Tactics

[UesugiKenshin]

I suggested a combat system like Homeworld where you have fleet formations and a rock paper scissors approach but advanced formations require advanced research and likely academies at various levels.

You could do the same for ground based invasions with formations plus terrain.

It's not necessary to see animations, but imagine in your mind various tactical formations. Think football tactics like coaches drew on chalkboards. High school and University level Football was more important than you think as really it's military tactics pretending to be sports.

It would be better to end sports and have them do mock military battles as that is practical.

[UesugiKenshin]

Because once attacked and since the Khaoran seem hardcoded to attack unescorted unallied colony ships, you send them to the periphery and put a fleet within the zone based on the radius the fleet can travel in a single turn. So the enemy will notice and raid, and so when you think you will, your colony ship retreats, and your fleet advances on that system. The Khaoran pounce like it's a catnip mouse treat...and get annihilated by a rudimentary ruse.

And believe it or, they don't learn, but keep trying it over and over. They will send almost everyone to fall for the same ploy.

Now the beauty is if you have high intelligence points allocated for the military, the attackers may get captured through sabotage as this group of Khaoran ships are in the Omega'ssphere of influence. That happened several times.

That sounds like a Cardassian attacking helpless colonists, not a genuine Klingon veteran. Maybe a Klingon dishonorable pirate?

[UesugiKenshin]

In Civ2, you can set campaign goals for empires, and thus have minor and major objectives. So this means the AI "prioritizes" that terrain as vital for scoring. This means a modder can simulate the taking of Paris and Berlin and Tokyo etc for a WW2 mod.

[UesugiKenshin]

If the BotE software had this "flagging of goals for scoring" ie achievements, then if we had a map editor and a campaign editor, as a mapper I would plan the empires and have minor and major objectives so the AI would seem smarter and prioritize many such goals based on how defensible they were and what ships and troops the AI possessed

The AI is notoriously bad at defending in Medieval 2 Total War Kingdoms. So just for the AI, there is campaign scripting, and if an AI settlement is attacked, units are spawned , thus the AI doesn't have upkeep issues and still has defenders magically appear so the human player does not run them over.

A smart coder then disbands them. So it's the best of all difficulties as the AI seems smarter, won't leave defenderless fortifications, and doesn't wreck the budget/treasury.

You can also have mercs who can only be hired by the AI, so if the AI has excess treasury, they can elect to "hire them" as was and is common even today in Afghanistan and Iraq.

[UesugiKenshin]

A wolfpack has military applications in navies. And in air sorties in aviation, it's swarming with fighters in squadrons.

Naval usage
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfpack_(naval_tactic)

Air combat doctrine
https://www.historynet.com/wolfpack-at- ... eature.htm

The US military often has a fighter pilot and a wingman among naval aviators. Now they are considering a fighter pilot and and unmanned fighter planes of various kinds.
https://sldinfo.com/2016/02/the-usaf-th ... -airpower/

Wolfpacks have been routine tactics since Homeworld was created in 1999.

[UesugiKenshin]

I believe in some mods that certain major and minor alien races would develop various levels of fighters to work in wolfpacks. I don't know that the AI will figure that out. It almost would be worthwhile for a special wolfpack fleet be a preconfigured unit rather than several units that join in a fleet.

Certain research at advanced levels could have presets of lethal manueverable swarming squadrons. Imagine you are a strong capital ship of some class...but alone. You are not manueverable, but have respectable weaponry, shields, and armor.

Along comes 5 to 10 fighters who are very manueverable,but each have far less weaponry, but together have as much, if not edging out...your own capital ship.

You are surrounded by buzzing furious hornets. Yeah you can smack one, and five would sting you, over and over...dampening your self-confidence.

[UesugiKenshin]

At the highest level, every turn is spaced from the next one by two weeks.

But an interesting aspect of advanced games would be fatigue.

A starship or fleet can likely engage one combat per turn, say you attack the Khaoran and they take the next turn and counterattack that starship or fleet with different unts. Your crew would be fatigued and not fighting at 100% combat efficiency. And undoubtably they took damage even if they won the sortie.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortie

See fatigue could as strong aspect of tactics at some point in a future BotE version. It would be unlikely on low turns, but an every turn occurance at turn #900.

I would imagine the Cartare would love to attack exhausted starship crews as a standard tactic. They would circle just out of range as two enemies battled, then on their next turn, attack the weakened damaged fatigued crew. As rural people say in this town, "They would be all over that like white on rice, Buddy!" That is kind of like saying, "You bet your ass!" or , "That naturally follows!".

[UesugiKenshin]

In battles, what most affects the outcome is command ability to lead and execute tactics successfully. Then the morale of the troops. Then weather effects and terrain. Then fatigue. And so forth. The strongest is not necessarily the victor.

So one clever aspect might be looking at every map coordinate point, and based on that coordinate's nearest neighbors, and celestial mechanics in the sector, there are modifiers to offense and defense.

The map has nine points in a grid, so besides the one where combat is resolved, eight maximum can affect that center map coordinate plus situations where the fight is not in open space time, but in a sector populated by a star and planets, right? And many have less as they are on edges and corners.

Then the map has stars and based on the type of star plus anomalies and possibly based on gas giants as they are massive and affecting gravity, then cumulatively this gravimetric distortion would make combat harder due sheering forces versus speed, acceleration, mass, and manueverability.

See Gravity Well.

http://www.sabrizain.org/startrek/Astro ... _Well.html

It's just a formula that the player would see. And the player and AI would attempt to attack opponents when their defense were lower in these regions and avoid attacking when bad outcomes would occur.

It's not much different but largely the stellar anomalies and stars have the greatest affect. See there would be tactics to fighting based on a quasi-kind of terrain.

You don't have to make it complex, but fudge the numbers by overgeneralizing based on star types. It adds an appeal as not every battle is in open spacetime,but might be in empty space or under seriously heavy gravity.

You can make it simple and say there are six classes of sectors and class 1 is the easiest straight forward combat and class 6 is the hardest.

This would create safe zones where class 6 sectors are quite hard to attack as an invading force is battling the celestial mechanics creating large gravimetric distortion, and class 1 are dangerous as there is no such benefit confered and easy to invade.

Think of any wargame that has terrain. It's the same idea where one type of terrain is terrible like establishing a beachead and soldiers get slaughtered as they defenseless incoming to get situated. Other soldiers, on a mountain, are nearly impregnable. The attackers have to ascend it and can get attacked by range all along the way and it induces fatigue to climb.