Fanboys: Cadia will never fall! Failbaddon: Haha planet cracks brrrr :p

When you need a colossus when the armies cant win

Cadia Stands

CADIA STANDS!

Cadia Steht

I actually suggested that to the Devs before they were reworked to protect pops from raiding!

@@MontuPlayshow did they react?

yes and no , people like to forget how many civilians die in war and lots have their "experience from movies or games" where you see zero or close zero it it happening , ill bring most recent big war who ended , iraq war with USA/allies intervention(war in ukraine is still going so no good statistics) on averige US/allies military killed 2-5 civilians for each iraq soldier they killed , in iraq war about 100k iraq soldiers/paramilitieries died , and about 250k-400k civilians die we know of (how many we dont know , how many was maimed , injured and scared or died later is another story) in most wars majority of casualties are civilians , even "modern wars"

@@VarenvelDarakus but it’s not like stellaris has never thrown realism away for gameplay purposes, and I’m fine like that. Stellaris isn’t trying to be the most accurate space warfare simulator, it’s primarily an economic game

You could make it so that each extra Fortress protect another 1 or 2 pops from collateral damage.

I think the Imperium Galactia games had ground based anti-orbital weapons. But they participated and got blown up during the battle for the planet before the landings took place.

@@poilboiler I could see that, because I know another game that had that concept was empire at war with the ion canons and hyper velocity gun. I still wish they could add a weapon like that though to the game

@@msutter117 Sadly in Stellaris it'd probably be forced randomized weapons like on starbases so you'll end up with ground defense guns only being autocannons with too short range to reach out of the atmosphere.

well, the reason why it's not in base game is because it's insanely unfair to be able to shoot stuff without getting ever shot back even Star Wars: Empire at War "only" had an EMP cannon that did zero damage while shutting down the shields of a target temporarily

@@letsplaysvonaja1714 the hyper velocity gun actually bypassed shields and caused massive damage, like it could destroy a capital ship in 3 shots. But it’s a fair point. The mod I used to use actually had it so if you launched a ground invasion immediately you could destroy it but you will lose ships in the process unless you leave it all to armies with no bombardment. There was work arounds. The mod itself doesn’t work anymore anyway with the last couple builds so I doubt the concept will be revived.

You can get the best of both worlds using the following starbase setup: 6 Ancient Ramparts, Ancient Shield Overcharger, Defense Grid Supercomputer, Communications Jammer, extra module of your choice (command center is mine, but this'll buff enemy ship fire rate), 1 Ion Cannon, fill the rest of the defense platform slots with strike craft hangar platforms. The Ion cannon will fire more or less as soon as enemies enter most systems, which will engage the starbase with the enemy fleet and cause the strike craft to deploy and attack. The starbase and platforms will have shield and armour hardening and buffs, making them extremely tanky, and if the enemy takes it then the things which gave it all it's power (the defense platforms) are gone and have to be rebuilt. You can easily clear 150k fleet power without any special or repeatable techs and the enemy has to evaporate the vast majority of that before they can take control of it.

I build starbases are the frontier worlds. They are here to help my fleet to engage enemy on the best possible ground before judging the strength of my foe. Fully maxed out starbase and my entire fleet behind it.

I usually have a powerful starbase on the direct border and then behind that system Ill have a Fortress World or Fortress Habitat with a weak starbase so if they punch through the starbase there stuck gives me time to mount a defense or counter attack assuming they punch through my fleet and the border Starbase

It can be argued the other way since if the war become a stalemate you will get the starbase back.

Well, I would argue the idea is you shouldn't be lifting a siege of a fortress world. Instead as your enemy wastes decades sieging it, you go around them and siege their entire empire. In the end, they conquered one planet, and you conquered dozens, winning the war.

I wish there was something like another tech tier of the planetary shield generator that’s able to block colissi, maybe only up to like 25% devastation or something. It just sucks that other than naval cap, fortress worlds become utterly meaningless once colossi get unlocked.

