Ground Combat - Streamlining Suggestion

[Watsong]

You have defeated the enemy defending forces. Their planet will soon be yours! But first, you must conquer it with your ground troops.

Factors:
- Making the troops and putting them on transports.
- Getting the troops there without them being killed.
- Getting the right amount of troops there, in order to succeed in the ground invasion.
- Sorting out the troops and transports afterward.

Problem:
The current method of enacting a ground invasion is cumbersome in having to access various UI screens, a little boring, can add mental stress (depending on the circumstances), and messy to clean up afterwards (if used troops are intended for further ground invasions).

Ground Combat Present Gameflow:
1. Decide whether to use existing transports and make ground troops or to make new transports with ground troops bundled in. This may require reviewing locations of already built/previously used ground troops, (If the trade pool is short of transports, and building more will take too long, an empire wide review of the effect of shortages is necessary).
2. Review your planets for one that is best suited to giving its production over to this task.
3. Queue up the necessary number of transports/troops, repeatedly revisiting to extend the build queue, if it is full. (Can happen if many transports/ground troops to build or the player wants to retain as much of their building build queue as possible).
4. Wait for the transports/troops to be built, making a mental note as to which transports, from where, will be going where.
5. Send the troop transports to the enemy planet, factoring in possible interception by enemy fleets on arrival - if your fleet cannot hold the planet. Also timing troop transport movements, if they will be sent from multiple systems.
6. If your ground invasion fails, possibly repeat the process.

Ground Combat Streamlining Suggestion:
1. Decide whether you have enough transports in the transport pool vs how many you want from it to be used in the ground invasion. (If the trade pool is short of transports, and building more will take too long, an empire wide review of the effect of shortages is necessary).
2. Click on the trade pool, in order to bring up the trade ships UI.
Click on the ships you want to send, (could be streamlined by making transport ships non-designable, allowing use of a slider bar for quantity).
Click on the "Invade Planet" button.
Click on the target planet.
The resource cost for the ground troops will be deducted. If not enough resources, the "Invade Planet" button won't work and, instead, present the error "Not enough resources").
3. Wait for the transports with troops to arrive. They will be sent from the nearest star, owned by the player, that is capable of building troop transports. (Currently all planets. Perhaps should be restricted to planets with a space station/suitable orbital building? Extra turns to arrival could be added to simulate the building of the ground troops).
4. If your ground invasion fails, possibly repeat the process.

Edit: Shouldn't the "Move Colonists" button in the star system UI be, instead, "Move Colonists/Troops"? It's unintuitive to consider ground troops as colonists when in all other circumstances they are ground troops. This method of moving troops highlights how you can already do it for your own planets - but not to invade enemy planets. Perhaps that's the easiest streamline? - to make it so the player can "Move Troops" and select an enemy planet. It does mean finding the troops and you would need to know the ETA for any synchronising of arrivals from multiple systems. An UI improvement to show how many ground troops are present in a system, (and not suppressing), would suffice. (Mock image attached).

Yes, this affects game balance. A little bit. Transports become impossible to destroy while waiting around a friendly star. So how about a "Piracy Pool" that you can assign warships to? They apply a transport destruction chance, per ship (factoring a tech' rating + size + speed + firepower + number of enemy transports vs empire size ratio calculation in (to diminish transport lost rate towards 0 when too few remain)), every turn, randomly applied to any empire with whom you are not allied. Your opponents cannot determine the size of your piracy fleet, except through spying. Defending against this includes - armed transports, that cost more, to modify the chance of destruction calculation, diplomacy - demand to cease piracy (only usable if target player is known to be pirating via spying on them). This allows a player to make use of their idle warships, without losing fleet strength for diplomacy purposes, and, in return, there is a several turn delay on recalling ships from piracy - potentially allowing a weaker player to strike while a stronger player has some ships away in the piracy pool.

[zolobolo]

Yes I love this: allow ground troops to be sent to enemy planets directly from the planet if there is trade capacity in the pool!
Can we have this?

I love the fact that we are allowed to subsidize civil trade with state porduction capacity and go around the micro mentioned above by setting a production planet or two endless pump out troop transport but this still has some drawbacks:
1. Need to position the transports manually afterwards
2. Considerable amount of income lost as these transport are busy Farying the troops instead of trading untill deployed: this it is a tradeoff of less micro to less efficiency whihc in most cases makes sense but in this case it could be streamlined for sure

I also have a sneeking suspicion that the AI is doing this already

But here is a slight drawback to be fare: there would be no sense producing troop transports anymore and thus the production decision options would decrease

[Watsong]

""...there would be no sense producing troop transports anymore and thus the production decision options would decrease" -

The troop transport could be renamed as an armed freighter and added to the trading pool like any other transport. The ship selector that already exists for the trading pool provides the implementation already - so should be relatively simple to add additional transport types. It would tie into a "Piracy Pool" feature quite nicely. You would have an extra reason to build stronger transports.

A third alternative implementation could be:
1. Make ground troops visible on the galaxy map like spaceships are.
2. Allow them to be moved around like spaceships, summoning their own transportation magically, (as per the "Civilisation" series of games from Civ 3? onwards).
3. Ensure that ground troops that are suppressing populations are marked, to allow eye flickingly fast evaluation of troop availability.

Perhaps a bit over streamlined. But still, the current state of ground combat causes me to just click "Bombard", because it's blissfully quicker, more enjoyable, and situationally more effective.

[zolobolo]

There was mention on environment penalty to the planet after bombing: this would for sure lessem the effect of the "bomb everything into the stone age" exploit

Producing transports by themselfes is more efficient so the player would just segregate production instead of creating troop transports