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Baloogan posted:Planetary invasions should involve glassing the planet, gassing the cities, and only then landing millions of troops for a long, brutal campaign is possible. I want hardened Surface-To-Space silos launching a barrage of anti-ship missiles at targets 10,000 km away. I want civilian casualties in the billions, military casualties in the millions. Trucks too, as mobile launch platforms. You'll never spot most of them until they fire. They won't be there anymore by the time of a counter strike, or if they are, you lost a truck, big deal. Thousands of them, camouflaged, moving, spread across a continent. Elukka fucked around with this message at 14:00 on May 29, 2015 |
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May 29, 2015 13:56
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I think one would have to go all "Afghanistan Stingers" about reining in
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May 29, 2015 13:59
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Lichtenstein posted:I think one would have to go all "Afghanistan Stingers" about reining in Planetary shields 
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May 29, 2015 14:04
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Elukka posted:Submarines. Anti-starship submarines. Your nukes and lasers are nothing if I have the ocean as a shield. Missiles will spring up from random spots in the ocean and bite anything that approaches the planet. Difficult-to-find resupply bases for the anti-starship submarines not only buried at the bottom of the ocean, but buried 100s-1000s of ft below the ocean floor. These resupply bases store vast quantities of missiles and also manufactures additional submarines and missiles. Starships brought down deep into the atmosphere to act as supremely capable anti missile batteries, shielding ground forces with their anti missile missiles. Spaceborne raiders based out of comets and asteroids pecking away at the mammoth supply chain required. Entrenchments spanning continents, a stalemated WWI fought with nuclear weapons over a 1000km no-man's land for a planet that will take a century of terraforming to recover.
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May 29, 2015 14:08
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Baloogan posted:
That's called warhammer 40k.
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May 29, 2015 14:31
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Its true though, Our "World Wars" involved millions of soldiers, billions of civilians and took years - yet they were fought over relatively small sections of the planet (ignoring the sea part of the pacific.) Yet in a 4X game, I can drop some troops and take a world in a turn - which can be anywhere from a year to a day depending on the game. We need a 4X with a ground war subsection, where the battle rage on for years, and taking a planet is a big thing - kinda of how its a big commitment to take a city early on in a game of Civ V.
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May 29, 2015 14:33
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Are we assuming kinetic orbital strikes are outlawed by some powerful galactic body? Because if the planet will be devastated by warfare anyway, "rocks fall, everyone dies" is generally going to be the best strategy for removing an enemy when you control space around the planet.
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May 29, 2015 15:13
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At risk of seeming like more of a sperg than usual.... use anti space-ship weapons on the space-rocks. Either knock them off course or shatter them into a million fragments which cause them to be more dangerous to any invading space fleets in orbit. This is one of the reasons any respectable civilization needs survivable anti-space weapons!
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May 29, 2015 16:05
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Grey Hunter posted:Its true though, Our "World Wars" involved millions of soldiers, billions of civilians and took years - yet they were fought over relatively small sections of the planet (ignoring the sea part of the pacific.) The thing is, if you do that you end up needing to reduce the amount of planets, and most space 4x games are about being able to play a ton of planets.
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May 29, 2015 17:04
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Baloogan posted:Yessssssssss. The pacific war is the closest history gets to a planetary invasion. The USMC space marines vs an enigmatic inscrutable alien enemy lurking in every cave. It's 2015, and this is cool again: 
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May 29, 2015 17:18
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If only I could play a 4X based on the Civil War, instead. Imagine: ensure the liberty & prosperity of the human race by enforcing the subjugation of the vile, subhuman aliens under your benevolent boot! Defeat your oppressors - who would foolishly unleash the alien scourge across the galaxy - and then spread the 'peculiar institution' across the Golden Sphere of near space! The possibilities are endless...
