The Invasion, and Capture of a Planet with out Glassing it

[darkwind]

so im not completely new nor a veteran. but ive had this issue that is i dont like glassing planets. i can do it but if there was a easy way to have them surrender ( yes i am aware of the surrender option of a battle, still have'nt had it work). now ive tried a number of things and quite a few work but since ive been reading these discussions quite a bit and, i was hopeing for the great wisdom ive seen else where.
note my current trick is to use beams and phasers to burn the imperialists away (quite effective when they become a independant colony and surrender). i plan on testing bioweapons tonight to see if they are another tool for me to add.

id love all help, advice, and esspesially storys. you guys tell the greatest stories and love to hear them.
love this community

[Vuyek]

There is a bioweapon which converts pop to your side. but yeah bioweapons are there for a reason. kill off pop, capture planet intact.

[darkwind]

the ai surrendered before i could use it but ya i found the assimilation bio weapon. id love any other tricks

[Mordachai]

You can look at the wiki for what weapons kill the least pop, and stick with those.
Mostly, fusion age or below will not glass to badly.
Antimatter warheads, antimatter cannons, mesons beams, etc., tend to slag a world in record time.
You can use invasion ships - use your main line to clear resistance & satts (and use the "don't shoot at planet toggle to avoid shooting at planet) - and then choose a separate fleet of invasion ships on the following turn and have them invade the hell out of it instead of glassing it.

Surrender options are hit & miss - mostly - the more powerful the enemy & the specific world - the more likely they'll spit in your face.

[darkwind]

hmm ya I've noticed that when it comes to surrender. well except i was slaughtering this empire and he would just not surrender. im currently testing a game with heavy use of assault shuttles. havent gotten good use yet, only rim worlds so far but im digging deeper so better test results coming up.

thank you for you're comments i've see both of you before on other disscussions and i think it cool you guys help so much.

[darkwind]

also if you guys could answer this that would be cool. sometime my bombardment button wont click off meaning ill bomb them even tho i just want to use the assult shuttles, tho if this is ineffective ill go back to glassing just more fun with a RP handiecap

[WuTaNiSt]

From my experience, the surrender option works off of two things.

The first is fleet strength compared to planetary toughness. I had a game where I heavily nerfed most energy weapon's damage to planetary population in order to encourage proper siege warfare ie. use assault shuttles & biowar sections or use ballistics & missiles with huge associated inf/ climate penalties. The changes were pretty nice, but the surrender rate went way down - planets just looked too tough to the autoresolve formula to let it consider surrendering.

The second is defence sats. I've NEVER seen an enemy world, even a small weak one faced with a stack of dreads, to surrender whilst a single satellite is in orbit.

One thing I tried which works pretty well, especialy with reduced damage to planets, is to build a dedicated siege fleet of destroyers. Send in your main battlefleets of dreads to clear out the enemy capital ships & move on to the next world, then send in a swarm of war or spinal mount destroyers with a dread CnC to mop up the leftovers, then switch them out with assault ships to finish off the planet. Even a size 10 world will melt like butter if you drop a couple of dozen shuttles on them simultaneously & the sheer weight of fire a specialized destroyer swarm can put out will overwhelm any cruisers still hanging around, even if it's more than just a couple of them.

[unkn0wnx]

1) Build a special ship(s) for hitting the planet. Ballistic weapons and no missiles (mass drivers or armor piercing MD). Best weapon for this is the bursters. Best ship for this role is a dreadnaught. If no dreadnaught then use as many cruisers you can deploy. Or put missiles in a different group and hold fire while attacking planets (I put them in group 3).
2) Assault shuttles or advanced assault shuttles. Advanced is better
3) Bio weapons. Does not work on Zuul. They are wonderful. Plaque is the only one I don't like.
4) Surrender by overwhelming number. You have to have to be two or three times larger than defender.
5) Lower morale and get them to rebel by using propaganda ships(-5), fighting (-5)
Bioweapons (-5). Does not work on Zuul.
Understand which weapons do climate damage.

