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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

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Author Topic: [0.97a] Nexerelin v0.11.1b "Clausewitz Protocol" (update 2024-02-11)  (Read 3012903 times)

Simulated Knave

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Some thoughts on conquering worlds in Starsector

TerranEmpire seems wise, and I largely concur with what he said. But this is interesting to think about, especially in terms of the population numbers.

Short version: conquest should probably be basically impossible barring little fringe worlds (the ones we actually see change hands regularly in the lore). At least not on anything less than a decade-odd timescale.

Conquest should probably be borderline-impossible for most of the big centres. I mean, they're massive. If significant conquest were easy, it would happen more in the background. Overthrowing the Hegemony should take at least five or ten years of sustained effort after the first shots are fired unless there are co-belligerents with similar resources. Hell, it's arguably unrealistic that a place that saw tens or hundreds of thousands of people move to it in the space of a half-decade (i.e. any player colony) isn't an unstable hive of violence with constantly shifting politics and a ton of people who won't follow the rules at any one time, or that the player doesn't see regular revolts or power-grabs from people who think "well, why NOT me?" Putting together an effective war machine should be pretty difficult.

Even integrating people from a cryosleeper should be hard to do quickly.

Combat strength for a large planet being 200 makes sense because that's its defence against a raid. But a raid is a very different thing than an invasion. I can probably steal stuff from my neighbour's house and run away, even if he's home. If I want to move in there, it will be trickier. Ground strength isn't the total forces. It means that anywhere your forces go on that planet that's worth going to strategically, there'll be 200-odd marines (or equivalent) within easy response time that they need to deal with. For a real-life example, the US has like 1500 odd fighters. Five responded to the 9/11 attacks.

And re rebellions and such, look at the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - both medium size 7 countries in game terms. Both took the better part of a decade after invasion for their economies to start really recovering. The War in Afghanistan is still described as ongoing, and I don't know that the Iraq War isn't either. In a game where the Luddic Path have crashed space stations into planets and Tri-Tachyon still screws around with AI despite it blowing up in their face AND wars being fought to make them not do it again, I doubt the civilians of any planet are likely to be particularly willing to let themselves be conquered. The first quote for the first mission of the game? The thing it tells you to play right after the tutorial? Smuggling weapons to an insurgency on Volturn.

That said, wrecking the economy is probably pretty easy. Just blow stuff up until it stops working. It's one of the themes of the game. It probably should be easier to control the planet to the point you can destroy the economy (well, some aspects of it) than to the point you can actually economically exploit the place.

Practically, I'd say large planets should be effectively capturable by events only, probably ones specific to that planet, and not all of them at that. Like you could rig the episcopal election on Chalcedon to turn it over to the Luddic Church (or rig others to turn Church worlds over to the Path). Or convince Volturn to revolt with ARCist support and re-establish the Askonian polity. But the player doesn't and probably shouldn't have an army that can challenge any of the major interstellar players other than Tri-Tachyon, certainly not alone - the population depth isn't there, and there's only so much technology can do to balance that out. Tri-Tachyon is a faction and none of the other independent worlds are because Tri-Tachyon has a size 6 world and heavy industry to work with (and a massive technological advantage, plus a bunch of pre-existing infrastructure). Without that, they'd be another set of indeps.

Gunboat diplomacy definitely should be an option for the tiny worlds and stations (if Tri-Tachyon or random pirates can show up with fleets, so can I). Size 3 and 4 are definitely vulnerable to the player.  But even size 5 I'd expect you to need local allies and a fairly long timespan to absorb them.
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TerranEmpire

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I wish to reply in-depth, but I have deadlines coming up :(

In short, I think if we define conquest as eliminating organized resistance then if you have space superiority, you can achieve this even against 1:10 or 1:100 ratio. History provides plenty of examples, where a well-organized force with superior firepower defeated a more numerous enemy.
(In British India for eg, Opium wars in China, etc)

To put it another way, if 20k well trained and equipped troops with air superiority, tactical nukes (aka tactical bombardment), and close air support would invade for eg Germany (size 7), they could topple the current government, and destroy their armies. However, after you pull out the tactical nuke-equipped planes, so they are no longer at gunpoint... Well, good luck with controlling your new territory.

So that's why I propose that size 7 and 8 pacification should take 10-15 years and a tremendous amount of money that is only possible with at least a few size 6 planets behind you.

