How do you INVADE??!?

[Malleus]

I have a series of TFs above an enemy colony. One TF is a transport with 3 troops on board. One TF has many missiles. I cannot figure out how to get the opportunity to invade or bombard. As per usual for this game, the manual and encyclopedia are useless. Help?

K

[Iasius]

Same thing happened to me in my current game (tried difficulty hard this time). I was able to conquer one Meklar planet (quite overwhelming with about 8000 troops vs 300).
I built new troops ships and filled all mine again. But no matter what I do I can't invade anymore. Must be why the computer can't invade my worlds either.
Once giant stalemate.
I'm colonizing the leftover planets right inside my enemy's territory right now.

[Malleus]

How did you do it the first time?

Everyone tells me that this is a cool feature of the game, and I cannot seem to do it

K

[asleepathewheel]

There's a bit of irony here, weren't you complaining in the thread that says the AI can't invade?


I might have the solution. Heres what I do now.

Attack the planet, not intercept or blockade or whatever that third option is. Manually control the battle. (or use auto and wait a turn, then control against zero defenders)

After victory, will bring up a screen asking to bombard or drop troops. You can do either four times (25% of total) or all at once.

Next screen: Can auto or manually determine ground tactics.

Try that and see if it works.

edit: the ai doesn't seem to invade as much for me as it should, probably the same problem that the enemies have.



Or it could be this: you can't invade an outpost, can only invade a colony. If the population falls below 1, then the name will be lower case and nothing can happen. Your enemy has lost control of it, but its still his species, and if the blockade ends, will probably recover to pop 1 in some turns. Same thing as if it were a yellow or red planet just colonized. Perhaps sending a colony ship there would take it over, not sure. Your blockade is slowing starving the population, eventually it will drop to zero.

Did either of these explain the situation?

[Malleus]

Yes, I am not happy with the game, and I have been complaining about it.

To be honest, I want to suck as much fun out of it before I return it tomorrow. I hear the ground combat section is good, so I want to invade once and see if it is.

OK, so the pop is below 1k, BUT the system is still in uppercase....hmm.

Tried manually controlling the combat, but it just did nothing and gave me a new turn.

K

[darcy]

To be honest, I want to suck as much fun out of it before I return it tomorrow. I hear the ground combat section is good, so I want to invade once and see if it is.

If it's any comfort for you, you are not missing anything. It's basically like playing Rock-Paper-Scissors without knowing the rules. You choose a tactic from a list, having no idea what the difference between all the options is. Supposedly you get a bonus if your opponent happens to pick a certain tactic. Or something.

Then the battle starts. The planetary grid turns into a kind of status bar that slowly fills with your colour while your soldiers give uninformative and repetitive comments. Mine said "General, we are winning!" three times in a row.

And that's it. Moo2's combat looks much much cooler. Hell, even Moo1's does. And it has cooler music,too!

di-di-dum, di-di-dum, di-di-DAT-dum, di-di-dum...

[Arnelos]

I have to agree that MoO1's combat music was better...

As for the combat tactics... here's another area where IG is trying to scam you into buying the strategy guide. The strategy guide has a complete chart of all of the combat tactics and the percentage chances of success for each against each other tactic.

I'm sure someone will put the whole chart into an online FAQ in the next few weeks, though.

[Grumbold]

Originally posted by Kromwel
Tried manually controlling the combat, but it just did nothing and gave me a new turn.

K

If the pop is < 1,000 then this can happen sometimes even if the name is in uppercase. Try a bigger planet and you should have no problems.

[Harry Seldon]

You have to attack the planet with a fleet twice to drop troops, and you need a bunch for it to give you the option. I had several troop ships over a planet but it wouldn't let me drop until I brought over a decent task force and added more troop ships.

[adamspt2]

I've successfully (and not so successfully) invaded several times so far in my one game (which I'm still in the middle of). But it seems like there's a limit to how many task forces can be in orbit? It seems (and this is probably something very obvious that I've missed) that I'll have troop ships as well as other task forces in orbit, I get the chance to bombard but the computer tells me that I have no troops. I direct a couple of non-troop task forces away from the planet, and then, suddenly, I have troops that I can land. Have I missed something or am misunderstanding what's going on?