Suggestion: Invading Atomic age primitives

[Kat Tsun]

Steal this idea for my mod.

Too late, I already stole a functional equivalent in having ground armies that would be able to turn planets into Tomb Worlds. Of course, this was months ago and so I didn't so much steal it as get perturbed as to why I couldn't nuke things into dust with Space Tanks.

It was sunk the instant I looked into how the Swarm converted planets and realized that making anything happen/trigger during ground combat was impossible. The only thing you can do is making events that fire after you've captured a planet. It doesn't even work if you lose a ground invasion, because the game literally is incapable of looking at that.

At best you can have a small chance of turning Primitive planets into Tomb Worlds after you've completely squished their armies. Nothing more. Or in my case, having a box that pops up when you've conquered a planet while possessing a certain technology that lets you choose between "pc_nuked" or "not pc_nuked". The only difference between this thread's idea and my final evolution idea is that the nuking is involuntary and the buttons say "Sad." or "So sad." instead.

 

[The Founder]

People are arguing because they have trouble imaging devs including anything except their very rigid and specific suggestions.

So you got no more arguments left, all you got left is insulting us as "not imagiantive and to rigid to see how good my idea is"? That will not aid a meaningfull discussion

For the 4th or so time: Some ideas just do not make a good (addition to a) game. Adding random chance is always to the detirement of the player, rather then his engagement.
If you add that chance to invasion against nuclear or space age civilisations, what would happen is one this short list:
- Conquer them with even more overwhelming ground forces, to reduce the chance of it happening
- use infiltration or Indoctiration and Enlightenment instead
- wait for them to get to space age. Hit them before they build thier spaceport.
- demand for an option to prepare the invasion - so this does NOT happen - from the Devs (like parking a fleet in orbit to block this chance). If they somehow fail at doing that preparations on thier own, give me a way to force them into doing it. At this point it just becomes "Normal Operation Procedure" to such an invasion, you added a lot of complexity without adding any deepth.

And the UNS weapons aren´t again that good. They are massproduced, and small but everything else on them is bad. FFS, they can´t even destroy something the size of one a edium sized naval ship with one shot.

The missiles are unavoidable for Corvettes, wich do not even have PD options anymore.
The overall poor performance is part of the way Missiles work. If Missiles were inherently inferior to other space weapons, they would not be in the game as a start choice to begin with.

 

[scaper12123]

It seems like an interesting proposition. I'm not sure how I feel about it, but it makes perfect sense when you think logically. An alien race coming to take all your stuff? Makes sense that you'd probably nuke yourself before you allow that to happen.

 

[hadaev]

Too late, I already stole a functional equivalent in having ground armies that would be able to turn planets into Tomb Worlds. Of course, this was months ago and so I didn't so much steal it as get perturbed as to why I couldn't nuke things into dust with Space Tanks.

It was sunk the instant I looked into how the Swarm converted planets and realized that making anything happen/trigger during ground combat was impossible. The only thing you can do is making events that fire after you've captured a planet. It doesn't even work if you lose a ground invasion, because the game literally is incapable of looking at that.

At best you can have a small chance of turning Primitive planets into Tomb Worlds after you've completely squished their armies. Nothing more. Or in my case, having a box that pops up when you've conquered a planet while possessing a certain technology that lets you choose between "pc_nuked" or "not pc_nuked". The only difference between this thread's idea and my final evolution idea is that the nuking is involuntary and the buttons say "Sad." or "So sad." instead.

I think i can deal with it.

 

[solidprice]

People are arguing because, even if the primitive xenos wanted to nuke themselves into oblivion rather than die, we assume that the space invaders' first action during any invasion would be to target the nuclear weapons of the planet. Regardless of whether or not the primitives are suicidal, any marginally sane invading commander is going to want to make sure that the primitives can't use the weapons against the invaders. When drawing up the list of the initial targets for invasion/orbital bombardment, nuclear arsenals would be target 1 for any general. As a side effect, that would also make sure they can't use the weapons against themselves.

Is it possible that some caches of nukes might be missed? Sure, but not enough to allow for a world-ending kaboom; contrary to what you might think, that actually takes a fairly large nuclear exchange (hence why all the nuclear testing during the Cold War didn't kill us all).

If fanatic xenophobes with FTL can't immolate their own planets in response to an invasion, primitive species with vastly less technology and warning certainly shouldn't be able to.

