There are two distinct ways in which you may defend your planets: The Turret Defence (TD) & The Ground Defence (GD). In the Turret Defence you build turrets, shields and hyperspace facilities. The aim is to stop the attacker before he reaches the planet surface. The Ground Defence requires Bunkers, Planetary Fortresses, Military Camps and lots of soldiers. Here you’re trying to take out as many enemy troopers as possible, before the attacker breaks your defences.
There is no rule that says you have to focus on one more than the other. You can try to have a medium defence both on the ground and the planet perimeter, but most players tend to specialize in one or the other. You could even choose to have a TD on some planets and a GD on others, but the common approach is that all planets have the same type of defence, planned from the beginning and therefore amplified by Civilization Traits and Doctrines.
Nigh-on all players avail themselves of the TD at some some point during a galaxy. They will, for example, be using Light Turrets during the start of the galaxy. To have success with this defence you’ll need to reserve a lot of planetary space for turrets and shields, and you’ll have to divert significant resources into developing your Planetary Defence technology. An acceptable level of defence in this paradigm is 3 Light Turrets, 3 Heavy Turrets and 3 Shield Generators (usually annotated as a ‘3/3/3 defence’). However, this is no more than acceptable – these planets are still subject to the larger enemy fleets, and players usually try to fit in a few more turrets.
Advantages: The main advantage of the Turret Defence is that the enemy never reaches the planet surface (hopefully) – so there’s no need to recruit and station expensive military units on every single planet, or for rebuilding them after a big fight. This frees up vital resources for conquest. Without having done any calculations, I believe this defence is generally cheaper to maintain than the GD once the empires go above 20 planets or so.
Disadvantages: The primary weakness of this defence is that once the enemy has a fleet powerful enough to overcome your turrets and shields, you are essentially at the mercy of your enemy. You may build more turrets or research another level of Planetary Defence, in order to keep ahead of your attacker, but unless you can somehow stop his production of ships, it’s inevitable that his fleet grows large enough to take on even your homeworld. Another major disadvantage is the space required for this defence, which is considerably higher than that needed for a GD. This space might have been put to better use with other facilities.
As has already been pointed out above, even players that specialize in this defence will make use of turrets and perhaps even the occasional shield. However, for the GD to be effective, you are very nearly forced to spend civilization traits on food production and -consumption, which means that those picks are wasted (or at least not fully utilized), if you rely too much on the TD facilities.
Hence the defence of all players tend to look about the same (a few turrets and perhaps a few soldiers), up until somewhere between turn 50 and 100. This is where the GD defender will start building a lot of troops instead of more turrets. Later still (after turn 200), I personally remove all traces of the TD gradually, as space grows sparse on the planets. I do this since a few turrets will make no difference at this point in the game, and might actually pose an exploitable weakness in your defences. This weakness stems from a combination of the fact that you cannot bomb a planet that hasn’t got any turrets or shields, and the fact that bombs aren’t precision weapons. Buildings other than strictly defensive ones can and will get destroyed during a bomb-run, which means that having a single light turret on a planet poses a threat to all other structures on the planet. If the attacker doesn’t have any troops with him, he can still do a great deal of harm if you allow him to bomb your planet. Fortunately this is simple, just sell all your turrets and shields, and he will be unable to harm you in any way (until his troop ships catch up).
When using this defence, you’re betting that you can build more troops than your enemy, not least faster than him – and that you’ll be able to keep the planets you take (as opposed to the other guy, who will have a hard time stationing a lot of military on the newly conquered planets). It’s a war of attrition where the speed at which you can take planets, is as important as how slow you can make the progress of the other guy.
I usually avoid researching Bunkers, since they’ll need to be replaced with Fortresses eventually. Only if I’m pressed in the early stages do I bother with this tech.
I consider a decent GD at turn 200 to be roughly 25 soldiers in Planetary Fortresses. By turn 300 you should probably have added another 10 soldiers to each planet (with enough fortresses to hold them all). You probably shouldn’t go much higher than this except for valuable planets, since the maintenance cost will become very prohibitive, especially for large empires.
Advantages: There are two major advantages to this defence. The first is the reverse of the disadvantage of a TD: It’s spatially economical. Compared to the TD, this paradigm offers greater productivity when looking to planetary space alone. The other advantage is that this defence will slow down any invasion considerably. No matter how many troops the invader brings along, he will soon run out and need to resupply before he can continue. This is vital time in which you might re-enforce your fleet to a point where you can deal with the threat, further bolster your defences or re-take some of the planets you lost. The troop depletion is especially painful to players specializing in TD, since they usually do not have traits that speed up the production of soldiers (like you do!).
Disadvantages: You shouldn’t pick this paradigm unless you’re prepared to spend at least half your trait picks on food-related options. It’s vital that you cut down on consumption and turn up the production. You won’t regret spending a point on increased credit income either, since another disadvantage of GD is that it can get very expensive for large empires, because they need to station a lot of troops on all their planets. In this way, the edge that this defence had over TD in regards of productivity is more or less lost, since you’ll need more planets with credit production than the player using TD needs (assuming an equal number of planets, of course).
The main disadvantage of a GD, however, is that your enemies can come and go as they please. They can, for example, park small fleets at all your ship-producing planets and thereby halt your production (since the new ship will get destroyed as soon as it’s complete). This also means that you’re very vulnerable to bio-bombing. Though not often used, your lack of a perimeter defence makes you susceptible to lone ships with Bio-bombs.
Furthermore, all your planets are generally vulnerable - you have to expect initial losses no matter who you fight. Most players will bring enough troops to conquer at least a planet or two of yours, but his progress will slow to a crawl, at least after the first system (and this is where you strike back).
guides\nongolfguide\planetary-defence-paradigm.txt · Last modified: 2012/02/26 22:17 by jackjack
