if the AI weight the existence of army in it's calculation to know if they declare war or not but they should), they save you tons of time in the early unification agains't small country.

[Socra]

Originally posted by Akameka:

I always found silly the fact states cannot defend themselves in XCOM and xenonauts games. I mean, yeah your cities are raided, maybe call the freaking army instead of only relying on a small paramilitary group ?

The reason of course is that the setting is an excuse to have a tactics based game. The xcom reboot handwaved it by letting some missions take place at overrun military bases.

Terra invicta shows another reason; considering some of the nations fall under control of the aliens, all out war between countries goes in their favor. It weakens humans overall capacity stragetically.

In each of the xcom games, you are fighting an essentially losing war, and are only able to win because you manage to do an impossible coupe d'etat by hitting their homebase (in your solar system).

[Zuul]

Just to point out a few facts.

Fact 1. The game contains a "troop transport" template selection in the ship designer.

Fact 2. Stretch goal 5 for the kickstarter involved 3d models on the globe. Specified items included armies, megafauna, and alien walkers.

Considering the presence of alien walkers and troop transports, I would hazard a guess that it would be an exceedingly BAD idea to cash in all the armies in the actual full game instead of the demo.

As an aside, it "might" be mildly profitable to disband some armies, but it depends on a fairly simple formula. If time to needing army is greater than 10 years, disbanding the army and rebuilding it before you need it will turn a profit. If time to needing army is 10 years or less, you are actively hurting yourself by disbanding it.

Replacing the army is 60 development points, you save half a point a month by disbanding an army.

TL;DR You don't break even until the army has been disbanded for 120 months, and if you get caught with your pants down by alien troops landing outside the demo...have fun.