Also, your explanation for the defense strength is something I totally share. The mechanic was meant against raids, not invasions.
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robepriority

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In that case, increasing the invasion defense and rebellion multipliers to 5x - 10x would probably make sense.

envenger

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I wish to reply in-depth, but I have deadlines coming up :(

In short, I think if we define conquest as eliminating organized resistance then if you have space superiority, you can achieve this even against 1:10 or 1:100 ratio. History provides plenty of examples, where a well-organized force with superior firepower defeated a more numerous enemy.
(In British India for eg, Opium wars in China, etc)

To put it another way, if 20k well trained and equipped troops with air superiority, tactical nukes (aka tactical bombardment), and close air support would invade for eg Germany (size 7), they could topple the current government, and destroy their armies. However, after you pull out the tactical nuke-equipped planes, so they are no longer at gunpoint... Well, good luck with controlling your new territory.

So that's why I propose that size 7 and 8 pacification should take 10-15 years and a tremendous amount of money that is only possible with at least a few size 6 planets behind you.

Also, your explanation for the defense strength is something I totally share. The mechanic was meant against raids, not invasions.

I also think the same.

Also 1 more thing the player can do to decrease the time is make contacts with the NPCs of the planet and increase the reputation. Or other NPCs in the same system.

Imagine you kind of working with pirates of the save system to increase the invasion rate or lead a rebellion on the planet with the NPCs you have higher contact with. In turn, they gain a higher position once you take over the planet.
Or bribing NPCs.
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nathanebht

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Questions and comments on the win condition.

What counts as friendly? The "Disposition towards" my faction on the Intel screen's Dipl Profiles category? The Factions screen should be ignored?

I have to take all of the Pirate worlds to win? The Pirate worlds never get invaded by the other factions, logically this would be one of the first things the other factions would take over. Same with the Luddic Path.
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holmedog

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    Adding my voice to the pile.  Love this mod - have almost 100hrs played on it.  However, there is a very, very obvious plateau point where once you can invade a colony you can invade *all* the colonies and "win".  I think there are several things that contribute to this, but there are some low hanging fruit that could be hit to make it less of a "I've built up the momentum now I win" feeling.

    • Once you invade a planet it should be locked from trade/dock repairs for a bit - This would stop the abuse of insta-repairing/selling off the loot from the invasion and moving on to the next
    • A successful invasion should call in all remaining colonies in the system's fleets for a "marathon" fight
    • An invasion shouldn't be possible if there are ships within X distance - This would remove the ability to kite off a large defense and then take over the colony
    • I would really like to see the area used to "suck in" defending vessels expanded as well during a station fight - Same reason as above
    • Minor thing, but the "vengeance" fleets should really have their recoverability reduced.  With a little luck you can get multiple capitals with built in mods extremely early in the game

    I really feel that none of the above would make conquering single colonies harder, but would reduce the domino effect of moving from one to the next.  I know lots of people have lots of opinions on the difficulty of Invasions in general, but I don't mean to touch on that here. 
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Simulated Knave

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Re nuking the sites from orbit:

Worth noting that the British lost a good few battles in the Opium Wars, and the Americans lost some in Iraq. Overwhelming support firepower only does so much.

Ground batteries should/would obviously prevent the whole "blast the enemy from orbit" thing (and thus should be both very hard to take out and a huge bonus to defence strength against an invasion). I'd wonder if there should be multiple installations of ground batteries to make it harder to take out all a world's defences at once? Or a series of invasion-related buildings, each of which provides a different bonus against it? Then give them to major planets from the start. Or even just automatically when a world reaches a certain population size (assuming such a thing is possible).

If your enemy can flat-out blast you from orbit, the obvious things to do are not fight places he is willing to/can blast from orbit, whether that be around valuable infrastructure or in civilian areas that the enemy is unwilling to destroy. Lots of underground bunkers, too, I expect, presumably well-shielded from detection. Planets are big places, and it would be trivially easy to have a whole bunch of hidden, sensor-hardened locations from which holdouts from the garrison can endlessly raid any occupier.

I'd assume the invasion process looks something like:

1) Besiege the world and wait for them to surrender. If the world requires food imports, this is hopefully a relatively quick process, though starving people to death will tank your rating with the Church et al (unless you're doing it for the glory of Ludd, obv).
Failing 1:
2) Slip raiding party in to open hole in ground defenses (assuming none already exists/you can't get someone local to do it for you). This is probably tricky to do if the enemy has ANY idea you're coming. A world under siege is almost certain to shoot first with the ground batteries and ask questions later.
3) Slip bigger raiding parties in to open more holes/use orbital bombardment to open more holes. Again, this is likely to get very difficult very quickly.
4) Re-enact the novel Starship Troopers - lots of quick mobile strikes at assets where you don't let yourself get bogged down because it's pretty damn easy to just issue every breathing, willing person a gun and you WILL lose to weight of numbers.
5) Try to persuade enemy leadership to surrender, cheerfully using hostages and bribery to do so.
6) Wipe out un-surrendered enemy forces to extent possible.
7) Maintain your own significant garrison indefinitely since you can never be entirely sure you HAVE wiped out the garrison, and even if you did you definitely didn't get all the auxiliaries. Hell, there may be combat drones in a warehouse programmed to activate in a few months.

