some thoughts on planetary invasion and naval construction

[scaper12123]

It is my hope that the next update after Banks will focus on combat and warfare. To that end, I've been thinking about planetary invasions and constructing navies and I've thought about how generic the mechanics behind those two things are. For the former, your navy attacks a spaceport and sits over the planet for a few minutes while your armies descend upon the world and slaughter a few defensive armies. Not much interesting going on, all things considered. As for naval construction, it's frustrating how quickly an enemy can restore their navy due to the vast number of spaceports used to construct ships. Disabling the opponent's naval capabilities should be a major strategic goal, not just a brief skirmish in one system and then a lengthy process of killing every last spaceport the opponent has (and even then they can start rebuilding them immediately).

I feel like invading planets should be an event that involves both ground and space combat at the same time, possibly between two fleets fighting over the planet as opposed to a disconnected space battle. Think of it this way: a fleet attacking a planet would probably have to deal with defenses orbiting the planet, defenses from the planet below, garrisoned armies on the planet, and possibly an opposing fleet taking advantage of their proximity to the planet to defend their territory. These things should overlap into something that requires a lot more thought going in than what we have now.

As for the naval bit, I get why our current system works: doomstacks are the major deal and not having any spaceports to rebuild with would be no good whatsoever. However, doomstacking will eventually be addressed and when that happens, I feel like the navy needs to be given its own means of construction separate from spaceports, acting as a major part of war for both offensive and defensive sides.

 

[AndragonLea]

I don't see how you would get that "two fleets battling it out under planetary guns" thing to happen very often, though. You could add artillery and X slot weapons to the planetary defenses (maybe making their strength depend on the fortification points to give planetary shields more meaning?), but there is just not very much call for it.

Maybe people would try to fight in orbit of the planet more if they knew it had guns to aid in the defense, but planets would need a very sizeable range to make that viable, otherwise you'd already have won or lost by the time the enemy fleet draws within range of the surface guns.

There is also not currently a way to make planetary bodies attackable, so implementing planet weapons and taking them out would need implementation of a whole new mechanic to get it done - I think this would be a good idea, but some of the veterans from other Paradox games are already whining that Paradox is throwing the 4 x crowd too many bones.

They'd rather have more diplomacy, espionage or any of the other systems already established in other games.

I'd like to see the ship construction become much slower on star ports of lower levels, with a comparable increase in speed when you build the (insert hull size here) assembly module.

That way you could rebuild the star port, but it wouldn't amount to much of anything because it'd take 3 months to build a corvette until you upgrade it back to tier 6 and build a corvette assembly module. This would make losing star ports hurt much more, give reason to attack them and cause people to build the modules on more than just 2 or 3 peace time naval centers.

Add the planetary guns in support of the star port when it is attacked and we'd be golden - more risk to destroying them, more impact for when you succeed, more importance in utilising the star port/planetary defenses in defensive wars.

Maybe implement a debuff on planets that lost a star port, so they'd take double the time to construct ships for X years to simulate the loss of experienced hands/machines when the previous star port blew up?

It would make thematic sense because you just lost your entire complement of skilled crafsmen and the infrastructure they needed to build ships - stuff like that can't just be replaced with a clap of hands, people like that usually represent decades of study and hands on ecxperience that are hard to find at the best of times, much less during a war.

I'd actually like for there to be more ways to make a planets developement impact war in general - a tier 6 star port on a tomb world with 1 robot pop constructs as fast as a tier 6 star port on your (supposedly) heavily industrialised and advanced capitol planet. That never struck me as right.