Gault.Drakkor wrote:Is it possible for players to bombard a planet's pop to zero? (I have seen monsters do this.) Then zero pop world reverts to outpost? Which means enabling this feature will additionally enable bombarding enemy empires out of systems?
Yes to all three questions.
Gault.Drakkor wrote:The construction of doom stack plus bombard + 1 solar means you can just run this stack behind enemy lines and just keep bombing colonies out of existence.
Yes. I envision you would need at least two turns to wipe out a system: one to get all pops to 0 and revert them to outposts, one to bombard(remove) the outposts.
The equivalent scorched land strategy with no outpost-removing bombard capabilities would require the same ships (doom stack with bombers and one solar), go as twice as fast but not removing outposts.
This means in 10 turns the outpost-removing version completely wipes out 5 systems and the other gets 10 reverted to outposts.
Rebuilding steps for outpost-removing version is building outposts/colonisers while for the other version it just needs to regain supply over the systems and start colony buildings (that gets you planets back to the colony state in less time).
So maybe both versions would be somehow balanced, thanks to that effect of outpost-removal requiring an additional turn. Unless... If the attacker can have two fleets (huge+tyne, the tiny one just the necessary for removing a few just-reverted outposts and going always one turn behind the huge one) and the defendant could can't harass the tiny fleet, then the outpost-removing version allows for a new, certainly more aggressive/damaging, scorched-land strategy.
However I think this won't be an issue, on the contrary, it can be good. Correct me other players with more experience or that have mess up with FO in more original ways than me, but I have the impression that bombardment weapons are seldom if ever used (and this means that scorched-land strategy is also seldom used), because conquering populated colonies is always better to achieve dominance than wiping them out (you not only reduce enemy's power but also increase yours), and this underutilisation of bombardment happens even when the fleet required for the scorched-land strategy is cheaper than, and doesn't require the logistics micromanagement of, the strategies that use troop ships to invade. So this outposting-removal capabilities could both give interest to bombardment parts and allow new strategies.