Advanced Save Game Six Empires Huge Map and Minor Races

[UesugiKenshin]

This is not a case where you send the strongest ship, but the one that has the combat bonus to that task during combat resolution.
...
All these magnificent really naval elements that SirPuffcake put in BotE, seldom get used because these ships get sabotaged or outright stolen. That is what just feels wrong as right now, rather than combat resolution in space, I'm practically the only one but the Heyoun flying around as I have all the rest of the empires' starships.

It would be a waste, but I could actually attack those empires with their own starships. What irony.

[UesugiKenshin]

The lightest starship I have in that sector is a very experienced veteran Saijin that is an assault ship, but very old and thus unmodded by the ship designer, with a very low torpedo yield. It destroyed 4 buildings and bombarded and 5 level 5 units attacked Voltaire with 35.6 billion in casualties. The only way to tell would be to run it over and over at least 100 times and see what the range of casualties ends up being.

I don't bother making low level troops as I think it's a waste of money through upkeep, but that may be flawed logic as it might be useful to have low level troops to minimize casualties. You would rotate them around for this specialized task, and use the stronger troops when called for.

The way morale works is new systems don't like a bunch of rowdy soldiers occupying a sector, and it can drive the morale low in that occupied zone.

Certain units confer a morale bonus, in the Omega's case, those are snipers.

It is largely irrelevant as I have so much money, that every single turn I rush all projects, thus my inhabited sectors rapidly gain positive morale and typically within 20 turns are close to 200 which is perfect.

Maybe when the Terrans do a ground invasion, they end up killing less civilians? They get penalized for bombardment. I don't know.

The only good way is doing intensive and extensive testing and the bulk of the Omega's troops are very experienced level 6 units, so I'm going to shelve that for later.

Regardless, Voltaire which was a Cartare inhabited sector can only make Omega ships. Who knows what happens when the Cartare are eliminated? I recall an early game back in April 2020, where an empire was eliminated early, and it seemed like they were vassals? I have not seen that since and I may be totally mistaken. I would like vassalage.

[UesugiKenshin]

The goal is to now take all space faring minor races from the major race empires, and dramatically weaken them, but not necessarily eliminate them. I will eliminate the Cartare just to see if I ever get to make their ships. If not, I'll mod existing ships classes with generations having better propulsion and manueverability and true cloaking.

It's plausible that merely redesigning minor race ships is enough.

I have to totally rethink redesigning starships or use low level Saijins as the escort for transports in ground invasions.

[UesugiKenshin]

http://birth-of-the-empires.de/wiki/ind ... itle=Moral
This is the general wiki topic on morale.

http://birth-of-the-empires.de/wiki/ind ... MoralValue
This is the effect that an occupying force has on an inhabited sector post-ground invasion.

If you have exceeding high morale due to many buildings, and coupled with empire wide benefits, it is a non-issue to keep 20 high level troops in every inhabited sector. 75% of my inhabited sectors have 10-20 now with a morale rating of 200 typically.

[UesugiKenshin]

http://birth-of-the-empires.de/wiki/ind ... er_Systeme
Let's look at the preliminary steps to an invasion.

The Omega have spent a fortune on developing an immense amount of nearly 1.3 million intelligence points. Those are points they could have spent on research or mining or buildings or on starships or troops.

Those points are allocated at 10% to all five of their "enemies" for espionage and that keeps the galactic map current, which is very helpful, but accomplished unnaturally early. That also has to be done to allow either random sabotage missions and targeted sabotage missions. Then you do missions based on risk assessment, and I always use the most careful setting. Then you pick whom to blame, which I have chosen the Heyoun as they are the only ones who are not getting sabotaged...yet.

Then I allocated about 15% on sabotaging four empires leaving none for the Heyoun. If I had more points like 1.7 million, I would start sabotaging them as well. This is a lot of points and a giant galactic map so it requires a lot. I could tailor my sabotage attacks, but I don't as that would be a lot of micromanagement. It's wildly successful thus far.

It doesn't matter as close to 5100 espionage/sabotage attacks have occurred! That is a colossal number and that has largely occurred since turn #300, and for the majority of time, it was in the form of ineffective diplomatic attacks to test if bribery would be an effective way to gain members for the Omega. It is not as it works, but only to end a membership, but then they go right back to being members with their same patrons within 2 turns.

So the Omega get about a 1700 % military sabotage benefit! So obviously that is more effective, and so every planetary defenses, troops, internal intel buildings acting as security, spacedocks, military shipyards, and starships have all been but taken out. And on a regular basis, all the "enemies" ships have been blown up or stolen (perhaps 400 of them) as some have been colony ships or transports and they got used up in the process.