[darkwind]

I have started using some of the things you guys have mentioned, and though your comments and some experimentation of my own ive found some decent ways to make them A: surrender or B: kill all of the imperial population ( my invasion strategy is now xeno tech heavy but its so worth it for quick empire wipes). But one thing @unknown mentioned ive never been able to do is get a planet to rebel ( this includes waiting over a planet for twenty-five turns and killing police cutters and propaganda ships they send out while i have propaganda ships in the back of my fleet). if you guys have some tips on that as well that would be swell.

[unkn0wnx]

Home planet will never rebel, or very rarely. I have never seen home planet rebel. You can also cheat by saving and then log in as the defender and see what moral rating is the defending planet. Propagand ship and staying in sector cause -10 a turn, it shouldn't take long. Keep trying, since it is based off chance. Zuul is also immune to this tactic, since he has no morale.
Zuul attacker can also convert the planet by infecting them with slave disks or abductors, and then kill off as many imperial as possible. Wait a couple turns for the Zuul infestation to kill imperials. Then ownership will switch to you next turn with 100 population. I usually do this by looking at how much population is left and then launch slave disks. One disk will capture 50 million, if you lucky you can get it down to maybe 5 million. And then next turn bombard the planet with impactors. Don't kill all of them though. Hold fire if it gets too low.

[unkn0wnx]

The cheat method goes like this after save you load the game. Instead of loading as youself click on the player and select the other AI players.

[Fulano]

Auto-combat does a ton of damage to a planet as well. It seems to keep hitting the planet until every last citizen is dead rather than stopping bombing once the imperials are dead. I always do manual until the planet is disabled, then go with auto-combat to finish off the ships if I want.

Avoid the weapons that do more climate damage. For example, Emitters don't do any damage to the climate. But you kind of need heavy emitters to be able to do enough damage to the planet to destroy it in less than a few turns.

Setting up weapon groups on your ships can help, so you can turn off the weapons that do more climate damage when it comes times to bomb.

I'm usually using AP rounds and Antimatter cannons and rarely have a planet uninhabitable after battle unless the race I'm fighting already has a very different climate than what I do. The medium mount version of these weapons do minimal climate damage.

I've not seen a table with all the weapons, but you can find the climate and infrastructure damage in the individual weapons here:
http://wiki.swordofthestars.com/sots1/Category:Weapons

Or it's handy to get an ally that has a very different climate than you do so you aren't competing for planets.

Or as a last resort, you can always mine the planets left behind and use the resources to boost your planet's industry.

[unkn0wnx]

Also I have three tricks. 1) look at the climate of a inhospitable world compare to you own. If slider is to the left you are good. Any time you hit a inhosbitable planet it moves it to right. So if you have a planet that is -1000 to the left. You park a siege driver in that world and wait for combat to start. Once combat started (Von Neuman or enemie), you bomb the planet with the siege driver. Each hit move it 100 to the right. You can keep bombing away, hold fire if you have to. One hit might kill enemy scouts. If larger force come, I bomb it one time and then run away (also works with impactor, but does much less climate damage) 2)If enemy is close enough to your climate, but some one glassed the planet and make it 1000 away from yours. You can no longer colonize it. If there are still civilians alive, rejoice. You kill all enemy ships and leave. The civilians will declare independence. They will try to terraform back to original climate. Will take many turns. You research level 3 language techs and go back. They will surrender if is within your range.
3) Use assimilation virus. If you didn't roll it, you can still reverse engineer from someone that has it. It instantly turn enemy climate to yours. Also work on independent colonies.

[Fulano]

I'd wondered if there was a predicable way the climate moved, because the old Wiki keeps mentioning how it used to just push the climate away but never said what it did now...

[unkn0wnx]

Uninhibitied world seem to behave differently than enemy planet. Enemy planets is random, so you do not want to hit it with certain weapons. Uninhibited world always moves to right. Nobody posted this trick even back in the day of SOTS forum.
And yes, do not auto resolve fighting enemy colonies. You can use auto after you killed the imperials on next turn.
Auto almost gurantee to turn it into wasteland.