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May 29, 2015 17:23
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Baloogan posted:At risk of seeming like more of a sperg than usual.... use anti space-ship weapons on the space-rocks. Either knock them off course or shatter them into a million fragments which cause them to be more dangerous to any invading space fleets in orbit. This is one of the reasons any respectable civilization needs survivable anti-space weapons! Why weren't these weapons being used on the transports landing troops? Not to mention that firing weapons out of atmosphere and from the wrong end of a gravity well tends to be difficult, though I'll concede that depends on what form of magic your game uses. The point is, if you can land troops, you can probably land rocks. And we haven't even gotten into the possibilities of just accelerating tiny objects to significant fractions of light speed. Actually though, the main reason i support the idea that taking the orbitals gives you effective control of the planet is because balancing two totally different forms of combat is a stretch when balancing one is hard enough. Making up justifications for why it's done one way or the other is mostly just something to occupy time on a slow Friday.
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May 29, 2015 17:26
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Oddly enough, the reason I want to see more of a focus on planetary campaigns has little to do with the campaigns themselves (though they could be fun), and in fact has more to do with highlighting the role of spaceships by reducing them in importance. The whole point of ships is that they're huge, but fast and efficient transports across a hostile wilderness, whether oceanic or vacuum-based. They tie nations together in bonds of trade, allowing vast populations to thrive and prosper as they never could with merely terrestrial transportation. They form a powerful, though seemingly-fragile link between the mother country and its colonies, allowing dispersed empires like that of the Spanish or the British to survive despite the vast distances that separate them. And the whole point of warships (at least according to Mahan) is to protect the trade that sustains those empires, and to permit empires to wage war on hostile shores. Armies take land and win the final victories, yes, but always in the background in the navy, providing firepower to secure beachheads, defense of the supply lines that permit foreign campaigns, protection of the trade that creates those supplies in the first place and decisive battles (or, y'know, not) against those who would seek to interdict any of the above. But since most space 4xes abstract the hell out of transports and armies and rely on the spaceship as the basic building block of military power, you don't really get a sense of that. Without an army to compare and contrast the navy with, navies end up becoming armies in space, with spaceships taking the place of regiments. Instead of naval strategy being intimately tied to the role of ships as transports, you get something that doesn't really look all that different from land-based wargaming. Instead of starships being incredibly potent weapons of war with firepower to dwarf their land-based counterparts, they're basically a stand-in for poor bloody infantry and often expected to die about as often. There just isn't a real sense of naval power. Which is a pretty flimsy and highly personal reason to want to tack on a pretty complex secondary combat system onto a genre that's notoriously difficult to get right in the first place, I'll be the first to admit, but I can dream. Also, it'd be pretty great to have things like a planetary invasion get cut off and manage to survive with the remains of whatever they have left long enough for the navy to return with reinforcements, or perhaps to have an empire's navy destroyed but still manage to hold out with planetary forces long enough for an ally to come in and save their bacon. Lots of cool stuff that could happen with even a moderately detailed planetary campaign system!
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May 29, 2015 17:36
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So can we talk about Aurora here? I feel like it's more than groggy enough. I never understood how to build a space station. So in my current game, Uranus has a fuckton of sorium that I want to exploit. I'd like to build a space station at Earth outfitted with an orbital habitat (for the 50,000 workers), massive cargo bays, and a fuckton of sorium harvesters. Then I want to tug it out to Uranus orbit and have it start hoovering up all that sorium into its cargo bays, which my cargo ships could then pick up and transfer to Earth. Or I could use it as a forward naval base for refueling. Question is: how the gently caress do I go about doing it? I'm in the ship design menu and I select PDC instead of ship, but there are basically no useful components listed besides like.. crew quarters and maintenance bays.
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May 29, 2015 17:40
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Drone posted:So can we talk about Aurora here? I feel like it's more than groggy enough. PDCs are not stations. They are "Planetary Defense Centers," which are basically "engine-less ships buried in the ground." You just want to make a ship without engines. Also, you need fuel tanks, not cargo bays, since sorium harvesters convert sorium directly into fuel. Then you'll need other ships to come collect the refined fuel. (Aurora Wiki.) Sorium harvesters do not require population to run. Orbital habitats are basically for if a body is not colonizable but you still want to have facilities on the ground. Orbital habs can hold population to operate colony-based installations. You can feel free to ask these questions in my LP as well, since I'd imagine a decent amount of Aurora players frequent it.
