god i spelt that badly, many apologies 4 those offended with my english (and to think i do extension)

oh and ther aliens, what makes u think they use human ideals and moral systems, or honour or anything like that. im sure the vasari fleeing for their lives across the cosomos dont particually care about honour with a galatic evil gribbly thing chasing them. they want to win the war as soon as possible to get back to fleeing.

If i remember right, when this was brought up before, the population units on the planet only represents the governing "elite", the army governors etc. The planet actually has much larger population. What you do is waging a war, well bombing, the governing structures and military forces on the planet.

So dont worry, the people you kill are the evil rulers of the enemy empire not the innocent population. Them you want to enslave and put into forced labour.

Well, blockades and culture kinda go hand-in-hand.

Your capital ships repel enemy culture, so... start the culture machine, and station caps in enemy orbit 'til they go neutral.

Hi Tsed, thanks for the info on capital ships- could you tell me a little about how that works? How many and how long usually do you have to leave in orbit for the Blockade/Culture feature to work its magic, and what happens when a planet goes neutral? Can you interact with them?

In Beta we were constantly told that we were actually bombarding very specific points of infrastructure and that the population count represented local/loyal governors reporting their taxes or some such.

Thus you were not destroying the entire population which is simply not on record, merely destroying their overlords and colony ships replace said overlords.

Personally I thought it was a crappy crappy way to explain it. But it is there for you if you need it.

I wouldn't mind some troop ships.

Oh and culture makes the planet revolt, thus why it registers at zero population because that is 0 population under control. So to Speak.

In addition to being morally repugnant, the planet bombing animations are way out of scale with the planet itself. There would be nothing left of the surface but molten ash if the explosions were accurate.

I've never understood the way orbital bombardment is implemented in games like this. They always make it look as if hurling untold gigatons of explosives or a bunch of large rocks against a planet is just a minor inconvenience that simply removes enemy population instead of an act of complete ecological destruction that will require many generations of terraforming to repair, if repair is at all possible.

Orbital bombardment should be a last option approach, for those planets that are either completely incapable of being taken by conventional means or those you wouldn't want to occupy anyway. Otherwise you should send in the grunts and hope they can pacify the place.

I saw someone quoting about Exterminatus above, well at least WH40k knows what a decent orbital bombardment means: WWW Link

Adding more options here would add more to those Nietzschian (and generally philosophical)aspects that gamespy was talking about...Like...nuking an enemy world should certainly affect their happiness towards you. An enemy who you just nuked should would be a lot less likely to form cease-fires and trade agreements with you, but leaving their populations intact might make holding a newly acquired planet more difficult(and probably lower loyalty there a lot)...but would make diplomacy a hell of a lot easier.

Also, people who feel they have the moral high ground fight harder, by a lot. Bombings might be powerful, but maybe it's accompanied by a temporary decrease in the effectiveness of your fleets(or, taking a world by more difficult but honorable means could provide a bonus to that effectiveness).

Adding more philosophical aspects like that make me enjoy games all the more in general.

It seems we have two choices but they are still not implemented fully to be effective ways of playing. I personally would like to add more options and strategy. I like in civ 4, when you took over a city, you had the option to occupy or burn it to the ground. If I occupied it I had to deal with revolts and try to win over the opposing citizens with culture. Burning a city to the ground was good for economic reasons or, if I had too many causalities from the attack, I would be so angry I was not in the mood to let anyone live. That is where the nuking a planet would come in handy and an added strategy to nuke it enough so no one can inhabit it.

As it has been suggested previously, landing marines, blockades and forcing surrender would be excellent additions. Maybe even adding the ability to enslave the population to boost production.

Basically there would be a way for anyone to play, each choice has to have a pro and a con attached to it to force you to be aware of your actions. But if you wanted to play as a dictator one day or a peaceful leader another, all the possibilities are there.

Meh, the game had limited ammount of time and virtually inexhaustible ammount of possible material... They oculd have these ships launching troop transports but its not as pretty...

