Suggestion: Invading Atomic age primitives

[Xoatl]

So I was mowing my front yard of space and I had a thought. What if I invaded some of these atomic age natives and during the invasion every day has an increased chance of triggering the atomic age planet destruction event. Losing your army in the process. Possibly further modifiers on the chance of triggering based on species traits. Would offer some protection to the civilization, excusing the fact that they'd be destroying themselves as well.

 

[Sheriff Godwin Law]

Modify the odds based on where their ethics fall on the militarist, xenophobe and possibly egalitarian axis. Make invading xenophobic, militaristic, egalitarians an almost guaranteed tomb world.

I like it.

 

[Wyrm]

This is quite a good idea.

If they ever implement surface-based anti-ship weapons I'd say atomic age should start having crude missile weapons with nuclear warheads

 

[LeibSSolmai]

I also thought about this mechanic once, but there is one Problem.
You are a technical extremely advanced race. You are able to build a research post right above them and they never notice it, even if they are early space age.
You of course don´t want them to ruin the planet your are invading right now, so I think the first action of your generals while invading is finding all of their nuclear weapons with your super advanced sensors and blow them all up with orbital bombardments or strike teams.

 

[Ketilsen]

I also thought about this mechanic once, but there is one Problem.
You are a technical extremely advanced race. You are able to build a research post right above them and they never notice it, even if they are early space age.
You of course don´t want them to ruin the planet your are invading right now, so I think the first action of your generals while invading is finding all of their nuclear weapons with your super advanced sensors and blow them all up with orbital bombardments or strike teams.

Pretty much this.

 

[Sheriff Godwin Law]

I also thought about this mechanic once, but there is one Problem.
You are a technical extremely advanced race. You are able to build a research post right above them and they never notice it, even if they are early space age.
You of course don´t want them to ruin the planet your are invading right now, so I think the first action of your generals while invading is finding all of their nuclear weapons with your super advanced sensors and blow them all up with orbital bombardments or strike teams.

Interesting point, but only relevant if you are invading with enough force to disarm the most protected and secreted weapons caches of the most powerful nations on that world. So I'd say only start risking it proccing if the ground combat has been going on for over a week. You invade with enough force to wipe out any organized resistance within a week, and I'll believe you invaded with enough force to capture or destroy multiple heavily defended military bases before they have a chance to launch.

On the other hand, you're simply dropping two regiments and expecting them to scrape out a win after a hard fight, or worse, dropping two regiments with the expectation that they'll need to retreat, regroup, and reinvade, while a single corvette in orbit is plunking away with class 1 mass drivers just to stop their troops from recovering, I don't believe you have the necessary resources to guaranty disarmament of enough of a world's nuclear armaments to stop its utter destruction.

 

[Alblaka]

the most protected and secreted weapons caches of the most powerful nations on that world.

We got laser weapons, some of us will have Armageddon bombardment and our ships are able to move faster then light.
I'm reasoanbly sure even our Corvettes could devaste any kind of 'modern atomic age' military installation. Or at the very least fry ICBMs as they start.

 

[ZomgK3tchup]

I assume that your interstellar invasion force has counter-measures to nuclear strikes and/or scanners to detect nuclear weapons caches.

Interesting point, but only relevant if you are invading with enough force to disarm the most protected and secreted weapons caches of the most powerful nations on that world. So I'd say only start risking it proccing if the ground combat has been going on for over a week. You invade with enough force to wipe out any organized resistance within a week, and I'll believe you invaded with enough force to capture or destroy multiple heavily defended military bases before they have a chance to launch.

On the other hand, you're simply dropping two regiments and expecting them to scrape out a win after a hard fight, or worse, dropping two regiments with the expectation that they'll need to retreat, regroup, and reinvade, while a single corvette in orbit is plunking away with class 1 mass drivers just to stop their troops from recovering, I don't believe you have the necessary resources to guaranty disarmament of enough of a world's nuclear armaments to stop its utter destruction.

This is a fairly specific example that is only applicable to the very first few years of the game. After that, even a modest invasion force should be enough to eat any pre-Space Age civilization for breakfast.

It also requires that literally no forethought has been put into the invasion: I assume that your general (or whoever is leading your invasion) is invading with knowledge of the enemy's capabilities and (roughly) what he/she should target. You do get a warning if an invasion is likely to fail, after all, so I don't think any invasion in the game is totally blind.

 

[BlackUmbrellas]

But what if we got a Footfall scenario?

 

[ZomgK3tchup]

But what if we got a Footfall scenario?

I'm sure that we could come up with plenty of examples where an Atomic Age or Early Space Age civilization would be in a position to use nuclear weapons as an effective deterrent against an alien invasion, but I assume that the majority of cases involve a sufficiently-sized invasion force that has already taken this possibility into account.

