Topic: Population getting a defense stat
I've mentioned this idea in the Discord channel but I thought I'd do a further explanation here. I've thought it's a little ridiculous that 1 transport and 2 droids is all it takes to conquer a "defenseless" planet. This seems unrealistic and leaves unportalled bankers and any unlasered early game planets extremely vulnerable. I just can't envision 2 droids showing up to a planet, saying it's theirs, and (up to multiple millions of) people living on that planet going along with it.
My idea is that population on a planet has a defense stat. This means that attacks on newly explored planets and retakes of defenseless planets are still easy to achieve, since population is low. Population would be included as ground units and would only fight in the last stage of the attacking battle screen.
One side effect is that pop bankers would have a slight advantage since massive population on a planet could add a noticeable defense in addition to fleet and lasers. Pop bankers are already at a large disadvantage compared to CF bankers because of the much larger NW and vulnerability to that one Partaxian in the family that doesn't like him ![]()
As far as the specific scaling, my first thought would be as 0.02. This would mean that an average planet with maxed pop of 10,000 would require 200 droids to match with equal racial attack bonuses. A pop banker with a huge pop of 1,000,000 would require 20,000 droids to match the defense. The scaling might be a little high but I would personally like to see more pop bankers since it requires more planning ahead and coordination with resourcers in the familiy. This is just one advantage to encourage more bankers to grow a bigger pair of balls.
TL;DR
It should take more than 2 droids to take a planet. One way to achieve this is to allow the people living on the planet to fight the attacking fleet.