Hey friends, Brian here, just wanted to share this accomplishment with y'all. Today I'm playtesting the latest patch to the game (release 7 of 1.6) which has a lot of fixes in it, such as the infinite enemy marines fix. I was also asked to do a planetary invasion to test out the auto-withdraw function. This makes the game fully withdraw all friendly units from a surrendered zone without any input from the player. It's a new quality-of-life thing that's FANTASTIC.
To give it a proper test, I loaded up a practice mission (a separate one-off mission not part of your overall campaign) and tried to invade a tech-level six (the second-highest tech level) enemy planet. After taking out its planetary shields, then bombarding cities that could shoot at us in orbit, I decided to take on their biggest city, with 64 units.
I'd never taken on a zone this populated before, but I knew I could do it, albeit with acceptable losses. I first beamed down four shock troopers (the light ground units in the game, capable of teleportation) and had them go into a corner of the map to draw away the bulk of the enemy's force. I then sent down a larger cadre of shock troops to build a landing pad for the dropship, which would bring in the heavier warrior cohort units. I set all of my units to reduce, in order to attack enemies directly and thin out their numbers.
The battle was FIERCE. The enemy kept throwing wave after wave of troops at us, but out shock troopers held until the first dropship (of what would be several) would land and unload their warrior cohorts. The battle raged on as I brought down more troops, fierce enough to wipe out an entire Legion.
Eventually though, after bringing down at least four waves (I stopped counting after that) of warriors, the tide began to turn in our favor. I also beamed down more shock troops into their unguarded northeast quadrant to help with capturing. Once we had a numerical advantage, I changed the general order to capture, so that units would begin to capture enemy tiles such as cities, factories and so on.
Finally, after more brutal fighting, the zone wisely surrendered. In took nearly 8 hours of in-game time, my longest time ever spent on one zone, and while our win/loss ratio was nearly 1:1, given the resistance we faced at the beginning, I was prepared to accept those losses.
In real-time this invasion took nearly an hour, and what an exciting hour it was! In my next stream, I have to capture a tech-level 7 UGA (enemy alliance) planet, so it is going to be a slugfest, but I now have more confidence in my abilities to do it, which will be my last step toward being promoted to a full admiral, which should hopefully happen tomorrow.
Thanks for reading y'all, and I hope you enjoyed my little invasion story. I had so much fun I just had to share it with y'all.