Combat Gripe

[Strategista]

So I am sitting here waiting for 0.30.0 to download, thinking back on my first full game. I won, but I was tearing my hair out for about half the game.

I would love to see a breakdown on exactly how combat is resolved in Pandora. I can read a combat prediction, but why is this going to happen is my question.

I am the type of player who, most of the time, plays 4X games by going balls out on tech-ing up, with mostly peaceful early expansion. I get myself an enormous lead in tech and infrastructure, and then bulldoze the AI's legions of crappy units with my less numerous, but vastly superior (and thus more expensive) army.

I can't quite put my finger on why, but for some reason this isn't isn't working very well in Pandora, even on Easy, and thus combat FEELS wrong to me in this game. I seem to take way, way too much attrition damage, when (even factoring in terrain, rank, devices, everything) I should blow them into space. I am very cautious with how I wage war in these games, I check everything before I pull the trigger, and still somehow my cutting edge, awesome units end up more mangled than my dog's chew toys almost immediately after I engage. Like, each of my units having 2-3 times their power or more. My state of the art, late mech/early trans era strike craft/mechs/tanks get totally banged up after killing just a handful of inferior units, and then they swarm me with the rest of their colonial/early mech infantry troopers and bare bones colonial strike craft, until I lose everything. I feel like it takes a ton of effort to field these awesome machines of war, and the AI knocks them out with a bunch of, essentially, pea shooters.

For example. At one point in the game, I had conquered the Imperium early on, in what started as a defensive war, but they would not drop the issue, repeatedly attacking me again after losing and signing cease fires, just being an all around militaristic d*ck (as I would expect from said faction). No big deal, I took the fight to them with my early colonial M20 avenger tanks and I eradicated them. This part of the game felt right, we were on equal footing tech-wise and I just overran them with numbers and careful tactics.

I was then easily twice the size of any other faction. Started to run away with tech and infrastructure, as planned. Then the religious chick declares war on me from halfway around the world. Interesting, since we had no prior contact really... but OK, let's rock. I put together a small but ridiculously powerful (I thought) task force of Hurricane strike craft and late mechs with fusion lasers, level 2 mech era armor, bonus attack devices,you name it, but alas... she drops a TON of baseline (no upgrades) mech era infantry troopers on my shores before I can deploy. No big deal... I thought I was about to steam roll them into the ocean, since I outgunned them so badly, but after each of my glorious units had killed ONE or maybe two invaders, they were so damaged that I had to pull them back and heal up. I was losing cities to infantry that didn't even have freaking Gauss cannons/armor!! This meant that, in order to stop an invasion by about 10 HORRIBLY outgunned, obselete infantry units and a couple colonial era strike craft, I had to scramble everything I had, abuse orbital strikes, buy some units outright, beg, borrow, and steal. And it took me the entire rest of the game to take over that religious empire, even with increasingly more advanced units, weapons, armor, devices, you name it. EXCEEDINGLY frustrating for a player like me that plays a hard tech game.

Basically, it feels like the game is weighted too heavily in favor of the number of units a faction fields, and not enough toward the quality of units. That's the best way I can describe it. It's like bringing world war II panzers against guys with bows and arrows, and losing because of attrition. At some point, the sticks and stones just shouldn't do jack to the tanks. In my humble opinion.

I suggest revisiting the combat mechanics and giving some kind of inherent advantage to units that are just WAY out of the league of their opponents.

/endrant

[SephiRok]

The way that combat works, a 10 power unit will take out exactly two 5 power units if they are doing combat that is equally favorable to both. So having double power units would mean you need half as many of them. The problem is, when you have many units, you can have a counter for everything -- flamethrowers, cannons, flaks -- and if you're defending the best counter will always get picked. The advantage of having higher power units in general is that they don't die and you can heal them up to use them again.

To trade well, you want good efficiency by having the appropriate weapons, devices and position, higher base power just gives you more buffer. I don't know the details of your game since you didn't post a save, but if he was swarming you with units, artillery and operations would have also done amazing -- they were designed to be good against many weak units. What I gather from your post is that you had higher base power units, but either not enough of them or not the right designs.

[eddparsons]

I recommend using the device that lets your unit not take any damage after attacking as long as it wins.

In my game I teched up and built up a moderate amount of good units all with this device (I forget the name) which completely stomped the (numerically far greater) opposition, generally with 100% win chance and taking no damage. Defending is harder but the massive boost for city defense helps there.

[jdmillard]

I recommend using the device that lets your unit not take any damage after attacking as long as it wins.

I love to use this device with aircraft who are paired with tanks or mechs that have the defensive bonus device. That device is pretty powerful and perhaps should have an even higher production multiplier.