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[laiocfar]

U go to a lower tech planet but u will found tanks from the union, a sort of UN that defend the plants against big powers like u. There are a sort of veterans ever better than your troops

I've never been able to get this game to complete a whole campaign. I originally bought it when it was pretty new an played it a bunch. Then I recently found it again looking around the web for Abandonware.

At neither of those times was I ever able to play a whole campaign. Sure, I can compete multiple assaults. I get promotions, awards, my legions get names, etc. But eventually I always get to the point where my invasions won't complete anymore. It usually happens round the time you get a mission that gives you 100+ hours to complete. These long invasions inevitably reach a point where they crash on me, or if I think to save them as I'm progressing, in order to continue after the inevitable crash, then when I reach the point of victory the game crashes again. I end up having to choose "New Mission" when I restart the game (which causes me to fail at my current mission), and then the new mission does the same thing.

In my experience, this game always reaches a point where you just can't continue and you have to start over with a new character.

It's a shame, really, becuase I liked this game so much. It filled a nearly unique niche in the history of computer games.

[laiocfar]

:angry: I am at the same point, i was abouy a new promotion and the game crashes always that i end the invation :angry:

This game had/has its bugs, but often times if the game crashes and you can't Resume Invasion from the main screen, you can instead simply start a New Invasion. You'll get a score of 0 for that particular invasion, but if you do well in your later invasions, you can still get a promotion by the fifth mission of whatever rank.

Also, the game rates you on a sliding scale based on the last five missions. If you play enough successful missions, the 0 score will be disregarded from calculations for next rank promotion.

Finally, this game is MUCH more complex than it appears. There are all sorts of little tactics you can employ in individual cities (really, they tend to be variations on about four different themes), as well as some overall strategy concerning keeping your ships safe by choosing the right cities to attack first, and managing your total horde of troops so you can kill off what is usually a numerically superior enemy.

[Zwischy]

I could probably write reams and reams of information about how to play this game, but I'll try to refrain from throwing in every little trick I know in the interests of distilling it to the most basic strategies that I've found work best on Star Legions. I'll try to work from the beginning of a theoretical invasion to the end.

When you select New Invasion, this screen gives you information which is a very good indicator of how much a PINTA a particular planet is going to be. First, read the tech level. Anything levels 1, 2, or 3 will be easily conquered by shock troopers alone. Levels 4 will require the use of warriors, though not many, while level 5 will introduce surface-to-air lasers (SALs), which are not dangerous on level 5 tech, but are the most annoying and dangerous enemy unit on levels 6 and 7 - more on that later. Levels 6 and 7 must be handled with skill and good timing, because you cannot simply overwhelm these tech levels even with your warriors, if you do not plan your invasion well.

Next on this screen, read the planet type. Generally, planet types don't affect much, but you do want to be aware of a couple things. First, Aquatic (A) planets have very little land mass and VERY few cities for its tech level. What this means is the enemy will be more concentrated in each city, but you won't have to conquer as many cities to win - which means you can afford to take more chances and push more troops into each city to conquer it. Most other planets will have an average to high number of cities, depending on both tech level and planet type. Generally, the more cities the better as this allows you to pick off the enemy piecemeal (which is why you can win most of your missions despite being outnumbered most of the time).

Finally, read the militia and UGA Regulars counts. Typically, these numbers are well short of what you will actually find on the planet, because reinforcements will slowly arrive in cities as you attempt to take over the planet. You won't find UGA Regulars until mission ten assuming your first nine missions are successful. Generally, any number less than two-hundred thousand militia and one-hundred thousand UGA will not pose much problem for your invasion force. Three to four hundred thousand will require careful planning, but you can probably conquer every city with reinforcements from Krellan HQ command. More than four-hundred thousand will require all your skill to win, as well as making a serious effort to find the capital city early in the invasion - more on this later.

Phew! All that, and we haven't even started to travel to the planet to conquer it!