I wouldn't particularly mind events that address fringe cases where your ill-prepared ground forces get nuked, but these situations would be so far from the norm that I can't see the developers adding them unless they had a free afternoon and thought "Let's write some fun events."

From a meta perspective, it's also reasonable that if something like this was added, no competent player would put themselves in a situation where it could. That would just turn invading Atomic Age and Early Space Age civilizations into a noob trap. While funny, I'm not a fan of punishing the player for not knowing the nuances of the game.

 

[BlackUmbrellas]

From a meta perspective, it's also reasonable that if something like this was added, no competent player would put themselves in a situation where it could. That would just turn invading Atomic Age and Early Space Age civilizations into a noob trap. While funny, I'm not a fan of punishing the player for not knowing the nuances of the game.

The game already provides alerts regarding the Atomic Age and how it makes a civilization incredibly volatile and liable to potentially explode- it'd just take a few tweaks to turn that into "invading can sometimes nuke the planet and/or blow up your invasion force".

I'm not arguing for a full-on long event chain that mirrors Footfall- I just think the possibility to have Atomic Age civilizations nuke an invasion force would be interesting. It could even add a tile blocker to the planet with one of those "Bomb Craters" or some such.

 

[The Founder]

So I was mowing my front yard of space and I had a thought. What if I invaded some of these atomic age natives and during the invasion every day has an increased chance of triggering the atomic age planet destruction event. Losing your army in the process. Possibly further modifiers on the chance of triggering based on species traits. Would offer some protection to the civilization, excusing the fact that they'd be destroying themselves as well.

This is only working agianst the player, not for the Civilisation.
Even if they do make it to space age on thier own, they simply can not be competitive at that time. Everyone will have 20-100 years headstart on them. Especially as they have to be a AI faction.
Pre-FTL are plain not competitive. And the only question is how you deal with them:
Uplift/Protectorate/Integration? Sciene Station? Invasion? Infiltration?

The only thing it might add is a incentive for Infiltration over Invasion. But that is already done via the Diplomacy Penalty and the "Stellar Culture Shock" penalty.

 

[Xoatl]

It shouldn't be a guarantee but an increased chance during the invasion period. I dunno where it would be at if you were invading an early space age civ. The icbms are still there, perhaps at quantitites low enough not to cause tomb worlds. I play a lot of xenophobe games and in order to clear out surrounding space and planets I typically only target primitives close to space age because the genocide diplo penalty is pretty hefty. But with what I described I might have to reconsider the order at which I begin exterminating nearby sentience.

This is only working agianst the player, not for the Civilisation.
Even if they do make it to space age on thier own, they simply can not be competitive at that time. Everyone will have 20-100 years headstart on them. Especially as they have to be a AI faction.
Pre-FTL are plain not competitive. And the only question is how you deal with them:
Uplift/Protectorate/Integration? Sciene Station? Invasion? Infiltration?

The only thing it might add is a incentive for Infiltration over Invasion. But that is already done via the Diplomacy Penalty and the "Stellar Culture Shock" penalty.

That's exactly right. If you risked a tomb world and losing armies if you were to attack atomic age primitives you'd start handling primitives differently. Or you can go even deeper and try to purposefully start tomb worlds for their flavour events and if you have one of those irradiated uplifted slaves running around.

I'm watching Colony right now but lots of invasion scenarios start with aliens shutting down major defense networks. But it's not an exact science. A particularly sneaky and paranoid species might have back up and redundant systems to fire icbms if tampered with or the loss of power. Or a particularly militaristic species that just has a ludicrous amount of stockpiled missiles.

Banks will have new ways to shift a species ethos so not sure if there's a good alternative to invasion there.

 

[Sheriff Godwin Law]

We got laser weapons, some of us will have Armageddon bombardment and our ships are able to move faster then light.
I'm reasoanbly sure even our Corvettes could devaste any kind of 'modern atomic age' military installation. Or at the very least fry ICBMs as they start.

Some of these Atomic Age civilizations are just years away from having space flight themselves. Your ships are not capable of faster than light travel within the gravity well. And your corvette have never been able to "fry" the ballistic missiles launched directly at them, what makes you think they'd be able to stop a multitude of ballistic missiles launched away from them on the other side of a planet?

I understand the realism versus gameplay argument. But I'm not sure your position is realistic or good gameplay.

This is a fairly specific example that is only applicable to the very first few years of the game. After that, even a modest invasion force should be enough to eat any pre-Space Age civilization for breakfast.

Then after that I agree with you, before that I don't.