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May 29, 2015 17:54
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bgreman posted:You can feel free to ask these questions in my LP as well, since I'd imagine a decent amount of Aurora players frequent it. I would, but I'm a couple thousand posts behind in the LP (which is fantastic btw) and I want to preserve my lastread as I work my way through it  So what if I wanted to do like a "terraforming station" in orbit of Venus? First move a shitton of terraformers there on the ground, then build and tow a spacestation with workers over to Venus and it'll get chugging? Yes I know this is a poo poo way to terraform a planet, especially one so difficult to terraform as Venus, but in my mind it's kindof a set-it-and-forget-it option.
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May 29, 2015 18:03
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I don't really consider "weaponized physics would make any sort of ground combat irrelevant or unrealistic" as a valid criticism because the same would easily apply to the whole of the 4x genre: we wouldn't be colonizing star systems, we'd be strapping engines to big rocks and hurling them at the enemy's homeworld at a fraction of the speed of light. It's a far larger design consideration that simulating ground combat at any depth might cause jarring shifts in scale and management level, but if the reason for implementing ground combat in the first place is so that you have a reason to worry about logistics and space-merchant-marine-convoys and how that factors into starfleet deployment, then the ground combat really doesn't have to be involved. Just have a bunch of combat factors chewing numbers back and forth.
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May 29, 2015 18:07
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While not a 4x game, Star General had an interesting mechanic where land battles were Panzer general style counter pushing affairs that were entirely separate from the space part of the game. Each turn in space was worth 8 or so turns on the planet surface. Could be worth looking into if you have a "shooty ships plus actual ground combat" itch to scratch. Unfortunately it's not be best title in the "general" series, but it's the first thing I thought of.
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May 29, 2015 18:09
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DarthJeebus posted:While not a 4x game, Star General had an interesting mechanic where land battles were Panzer general style counter pushing affairs that were entirely separate from the space part of the game. Each turn in space was worth 8 or so turns on the planet surface. Could be worth looking into if you have a "shooty ships plus actual ground combat" itch to scratch.
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May 29, 2015 18:13
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Drone posted:I would, but I'm a couple thousand posts behind in the LP (which is fantastic btw) and I want to preserve my lastread as I work my way through it You'd be better off researching terraforming modules and building ships incorporating them. Each module acts like a single terraforming installation and requires no pop to run. That said, yes, what you said will work, though remember that each terraforming installation requires 250,000 workers (5 habs worth).
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May 29, 2015 18:16
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gradenko_2000 posted:
My beautiful heavy cruisers, may angels sing thee to thy rest! And ya Singapore fell way faster then I thought! Which is nice since now I can free up even more troops to finally crush Manila! 
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May 29, 2015 18:23
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Tomn posted:
Sounds fine to me 
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May 29, 2015 18:55
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Tomn posted:Also, it'd be pretty great to have things like a planetary invasion get cut off and manage to survive with the remains of whatever they have left long enough for the navy to return with reinforcements, or perhaps to have an empire's navy destroyed but still manage to hold out with planetary forces long enough for an ally to come in and save their bacon. Lots of cool stuff that could happen with even a moderately detailed planetary campaign system! Sugar Dirt is the best episode of Space: Above and Beyond. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRDdRp12BuE&t=2027s
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May 30, 2015 02:56
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Drone posted:So can we talk about Aurora here? I feel like it's more than groggy enough. Groggy Enough!? This game is like Dwarf fortress crossed with War in the pacific. Its so dense its a grog black hole. As I approach it, time slows and a neckbeard starts to grow at a very accelerated rate. The event horizon is just a smear of terrible UI being stretched and spegettified into a series of infinite submenus. All information on game mechanics has been lost to its infinite density and hawking radiation, what has not fallen in has been ejected from the center as a relativistic jet lovely half finished wikipedia pages, experiencing a slower reality. If I fall in I'll start tapping on the bookcase, please come find me. Honestly I've been trying to get into it because it looks like WitP in space, which would basically be the best thing ever.
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May 30, 2015 04:56
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Aurora is pretty fun to play, I often just leave it running in the backgrounds and do turns in it now and again. Course once you get to actual combat it can take forrrreeeever.
