Weapon of coice for glassing a homeworld?

[geoschmo]

Yes, if we are striving for accuracy then as Baron says there needs to be some sort of different ratios for planetary bombardment.

Facilities and weapon platforms shoud be fairly eacy to destroy from orbit, even with standard weapons, as they are stationary, fairly large targets. Troops, not so easy, but still not all that difficult given a little time, or a lot of ships.

Orbital bombardment, even standard weapons, should degrade planetary conditions somewhat. Although I am not sure I understand the logic for haveing the resource levels of a planet drop as it does now when a colony is glassed.

Population should be fairly easy to kill off at first, but should get steadily more diffucult as the population drops. The Last million or so should be almost impossible to kill from orbit, even with planetary weapons.

The result of all this would be that heavy bombardment would result not in a glassing of a world, but a wiping out of all the infrasturture and defenses and a significant amount of the population. And degrade the conditions so that the survivors have a hard time repopulating it.

Of course this only applies for atmosphere correct planets. If it's a domed colony it should be fairly easy to completely erradicate the population.

Geoschmo

[Taera]

That would be fairly difficult to implicate in the game IMO.

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by Taera:
That would be fairly difficult to implicate in the game IMO.

Oh definetly. But it was very easy for me to suggest.

Geo

[PDF]

Well, I agree that the planetary combat need some modification...
As of now, we can already do some things :
* Drop Wp altogether, I don't like them, that's not SciFi as I want it
* Make population much more resistant to damage : it just hurts me to see a lone "Escort" killing 100M people with its DUC1...
even if it supposed to weigh 150KT that don't help, what I see is a small 100 m long craft...
* HEAVILY Shield planets/facilities !! That's what B5 mod did, along with shield skipping bombs ! That's very neat, to kill planetary stuff you have to use bombs instead of rays

With this planetary attacks should look better IMHO. If I ever do a mod I will begin with this ...

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by PDF:
* Drop Wp altogether, I don't like them, that's not SciFi as I want it

I don't understand. What do you have against Weapon platforms?

Geoschmo

[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by Phoenix-D:
We aren't talking about destroying the planet, just killing off the population that lives there. Weapons that are designed to take out large warships will certainly take out cities. The biggest issue would be killing more spread out populations.

Phoenix-D[/QB]

My italics. That's the issue. A ship, a WP, even a troop, is a single 'hard' target. You have to hit it directly with a concentrated attack. Facilities are less 'hard' but at least fairly localized. You can see/scan the location of a mine, factory, research lab and bLast it.

Population is a whole other thing. People are not likely to be in one convenient location unless, as Geo points out, the colony is a hostile atmosphere type and everyone has to live in domes. So it's just not realistic to be able to wipe the slate clean on a populated planet with DUCs or even APBs or any other beam weapons.

[mac5732]

As with other discussed weapons/damage/etc, it must be remembered that balance is the key. If one goes overboard and makes a planet to hard or nearly impossible to glaze then balance is gone.

IMHO, Probably the easiest way to help in this area is to increase the use and strength of Planetary Shields. In addition as a side note, the possiblity of stronger wp shields/armor could also be looked into. These would be stronger then ship shields/armor, due to the larger area for infrastructure then you have on a ship. Increasing the range of wp's is also an option, as well as limiting the types of weapons that can glaze or damage a planet. Glazing planets whether pop/resources/infrastructure is needed however, it should not be as easy as it is currently in regards to planets that have progressed past initial colony stage. This is where planetary shields come into play. You could have different levels with higher levels of damage resistance as you go up the ladder. Also you could also have say level one shields stop x type of damage/weapons, level y stops up to ... dypes of damage/weapons, etc. or something along this line. We must remember not to make it to strong or play balance is gone..

This is only my opinon and 2 cents worth.

just some ideas mac