Should planets from gestalt empires be impossible to invade?

[MrRober95]

So I have been looking for mods to overhaul ground warfare with little success, and I've been thinking: Ok, in a regular conquest the defending army is composed of normal people whose job is to protect the planet. Beat them and the planet is yours.

But what about planets whose population is made of organic drones or machines? The hive mind or AI controlling the empire should only care about expansion and survival, with the population being mostly mere puppets to throw away at will minus specific individuals given more autonomy (leaders).

So if an invasion happened in one of their planets, wouldn't it make sense for it to force ALL the planet pops to attack the invading forces once the defense units were about to be destroyed? It knows the planet is about to be lost forever, and with it a piece of itself, so wouldn't it throw everything at the invaders? Everything - the vaccuum cleaning roombas, the little insect drones tasked with cleaning ♥♥♥♥ from the farms... More can always be made. They are mindless tools, expendable... Unlike a planet.

It would be cool to see some mechanic about this. Either you sacrifice 100 armies to achieve conquest or wipe the planet clean with bombardment until every creature or bot is dead.

What do you people think? Would you also like to see the game expand in this regard?

[corisai]

a) Drones by definition are higly specialized. So non-combat one are mostly useless in battle. How you will perform against invading army with your own bare hands, lol? And we're humans, we're NOT specialized.

b) Loosing a single planet is not the end of the war. Gestalt could expect to re-conquer it. Your suggestion is basically self-destroying the planet for them if enemy manage to capture it even for month.

[corisai]

Originally posted by MrRober95:

It would be cool to see some mechanic about this. Either you sacrifice 100 armies to achieve conquest or wipe the planet clean with bombardment until every creature or bot is dead.

Honestly? In case of your suggestion my empire would just spending a few days on bombardment and then invade to finish few remainings of your ground force.

Because if all population of your hive are combatants - we will just drop a few powerful nukes and set them to explode in mid-air. That will deal 0 radiation contamination and wipe out most of cities. Don't forget that antimatter missiles are just tier3 tech :)

In sum - your suggestions will weaken human Gestalt players a lot in multiplayer.

[MrRober95]

Originally posted by corisai:

In sum - your suggestions will weaken human Gestalt players a lot in multiplayer.

Who the bloody hell said anything about HUMAN gestalt empires?
And why multiplayer only? This goes for singleplayer too.

[MrRober95]

Originally posted by corisai:

How you will perform against invading army with your own bare hands, lol?

Poorly. However since you are focusing on humans then a city of us, unarmed and mindless like zombies, would do decently against an army just by sheer numbers. Huge casualties of course, but hive doesn't care. Now go further and think a continent of humans. Now further and a planet. Yeah.
Hive pops not paid to think or feel fear, hive pops just do. (In fact hive pops not paid at all, hive pops may go on strike.)

Originally posted by corisai:

Loosing a single planet is not the end of the war. Gestalt could expect to re-conquer it. Your suggestion is basically self-destroying the planet for them if enemy manage to capture it even for month.

That's not my suggestion? What I'm saying is a gestalt empire would throw what for it are plain tools in order to try to keep it. If it looses it then not great not terrible, it is not the end; if it keeps it hooray gestalt hive mind happy back to work and to reproduce, surviving drones.

EDIT: Adding to this, what about the final planet? Wouldn't the gestalt mind actually throw everything it has left in that situation of actual life or death?

[Elitewrecker PT]

Wasting pops that could possible be recovered later before they're purged.

If you're on your last planet, turning every pop into a (weaker) defensive army wouldn't save your game anyway.

[Satnol]

We all know that if we invade a borg planet successfully they suddenly become our slaves, doing whatever we tell them to with a smile on their face :)

[ScreamCon]

Hives are intelligent but also not. The ant colony for example is really good at on the spot adaption. For example if their egg cavern suddenly becomes open ground the keeper ants will rapidly try to move their eggs babies underground.

If you hack the hive open with a gaint shiny tool of some sort, they are adaptive but expose their inherent weaknesses in ways. What am I saying?

I'm saying while a hive or machine empire are powerful in their own regard, their government form does expose weaknesses if you look at it from the right perspective. A hive is just like an individualist empire. ALL DRONES are individuals. Their not an infinitely connected mass of organic.

The digital machine empire is the closest thing to that really. But even then. When a strategy is meta, the weakness looks dwarfed. When the meta catches up to a strategy of existing, the weakness becomes the downfall. All it would take is to see how a digital machine empire, their weakness would be to undermine even that authority.

Now that doesn't mean you can't sympathize with a particular form of existing