[Zwischy]

Ok, so you hit 'OK' and are on your way to the planet. When they let you out of the stasis chamber, you will see a map with your flagship floating around it with a large pulsing circle moving with it. This circle is your ship's range of vision, and any part of the map which was black will be uncovered when your vision circle moves over it. In the upper right corner of the screen, you will see six rectangles. Clicking on these will take you to different informational screens. The first one you should use is the lower-left panel, which will give you your ship data, as well as orbits and planetary data. All battleships (the white ships) and troop carrier ships (yellow ships) have this 'circle of vision' though you only ever see your flagship's vision circle on the map.

The first thing you should do is set all your troop carriers to Low orbit. While this makes them more vulnerable to fire from the planet for those planets that have planetary defenses, it also cuts in half the time it takes for your shock troops to beam down to a city as well as the time it takes a dropship full of warriors to travel to the planet's surface. All Battleships should be set to Polar-High orbit (which will later change to Inclined-High once you've uncovered the planet's surface), all corvettes (orange ships) should be set to Inclined-High orbit, and all supply ships (blue ships) should be set to Equtorial-High (which they usually are when you start an invasion).

The reason for the other ships' High orbits is to allow them to take less damage from planetary defenses from the ground. You don't ever dare let a ship get blown up by planetary defenses because it REALLY hurts your invasion score. One of the first tasks you should attempt when you invade a planet is to find an open area on the planetary map where you can 'hide' severely damaged ships long enough for your supply ships to repair them. How do you hide a ship? You use a Geosync-Low orbit over an area of the map with no cities, or with cities which you have already conquered. The idea is to keep them out of the sight range of any planetary defense pods (PDPs) in other cities so they can't be fired upon. If there aren't any areas large enough to hide a ship, then you may need to conquer a few cities in the same general area of the planet so you can hide ships.

Your next task before you select any cities to attack should be to click on panel five in the upper-right hand corner (the one to the right of the ship data panel), which is your dropship data panel. Here you should set auto-reinforcement (AR) for each of the eight invasion zones you may have active at any one time. Click on the red buttons (upper middle of the screen) numbered 1-8 to set them all to green lights. This will allow your troopships to begin dropping warriors as soon as the dropship can land on a finished pad in a city which has AR active. This feature is awesome because a dropship will launch before the landing pad is actually finished, so that the dropship arrives about two seconds after the pad is actually finished constructing, which of course helps you to bring your warriors into the fight to secure the landing pad's position.

This done, you are ready to begin selecting cities to invade!

[laiocfar]

Usefull but the planetary defences arent no treath, the biggest problem is death of shock troops and lack of personel to secure the landing path for the core of the invasion.
Anyway the WORST problem is that the game crash when its about to end the invasion.

[Zwischy]

You're right, the PLANETARY defenses, or PDPs are little threat (though I HAVE had an orange ship occasionally blown up because it was on Polar orbit, which is the best way to get a ship dead), but the surface-to-air lasers are absolute death on tech levels 6 and 7. The SALs shoot down your dropships as they try to land on the pad and when they're actually sitting on the pad. Since the dropships carry your warriors and your warriors are the hammer blow which brings down enemy hardpoints, it is VITAL to keep your dropships from getting gunned down as they attempt to reach the surface.

Ever see the message 'Drop ship destroyed by defensive fire?' This means you just lost 6000 warriors. That's a huge chunk of troops to lose in one shot.

ALWAYS call for reinforcements from HQ. It doesn't really cost you much in the way of mission rating, and having that many more fresh troops will actually save you troop deaths in the long run. More legions will have the opportunity to gain battle value more quickly, and the more 1000 troop units you can throw at the computer the better.

As for keeping shock troops alive, you're right, they die easily. You have to be thoughtful (notice I said thoughtful, not cautious) how many shock troops you commit to a given drop and understand feints and Withdrawing individual cohorts become important. Ever notice how the enemy units move toward your shock troops when they appear in the city? The more shock troops you land in a quadrant, the more city troops are likely to react and move towards them. This is what's important in a feint - not the damage your shock troops can do, but rather how many enemy they can get to move towards them which ideally leaves another quadrant open for another shock troop drop. You can land shock troops in a quadrant then have them race toward the corner of the city using command of individual cohorts to pull as many units towards them as possible. Three cohorts is usually required to get any movement; send four or five if you think you need to draw off a lot of enemy units. Don't be afraid to let them die, but if you can get a construction drop running before your feint units are engaged in combat (enemy units adjacent to them), do use the Withdraw command to save them for a future feint.

