New Player Looking For Advice

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SanguineQuest
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New Player Looking For Advice

Post by SanguineQuest »

Hey there, I just discovered this game a few days ago, and it's a really impressive piece of work. I loved Birth of the Federation when I was a kid and this seems like everything I would have ever wanted out of a sequel! That being said, there is certainly a learning curve. While the basics work very similarly to the old game, a lot of new systems and new layers to old systems have been added, and the manual on the website was last updated in 2010 and isn't exactly comprehensive.

For the most part I feel like I've been able to figure things out playing a test game as the Klingons, but I recently got into my first war against Cardassia, and suddenly I feel like I'm doing something wrong. I mustered myself a fleet of 4 destroyer IIs and a stack of four Troop Transport Is, figuring based on my old days in BotF that it would be a good start to get a foothold. They'd colonized a system on the fringe of their main territory in a pretty bad system, so I colonized the much better system right next door and attacked, planning to wipe them out. First round I blew up their 2 orbital batteries and took no damage thanks to my fleet's superiority. The combat system for attacking the planet was very intuitive, so I have no issues. But then I started bombarding the planet and destroyed... nothing. No buildings, no population loss.

So I called in my stack of 2 Battlecruiser 1s and 2 Battlecruiser 2s for backup and started bombarding again with all eight ships. This time I killed about 4 million... out of a population of 220 million. I did take out two buildings as well, so I figured "Maybe once I've destroyed all the infrastructure things will pick up." No such luck. So I figured "Ok, I'll call in my troop transports and just take the planet, maybe bombardment is just much weaker in this game because it was OP in BOTF." Except my four Troop Transports combined were not enough to take the planet even with four rounds of bombing before they landed. And worse, they didn't even damage to planet's population because instead they ripped into a second number I hadn't noticed, Garrison.

So I figured "Maybe they want planetary assaults to be more realistic in this game a take a lot of landing ships, I'll just build like ten." Except the I discovered that you can only build troop transports by draining your own planet's Garrison numbers as a secondary resource. Very cool! But very not good for me when my planets with high garrison numbers were a long shot away from the front lines and also when I can only build one ship at a time on each such planet. Even with my warship fleet continuing to bomb the target every turn, by the time I got a stack of 5 Troop Transports together and to the battle lines the enemy garrison had actually REBUILT because my bombings almost always only killed civilian population, never garrison. Which meant that when I tried to send in troop transports again they were outmatched and I lost all five.

So the question that arises from this story is: am I doing something fundamentally wrong? Is planetary bombardment supposed to be this weak? Am I expected to only be doing it with very large stacks of ships, like 20-30, if I want to see results like I'm used to in BOTF? Or is it a function of tech and later game ships are the only ones that take down planets at reasonable speeds and the early game is supposed to be all Ground Troops? Is the Garrison supposed to be so resistant to any sort of softening so I have to plan many turns ahead and ensure very large stacks of Troop Transports even to take a low-level sub-250 million star system?

Any kind of guidance on the basics of how I'm supposed to be fighting a war in this game would be very appreciated. I want to share this game with people I know, but without any kind of comprehensive instruction guide or strategy guide I have to be able to explain how things work myself. :)
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Re: New Player Looking For Advice

Post by Iceman »

Hi SanguineQuest, welcome to the forums and to Supremacy!
Glad you're liking the game, I'll try to answer your questions so that you can adapt and enjoy even more.

You're right that the manual is completely outdated, a few weeks ago afc updated it a bit, but there's too much to change/correct, we should really do one from scratch. Which reminds me, he probably thinks I forgot all about this... :neutral:

Re your questions,
SanguineQuest wrote: Wed Jan 18, 2023 4:47 am For the most part I feel like I've been able to figure things out playing a test game as the Klingons, but I recently got into my first war against Cardassia, and suddenly I feel like I'm doing something wrong. I mustered myself a fleet of 4 destroyer IIs and a stack of four Troop Transport Is, figuring based on my old days in BotF that it would be a good start to get a foothold. They'd colonized a system on the fringe of their main territory in a pretty bad system, so I colonized the much better system right next door and attacked, planning to wipe them out. First round I blew up their 2 orbital batteries and took no damage thanks to my fleet's superiority. The combat system for attacking the planet was very intuitive, so I have no issues. But then I started bombarding the planet and destroyed... nothing. No buildings, no population loss.
Destroyers are not very good for bombardment; they focus on beam weapons, and those are only good vs other ships, orbital batteries and planetary shields. Space combat really.
You'll want heavier ships to cause significant damage to planetary installations, those that focus on torpedoes.
So, when assaulting a system, Destroyers are needed to take out OBs and the shield, and Cruisers+ to bombard.

