Bombarding Planets

[Hydro]

How do you do this? Even against undefended planets bombarding (when I turn off AI control) doesn't seem to do anything. In the early game I have missile DDGs and CLGs, which should do a nice job - but don't.

Am I doing something wrong?

The reason I ask is that early in the game my poor Trilarian troopers are hopeless against, say, Sacra, unless they have massive numbers and my economy isn’t prepared to build large numbers of troops or transports. Also, I do NOT want any Ithkul in my empire. They are vermin to be exterminated. The thought of having those vermin migrating to other inhabited planets (with an ideal environment for them – the AI does this a lot) and eating my loyal subjects is…disturbing.

[GodKing]

Missles are the only thing that you use to bombard a plannet with from what I have seen. Make sure you are clicking on "assult planet", then if you defete the space based defences, you are taken to the bombarding screen, then if you have troops, you are taken to the invading screen. I usually just skip over bombardment as I like to take along a large fleet of marines or armor to take the planet over as intact as possible.

[TrainWreck20]

You can bombard with non-missile fleets....it just doesn't do a whole lot of damage. I have bombarded repeatedly for several turns, and you can see the population slowly go down....I assume structures are being destroyed, as well.

[Hydro]

TW - good point. I hadn't thought to look to see if the pop was decreasing. So, maybe my single CLG and DDG aren't able to wipe out a population. I don't suppose I can check about structures, either. But I don't care - as long as they..ahm..go away I don't care.

[Hydro]

I played a bit and found how to bombard planets: you have to do it manually since the AI apparently will NOT bombard them for you if you Cede Control or Watch. If true, this is a problem since it also means the AI empires won’t do this to you – all they will do is blockade.

So, I manually controlled combat (which was resolved with no combat since there were no defenders), then went to Next Phase and chose Manual resolution. When I chose any other option I there was no bombardment. I had to select bombardment after Manual. Here is what was interesting. My missile CLG and DDG did lob their Anionic (sp?) torpedoes and did 3% to 5% damage to the planet per turn. This, in combination with starvation, slowly but surely reduced the pop. In another situation the bombardment might have destroyed infrastructure, but here there were none. I LIKE this – it makes sense that a very small task force couldn’t reduce a hunkered down population completely and that the last tattered remnants would be very hard to eliminate (like the battle at Stalingrad win WW2 for both the Soviets and Germans). One other note – bombarding did NOT reduce the 50 ground troops the nasty Sacra had in the 5+ turns of bombardment, even when the pop got down to 280 (much less than a full colony of 1000 pop). Another note of interest – even though the pop was down to 280 it still showed up as a full colony, and I could NOT migrate to the world since it was still ‘owned’ by the AI. Oh, well. They’ll just have to die. Nasty Sacra.

It is too bad the AI does not use this tactic since it is useful for preventing a young planet from getting on its feet as a waiting action for ground combat, or simply to eliminate the planet. I’m sure a larger task force would do a better job at eliminating the pop faster, too.

[TrainWreck20]

I did have an enemy fleet mercilessly bombard my planet in a prior game. I was desperately trying to build some sort of defensive structure, but my facilities were being bombed into oblivion and it was a losing battle. I did manage to get a fleet there before total annihalation, but there was quite a bit of damage. The fleet was a total of about seven ships, I think, I do not remember the types.

PS: Apolyton, pay the fee for your spellchecker, please!

[vmxa1]

I had that happen as well. For a long time they had a fleet (both of us had a planet there) and did nothing to me. Then they attacked and I had to send in a crew to stomp them and some marines to capture the planet (fun). Now I do not allow any fleet in my area.

[Hydro]

Well, that's good news! Enemy fleets have blockaded defenseless planets, but not done anything else to them. In MOO2 they would have been summarily eliminated in a turn or two.