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I was bombarding a planet to soften up the defensive forces. The enemy originally had several thousand troop strength, but right before I invaded they had less than 200. As soon as I stopped bombardment and my troops landed, the planet looked like the following. I circled the one defensive army they had before my troops landed. All the others appeared out of thin air. Is this normal?

Edit: Here's a gif of it in action https://imgur.com/a/b3gkOn9

Welp, after I captured the world, it immediately rebelled and found another 600 troops somewhere. Now, even though I had 800 on the planet along with significant defensive bonuses, it's going to be a nail biter.

Those are militia, which any world will raise based on its population once it is invaded.

The rule I follow after losing ALOT of troops, is how many troops you think you'll need, bring double.

Erik Rutins wrote: Sun Apr 10, 2022 3:34 am Those are militia, which any world will raise based on its population once it is invaded.

Thanks, figured it might be something like that.

I think there is a bit more here than meets the eye - like why do I see troop strength of the system on the data tag, but not when I click on the individual colony (no intelligence data on troop strength).

There should be fairly hard data on troop composition, including how many militia to expect.

In a real war there is always some intelligence and estimates and it is very difficult to "surprise" the enemy with greater numbers, because ground troops are usually slow and not easy to quickly move somewhere else.

In addition, a country is normally eager to show (and exaggerate!) how strong their army is, just to deter any attack.

I would therefore suggest to show actual troop levels on all planets, as soon as the planet is known to the player. Suddenly "conjuring" troops to surprise the player is just a "one-trick-pony" and not a gameplay enhancing element. It becomes tedious to go "oh yeah, I need to add X troops for militia in my planning"...not something an emperor would need to do!

Litjan wrote: Sun Apr 10, 2022 5:23 am I think there is a bit more here than meets the eye - like why do I see troop strength of the system on the data tag, but not when I click on the individual colony (no intelligence data on troop strength).

There should be fairly hard data on troop composition, including how many militia to expect.

The Combat Screen clearly tells you the strenght, including Militias.

Note that showing the Militias would be a UI issue. Planets can already have way more Troops then can be displayed. Especially the large ones. Adding the Militia to it would make it worse.

zgrssd wrote: Sun Apr 10, 2022 7:36 pm

Litjan wrote: Sun Apr 10, 2022 5:23 am I think there is a bit more here than meets the eye - like why do I see troop strength of the system on the data tag, but not when I click on the individual colony (no intelligence data on troop strength).

There should be fairly hard data on troop composition, including how many militia to expect.

The Combat Screen clearly tells you the strenght, including Militias.

Note that showing the Militias would be a UI issue. Planets can already have way more Troops then can be displayed. Especially the large ones. Adding the Militia to it would make it worse.

Where on the combat screen is this shown? I link to a gif in the OP that clearly shows the militia and it's strength appearing suddenly when my armies land.

Aside from that, I want to also focus on the rebels. I will lose that fight, even though my units were significantly stronger than the rebels (almost double at full strength), I had a raw power advantage of about 800 to 550 or so at the start of the rebellion, and I also had several bonuses amounting to +35%. How could I possibly lose this?

Edit: I want to focus on this because it's not clear to me whether this is a bug and some calculation isn't performing as expected, or if there's a degree of randomness that can swing a battle on the order I'm seeing. If it's the latter, I think it needs to be revisited because the internal game logic doesn't make sense. I can get the +25% "Overwhelming Power" or whatever it's called bonus when the actual fight comes out very close to a draw.