It's still important to spam soldier jobs for naval capacity in the late game, there are only so many starbases you can build before their energy upkeep becomes unmanageable, so you can't rely on anchorages forever.

@@blahmaster6k Well, when you only have two sectors, less than a dozen inhabited planets, and 25 out of the 27 starbases you're allowed are nothing but fully-upgraded and boosted anchorages, they usually do the job for me. (I like playing defensive, with the starbase-boosting traditions.)

You also get the navel capacity boost if im not mistaken. Im glad he explained the not having multiple is not technically beneficial in defense because i definitely was making that mistake thinking it helped but mainly for me i love that navel cap benefit :) spam them soldiers!!! Build a Grand Fleet 🤣

Can collateral damage or bombardment destroy the fortress?

@@Matoro342 As far as I know? I didn't think it had any specific special resistances or anything.

Army strenght doesnt say much. Especially if the units are weak it can actually hurt your defense.

Yeah, and then the enemy hired your enclave and then suddenly you had enemy literally outside your capital gate

@@detachsoup6061 either way they are the quickest and cheapest way to build a ground force, but the built in home system protection is the main attraction. max level merc enclaves with end game tech are well over 300k fleet power (although again, they are terribly designed ships, and you need to pay influence and energy to keep them home/out of xeno hands). keep in mind thats 500 army strength per merc enclave, every 2 years, you get to keep them not just hire them, megacorps can have up to 7 enclaves, thats a 3.5k invasion fleet that could be spawned out of thin air for extremely cheap, very very often, forever

@@XVlove if they declare on you while they're in your systems the fleet goes missing in action, they usually build up outside your borders so you can just recall them, for a hefty fee. they are actually a very good way to bait wars against yourself because you can just take back control of the AI's brand new main fleet that they just spent a boatload of energy to hire, and wipe them back with it. great for 'counter-vassalising'

I mean, mercenary army strength depends on what you provided them with if your species is very strong cyborgs they will be decent if they are a weak race and you founded the mercs before even ascending then yes, you should probably not buy their soldiers

Iserlohn in stellaris would basically a habitat mixed with megashipyard with obscene firepower. Ground invasion for the FPA was the only option because yang was given like tiny fleet and staff and they captured it both times with things closer to subtifuge and infiltration than a ground invasion. The first capture didn't involve any violence to reach the commander. The only time the station was at risk/sieged in a battle was when they used Geiersburg fortress and that was mainly because of alliance infighting. Doing something similar in stellaris would be sending in a small ground uinit in an enemy system and taking it over because you got their admiral/govenor/empire leader

Absolutely. Especially when there's the LotGH ship sets floating around

Gigastructures mod has the Maginot world which is basically this. I have killed entire Awakened Empire doomstacks with just static defenses using a maginot world.

What about the battlefleet Cadia ? Brave man and woman on void ships fighting against chaos

Absolutely!

Always felt weird to me that you only get S and M slots on your biggest baddest citadels. You can hold a half-dozen titans simultaneously but you can’t even fit a large gun? If I want to blow up an asteroid I need to build a defense platform because the citadel guns don’t have the range? I’d expect a T and a couple X slots on a citadel, one X and a few L on a star fortress, etc on down. Plus also P slots on them all. Right now if you’re weak attacking a star base, you can just camp at carrier range and send in fighters to do the job. As long as you can destroy a platform in under 60 days, the fighters will eventually win.

play with the New Ship Classes 3 (NSC3) mod. not only does it bring in new ship classes, it has 2 new levels of starbases and re-adds the defense stations and fortresses from pre-2.0. a t7 starbase by itself armed with a bunch of gun batteries can hold off anything short of an FE's fleet. with a bunch of artillery defense fortresses, it can hold off the FE's fleets

You can do 600k citadels without mods and if you pick the right components a citadel with a small 200k fleet can even defend 10x the crisis ships.

