A good read that I think many gamers haven't even thought about:
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_atomic_bombs_will_it_take_to_destroy_the_world
How many atomic bombs will it take to destroy the world?
This is a pretty good read.
Also it makes MoO2's ship-to-ship missile nukes being sucky against planets make more sense. Through it does get silly when you win the battle and freely bombard the planet with nukes... from WHERE? You just got a few ships with limited ammo and piddy nukes. You should't be capable of doing that.
Genocide a planet is pretty easy for a space fleet.
Asteroid belts. Attach a few simple propulsion systems on it. Your basic missiles will do. Accelerate it and crash into the planet.
If they have big orbiting asteroids like Earth's Moon. Do as above: De-orbiting that sucker into mother planet.
He hold the orbit hold the planet. No planet would defy winning fleet unless they feel like a scorching earth campaign is called for, ie resisting to the last man.
It makes for a boring ground combats in a space game.
ARGH! *bangs head against desk*
What's with the sci-fi community and their disturbing tendency to ignore planetary ground combat and just toss rocks like inhabitable planets are cheap and plentiful?! "Oh we just tossed rocks at twelve goldilock planets, let's move on, inhabitable planets are cheap, right?" WROOONG!!
Even in Warhammer 40K they don't do that much, a grimdark setting where planets often contain hidden tomb worlds full of murderous robots, get corrupted by Chaos, overrun by Orks and turned into Daemon-Worlds or end up munched up by Tyranids; despite wrong generalizations, if the Imperium applies Exterminatus to a world, they usually make DAMN SURE the world is irrevogably damned and lost. By that stage, killing anybody sane or alive living on it is mercy-killing. And that's WH40K, which is a much more utterly insane and GRIMDARK setting than 99% of all Science Fiction out there, and it features things that would make 99% of the most vicious sci-fi baddies cry tears of blood and run like sissies. Hell, and in WH40k inhabitable planets ARE (relatively) plentiful, and the Imperium probably knows how to terraform anyway.
There's also the fact tossing rocks at inhabited planets is wasteful, unless its retaliation (someone else did it first) or a attack against a very horrible enemy (think Zerg/Tyranid/Chaos/Blight level of "HOLY FUCK THIS SHIT JUST DOESN'T DIE!!). Planets not composed of boring rocks and ices or Gas are VERY RARE in the Universe, ESPECIALLY if they contain life. Planets bearing advanced life are much much MUCH more interesting and important to a space-faring civilization than big ball of scorched rock. All that bio-diversity, along with life-bearing capacity, would be a great bounty for any civilization even remotely interested in genetic research. For all we know, the alien equivalent to instant cancer cure is somewhere on Earth and vice-versa. If the aliens are artistic types, they would also might be interested in studying the culture and art of their new conquests. There's also a very SEIV-thing where a empire can take over a planet a dislocate lots of people from their original to a new planet, a planet whose conditions the empire's main race can't stand, but the other race can live fine. A empire of aliens who live in Methane Atmosphere planets and can't stand to oxygen planets, finds a bunch of aliens who breathe oxygen just fine, tranplants some of them to colonize those once nigh-useless planets and turn them into useful vassal planets. Also, capturing industry and technology from conquered planet is always good.
tiagocc0 said:
It should be based on a fear factor, surrender to live today and fight tomorrow.
So having a good fleet orbiting a planet should be enough for you to access that planet.
Removing your fleet should let them have their planet back.
Troops then should be used to secure the planet, you can move your fleet back leaving troops on the planet.
In the worst case scenario they would not give access to the planet even with your fleet there, they want to fight your troops.
In this case if you win you get the planet since the other side resistance died.
EDIT: So you have an option of trying and losing or not trying and being able to get your planet back by just getting rid of their fleets. /ENDOFEDIT
I suggested something like that once in a topic.
The idea is that there would be a difference between taking over a planet like that and taking over the planet with ground troops. The idea is that a planet taken with orbital power would be like a vassal in Crusader Kings (under your command and submitted to you, but not 100% under your control), whereas a conquered planet would be 100% under your control.
Oh yeah, Planetary Force Fields. Your ships arrive, the enemy planet is protected by a ginormous force-field fed by a immense network of force-field emmiters and energy reactors placed under mountains, underground and well under the ocean floor. Their side of the force-field also includes A LOT of immense weapon plataforms, disposable missile launchers, submarines packing nukes (if it has a ocean), asteroid fortresses and orbital weapon satellites. Which can shoot at your fleet but you can't shoot at them without breaching their force-field, which can't be taken out in one stroke and is well beyond the strength of a ship-sized forcefield due to scale. What now?
Also, depending on how your ships and FTL are, you might have small Pirate-Empires where a bunch of pirates get ships and use them to terrorize small groups of solar systems instead of normal planet-based Space Empires. That shit probably would't work with Wormhole Gates as the main method of FTL, for example - One or a few points of arrival make for easy solution to the Pirate Problem; just deploy lots of defensive satelites near gate, watch as pirates appear and get blasted on arrival.
Instead of resolving it at the time of deployment, troops could actually last several turns.
Yeah, this needs to appear in 4X fast, I hate how in MoO2, SEIV and GalCiv2, ground combat was a instantaneous activity. No world-wide vietnams, no nothing, aparently everyone just lines together at the same time and shoot it out until one side is dead or something. Retaaarded.