It also requires that literally no forethought has been put into the invasion: I assume that your general (or whoever is leading your invasion) is invading with knowledge of the enemy's capabilities and (roughly) what he/she should target. You do get a warning if an invasion is likely to fail, after all, so I don't think any invasion in the game is totally blind.

You're a big fan of the false dichotomy aren't you?

The choice isn't between "no forethought" and "can disable an uncounted number of nuclear arsenals stretched over an indeterminate number of industrialized nations."

And the choice isn't between "I have found every hidden installation on every nuclear power capable of causing mass destruction" and "we're going in completely blind boys!"

There's a middle ground, the middle ground that I suspect you are (roughly) aware exists and would acknowledge if you weren't arguing from a position of hysterical extremes. That middle ground is also impossible to accurately represent effectively in this game. Which is why the original poster suggests that there be a critical fail chance that leads to the kind of destruction that we presumably reasonable humans were prepared to cause one another rather than lose the cold war. And why I agree with it, and think that critical fail chance should be modified both by the length of the war by a people's tendency towards xenophobia, militarism and egalitarianism.

 

[The Founder]

Some of these Atomic Age civilizations are just years away from having space flight themselves. Your ships are not capable of faster than light travel within the gravity well. And your corvette have never been able to "fry" the ballistic missiles launched directly at them, what makes you think they'd be able to stop a multitude of ballistic missiles launched away from them on the other side of a planet?

They are not "just before FTL". Atomic to Early Spaceflight takes 60 Years at least. Early Spaceflight to FTL another 60 years. 120 year is a lot of cosmic time.

If the Pre-FTL cilvilisaiton had this option, there is no reason a FTL Civilisation should not have the same. Indeed they would be more willing to Tomb thier planets, given that they propably have more of them.
It would be ludicrous that you can conquer them once they do reach FTL age (even if they have no space military to speak off) without that danger, but not while they are just before that.

 

[Serenity84]

There are plenty of sci-fi works where Earth beats alien invaders even with inferior technology. And it's just handwaved away because there needs to be a story of course. No reason why other planets couldn't have a chance to do the same to you.

There is already an event where the aliens can discover your observation post and go XCOM on you.

 

[Xoatl]

There is already an event where the aliens can discover your observation post and go XCOM on you.

Good point, there is precedent in the game already for primitives offering some level of resistance. You can just avoid it by turning off aggressive observation. But primitives shouldn't be that easy to predict. Primitives with more range to what they can do (within reason), should be hyped. What Sheriff Godwin said is very much on point. Sometimes people on this forum seem to troll with their mind numbingly rigid positions.

What are you going to do.

 

[ZomgK3tchup]

The choice isn't between "no forethought" and "can disable an uncounted number of nuclear arsenals stretched over an indeterminate number of industrialized nations."

And the choice isn't between "I have found every hidden installation on every nuclear power capable of causing mass destruction" and "we're going in completely blind boys!"

That's exactly what the choice is.

By virtue of having lightyear-spanning sensors and the ability to scan a planet for resource deposits of your choosing, you shouldn't have a problem figuring out where primitives keep their nuclear weapons. Failing that, you could use their own Internet to come up with probable locations.

A reasonably prepared invasion force would have this information in advance.

There's a middle ground, the middle ground that I suspect you are (roughly) aware exists and would acknowledge if you weren't arguing from a position of hysterical extremes. That middle ground is also impossible to accurately represent effectively in this game. Which is why the original poster suggests that there be a critical fail chance that leads to the kind of destruction that we presumably reasonable humans were prepared to cause one another rather than lose the cold war. And why I agree with it, and think that critical fail chance should be modified both by the length of the war by a people's tendency towards xenophobia, militarism and egalitarianism.

The middle ground assumes that the invading force, for some reason, neglects to target the defender's nuclear arsenals. I didn't mention it because it doesn't make sense: the attackers would have to grossly mismanage the assault from the onset. The first logical question one would ask when invading primitives of this level is "Do we know where they keep their nukes?" followed by "Do you want to destroy their nuclear arsenals before we land or during the landing?"

 

[Secret Master]

Well, one of the reasons I invade atomic age primitives is to prevent them from turning their worlds into nuclear wastelands, but I see the OP's point.

There's all kinds of nasty tricks an atomic age race could use to turn their world into a tomb world even if they are losing the war quickly. If they have SSBNs, I don't see how the invading forces hope to get all the nukes. And if they screw up the first twelve hours of the attack, enough of the world's arsenals can be in transit to targets to glass most of the planet.

This, of course, assumes the defenders even bother to hold back. The defending primitives might be insane enough to use their nukes on each other, hoping to settle centuries-old grudges under the chaos of an alien invasion. (Stranger things have happened in Earth history.)

 

[Sinister2202]

I like this idea