Set piece battles would be vanishingly rare - I'd expect plenty of house-to-house fights, which is hard for any game to simulate well on anything other than a broad level. Depends a bit on the planet, of course - if everyone lives in easy-to-crack habitation domes, I would expect a sufficiently dedicated attacker to just blast domes until everyone else surrenders.
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JUDGE! slowpersun

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Why does everyone always default to dome cities?  If populations were that worried about getting antimatter bombed out of existence on a barely inhabitable world, then they would build DOWN, not up.  Poorest people would live near surface, rich get to be the mole people for once.

Obviously, inhabitable worlds wouldn't have the dome issue unless it reeaaally wanted it.  Or maybe with pollution.
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Warnoise

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I am commissioned to Luddic Path and I am 100% with them yet I still get luddic path cells incidents. Is that intended?

Is it possible to disable luddic path cells in my base?
« Last Edit: May 20, 2021, 06:43:55 AM by Warnoise »
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Simulated Knave

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slowpersun: because digging down is harder than just building a dome. That said, digging down is also a good way to radiation harden, so that is probably more likely.

Also, golden age sci-fi loved dome cities.
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Bob69Joe

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Is this because of Nex? Redacted making raids on core worlds. I haven't noticed them make successful raids yet.

[attachment deleted by admin]
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Bob69Joe

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I'm posting again to attach another image. I received a mission from a contact within my own faction and he now just hangs around in the admin section on my planet without going away or offering anything else. Will he just go away eventually?

[attachment deleted by admin]
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DownTheDrain

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Is this because of Nex? Redacted making raids on core worlds. I haven't noticed them make successful raids yet.

It didn't even occur to me that they're not supposed to do that as I haven't played vanilla in forever.
Haven't seen them succeed yet either but I never was in the system to check what kind of fleets they're bringing.
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Histidine

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I am commissioned to Luddic Path and I am 100% with them yet I still get luddic path cells incidents. Is that intended?

Is it possible to disable luddic path cells in my base?
Not specifically intended, but I have no plans to change this.
The solution to Pather cells will always be to disrupt (use an operative or kill the base), or not do things that attract their attention in the first place.

Questions and comments on the win condition.

What counts as friendly? The "Disposition towards" my faction on the Intel screen's Dipl Profiles category? The Factions screen should be ignored?

I have to take all of the Pirate worlds to win? The Pirate worlds never get invaded by the other factions, logically this would be one of the first things the other factions would take over. Same with the Luddic Path.
Just relationship > 50 as per the factions tab, and factions tagged as pirate-type in their Nex config (for vanilla factions this is pirates and Pathers) don't count.
You also don't need to conquer pirate-type factions for the conquest victory.

...That reminds me, I've been meaning to change conquest victory conditions, now that I'm making invasions costlier. Maybe something like "control 60% of the sum of market sizes in the sector", or maybe "control 66% of all heavy industry worlds".

Is this because of Nex? Redacted making raids on core worlds. I haven't noticed them make successful raids yet.
Yeah it's a Nex feature.
They should succeed if they happen to pick a less-defended system, although this seems to be infrequent lately, possibly because there's no such thing as a less-defended system once all the special task groups arrive in response to the raid.

I'm posting again to attach another image. I received a mission from a contact within my own faction and he now just hangs around in the admin section on my planet without going away or offering anything else. Will he just go away eventually?
That's a vanilla thing AFAIK.
Is he marked as a potential contact in intel? If so, try deleting that and see if he goes away. Although my experience seems to be that quest givers you meet in bars, just hang around forever once created.
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AcaMetis

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Quote
Not specifically intended, but I have no plans to change this.
The solution to Pather cells will always be to disrupt (use an operative or kill the base), or not do things that attract their attention in the first place.
Might be worth mentioning that a vanilla feature is that Pathers will not create cells on Pather or Luddic Church planets, even if they exceed the pather interest value. Not sure if the same is true for when the player buys governorship of one of their planets in Nex, though.
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