Stationed Military protect your planets against invading troops, and with Bunkers and Planetary Fortresses it is sometimes pretty tough to crack such a planet - especially if a planet has a massive amount of stationed military hiding in bunkers. The invader either has the option to attack that planet with a considerably higher number of troops (possibly together with allied forces), or resort to use a pretty deadly weapon that helps you to overcome such planets, albeit coming at a hefty price...
Bio bombing allows a player to attack military stationed on a planet with biological weapons. To do that, you need to research a new ship-module named “Bio Bombs”. You can equip your ships with an arbitrary number of them. Each bio-bomb is capable of killing 20 stationed military (and citizens) per turn. So if you pack 4 bio-bombs on one ship, you can potentially kill 80 military. However this is a approximate number, because military inside bunkers and planetary fortresses are protected pretty well, and are harder to kill.
So what’s the “hefty price”?
Planetary space becomes inhabitable for a limited amount of time. Although that space will recover over time, a large part of the planet can become uninhabitable. One bio-bomb renders 5 planetary space uninhabitable. Per turn 1 planetary space will recover again. So if 20 planetary space were affected, it will take 20 turns to fully recover that planet.
Bio-bombing has a negative impact on loyalty of the conquered population of that empire. Say you previously conquered three other planets of the player that you are bio-bombing, that population will become discontent with your actions, which might lead into a rebellion of that planet. You need to take that effect into account, and check which of your planets could potentially be affected.
“Sympathetic ex-citizens of your victim” lose 1 loyalty point towards you per bio-bomb dropped, which can not be quelled, but recovers by 1 loyalty point per turn.
More importantly, for every bio-bomb dropped your empire will suffer a -0.1 reputation penalty.
Because of that, when you use the ship-command “bio bomb planet”, a dialog will pop up, warning you about all that. You can set the number of bombing runs (turns) you wish to have performed, and you need to confirm your actions by clicking “yes”. You can also select the number of bio-bombs that should be used during each bombing.
The bottom line is, only use bio-bombing if there is no other option left. And if you use it, try to keep the dose very low, to minimize the backlash on your reputation and productivity of your empire.
After bio-bombing you will receive a battle report like this.
Bio-bombing is performed right after conventional ship-to-planet bombing. Invasions (”conquer planet” command) are automatically postponed until no more ships with a “bio bombing” ship-command are in orbit of that planet. That means you could send a fleet to “bio-bomb” a planet for 3 turns, and at the same time order a troop ship to conquer. The troop ship will only start the invasion once the 3 turns of bio-bombing have passed.
Effect of Bunkers and Planetary Fortresses during bio-bombing:
Bunker: 1 in 2 chance that a stationed military inside of it gets killed by a bio-bomb.
Planetary Fortress: 1 in 3 chance that a stationed military inside of it gets killed by a bio-bomb.
You can bio-bomb a planet until there is no population left, and actually even beyond, until there is no more planetary space left. If that happens, you still need to conquer the planet, because it is still in possession of it’s current owner. Since the planet’s population is 0, you also need to send in a colony ship to re-colonize that planet.
Facilities do not get directly destroyed through bio-bombing, but indirectly since the planetary space becomes uninhabitable.
manual\bio-bombing.txt · Last modified: 2012/02/26 22:17 by nongolf