However, don't expect the enemy to move ALL its troops toward your feint - some near the central parts of a city will stay there to defend it. It might be necessary to drop TWO feint assaults in - say, NW and NE quadrants, which should leave one of the southern quadrants open for your 'actual' drop. Heck, sometimes you just have to send in enough troops - say 15-18 units - to do damage in general until you can loosen up the defenders enough to make your 'real' drop. Sometimes that 'real' drop is to construct a landing pad, but often it's a raid to take out the shield generators or SALs under the city's shields, to make it easier to make a construction drop/drop ship landings later.

You'd be surprised how much faster are your shock troops than the enemy troops, especially if a road leads to the desired target. You can manually command individual units to move to certain areas of the map. Usually they'll take the fastest route there which includes the use of roads - so pay attention to the directions roads travel, especially if one leads from the edge of a city to key enemy defensive pieces like SALs. Clear the road's path with a feint if possible, then send in three or four more shock troops to try to sneak in and destroy soft targets near the road.

If this is blocked by an enemy fort or enemy units you may have to take direct control of the unit and command them to each 'way point' they need to use to circle around an enemy defense and knock out a SAL or something similar. Also, use command of individual units to get your troops to 'gang up' on the same enemy unit - sometimes if only one enemy militia unit stand between you and a SAL, you can destroy it before any help arrives to stop you. This also becomes important when you're trying to push the enemy off the squares adjacent to your drop ship. A word of warning: don't keep issuing the same command to a cohort over and over or it will never move, because this resets the unit's 'speed,' so to speak. One command once is good enough.

Last of all, DO NOT ENGAGE LEVEL 6, LEVEL 7, OR UGA REGULARS WITH SHOCK TROOPS any more than is necessary. These units will absolutely demolish your shock troops (they CAN hold their own once many of your legions are near 100% effectiveness, but this is still a good policy to follow). It is unfortunately necessary to sacrifice some shock troops in the interest of gaining time enough to build drop ship landing pads, but once the landing pad is built and warriors are unloaded from the first drop ship, WITHDRAW AS MANY SHOCK TROOP COHORTS AS YOU CAN! Do not let them engage the enemy, save them for future feints/raids on SALs/construction drops! Do this by selecting the individual cohort and selecting Withdraw amongst the red buttons at the very top of the screen (you only see these buttons when you select an individual cohort). You can also use the Group selection button to get several cohorts to withdraw at once.

Finally, don't try to attack too many cities at once. I find four is the most I can actually monitor at one time, but if I have to take the time to direct cohorts individually to their raid targets, even four is too much. Once I manage to land a drop ship's worth of warriors and the landing pad looks secure enough (meaning an enemy unit won't sneak around and kill the drop ship), I withdraw any shock troop cohorts in that city and move on to my next target selection, and trust that my warriors will handle things - they usually do. However, you do have to occasionally check back on mop-up operations to make sure a sneaky red militia unit didn't try to run all the way around your troops and take out your drop ship pad when they've moved away from it. I always have the drop ships leave the pad once auto-reinforce has turned off for that city, so if the enemy DOES sneak around, they only destroy an empty pad.

Most planets I conquer within about half the time allotted by Krellan HQ.

And as for the game crashing, there isn't really much I can tell you because even if you reload a save, usually the same crash happens at the same time. Still, you can try saving frequently and see if that helps. Also, I like to use File-Freeze to freeze time first before I save. I figure the less things actually going on when I save the more likely the save won't corrupt.

Though remember, even if an invasion crashes, start a new one! Sure, you'll get a score of 0 for the crashed invasion, but look on the bright side: with no promotion, your shock troops will have more time to build up their Battle Value against softer tech levels. And the sliding scale only counts the last 5 invasions, so if your next four score 99.8% (only twice have I ever scored 100.0%), you can still earn the promotion...

[laiocfar]

i will try that of freeze before save.
I never requested of backup, when i run off of shock troops i blew up the rest of the cities. Another thing, when you target a city, it is reinforced all time, so i target 8, 6 blew up full of enemies and 2 to invade.