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May 30, 2015 05:30
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My last Aurora campaign fell the dreaded "time progression slows to a crawl for no goddamn reason"-bug. But it scratches a some itches in a way no other game ever has for me. I could spend hours just designing new spaceships. It's really a bit of a pity that it does so poorly in creating really massive fleet engagements, most fights are a dozen ships each on both sides or less. One of the things I loved about MoO was how you were able to have fights that involved hundreds of ships and destroyed the industrial output of your entire empire in a single turn...and then you do it again three turns later. As for the orbital invasion debate, I don't really see the point of shipping a hundred million troops (that's what I'd consider minimum for taking a world of earth's size and population, with another 50 million or so as ready reserve, and this is probably seriously lowballing it), landing them in the face of intense hostile defensive fire to begin a multi-year ground campaign that will leave the planet an irradiated hellhole devoid of life if I can just nuke the planet from orbit and get an irradiated hellhole devoid of life without going through all the trouble. Or, if I have qualms about doing that, I could just keep my fleet out of range of ground defenses and blockade the planet until the society on the ground regresses back to subsistence farming from lack of resources. Or in game terms, nuke the enemy colony and send in a colony ship of my own. Of course, that assumes a certain kind of annihilatory warfare where carpet bombing cities out of existence is perfectly reasonable. A good author can make a dozen cases as to why there should be fighting on the ground. (Two approaches I'm considering for a novel I'm writing is that aliens just place a very high cultural value on holding, taking and defending territory. Another is that they are your stereotypical Honorable Warrior Race that consider individual combat and bravery the highest form of honor and nuking something from orbit as something you only do if the other guy does it first).
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May 30, 2015 06:29
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ArchangeI posted:My last Aurora campaign fell the dreaded "time progression slows to a crawl for no goddamn reason"-bug. But it scratches a some itches in a way no other game ever has for me. I could spend hours just designing new spaceships. It's really a bit of a pity that it does so poorly in creating really massive fleet engagements, most fights are a dozen ships each on both sides or less. One of the things I loved about MoO was how you were able to have fights that involved hundreds of ships and destroyed the industrial output of your entire empire in a single turn...and then you do it again three turns later. I think that bug is supposedly because the game is simulating combat between two NPC races in the background. Even if you've never encountered one of them. imho it's a pretty big flaw in the design of the game, but also the limitation of the system it's coded in I guess.
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May 30, 2015 06:52
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Aurora is awesome and totally unplayable due to the bugs and lack of clarity about game mechanics. The comparisons between it and Dwarf Fortress are apt, even if Steve is not Toady (key difference being Toady works on his game full time). If there ever was a game that would benefit from opening it up to external development, this is it. It's too bad any and all initiatives of developing an alternative die immediately. Hell, I don't think any title has brought me closer to actually learning to code than Aurora did.
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May 30, 2015 14:12
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Been playing CM:BS and enjoying it. One thing I'm working on is clearing larger buildings with infantry without destroying walls / the building, is it just best to force enemy out of the building with heavy fire? Assaulting it usually ends in my infantry losing a few guys and running.
Michi88 fucked around with this message at 07:02 on May 31, 2015 |
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May 31, 2015 06:50
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One of Combat Mission's weakest points is building/urban combat. Yeah, your best bet is to suppress the total loving poo poo out of it and then keep doing so and then after doing that do it some more. It's one of the worst things about CM.
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May 31, 2015 08:55
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It isn't so bad once you learn the AIs behavior patterns. Assaulting buildings is probably the hardest thing to do irl. Is there some specific reason why you can't destroy a wall? If you can't get over watch on the building and spend a few turns shooting at the windows before going in then the best thing is to come if from a blind wall then breach and clear. Well the best thing is to do both. The worst is when you go into the building and the buildings behind and previously hidden from you are all full of enemies and just own you when you enter.
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May 31, 2015 14:30
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dtkozl posted:It isn't so bad once you learn the AIs behavior patterns. Assaulting buildings is probably the hardest thing to do irl. It was mostly something i came across while doing a campaign mission, where it says to preserve certain buildings that included a large apartment block full of Russian rpg teams and infantry. I ended up using heavy Mg teams to lay into the windows and door until the first floor enemys ran, then cleared from floor to floor. It ended up costing me about half a squad because of how fast the enemy went from cowering to dropping the first guy in the room.
