Planetary Invasions; They kind of suck...

[SangralKnight]

I've been playing stellaris for a long time, I love every aspect of the game, from the cataclysmic battles, to the xenophobia, to the hive minds and every aspect of science fiction. The economy is engaging and rewarding, empire building feels natural, fleet battles are awesome to watch, diplomacy feels engaging, and playing with friends is fun... but the Planet battles are a boring chore.
Invading a planet is a forgone conclusion 90% of the time, its just an added bit of attrition. and the invasion is played out essentially as one big battle.
In my opinion invading a PLANET of billions of people, even after a prolonged bombardment should be a massive undertaking. The UI should show the planet itself, how the battle is progressing along various fronts, allowing you to either let the general you sent lead, or directly reposition forces to deal with threats. The defender should be able to fight tooth and nail and potentially WIN on the ground. Maybe im asking too much, but there has never once been a single 4X strategy game I have ever seen that does planet wide combat justice.

[SpellSword0]

Originally posted by ArandomGrailKnight:

Maybe im asking too much, but there has never once been a single 4X strategy game I have ever seen that does planet wide combat justice.

And that is because it would slow down the pace of any 4X game drastically, to have to manage a more complex ground combat system that isn't the focus of the game.

Having a more in depth ground combat system in a grand space based 4X game sounds like a cool idea on paper, but it would be at the detriment of the rest of the game at large. If it's complex to the point of requiring your attention to focus on and manage your invasion, then it is taking focus away from other aspects of an ongoing multi front war such as fleet management, empire management, and potentially other invasions happening simultaneously.

The best and probably only way to keep track of everything with any decent capacity would be to slow down the game speeds and use excessive pausing, which would be fine for a single player match. But in a multiplayer game with many people? You'd either have to slow down the pace of the game for everyone else when one or two players got into a war, or you'd be at a disadvantage, unable to stretch your concentration across every invasion, fleet, border incursion, and overcrowded colony of your 20 colonies. Thus putting you at a critical disadvantage and making war even more frustrating and less fun than it currently may be.

This is the reason ground combat in 4X space games are either extremely simplified, or just non existent (see: Sins of a Solar Empire, where orbital bombardment is all you get).

[A Bat From Wuhan]

I think they should add some of the "rock-paper-scissors" style combat similar to Ship combat (Laser beats Armor, Kinetic beats Shield, PD defeats Missile, etc.).

As of now, all the armies are practically the same except some have bigger numbers and the bigger numbers are more gooder and win. There should be a few different "classes" of armies. You got your cheap and plentiful Infantry (basically armies now), Tanks/Armored which are more expensive (alloys) but get a bonus against infantry, some kind of Anti-Tank army (Space Helicopters? IDK.) that are the counter to tanks but sub-par elsewhere.

Hell, if you really want to go complex add in an "Army Designer" so you can custom tailor armies to certain opponents. With the upcoming Intelligence mechanic, this could make figuring out the defensive composition of a planet more important. You can't just send in a doomstack of 30 Infantry armies, because the enemy planet might be garrisoned by 5 Tanks that will hard counter that. You have to figure out what your opponent's armies look like, and make sure your invasion force can counter that. You might need to land a probing force to see what the enemy has before sending in the main force.

I feel that it's "simple" enough to not distract from the rest of the game, while adding a bit more "strategy" rather than "Haha Big Number go Brrrrr".

IDK, just an idea.

[SpellSword0]

Originally posted by A Bat From Wuhan:

IDK, just an idea.

It's a neat idea... Running with this idea, you'd basically have to preview the planet in question ahead of time, and build an army hand tailored to beat its defenses, right?

And then, planetary defenses would have to have the ability to customize themselves, which would add another thing that the colony owning player might have to manage on a planet by planet basis.

But perhaps you don't "have" to build a custom defensive army for every planet if you don't expect it to become invaded. Or, it's something you might do only when a war starts and you expect the worse? But then, how will you know what to build your defenses with without first seeing the enemy army?

A rock paper scissors system like this would require quite a bit of precognitiveness on either side. And wouldn't be immune to oversized one type doom stack armies anyway. I imagine it would just end up ignored by most players...

And that's all assuming armies don't take ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ forever to recruit, which they currently do.

[SangralKnight]

Originally posted by S.S.:

Having a more in depth ground combat system in a grand space based 4X game sounds like a cool idea on paper, but it would be at the detriment of the rest of the game at large. If it's complex to the point of requiring your attention to focus on and manage your invasion, then it is taking focus away from other aspects of an ongoing multi front war such as fleet management, empire management, and potentially other invasions happening simultaneously.