So I called in my stack of 2 Battlecruiser 1s and 2 Battlecruiser 2s for backup and started bombarding again with all eight ships. This time I killed about 4 million... out of a population of 220 million.
You effectively are only bombarding with 4 ships, as the Destroyers have negligible effect.

I did take out two buildings as well, so I figured "Maybe once I've destroyed all the infrastructure things will pick up." No such luck. So I figured "Ok, I'll call in my troop transports and just take the planet, maybe bombardment is just much weaker in this game because it was OP in BOTF."
Exactly!

Except my four Troop Transports combined were not enough to take the planet even with four rounds of bombing before they landed. And worse, they didn't even damage to planet's population because instead they ripped into a second number I hadn't noticed, Garrison.
4 TT 1s carry 160 troops (40 crew/troops each IIRC), so if the system is already well developed (220 current pop), you're a bit short on combat power. Even playing the Klingons, with their combat strength bonus (the Cardassians' is only a bit lower).
Yes, in Supremacy what you need to overcome is Garrison, not population. If the system has a Bunker Network, it'll be even tougher to subjugate - it protects Garrison from orbital bombardment (and in ground combat too). Also, the defender always fires first, so you need to have a (much) higher combat potential when attacking - just like in RL.
Once you have access to Command ships, those (in an assault fleet) will allow you to choose a bombardment strategy - Maximum Damage, Balanced, Maximum Precision.The 1st option deals maximum damage to population and structures, and is the default strategy when you don't have a Command ship. The last option focuses on attacking the Garrison, minimizing collateral damage.

So I figured "Maybe they want planetary assaults to be more realistic in this game a take a lot of landing ships, I'll just build like ten." Except the I discovered that you can only build troop transports by draining your own planet's Garrison numbers as a secondary resource. Very cool! But very not good for me when my planets with high garrison numbers were a long shot away from the front lines and also when I can only build one ship at a time on each such planet. Even with my warship fleet continuing to bomb the target every turn, by the time I got a stack of 5 Troop Transports together and to the battle lines the enemy garrison had actually REBUILT because my bombings almost always only killed civilian population, never garrison. Which meant that when I tried to send in troop transports again they were outmatched and I lost all five.
Notice that 220 pop is not exactly a small system. These systems cannot fall to 4 Cruisers, that wouldn't be fun. :wink: And certainly not if the AI would assault your 220+ pop systems with 4 Cruisers :twisted:

You're probably at TL 4~5, if you have Cruiser IIs. Maybe you should have a larger navy by now? Especially if you intended to go to war with another empire. I don't know the size of your empire, but if you still have available population support, it is getting wasted. Unless you have resource shortages, ofc.

So the question that arises from this story is: am I doing something fundamentally wrong? Is planetary bombardment supposed to be this weak? Am I expected to only be doing it with very large stacks of ships, like 20-30, if I want to see results like I'm used to in BOTF? Or is it a function of tech and later game ships are the only ones that take down planets at reasonable speeds and the early game is supposed to be all Ground Troops? Is the Garrison supposed to be so resistant to any sort of softening so I have to plan many turns ahead and ensure very large stacks of Troop Transports even to take a low-level sub-250 million star system?
Hopefully I've answered some of these questions above.
In Supremacy, past a certain point, you are able to build lots of ships (lots of systems, higher level shipyards). If it is too easy to assault systems (with only a few ships), mid and late game get to be rather uninteresting, and pretty brutal. Notice that empire homesystems have ~300 max pop (before Moon Habitation), so having half a dozen ships be able to take one out... :neutral:
Tech also plays a role, yes, as higher tech ships have higher firepower. And higher tech TTs carry more troops.
Planning ahead *is* part of a strategy game :razz:
Early game is not supposed to be all ground troops, no, but it requires a large investment otherwise.

Any kind of guidance on the basics of how I'm supposed to be fighting a war in this game would be very appreciated. I want to share this game with people I know, but without any kind of comprehensive instruction guide or strategy guide I have to be able to explain how things work myself. :)
:up:
The more you share, the better!
If I left any question unanswered, please point it out, and I'll answer it. Any other questions that may arise, feel free to post them!
And any suggestions that you may have, you're welcome to post them too.
Thanks for the feedback! And keep it coming.
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SanguineQuest
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Re: New Player Looking For Advice

Post by SanguineQuest »

Thank you for the reply!

Your response clears up a lot. In BOTF (at least to my recollection) the distinction between Torpedo heavy ships and beam heavy ships in planetary bombardment was fairly marginal, pretty much any colony with 220 or below population cap wasn't worth much of anything because of their labor force limitations, and it was wise to run with a relatively light Navy (at least when playing against the AI) even during wartime unless you really needed a larger force so you could build up credit stockpiles for use in paying Minor Races and buying buildings to rapidly develop new colonies.