@@matthewnuss1551 they also massively buff the stats and amount of slots every tier of station has. Its honestly kinda busted but i love it

Hence the quote: "The planet cracked before the guard did".

Yeah they can literally invade the minds of the enemy

Warforms go brrr.

Psionic armies are useless against the superior might of steel, why worry about morale if everyone is a robot?

Similarly, if you know an enemy is fielding offensive armies that excel at breaking morale (zombies and battle frames to a lesser extent, psionics, warforms and xenomorphs to a greater extent), prioritise armies that counter this strategy. Gene warriors, psionics and fanatical defenders are extremely resistant to morale loss, while robots / machines, the undead, xenomorphs and offspring-led are completely immune to it.

You gotta be careful doing that though since the -50% damage is pretty nasty.

​@@jackbright2125not to mention the 50% sublight speed reduction, meaning is your fleets can no longer run from a bad fight. And if your fleets were evenly matched before, that debuff will ruin you.

Planet cracker go brrrrr

"Abbadon had a temper tantrum, went "FUCK YOU, I HAVE A BLACKSTONE FORTRESS!" and fucking YOTE that bitch into the planet"

Cadia never fell.

Cadia stands.

Chaos didn't get *bored* Abbadon just got desperate... And if Horus was alive at the time he would have his head for using a black fortress like that😂

Zombies are terrifying no matter what, unless you have very strong soldiers like warforms or xenomorphs.

Ironically happened to me once when I tried to invade some AI fanatic purifiers. If I invaded a Planet and didn't have at least 3x as many troops as them, the AI would just slowly kill my own troops while constantly reanimating theirs. Nearly lost that war despite occupying like 90% of their systems and planets because of that.

Good luck doing that when my 7k clone soldier ascendant army lands on your world. Even if that fails to achieve the task my colossus always stands ready.

So the real question is: what’s the cheapest most efficient assault army? Clones? Zombies? Genetically engineered soldiers? Things to pursue

@@TheNaturalnuke perhaps whichever is the strongest you have.

No longer works??

​@@TheNaturalnuke Very situational. Do you go for raw power for the best chance of repelling enemies, or less raw damage to reduce collateral damage to your world? Do you use morale breaking tactics for an easy low-collateral win, or morale resistant / immune armies if that's the enemy's plan? Do you use expensive units that cause high war exhaustion when killed, or spammable fodder to slow enemies down for cheap?

That's why I have Gigastructural Engineering and build Maginot Worlds.

I mostly play my hydrocentric empire and use the colossus to turn enemy planets into ocean world that I can inhabit after the war. Much more elegant than cracking the planet and making it useless forever.

Imagine being such a noob you massacre innocents smh

​@@rizkiramadhan9266The naivete to think filthy xenos could be innocent. Having their planet cracked is the most humane way of dealing with them. The rest go to the processing plants where they can attone for their transgressions on the supermarket shelves.

​@@rizkiramadhan9266Imagine being such a noob you don't.

I believe that that only affects the amount of ships you need to reach the max amount of bombardment. I might be wrong though

looks like standard +- damage modificator, -100%+20%=-80%, not 100% sure though@@art-games6230

"Every bunker on a world turn the clock forward for it´s destruction." -Imperial Death Trooper Division

@@deathtrooper7760 "Every innocent life you take is three more recruits for the Rebellion. I'd explain why, but my stay in this cell will be ending... right now." -last interrogation log of Prisoner 889345-A "Ara Blade", Rebel Infiltrator

but this is not Mass Effect Andromeda

@@yb1149 Your ability to point out the obvious is inspiring

gigastructers up in the l-gate cluster

@@deathtrooper7760 I can't really get gigastrictures or L-gates, since I only have the federations DLC. However, some of my mods give me megastructures that are, for all intents and purposes, gigastrictures

There is always the memorialist civic on your next run!

Might refresh on the turn of the month.

As mentioned I think its turn of the month, may be a specific amount of time as well.