Im not asking for things to be all that much more complex, there is structure for a good system already there. It could even happen automatically without your attention. But rather than a simple tug of war box, SHOW the planet being conquered, SHOW where the fighting is happening. SHOW the actual fights to some extent. Like they show the fleet battles. Technically in fleet battles you can't do anything but watch anyway. Its always about prep. But ground combat prep is non-existent and essentially pointless. As it stands now even bothering to build an army is at best a chore, and at worst an outright waste of time and resources. I also agree that you should be able to design armies like you design fleets, rather than bog-standard generic troops. pouring resources into certain key planets that you need to hold, and having a logistical system in place would make galactic war more fun, rather than just being a fleet based punching match, or a game of cat and mouse between doomstacks bliping off stations.

I guess my real beef is that Ground based fights are down right boring to watch, its supposed to be this big epic months long battle for control of a planet, reduced to blinking lights. Why not put the same love into ground combat visuals that are put into space combat visuals. At least give some semblance of an idea that there is something bloody happening down there. For all the places this game shines, its a down right disappointment.

[Dioskouroi]

You used to be able to equip armies with 1 equipment or mod but they took it out because it was too much micro and not fun

[MP]

Planetary invasions aren't just a single front with organized troops exchanged gunfire, like Stellaris and other traditional 4X games display. You can't just throw troops at a planet and expect to win. It's meant to be a prolonged war of attrition until one side gives up.

(Un)fortunately, PDX favors gameplay over realism.

[Zorlond]

There's an old game called Star General that tried to have a planetary combat map in addition to the star map. It kinda fell on it's face. Mainly because the AI would fill every single hex of the planet map with units and you'd have to throw hundreds of units down, three or four at a time, just to open a hole to get a real invasion force onto the planet.

[Nico]

Originally posted by MihaP:

Planetary invasions aren't just a single front with organized troops exchanged gunfire, like Stellaris and other traditional 4X games display. You can't just throw troops at a planet and expect to win. It's meant to be a prolonged war of attrition until one side gives up.

(Un)fortunately, PDX favors gameplay over realism.

Realistic would be that there are no ground fights at all, because a war all over a full populated planet would be a total devastation and would made a planet unhabitable. So why waste billions of soldiers for an unhabitable rock?
If there are interstellar wars it might would be a fleet battle and the winner would be in a position to make a demand that could not be refused, for example threaten with a relativistic kill missle, astroids or orbital bombardment. Even if they rather die than surrender, it would be easier to send some relativistic kill missles and end it, instead of sending billions of soldiers with the same result.
Back to topic: I find the concept stellaris using today also boring, but a more complicated system would draw too much attention from the important aspects as S.S. already descriped.
Only visuals would be boring after some invasions as well because you might watch it at your first games but after that you would ignore it again, because there is too much going on in a war to just watch the animations.

[Zorlond]

Originally posted by Nico:

Realistic would be that there are no ground fights at all, because a war all over a full populated planet would be a total devastation and would made a planet unhabitable. So why waste billions of soldiers for an unhabitable rock?

Actually, if an alien fleet decided to pop into orbit of Earth IRL and demand our total surrender, all they would have to do is blow up our transportation network. This means blowing up:

- Ship docks
- Airports
- Highway junctions (funny thing, those interchange clovers look like giant bullseyes from space)
- Major train yards (only need to destroy a few, really)

And then occasionally wreck our attempts to fix/bypass the damage. How does this force our surrender? Because 99% of our food is grown in areas that only contain 1% of our population. Without our vast transport network, the planet starves within a month. Then the soldiers march in a take control of the survivors.

[Nico]

Originally posted by Zorlond:

Originally posted by Nico:

Realistic would be that there are no ground fights at all, because a war all over a full populated planet would be a total devastation and would made a planet unhabitable. So why waste billions of soldiers for an unhabitable rock?

Actually, if an alien fleet decided to pop into orbit of Earth IRL and demand our total surrender, all they would have to do is blow up our transportation network. This means blowing up:

- Ship docks
- Airports
- Highway junctions (funny thing, those interchange clovers look like giant bullseyes from space)
- Major train yards (only need to destroy a few, really)

And then occasionally wreck our attempts to fix/bypass the damage. How does this force our surrender? Because 99% of our food is grown in areas that only contain 1% of our population. Without our vast transport network, the planet starves within a month. Then the soldiers march in a take control of the survivors.

Yes I think that would work and maybe it would kill around 70 - 80 % of the population during a year but I would expect to have some parts of the military intact because they usually have a lot of rations which will be eatable for almost forever.
At least there might be some bunkers which could attack the landing forces with nuclear missles which could cause, even if the invaders are able to destroy them, high radiation that pollutes earths atmosphere. Although a high advanced civilisation might not care because they can treat radiation damage easily.
Nethertheless, we should not let that happen and immediatly surrender if a fleet arrives tomorrow in earths orbit, because you do not mess with someone who is able to use the huge amounts of energy you need for interstellar travel (if FTL is as impossible as todays knowledge)

[MP]

Surrender but resist the occupation. WW2 showed us the way.