I've already observed systems in this game which are designed to shift those paradigms, of course. The new three-resource system for shipbuilding and the single-slot shipyards make smaller systems more valuable than ever, provided they have useful resources. When I found a Rogue Planet inside a Nebula that could only support 40 pop I decided to try Colonizing it because of the special Deuterium building that could only be built on such a planet and it ended up being a really valuable investment, something that would have been almost unthinkable in the old game. Thanks to your reply I can see that I need to shift my thinking away from treating colonies below the 280+ mark as fairly worthless stepping stones when I'm pushing into enemy territory. In BOTF when playing on normal difficulty (the same level I was playing here) from what I remember a task force of 6-8 bigger ships as my main system-taking force supported by 1-3 squads of 1-3 smaller/faster ships as a screen/picket against counter attacks was enough to handle most one-on-one warfare in the early to mid game provided I had tech parity or superiority. It was rare to need more than two Troop Transports per star system I was attacking unless I wanted to fortify conquered systems with outposts and starbases quickly. A larger military than that (not counting colony ships, explorer ships clearing up my fog of war, and ships dedicated to intimidating minors or garrisoning my space because of the relative weakness of Outpost 1s) was only necessary if my enemy managed to build up a serious Murderball or very large Battery stack that I needed to break. It seems in this game I'll need to think bigger if I want to go on offense, and worry less on keeping my gold pile building up for a rainy day and more on putting that cash to work in space.

If I did have a follow-up thought/critique: While it would be fair to say that planetary bombardment was too powerful a strat in the old game (and I like this new addition of command ships enabling nuance between targeting civilians and garrisons btw) one could argue that it's true to Star Trek lore. Even single starships are capable to razing entire worlds according to multiple episodes. In Deep Space Nine when a significant fleet bombarded the fake Dominion homeworld they expected to obliterate the planet's entire crust and mantle in a matter of hours. In light of that, it feels a bit strange to have 2 D6's and 2 D7's completely stalemated by an otherwise defenseless planet based on nothing but the sheer number of people living on it.

I'm sure you and everyone else in this community have put mountains of thought into balance, but my gut feeling is that if the empire a planet belongs to can't send forces to contest space superiority, and there are no structures left to protect the populace, even a relatively small number of ships being able to glass it in relatively short order makes sense. Surely there must be a way to square that circle. Perhaps make starvation a multiplier on bombardment, so when Farms are all gone the populace dies faster? That might even make sense as an additional command option. Instead of a balanced attack between population and garrison (that feels a little superfluous) make it specifically for targeting infrastructure instead of either Population or Garrison. That option would be the best choice for a smaller siege fleet trying to multiply their force by removing the things which allow the population to sustain life. Larger fleets can instead target the population directly and leave the planet's infrastructure more intact, justified as precision bombing of housing and trade hubs instead of industrial centers and farmland. The Garrison, because it is a hardened military force which could easily have the means to mitigate supply losses, can remain insulated from the effects of civilian-focused bombardment like they currently are, meaning that if you want to take the system instead of just destroy it you still need to deal with them in a targeted way with troop transports and garrison-targeted bombardment.

Regardless of if my idea is useful, I still appreciate the advice and explaination of the design intent. I look forward to spending more time on this game. :)
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Re: New Player Looking For Advice

Post by Spocks-cuddly-tribble »

SanguineQuest wrote: Wed Jan 18, 2023 2:46 pmIn BOTF (at least to my recollection) the distinction between Torpedo heavy ships and beam heavy ships in planetary bombardment was fairly marginal
Au contraire, mon Capitain!

In BotF beam weapons are completely ignored for planetary assault, even vs orbital batteries and planetary shields. :wink:

So destroyers/scouts were only useful as cheap sacrifices for the orbital batteries, since strike cruisers were also useless due to OB first shot advantage destroyed them (weak shields/hull + weapon range ignored).

Invading larger systems with TT version 1 (40 base pop) is very problematic in BotF as well.
I don't know how many bugs is too many but that point is reached somewhere before however many in BotF is.
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Re: New Player Looking For Advice

Post by Iceman »

Spocks-cuddly-tribble wrote: Wed Jan 18, 2023 3:44 pm
SanguineQuest wrote: Wed Jan 18, 2023 2:46 pmIn BOTF (at least to my recollection) the distinction between Torpedo heavy ships and beam heavy ships in planetary bombardment was fairly marginal
Au contraire, mon Capitain!

In BotF beam weapons are completely ignored for planetary assault, even vs orbital batteries and planetary shields. :wink:

So destroyers/scouts were only useful as cheap sacrifices for the orbital batteries, since strike cruisers were also useless due to OB first shot advantage destroyed them (weak shields/hull + weapon range ignored).

