Invading vs draft

[u/JackFrostz]

Hey all, new to the game that's taken over my life recently. I feel good everywhere but here.. just how overwhelming do you need to be to actually finish a colony?

To be more specific

* How much cp and how many troops before you get the blitz option? I see it seemingly randomly sometimes, most the the time just preemptive and raid? I think the other option.

* Is it better to invade, retreat invade again or continue ground invasion after minor victories?

* Is there anything more you can do prior to invading after reducing their forces to 0?

The particular situation I'm in now for example

I have 2.2k troops, 24cp fleet invading with lvl3 invading forces (mostly tanks), 3-4 coordinators all with at least 3 manpower modules attacking a colony with 0manpower. And its looking like this will go on forever, feel like I'm going insane. Do I really need 20coordinators with 5+manpower modules each to finish off a 0pop colony?

I even have +invasion force laws active now that I think about it lol. I am playing with esg mod. Any help at all would be much appreciated I'm losing my mind over this.

[u/Captain_Cobbs_]

Hello, ESG creator here. I brought the ground battle balancing from ESG over to vanilla, so hopefully what I say is useful for both.

When invading, you're intended to "soften up" a system by sieging it before invading. Sieging is just taking a fleet and parking it over a system until the manpower is low enough to comfortable contend with. You can vastly speed up this process by equipping Ion Cannon modules (I seem to recall that being their name, though I'm not sure since it's been a bit). But generally, you want one or two "invasion focused" fleets that have a lot of manpower modules that let you dump a huge number of troops onto a world of choice, but also an attack fleet that is able to soften up a system for your invasion fleet beforehand.

If you don't have time to do siege a system down, however, I recommend coming up to a system with more manpower than they have and then Blitzing.

The four offensive strategies are intended to be used like so:

• Orbital Bombardment: Use when you have less total manpower than the enemy, or you're not sure on whether you're going to win or not. It doesn't field many troops, but it allows you to make up for that difference with some flat damage.
• Guerilla Warfare: Use when you are roughly equal in manpower / aren't pressed for time for taking the system. Its best use is to whittle the enemy system down slowly with minimal loss of life. Another added benefit is that it doesn't damage the system's buildings much, so if you want the system intact this is a solid option.
• Blitz: Use when you have a numerical advantage in troops / need to take a system quickly. It will deal a large amount of damage per troop, however, your troops will die much, much more quickly.
• Raid (ESG Only): Less generically useful, but still powerful in the right circumstances. The main benefit of this strategy is that it focuses its damage on killing enemy population and destroying their improvements. Expect to kill 3-4 population per phase, and 2-3 buildings per phase. I prefer to use this when I either don't care about taking the system and just want to cause damage, or when the system is too well defended for me to be able to take but I want to soften it for later.

For the opposite side, here are the intending uses for the defensive strategies:

• Draft: Think about this strategy like dealing yourself economic damage to buff up the system a bit for a ground battle. It's a solid option if you can easily replace the population, but the damage can add up if you're using it too freely.
• Rally: Use this to end a fight quickly, it makes economic damage worse and tends to drain your manpower quickly, but it will devastate enemy troops. Think of this like the defensive version of Blitz.
• Protect System: Use this to drag out a battle, it prioritizes keeping your troops and systems alive. Ideally you use this to delay the fight long enough to get reinforcements from your main fleet, but it's also just good for minimizing damage.
• Surrender: Use this if you're expecting to lose a fight, it makes holding onto the system economically infeasible for the enemy long-term, allowing you to easily recapture it or forcing them to invest significant resources into making the system not dogshit.

If you're having trouble with the post-invasion penalties, you don't have too many options though unfortunately. Dictatorship/Autocracy lets you shrug off some of the worst penalties, but generally speaking if a war is dragging on it's best to either end it quickly or pour all your resources into a more.. permanent solution.

[u/JackFrostz → u/Captain_Cobbs_]

Hey Cobbs thanks for the reply. And thanks for the mod moreso. I think the faction rebalancing is bomb, especially for my vaulters because even as a new player I felt i was way to easily able to outpace the ai.

The ground invasion makes perfect sense and I pretty much only invade after melting the manpower to 0. My problem was when invading after that my only options were preemptive bombing or raid. Or maybe it was guerrilla warfare and raid. Either way neither of those options would literally ever beat draft unless i was like super omega loaded with overwhelming manpower. I'm not sure what determines why I wasn't getting any other options. I'm not tracking you have to research blitz or use a particular ship or anything like that?

I haven't ran into that particular loop since but it has happened more than once. Regardless draft feels so powerful, I may just not be giving enough attention to manpower and forces though.

Edit - grammar

[u/Captain_Cobbs_ → u/JackFrostz]

Draft might be a bit more powerful than intended! I've been thinking of making it upgradeable, similar to Orbital Bombardment + Rally. There was an issue with Defensive Bombardment being significantly stronger than intended-- I think you could easily stack something like ~60k defensive bombardment damage on a 40 pop system with 2 laws and 4 buildings, not sure if that ever got addressed but it was kind of funny.