[Zwischy]

Actually, want to know the best trick to keep enemy reinforcements from showing up? Don't select a city until you're actually ready to invade it. Also, by doing this, you will find that if you attack a city right after selecting it for invasion, you may very well catch the enemy militia with half-strength units (but not the UGA Regulars - they start at 90% strength always and reinforce much faster than do militia). The longer you wait, however, the more enemies you'll have to fight, and higher tech levels reinforce faster. All that said, though, this fact is VERY useful in the later stages of an invasion when most of your warriors are likely not at full strength any more and there's just...a few...BLEEPING cities left!!

I've found that you can often use shock troops horde invasions to mop up the last few cities using this fact, if your warriors are just too weary to do the job anymore. What do I mean by a horde invasion? I mean dropping something along the lines of, oh, about 40-50 shock troops into the city as quickly as is possible (you can of course only send 9 at a time). Preferably, I drop them in different corners so more units can get into the thick of things immediately, rather than getting stuck behind a wall of friendlies, but city terrain will dictate where you drop them. The more numbers you have the more local superiority you can muster and the more quickly you can destroy those half-strength milita before they can reinforce - and 8 shock troops attacking the same UGA unit WILL destroy that UGA in fairly short order.

Remember that on the world overview screen (it's the upper-leftmost of the six panels), you can view individual cities by right-clicking on the city rather than left-clicking, and get an overview of the city and its defenses. You may not get to see everything, sometimes some SALs or other city defenses don't show up in this view, but you can see what the total number of units and the general makeup of those units (UGA, militia, shield generators, forts, PDPs, SALs). This is a great tool to help plan out your invasion.

At this point in my experience I'm not generally too choosy about which cities I attack, since I'm pretty sure of my ability to crack any setup the computer has against me (though I'm not above bombarding a city if it has a ton of troops and/or no good place to land due to the sheer thickness of enemy troops, and has enough city blocks that it might very well be the capital city). My current philosophy is to take out all the cities along the equator of the planet first so my supply ships can't be destroyed. Supply ships are the only ships which cannot replenish their energy (they replenish all your other ships' damage periodically, though not so quickly that you can ignore 'hiding' your ships in a low geosync orbit like I mentioned in an earlier post), so conquering cities along their flight path (the equator) keeps my entire fleet much, much safer.

Optionally, you can try to find the capital city first. The manual recommends this and frankly, it's the only chance you can get a tech level 6 or 7 planet with, say, 200000+ militia and 400000+ UGAs to surrender, because I guarantee you're going to run out of troops before you manage to conquer all the cities, even with reinforcements and even if you're the best damned strategical and tactical genius God has ever put on this green earth (though I would still recommend letting your troops fight and die to the last man because they can get that many more honor points to improve their Battle Value).

How do you locate the capital city? Use the right-clicking tool I mentioned earlier and count the number of city blocks, including spaceport and industrial complexes (I admit this is made difficult by the presence of enemy units on city squares, making them harder to count accurately. There IS a way to view the cities from the world overview map viewing only the terrain, but it's kinda complicated to explain right here). Whichever city has the highest number of such squares is likely to be the capital city. HOWEVER...

If you have more than one city tied for the highest number of city blocks (and this happens quite often), the 'tiebreakers' you should consider are 1) the total number of troops in the city, 2) the total power of the units in the city listed below the total number of units, and 3) the total number of forts, SALs, shield generators, and PDPs. The city with the most of each of these categories should be your first target.

Yes, you can bombard it to rubble. In fact, I highly recommend it, though sometimes I will invade it anyway in the sheer interest of picking a fight (okay, so I have pent-up frustrations). How do you know you just scored the capital city? Go to the Legions Data panel (the lower-rightmost panel of the six) and click on 'Mission Data.' If the morale dropped from High to Medium then you nailed the capital city. If it didn't, ah well, at least you just obliterated a good chunk of the enemy. Sometimes simply killing a lot of enemy troops with a single bombardment destruction of a city is a good way to get them to surrender without hurting your score TOO much (and city bombardment really does hurt, you don't want to destroy more than one or two this way if you can help it). Anyway, killing the capital city first makes a planet MUCH more likely to capitulate, even when it looks like you might well run out of troops, reinforcements or no.