Usual Amount of Defence Armies?

[Woozywyvern]

I have only just started playing as aggressive races, conquering planets (I have previously palyed as defensive, and pacifistic type empires). When I am trying to conquer enemy planets, they seem to have a large amount of Defence Armies. The military strength is about 900 (each Defence Army is seems to be at about 64 Military Strength).

Currently my Assault armies have around 26 Military Strength each.

As I am inexperienced in this aspect of the game, I wanted to check if this is a usual amount of Defence Armies for a planet to have when played by the AI?

 

[RoverStorm]

Depends. The AI loves to spam precinct buildings (the ones that give police jobs). They are programmed so they "shouldn't" build more than 3 on any one planet, but each one basically comes with 4 defense armies, so that's 12 defense armies if the AI builds them. Then they're usually going to have between 2-6 more defense armies from the jobs provided by the planetary capital.

So it's not uncommon to find planets with 14-18 defense armies around the mid-late game. Typically, the worse an AI's economy is, the more they prioritize NOT building police station and therefore the fewer defense armies they have.

Usually I find most AI empires have lots of defense armies on planets with lots of pops (usually upwards of 50), but anything less quickly drops down to being guarded by just 2-6 armies.

Basically if the AI doesn't need any other buildings on a planet, they are going to default to building 3 buildings that give 4 defense armies each, quickly giving lots of defense armies. But otherwise they're not usually heavily guarded.

 

[Woozywyvern]

Great stuff - thanks for the reply, so the AI is behaiving usually (Wasn't sure as I am using the beta patch version and this is my first instance of this type of war).

I shall modify my tactics accordingly.

 

[trojan1234]

I experienced the same in 2.2.5. I needed 1.5k army to take each planet.

Defense army was of size 500 or less in 2.2.4 or before so it might get fixed next patch.

 

[Bouchart]

AI spams precints so they get tons of defense armies. They'll also build assault troops and station them on a planet. And the AI also likes to use the Martial Law decision when being bombarded, which enables two Soldier jobs and more defense armies.

As a pacifist I declared a subjugation war and it took nearly forever to take a capital planet because you're stuck with Selective bombardment and the Ai has tons of defense strength.

 

[ApocalipsA]

Bombarding then land your armies. While bombarding the Planet you can kill the armys on planet and Damage the defense. Look this green Thing xD