Planet Defensibility

[Annimagus]

My friend and I just had to cut short a multiplayer game as he had a work meeting.

For our first map, we started off with the full galaxy map on 2v2v2v2v2 with locked teams, large fleet sizes, and fast resource generation.  Perhaps not the best of ideas, but we survived until he remembered his work meeting (a good... what, 5 hours later, I think), so we did OK.  Even if our Sins experience didn't directly translate, it carried over moderately well.

Let me start this off by saying that the mod is wonderful.  The models and effects are gorgeous, the gameplay is engaging and fun, and we greatly enjoyed watching Viscount-led fleets come face-to-face with Executor-led Star Destroyer squadrons.

We eventually ran into an issue with planet vulnerability, though.

Enormous enemy fleets would hyper into planets with maximized Golan defenses and planetary defenses (HP) but little to no waiting fleet (as our fleets were, if not completely concentrated, then at least clustered; I had mine broken into three groups of about 10-12 capital ships apiece plus support).  These enemies would proceed to ignore the Golan defenses, bombard the planet, and flee, all before forces even one jump away could get there to defend.  The Golans would inflict minimal losses and take immense damage in each action, and any infrastructure damage to the system would be irreparable until we could get a colonizer back in-system.

The real problem, however, came after a planet fell the first time.  After a planet fell once, enemies would continue hit-and-fade attacks with their enormous fleets.  Any time you colonized the planet, a swarm of Star Destroyers or Mon Calamari Cruisers would return, nuke the still-regenerating planet with its reduced HP cap (since you lose all researched defenses every time the planet bites it), and retreat again.  Eventually I was having to push PAST contested planets, forcing the contest into enemy territory just to be able to colonize planets at least one jump behind the protection of my fleets.

What this all boils down to is that planets are ridiculously vulnerable and difficult to defend, as compared to base Sins.  With no available static defenses that can effectively fend off enemy fighters and bombers (IE, no hangar defenses), no planetary shields and no planet-hardening upgrades, the fight between us and our neighbors became a roiling furball across two or three uncolonized systems; colonizing them before we drove the enemy at least two systems away was a complete waste of money and time, so we just made sure that our enemies COULDN'T hold them and then just drove deeper.  My strategy of advance for base Sins was always far more deliberate (move into a system, destroy the enemy's defenses, take the system, build my own defenses, and THEN move on) than this state of affairs allows for.

I know you wanted to reduce fighter/bomber spam from regular Sins, and as a Unity player I can appreciate why.  A full Unity fleet deploying all its strike craft at once will make even extremely powerful graphics cards overheat.  I don't cry for the loss of hangar defenses, except insofar as they offered ways to defend against enemy strike craft (I believe the TEC hangars had flak cannons as a researchable thing, and the Vasari hangars had... something).

The Golans are awesome, but do not have the firepower to make up for their much smaller numbers (as compared to base Sins' Rail Guns (TEC) or Beam Turrets (Unity).  When building planetary defenses, we were ringing our planets with Golan 3s, and filling in with a Golan 2 to hit the tactical slot cap, and it just wasn't enough; the enemy would come into a system with enough ships to outnumber our stations 4:1 or 5:1 and just ignore them.

The Defense tree for the New Republic was rather sparse.  Perhaps adding flak cannon upgrades to the Golans, and borrowing the "stations can engage multiple targets at once" upgrade from Sins' space stations for the Golans could help make up for this.  In addition, methods of planet-hardening would be nice.  Planetary shields, bombing damage reducers...  Something to bring planets back from the ragged edge of vulnerability we found them at.

Thanks!  And again, despite all those critical words, we really did enjoy ourselves.

[Corey]

One of the core issues with planet defense right now isn't Golans being insufficient as defenses, but Golans not quite functioning properly at the moment. There's an obvious aspect to this (lacking shields), but also another one that's a bit less obvious from just playing, where I'm fairly sure that their weapons aren't set up with the proper banks, which means that they're not actually fighting with what they should be. Both of these issues will be addressed (I intend to look at them today). The plan is ultimately to give the Golan III its hangar from the start, and potentially give the I and II their hangars as a sort of purchaseable upgrade like the one on the Acclamator. However, we haven't done that yet because our fear is still that once the technical issues with the Golans have been resolved, especially the Golan III, they may end up being effective enough that getting too many fighters in addition to that will become ridiculously strong, especially when turbolasers actually do provide some defense against fighters without needing direct anti-fighter annihilation abilities like the Gauss cannons had.

Planet health, such as it is, is just something that we forgot to scale up when transferring our ICW values to the ships as their starting point. Shields, too, are something that I ultimately plan to build directly and inherently into the planets instead of being a separate structure.

[Annimagus]

Very cool and good to know, thank you!  You guys are awesome and on top of it already.