War score subtraction for occupying an enemy planet?

[smjjames]

@jmpveg22 Only problem is that theres utterly no strategy to ground invasions as it's abstract as heck. Also, what's stopping you or me from spamming large numbers of marines onto a world? Nothing. Theres a limit to the number of defending units (plus the auto-garrison), but there appears to be no limit to how many you can land on a world for an invasion, the excess will be auto-embarked when the fight is over.

One thing that I think would be an improvement is having more advanced (and more powerful) defending units for the mid-late game. The ones that we have, are with you the entire game and don't increase in strength, but we get access to much stronger attack units. I suppose one could just stock their worlds with entirely gene warriors for defense, but they aren't meant for defense.

 

[Crissa]

@jmpveg22 Only problem is that theres utterly no strategy to ground invasions as it's abstract as heck. Also, what's stopping you or me from spamming large numbers of marines onto a world?

What's to stop you from leaving a single cruiser over every enemy planet?

I 'accidentally' won a war doing this because I took a three and two planet systems and dropped a cruiser over each planet after breaking his fleet. Poof, a bunch of warscore.

...I had actually wanted more time to destroy some outposts so I could win a mining station.

 

[Oscot]

@jmpveg22 Only problem is that theres utterly no strategy to ground invasions as it's abstract as heck.

Well the same is true of space invasions; Stellaris has the probably-realistic-in-an-FTL-war-but-nevertheless-highly-counterintuitive property that (especially for wormhole empires) there is no such thing as a front-line in wars. Fleets can pop up and blast you in any system they want, so there's never a strategy of "OK lets fortify in this one border-zone star" because the enemy can just jump right past your defenses and shoot up some other system.

Of course if the suggestion of @GamerSteve were implemented, and the occupation of your wargoal planets started the warscore ticking, then at least you could specify those as set pieces. But as it stands, there's never any reason to fight over this specific system or invade this specific planet, because they all give similar warscores.
Hell, when you're declaring wargoals there's never any reason to ask for a given system either, because there's never any cool special objects within a system that make it valuable to possess. Strategic resources are still totally underwhelming and the only consideration that ever goes into my DoWs is "What causes the minimum of border gore?".

As I said, interchangeable systems is probably realistic for FTL warfare in geography-free space, but realistic or not it's kinda boring to play. When every system is equivalent there's no sense of urgency or accomplishment in taking a given one.

This is another example of my perennial complaint that the planetary systems in Stellaris lack personality. There's only, what, two setpieces (Sanctuary and the Cybrex ring), plus two "half setpieces" (the FE Gaia / Ring homeworlds), and after that, the other 996 systems in your 1000 galaxy are entirely un-memorable.

 

[GamerSteve]

But as it stands, there's never any reason to fight over this specific system or invade this specific planet, because they all give similar warscores. Hell, when you're declaring wargoals there's never any reason to ask for a given system either, because there's never any cool special objects within a system that make it valuable to possess. Strategic resources are still totally underwhelming and the only consideration that ever goes into my DoWs is "What causes the minimum of border gore?".

Yup.

My friend and I who play Co-op together, as a federation, pretty much always do it adjacent to our own borders so as to keep the empire contiguous and continuous. I will also obsessively go after the 'dashed line' blobs if I have to or the small bubbles that get pinched off of a larger empire, because I want my empire to be nice and clean and monochrome. (And so does he, LOL.)

Basically, I'm doing a paint-by-numbers conquest scheme rather than saying he, I need this world because it is strategically worth taking. I never even remember what world is what anyway, other than the ones in my core.

 

[Oscot]

My friend and I who play Co-op together, as a federation, pretty much always do it adjacent to our own borders so as to keep the empire contiguous and continuous. I will also obsessively go after the 'dashed line' blobs if I have to or the small bubbles that get pinched off of a larger empire, because I want my empire to be nice and clean and monochrome. (And so does he, LOL.)

Then you know my pain: that enlightening primitives is SUFFERING.
It's like painting a wall in a lovely matte hue and then vomiting on it.

 

[GamerSteve]

Then you know my pain: that enlightening primitives is SUFFERING.
It's like painting a wall in a lovely matte hue and then vomiting on it.

In our current game my xenophobic spiritualists just go in and conquer all primitive worlds. They hate us for decades but we don't care.