Taking out the spacedocks or military shipyards means these "enemies" can't even muster new ships, because they are perpetually being sabotaged.

There is no running tally, but there are 5100 reports you can read, and so you could write all that down by inhabited sector, and then know what specifically was done to each.

Let's assume that the Cartare have the worst situation and are defenseless followed by the Khaoran, then Rotharians, then Terrans. They lack by various degrees a way to repel invaders. Then you can through various starships scanning ability and in conjunction with various scanning technology in sectors like isolinear ones, then make some assessment. Then you have outposts and starbases too. All of which have range versus your starships that can edge up on inhabited systems. Let's assume that no outposts are on the inhabited sector and that no planetary defenses exist like shields, minefields, and orbital batteries.

[UesugiKenshin]

Now step 2.

The Omega then are attacking largely helpless systems as they have no proper defenses. I'm bombarding with the weakest assault ship, a Saijin as that improves my odds by a 20% percentage, then that Saijin is also doing triple duty. The actual damage only arises from torpedo weaponry.
1. as it is an escort for transports
2. as it bombards the enemy's inhabited system
3. as it delivers the military units to that inhabited system.

Now I'm presuming that all specific defenses have been taken out like bunkers, but some races have special defense buildings, and that means you looked up what major or minor race up in the wiki, and noticed their special defensive buildings, and ensured that those are also eliminated.

Thus your empire is attacking cowering civilians and they gain or lose combat ability based on the type of race they are.

[UesugiKenshin]

Step 3
Defense by population:

Formula is: maxFightsFromPop (Habitants / 5) * morale
example: Pop = 11.4, morale = 100 -> maxFightsFromPop = 3
nPower: Standard is 10
IsRaceProperty (RACE_PROPERTY :: FINANCIAL)) -> nPower - 2;
IsRaceProperty (RACE_PROPERTY :: WARLIKE)) -> nPower + 10;
IsRaceProperty (RACE_PROPERTY :: AGRARIAN)) -> nPower - 3;
IsRaceProperty (RACE_PROPERTY :: PACIFIST)) -> nPower - 5;
IsRaceProperty (RACE_PROPERTY :: SNEAKY)) -> nPower + 5;
IsRaceProperty (RACE_PROPERTY :: SOLOING)) -> nPower + 2;
IsRaceProperty (RACE_PROPERTY :: HOSTILE)) -> nPower + 7;
0.135 KILLED_POP (random, but max 0.00075 of torpdmg = max 0.396)
13 Experience complete gained (killedPop * 100 + ship defense: 0)

This is the actual formula with the warlike racial attribute being the best modifier and with pacifists having the worst modifier.

The formula is dividing by 5 so a maximum of 20% is fighting which is historically accurate based on American history. See a previous post where 13% is the average followed by resistance movements adding up to a 20% maximum.

[UesugiKenshin]

Step 4 combat resolution.

This is where things go awry...and too many civilians perish.

0.135 KILLED_POP (random, but max 0.00075 of torpdmg = max 0.396)

Now in testing, I got no positive benefit from not doing bombardment, but actually more civilian deaths!

The amount of civilians killed should be a factor of 0.135 multiplied times the total population which is 67.0 billion, but is currently 62.0 billion. That should be a theoretical maximum of 8.37 billion only without bombardment.

The theoretical maximum should be 0.396 multiplied by 62 billion which is 25.552 billion casualties.

Instead with minimal bombardment by a base level lowest level assault ship (unmodified is without additional torpedo armament) was 35 billion.

With an immense torpedo barrage, it wiped out 60 billion leaving only 2 billion survivors.

Something is wrong in the calculations as I attacked with a minimal number of Level 5 troops and still got 30 billion casualties.

[UesugiKenshin]

Goal
What I am trying to achieve is the least civilian casualties as a military tactician and that theoretically is 0.135 or 13.5% of the current 62 billion or 8.37 billion civilian deaths .

This is what I am struggling with. I do not want any more than minimal civilian deaths so personally no more than 10 billion. I will experiment with that, and so should you, but seldom does the player have such an ideal situation to do actual military testing versus using whatever troops and starships they have.

An egregious amount of civilians casualties are occurring, that I presumed was due to too strong an invasion force or too much bombardment. One could cheat and use the ship designer by modifying an assault ship like a Saijin, but removing all torpedoes to get the 20% advantage of success, but without actual damage.

This would be next step, but that would take a lot of time to make such a ship and intentionally make it underpowered and dispatch it to the correct inhabited enemy sector to wage the invasion.

[UesugiKenshin]

What a military tactician should be able to do is modulate how many combat troops in transports to deploy and so minimize casualties following the generalized formula of one troop unit per 10 billion people and not use bombardment. You would send the lightest plausible effective invasion force largely based on if they are pacifist civilians or if they are warlike civilians.