Your two main goals in ground combat is killing the enemy and breaking morale. In the early-mid game, most armies provide moderate stats for both. In the late game, you tend to have a single army type competent at both

One thing I would be considering is the time it takes to make them. Ideally you go for the strongest, but there will be times where you need an immediate army. Which is why clones are great. Typically though, build the strongest armies you can during peace time and clones during war time unless you have time.

I use mixed armies because I’m always a xénophile and you can only recruit a limited number of armies of each species. But you can’t control who goes to the front first, so if you have a cunning plan of mixing different strengths and having then complement each other somehow, RNG will screw you up. (And there’s isn’t much of a way for units to complement each other anyway, ground combat is too simplistic.)

Sorta but not really. Also depends on what you mean "strongest". TL;DR: Army types just encourage flavor imo, due to the simplicity of land warfare all that matters is how fast you want to conquer a system and move on. Any army type will do if you have enough for the situation you need them for. For example, compared to regular assault armies: -Slave armies cost 50% to build, have 66% build time, cost 50% upkeep, do 100% dmg, do 75% morale dmg, do 125% collateral dmg, have 100% health, have 75% morale and cost 50% war exhaustion when killed. They trade slightly lower some stats for much cheaper costs, making 2 slave armies superior to 1 assault army effectiveness for the same cost/upkeep. But they aren't readily available to all, you need to have an enslaved species in your empire to recruit these. -Psionic armies cost 250% to build, have 133% build time, cost 250% upkeep, do 200% dmg, do 300% morale dmg, do 50% collateral dmg, have 350% health, have 500% morale and cost 300% war exhaustion when killed. They trade much higher costs for even higher stats, in terms of raw damage they may not compare to 3 assault armies but their health surpasses 3 and their morale damage is on par with 5 assault armies. Meaning they absolutely demolish routable armies relative to their costs, especially slave armies but will perform slightly worse for their costs against unroutable armies. They are also even more exclusive than slave armies because they require an entire ascension perk to unlock. -Robotic armies cost 150% to build, have 100% build time, cost 150% upkeep, do 100% damage, do 100% morale dmg, do 150% collateral dmg, have 200% health, cannot rout, cost 50% war exhaustion when killed. They trade higher costs for higher stats and immunity to routing. Less raw damage but more health relative to their costs combined with being immune to routing means they will out DPS other armies per individual army, making them well worth the costs. They are slightly more exclusive than slave armies but less so than psionics, because you can't build more of them than you have pops and they "grow" much slower than organic pops but do not require an ascension perk or specific ethics (even spiritualists _can_ use them if they _want_ to). In summary all this comes down to is incentivizing certain flavors of empires to build certain types of armies that thematically fit with them: A technocracy (bonus points for mechanist origin) will be able to build a larger population of robot pops faster which enables them to field appropriately sized robotic only armies, which feeds in to the whole techno vibe. A biologically ascended empire will be able to field the most elite armies (space marines!) of biologically perfected warriors, which feeds in to the genetic mastery vibe. And if you're feeling particularly vengeful you can unleash a horde of literal xenomorphs on enemy planets to give a satisfying feeling of "f*ck you" to the enemy. In practice it doesn't really matter though, you can rock nothing but regular assault armies well in to the late game. The perceived loss in cost efficiency is entirely negated by building 1 or 2 generator/mining districts across your empire, aka its negligible in the grand scheme of things.

It makes worlds way easier to capture but also makes repopulating and rebuilding them afterwards an huge pain (especially larger worlds with lots of pops and infrastructure). Both strategies have merit: Either make the capture process easier and way more likely to succeed, or go the hard route and have a good or at least decent world ready to work almost immediately after its capture.

“Locked.” When bro’s never played tall.

No, that only affects the 'shield HP' on things like ships and stations! Nothing can turn off a planetary shield (unless you click 'deactivate' or it gets ruined by bombardment but that is very rare, maybe impossible)

using the hyperlanes, yes, using the L-gate, no!