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May 31, 2015 16:33
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You must weigh the value of trying to preserve the target versus preserving your manforce. If you absolutely can't lose those preserve points, then only use machinegun & rifle fire to suppress the enemy and hope that they are suppressed when your troops roll in. If you absolutely can't afford casualties, then nuke the place. If both, you can use Target Brief command to kill the bastards while limiting the collateral damage somewhat. Also note that sustained HMG fire will eventually damage buildings, albeit much slower than 20mm+.
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May 31, 2015 17:35
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dtkozl posted:It isn't so bad once you learn the AIs behavior patterns. YEP! Which is ridiculous. It's a game that touts, "Hey, real tactics and procedures will pay off!" and then has several problems with the TacAI making that impossible without exploiting the poo poo out of the game. I love Combat Mission, I really, really do, and that's why it's so incredibly frustrating that they've settled for a "good enough" approach on many of its aspects, primarily the TacAI.
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May 31, 2015 17:53
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Nenonen posted:You must weigh the value of trying to preserve the target versus preserving your manforce. If you absolutely can't lose those preserve points, then only use machinegun & rifle fire to suppress the enemy and hope that they are suppressed when your troops roll in. If you absolutely can't afford casualties, then nuke the place. If both, you can use Target Brief command to kill the bastards while limiting the collateral damage somewhat. Playing some this morning I've really started seeing the perks of the target briefly with Bradley auto cannon fire, it usually results in full suppression while still not taking down multiple walls unlike the mk19 Stryker which are really good at bringing down structures. I for some reason just now after reading that realized the preserve markers were not automatic "you fail if you destroy these" marks, which i thought before. If you guys want to give any suggestions for good missions I would give them a shot, mostly playing quick battle maps with friends and the campaign atm, i should add my email to the board / will do shortly.
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May 31, 2015 18:05
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Michi88 posted:It was mostly something i came across while doing a campaign mission, where it says to preserve certain buildings that included a large apartment block full of Russian rpg teams and infantry. I ended up using heavy Mg teams to lay into the windows and door until the first floor enemys ran, then cleared from floor to floor. It ended up costing me about half a squad because of how fast the enemy went from cowering to dropping the first guy in the room. Yeah thankfully this doesn't come up much in the ww2 versions. What specifically triggers a failure for that objective, a single wall destroyed, more? Is it an either/or or does each wall destroyed mean a bigger bite from the points lost? One thing in general that is useful is learning the power of target ground + patience. If you know an ambush is coming in the woods or a building or perhaps someone has a tank that is just behind a line of trees and can't be seen, just laying into it with target ground can generally take care of it. You probably won't have to worry about clearing major forests in black sea but if you are going up against another human who knows what they are doing it is a mandatory skill imo.
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May 31, 2015 19:10
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Yeah, that's probably one of the best tips I can offer about Combat Mission: Patience. Most scenarios are 45 minutes minimum, often 60-90. You have all the time in the world, move up slowly, make sure you're doing recon, and don't rush into any sort of attack. With the modern hardware in Black Sea and one rifleman outgunning an entire WW2 squad recon by fire is exceedingly valid and mostly cost effective. In all the time I played since it came out I've only had a squad run out of ammo two or three times. Also everything is explosive. Seriously, the fact that SL's have air burst GP's is loving awesome and makes shooting sons of bitches that much easier. Although that does mean the objectives for NOT blowing stuff up are that much more difficult.
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Jun 1, 2015 01:14
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quote:Is anyone interested in a C:tgw game or maybe a Guadacanal Witp scenario? I just finished one and my WITP game has stalled so I have some extra time for pixelman battles. Anyone?
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Jun 1, 2015 14:03
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Saros posted:Anyone? No but I'll take another DC:Case Blue game.
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Jun 1, 2015 14:12
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Grey Hunter posted:Its true though, Our "World Wars" involved millions of soldiers, billions of civilians and took years - yet they were fought over relatively small sections of the planet (ignoring the sea part of the pacific.)
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Jun 1, 2015 14:18
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