Under ordinary battle circumstances, they would have numerous military options to repel such an invasion.

Again, this is why BotE needs to be modified as intel agencies have a godlike ability to invoke mammoth levels of sabotage that literally is impossible. That ultimately makes inhabited sectors defenseless and this is peculiar as there are so many safeguards like troops, outposts and starbases, bunkers, specialized defense buildings, orbital batteries, minefields, and shields to prevent such invasions from occurring besides actual starships in orbit.

My modding solution is either
1. Create custom scenarios where no intel buildings have been made up to turn #400
2. Make a modded version where it is implausible to make intel buildings until turn #400 as the requirements are so extreme.

Either way solves this.

[UesugiKenshin]

Plausibly the 0.135 modifier to civilian casualties is too high for an inhabited sector. I suspect there is a formula issue in the game code for that module. Maybe it should be 0.065 instead?

This is why war is imprecise as whatever assault ship you send is needed to soften up the resistance, and the sector shouldn't be defenseless except in very early turns and in major race sectors. Ideally the minor races have some defenses even from the start particularly the space faring ones.

[UesugiKenshin]

For 480 turns, as I know how to manipulate the commodity system to achieve millions (currently 36 million but I have had it as high as 100 million), I have overbuilt defenses and energy even available in redundant amounts including excess farms so that in any case, even during wartime, the defending people would neither starve nor suffer high casualty rates.

Redundancy is critical as you know in wartime that some percentage of agriculture and energy and buildings will suffer bombardment. It is inevitable.

They have every available protection including conquered minor alien races. That is likely why empire-wide morale is perfect and at 200 % and so the Omega have a utopia.


That is what you want to achieve as there is no benefit to having excess treasury beyond a million unless it is to completely protect the empire. 4 of the 5 other empires have the worst possible situation, and in a 100 turns, even the Heyoun would have the same situation.

[UesugiKenshin]

The ugly aspect is IF the Omega can't use other major race ships, then truly there is no real ultimate benefit to having occupied major race citizens be around as they might rebel. This is the tragic truth as extermination might actually be better, and this is ironic in a German wargame.

In actual war, you would pay a heavy morale penalty to such malevolent tactics as all the citizens would equally fear they themselves are expendable. That was the historic fear among Russians and is the current concern among the Chinese and North Koreans. The only ethnic people to ever sort of accept this fate were the Japanese.

[UesugiKenshin]

This poses an ugly question. Is it better to eliminate all major races and only have the Omega leading all the minor races as an empire?

Probably that would be a conclusion that could have a consensus among the Omega unless those other major race ships can be redesigned to be more powerful than their own starships.

One highly unrealistic aspect is the colossal population growth rate as in no way would be galaxy be so populated so rapidly, thus one would not exterminate as it would take forever to populate and build up inhabited sectors in a realistic fashion.

[UesugiKenshin]

https://dcas.dmdc.osd.mil/dcas/pages/ca ... %20million.
In WW2, there were 15 million military personnel deaths and 38 million known civilian deaths. These are difficult to estimate due to adequate records and propaganda versus actual defensible academic records even with bombardment.

The worst examples of this have been discussed at Nanking by an Australian academic named Askew, compared to the John Rabe estimates, then independently Chinese academics scholarly in excruciating detail examined all available evidence over a decade long process what the actual numbers were.

Compare that to Iris Chang's nonsensical propaganda results.

Similarly one could look at Chinese purges under Mao during the Cultural Revolution or massive deaths caused by Stalin by a variety of means including inept induced famines and purges.

The point is that looking at the worst examples of democide or genocides, you probably never get 13.5% casualties based on known demographic information.

You might get 13.5 % casualties in a targeted zone, but historically you have urban population density versus rural agricultural population density. Say for example the USA. We have 72.5% living in 3.5 % of the land mass, and 27.5 % living in rural regions. So dispersal by bombardment would be intense in that 3.5 % urban region, but largely ineffective elsewhere.

Example
The USA has 330 million people but 239.25 million live in 3.5% of the urban population regions. So you would expect higher bombardment casualties in that tiny space.

Similarly, you have the WW2 aerial bombardment of the Japanese civilian population in densely populated urban areas causing about a maximum of a million casualties plus nuclear incineration from two atomic bombs. The Japanese population in 1942 was 73.114 million, thus 1.2 million while extreme is rather small in civilian casualties. You still have other related war deaths like starvation, injuries leading to death, polluted water, disease, lack of shelter based on seasons, etc. You fall far short of such mammoth casualties.

I think the 0.135 as the base casualty rate is too high based on the best information and the 0.396 total casualty rate based on maximal expected bombardment is also too high.