Bombardment

[Ahura86]

I have been playing the game for a couple of weeks now, and recently i was i my first big war. After some hard fighting, i had taken over all colonies, except the home world, which had something like 1,5 mio in troops. Since i didn't want to waste money on a bazillion transport ships, i instead decided to try bombardment. However even with a fleet of 8 cruisers with bombardment weapons, i couldn't seem to bomb them faster than they regenerated, but on the other hand my reputation just tanked!
Can anyone explain exactly how bombardment works? Was i just using to few ships or did i do something wrong?

[Falokis]

Bombardment takes a good while depending on how many ships you use and the level of the weapon. Typically it seems like the population can keep pace with the destruction until the quality of the planet drops. As the planet quality goes down, the population cap does too. I bombard plants I don't plan on living on due to the fact the quality is usually 0% by the time I'm done with it.

Edit - Many times you can wipe out the troops there well before the planet is completely destroyed. Then, I may invade.

[pycco]

once you have teraforming facility's bombarding is ok, before it does massive damage to world making cost $$$ to sustain. then you have to WAIT for it to "heal" instead of getting 100k+ from a new HW. i would suggest invading it use tanks special ops and elite troops and robot troops. mixing these 4 will give you a easy battle the robots are for getting to the overwhelming force point as they are cheaper and less durable than other types of troops.

[Fleshbits]

Doesn't a planets quality naturally regenerate after being bombarded anyway?

[Aeson]

Doesn't a planets quality naturally regenerate after being bombarded anyway?

Yes, but a low-population planet with reduced quality, which is what you get if you take a planet you bombarded, isn't generally that great a prize, and can easily be one which costs you fairly significant amounts of money while the quality and population recover.

[Tehlongone]

The reason you can't destroy their troops is that each shot hits a random troop and if they have enough they can recover between hits. The solution would be overwhelming bombardment but that tends to rapidly reduce population so...

Basically a planet like that must be either conquered at great expense or simply removed through full scale bombardment. If I have an annoying neighbour early game I prefer to simply destroy him utterly instead of attempting a costly invasion (troops are expensive...) the planet will heal eventually and you get to settle it with your own race.

The natural healing seems quite fast to me. You don't need to wait for it to recover fully, as you'll have like 30m population the low-quality penalties don't add up to more than the maintenance of a troop or two.

A homeworld is a decent price but investing in the necessary troops to collect it just isn't worth it if you won't be invading other stuff as well and have the economy to support it. Moreover they'd be ALIENS as opposed to loyal citizens so they'd be inferior economically in the long run. You might as well just kill them now and get it over with.