Conquest of Solar Systems

[Yurk Embassy]

Not trying to be rude or mean or anything, but this made me sort of laugh considering the new "noncombatant" feature.

As I said two sentences later, Noncombatant is different. Attacking someone who's not even there isn't fair by any standard; it breaks immersion in itself. Although, in my opinion, if there ends up being such a thing as planetary shields or countdown before attack, Noncombatant mode might as well be removed entirely, as lengthy sieges would be long enough for someone to notice and act upon.

The notion of city or planetary shields forcing you to besiege multiple planets per system is broadly speaking wrong-headed. Most planets, and even resource zones, have no value. There is no reason to attack targets that already mean nothing to the enemy.

I mean, there are habitables too, that produce officers; those can be weaponised very effectively, be it by gathering a small fleet by yourself or by having officers in players' ships, which can also make a huge difference. Not to mention every enemy city you find is susceptible to be a quick refuel/resupply/repair/refit point. But you're right; many planets, in themselves, have no value at all, and that's also part of the idea. If empires see no reason to attack a planet, nothing forbids them from not attacking it. If these planets have no value and are more troublesome to invade, at least it'd make it less frequent for powerful empires to go "Haha me gonna stomp that noob because that's fun." However, if they mean to take a system that includes both valuable and worthless worlds, the other worlds occupied by the enemy would have value in the context of war with this empire, as they wouldn't want them to keep a foothold near their newly-acquired possessions.

Their decisions with regards to war and invasion would be more often driven by strategy, which would not necessarily be a bad thing (for example, in Total War, you don't wanna attack a walled city without artillery if you only have one army and more enemies are lurking around your own city; that's critical thinking, and yet having to think that way does not make the game any less fun). That would, without stopping it, reduce the chances of noob and weak empires getting their asses kicked for no reason.

There are two types of planets that matter to war fighting capacity, resource harvesting worlds, and shipyard industry systems. Generally the resource harvesting worlds don't have overmuch effort put into defending them, and if city shields were a concept, resource worlds most likely wouldn't be practical to shield. The majority of the resource extraction nodes could be bombed out, removing the resource world from the equation, unless many separate shields were constructed. This could be limited any number of ways, for instance simply allowing only one shield per world.

I think I see your point about resource cities being rather stretched because resource-based. However resource worlds wouldn't be that much of a challenge to protect, with one-per-world, planet-wide shield generators. This one thing could be easily balanced by making it unavailable for moons, capping them to one per planet, forcing players to place them within an Empire city jurisdiction. Maybe even limiting it to one per star system, instead of the worlds themselves, but that would be weird, hardly convincing in terms of Lore, and in that case, systems filled with cities could still be taken more quickly than it'd take for a player sleeping at 1am to wake up and log in.