Invading larger systems with TT version 1 (40 base pop) is very problematic in BotF as well.
In Supremacy, only beam weapons fire at orbital batteries. Against the planetary shield, beams are fired first, and only after all beams (of all ships) have been fired will torps be fired. Against ground targets, only torps are fired.
Strike Cruisers are brutal vs ground targets, with their high torp complement. And they have a targeting bonus too. They're crap vs OBs, since they have few beam weapons.
OBs always fire first.

We tried to keep it as close to BotF as possible, but "refine" it a bit - to make all ship types important in some way, and still make some sense.
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Re: New Player Looking For Advice

Post by Iceman »

SanguineQuest wrote: Wed Jan 18, 2023 2:46 pm Thank you for the reply!
:up:
pretty much any colony with 220 or below population cap wasn't worth much of anything because of their labor force limitations,
In Supremacy, the output of Production Facilities (the base structures) is higher than in BotF.

and it was wise to run with a relatively light Navy (at least when playing against the AI) even during wartime unless you really needed a larger force so you could build up credit stockpiles for use in paying Minor Races and buying buildings to rapidly develop new colonies.
Notice that you only pay your fleet's maintenance cost that is in excess of your population support! As long as you keep it below pop support, you don't actually pay anything. (stations are not included)

In BOTF when playing on normal difficulty (the same level I was playing here) from what I remember a task force of 6-8 bigger ships as my main system-taking force supported by 1-3 squads of 1-3 smaller/faster ships as a screen/picket against counter attacks was enough to handle most one-on-one warfare in the early to mid game provided I had tech parity or superiority.
Well, some people here want huge fleets :twisted:
Maps are also potentially larger, so that type of "design" was simply not very viable.

It was rare to need more than two Troop Transports per star system I was attacking unless I wanted to fortify conquered systems with outposts and starbases quickly.
That is kind of lame. :twisted: Unless you want games to be faster, ofc.


Dinner time. The rest will have to wait :wink:
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Re: New Player Looking For Advice

Post by SanguineQuest »

Spocks-cuddly-tribble wrote: Wed Jan 18, 2023 3:44 pm
SanguineQuest wrote: Wed Jan 18, 2023 2:46 pmIn BOTF (at least to my recollection) the distinction between Torpedo heavy ships and beam heavy ships in planetary bombardment was fairly marginal
Au contraire, mon Capitain!

In BotF beam weapons are completely ignored for planetary assault, even vs orbital batteries and planetary shields. :wink:

So destroyers/scouts were only useful as cheap sacrifices for the orbital batteries, since strike cruisers were also useless due to OB first shot advantage destroyed them (weak shields/hull + weapon range ignored).

Invading larger systems with TT version 1 (40 base pop) is very problematic in BotF as well.
I fully admit that I could easily be remembering wrong, it's been a long time since I played it and the game's mechanics are famously opaque.
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Re: New Player Looking For Advice

Post by Iceman »

SanguineQuest wrote: Wed Jan 18, 2023 2:46 pm one could argue that it's true to Star Trek lore.
I wouldn't use the ST lore argument honestly, given that it is anything but consistent.

Even single starships are capable to razing entire worlds according to multiple episodes. In Deep Space Nine when a significant fleet bombarded the fake Dominion homeworld they expected to obliterate the planet's entire crust and mantle in a matter of hours.
According to Memory Alpha, ~20 ships destroyed 30% of the planet's crust. Which is rather inconsistent with other orbital bombardment descriptions like you mentioned. See above.

In light of that, it feels a bit strange to have 2 D6's and 2 D7's completely stalemated by an otherwise defenseless planet based on nothing but the sheer number of people living on it.
They are not stalemated, they just can't kill the *population* massively. A planet is a huge area for 4 ships to bombard. People ae not just going to stand around in high profile targets (like cities) during an orbital bombardment, making it easy on the attackers :wink:
In fact, the formula for damage to pop includes population density. :cool:

Just as a curiosity, damage is reduced by the defender's Construction tech level.
Population casualties are reduced by Population Health buildings in the colony.

I'm sure you and everyone else in this community have put mountains of thought into balance, but my gut feeling is that if the empire a planet belongs to can't send forces to contest space superiority, and there are no structures left to protect the populace, even a relatively small number of ships being able to glass it in relatively short order makes sense.
Then again, a system taking several turns to be destroyed allows the defender to send in reinforcements. :wink:
Notice that the larger the attacking fleet, the less turns the defender has to send said reinforcements.

Instead of a balanced attack between population and garrison (that feels a little superfluous)
Did I mention that the Maximum Damage option carries a heavy hit to Regard with other civs you're in contact with ? :twisted: Uh, some civs just don't care, but most do. Balanced is slower to damage the colony, but carries no such hit. Maybe the Feds should consider that option. :cool:
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