Conquest of Solar Systems

[QuakeIV]

I'm not in any case sure why you are suggesting that solar systems would necessarily fall as one.  I tend to build colonies so that they are at the very least independent in terms of air and food power and so forth, mainly to avoid huge failure cascades due to supply chain issues.  You say few people do it, but I am fairly sure its nearly standard practice.  It seems like at best the system-wide siege idea would make it easier to conquer large swathes of space in a reasonable time frame, but it seems like thats an annoyance you have never personally been subjected to so its weird to me that you are so determined to make the case for that.

I don't really understand the point you are trying to make here. Are you saying you would rather have to spend multiple days sieging each and every world of a solar system one at a time? And only large empires that can field more ships should there for be able to siege solar systems with many worlds? Assuming you need one ship per world siege.

It does diminish the point of talking to you somewhat when you seemingly forget things I said two posts ago. If a conversation cant have more history than one post then it turns into a loop of re-iterating points.

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Most planets, and even resource zones, have no value. There is no reason to attack targets that already mean nothing to the enemy.

There are two types of planets that matter to war fighting capacity, resource harvesting worlds, and shipyard industry systems.
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If you need further clarity, what I meant by this when I said 'resource harvesting worlds' is that most worlds do not have circa q248-255 resources on them. If your enemy is fighting with ships noticeably below this range then they will be at a firm disadvantage. There is rarely more than one resource zone like this in a system, let alone a sector in most cases.

And all the newbies that don't know they should make every single colony self-sufficient are just at a disadvantage because the attacker can avoid wasting time and warships on little mining colonies that will decay on their own?

People who don't know what they are doing will always be at a disadvantage, allowing them to at least build a shield that gives them days or longer to react to the attacker would significantly lessen that issue because its such a basic precaution that they could relatively easily take.

I have yet to see any of the shield generator ideas mention the invulnerable surface-to-space weapon systems and how the attacker is supposed to withstand that firepower for days of a siege. Or is the attacker supposed to just be bombing the other side of the planet? Until the defender quickly build new invulnerable surface-to-space weapon systems under it?

I would rather have a single week long siege against the whole solar system at once. The attacker having to be in orbit of the sun or at the rim of the system so they aren't disadvantaged by invulnerable surface defenses. The defender having to actually take the fight to the sieging ship, or just evacuate around it.

Do not allow surface to orbit weaponry to fire through a shield that has been pushed into siege mode. This would also be consistent with the earlier notion that no resources or people come in or out of the city while it is besieged. So in other words if you want surface to orbit firepower, you will need to build it outside of the shield bubble. (in fairness these things can be really dangerous in their own right)

In my opinion by far the biggest obstacle to changing cities into something that take a while to build up is the fact that they are so easy to quickly destroy.  A way to defend them has to come first, as a pre-requisite to them being harder to build up.

Yeah that has been an issue since before destroy-able cities. There is no difference in the value of a city that have existed a year, verse a city that was built a week ago. But this seemed like a while separate issue and I didn't want to get into it here.

If you wanna make a thread for the topic, I would love to read your thoughts on the matter.

I probably wont bother any time in the immediate future, I think we both agree that it would be preferable for cities to gain value over much longer periods of time however. Cities potentially reaching their full potential within hours or days is a bit silly and right now it kindof has to stay that way until cities become less vulnerable.