Good points.
F. Xenophobe and a few others should be able to immolate/commit suicide/self nuke.

My thought were:
That you shouldn't be able to jump in day 1, with a 1 star armchair general w/basic just enough assault army, and think you can solo take a pre spaceflight race with just transports, and not expect problems.


Now with a decent fleet giving bombardment support, led by zeno
Edwin rommel, with gene super soliders on mounts, you should have 0 problems blitzkriging them and having them bend knee as easy like all other stages.

 

[Xoatl]

So you got no more arguments left, all you got left is insulting us as "not imagiantive and to rigid to see how good my idea is"? That will not aid a meaningfull discussion

I already presented what I wanted, any further addition would have diminishing returns to be worthwhile at this point. Also, others have taken up arms for me, so that's always nice to see.

Eventually I settle on ignoring debate chains for this very reason.

 

[Aurtose]

An interesting point raised and then largely avoided by this thread is the possible applications of this to the ground combat/invasion mechanic as a whole.

-A captured militarist planet with unhappy enough pops could nuke itself as a "screw you" to both the invaders and their own government, who seemingly abandoned them
-Policies for ground invasions and ground defence (guerrilla, assault, WMDs ?), providing a trade-off between damage and population damage and tile blocker creation
-The latter point could also be expanded to have various effects associated with army types (beyond statistical changes). For instance: psi armies are less likely to cause civilian casualties; xeno armies start purging and infighting if left on a planet; robots cause higher civilian casualties

Regarding the plausibility of an FTL civilisation failing to plan to prevent a nuclear war: it takes a few weeks for the player to be told that a scientist has gone rogue and declared himself a god of the primitives; there are events that include transports being shot down; etc. This game plays with the comically inept alien trope from time to time and, beyond that, if as a player you don't care, so drop half a dozen robot armies or a couple of xeno armies on a planet just to get them out of the way then your indifference should be represented. Maybe the chance should only apply to armies without a general though, generals are pretty worthless atm. and anything to give them value would be good.

 

[solidprice]

An interesting point raised and then largely avoided by this thread is the possible applications of this to the ground combat/invasion mechanic as a whole.

-A captured militarist planet with unhappy enough pops could nuke itself as a "screw you" to both the invaders and their own government, who seemingly abandoned them
-Policies for ground invasions and ground defence (guerrilla, assault, WMDs ?), providing a trade-off between damage and population damage and tile blocker creation
-The latter point could also be expanded to have various effects associated with army types (beyond statistical changes). For instance: psi armies are less likely to cause civilian casualties; xeno armies start purging and infighting if left on a planet; robots cause higher civilian casualties

Regarding the plausibility of an FTL civilisation failing to plan to prevent a nuclear war: it takes a few weeks for the player to be told that a scientist has gone rogue and declared himself a god of the primitives; there are events that include transports being shot down; etc. This game plays with the comically inept alien trope from time to time and, beyond that, if as a player you don't care, so drop half a dozen robot armies or a couple of xeno armies on a planet just to get them out of the way then your indifference should be represented. Maybe the chance should only apply to armies without a general though, generals are pretty worthless atm. and anything to give them value would be good.

This.
Genarals matter quite a bit in Europa and HOI, so it seems strange learders dont matter.
All i wanted to hire were scientists,governers,and 1/2 gucci 5 star doom fleet admirals

 

[Salaman Der]

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.

Uhm... what if, in an Infiltration/Invasion, a "nation" of the Natives betray them, actually helping the invaders in exchange of some sort of "preferential treatment" (some pops get special traits, more loyalty and can't be enslaved/relocated/purged or are even translated as a whole in a sub-race with different ethics than the original)?

 

[DrachenEngel]

On a similar note, I think failing an Invasion should also have some effects,like turning them Xenophobic and letting them skip tech stages.

 

[Kat Tsun]

On a similar note, I think failing an Invasion should also have some effects,like turning them Xenophobic and letting them skip tech stages.

It's pretty much impossible to fail an invasion. Not that it matters, though. You can't trigger anything if an invasion fails. There's no condition for it. There is also no condition for checking status of ground combats on a per tick basis (but I think there is one for fleet combat).

There is a condition for detecting whether a planet has changed sides/been occupied though, which is how the Unbidden cleanse worlds and the Swarm converts them.

Your idea is impossible.

Besides, they already turn xenophobic if you're using the aggressive observation option.