Perhaps we will get some other options later, perhaps not.

But a good ol space game isn't proper if you can't nuke planets.

In all of these games, those numbers are just a representation of something. Normally there is a backstory to explain what the numbers are. You can choose to imagine your wrecking every single person on the planet, or that each planet has 200 people (or whatever the number is). Would planet combat be cool? Maybe. Are the scale of the blasts a little out of wack. Yep. Does it really matter? Not a whole lot.

I'm with you. In fact, I was hoping for some more evil ways to wipe a planet clean, biological and chemical weapons anyone? Research the vaccine and then the virus and fill the atmosphere with it. Land your troops/civi's on the Planet and set up shop.

Space Empires V had a similar thing, using 'Plagues'. Level 1-5 I believe, and same with the vaccine. Especially good if they were starting to get on your nerves, and hours of orbital bombardment weren't an option.

But as most people have said, we definitely need more options with planetary takeovers.

So your objection is that doing the right thing is also the harder method? Pfftt.

you guys DO know that you can surrender planets right?

You can abandon them yes, but the AI never does. And is there an advantage in doing it? Resources or anything?

Easy come, easy go. If a planet joined my empire moments after seeing the fleet arrayed in orbit, I'd bomb it anyways. Very few things can instill loyalty as well as fear can, and very few things are as fear-inspiring as dozens of warheads screaming through the atmosphere.

The best thing my citizens can say about my empire versus the rule of another:
"Oh, sure, that Empire over there is nice, but this Empire, the one currently ruling us, they glassed our fields and massacred our defenders once and they'll do it again if they have to."

That's not to say the people aren't treated well. A trade station in every orbit and a shield over every planet.

Oh man, you have made a political scientist all teary-eyed with laughter this day.

ditto hehe

agreed when ruling a massive empire across the stars fear is the only sure fire, uncle sam way.
whats gonna make you work harder and toe the line- a gift basket of fruit or the threat of some unimaginably horrible death(or the deaths of your loved ones)
though as a game aspect the ability to invade would be cool, though time consuming and so imparctical for multiplayer

Cause fear across star is not very good thing, otherwise, you will never rest in peace, there always rebal and fight back and throw you out of office, (Most rather have you dead and wont let's you alive!) so there will resistance even inside of your empire (Zealort Good-boots!) for all eternity if you do evil on poor planet. On other hand evil people dont care, but will sneak your back and kill and taken over.  

It’s probably worth noting that the Advent have an entire interstellar cannon that fires PURE F’IN LOVE across massive distances, impacts a target gravity well, and causes the people on the planet in question to swoon and think happy thoughts about them.

If it’s any help, play the Advent and imagine the bolts of psychic energy descending from the heavens over the besieged worlds is made of Pink Ponies and Pure Rainbows, convincing the populace that you’re In The Right. And there you go. Tilt your head just so and it kind of looks that way, too.

Me, I’m blowing merry Hell out of the homes of politicians, pacificists, and other undesirables to free the poor downtrodden masses to toil in my space-mines in freedom.

Casual genocide is one of the little annoyances in GalCiv2 as well: if you want to decommission a colony ship that's in planetary orbit, you have to launch it first, with a minimum of a million people on board. The player is forced to murder one million of his own citizens just to decommission that ship.

Wonderful post.
Peace and love to you!

Actually I think it might be a pretty good idea to have the planet surrendering depending on your culture's influence on it. E.g. if you have 80% influnece you would only have to fire a few normal shots at it (why waste antimatter :P) and the planet would turn over. On the other hand if you have 0 culture there... well we can guess what happens.
Okay real world example:
A) You come into a town with many people being happy about you. You won't shoot and if you do only those who attack you.
You go to a *insert random criminal place* as a law enforcement officer and suspect them to greet you with open arms. Would they surrender... I doubt it.
That way it would at least make sense... to me at least.