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First of all is it to easy too just bombard the crap out of any planetary defenses and then recolonize the planet afterwards. We should be able to build real planetary deference batteries and air fighter defenses that would shoot back at bombing star ships. Perhaps should the batteries and air fighter be equipped with the latest  weapons and you would be able to build several of them depending on the planets population. Perhaps one for each five populations. First population would lock up first battery and fighter base. Population number six could lock up a second battery and fighter base. The defense buildings would be prioritized when bombarding so there would be a higher chance they get hit by bombardment but might have a health bar so they don´t get destroyed right away. Planetary shields would help the defenses to hold longer. This way it would be possible to fortify the planets better and make bombardment cost so that invasion would be a real option. Remaining  planetary defenses would get a chance to shot down invading forces too.

It should also be a greater diplomatic penalty for bombing (killing) civilian population than invading. Using bio wepons or stellar cannons should ofc be even worse. There should be diplomatic messages after ruthless bombardments. Some races might not care that much while others don´t like unnecessary killings. Bulrathi, Sakra and Merrshans might instead commend you for the honorable fighting after a successful or failed invasion since they like that kind of stuff and that instead could improve their respect and diplomatic rating with them. 

we also need more info when invading. Both attacking and defending ground combat strength as well as number and hit points of the different participating units needs to be visible when deciding  bombardment and how many units to invade with.

There should also be animations both for invasions and bombardments. If you remember the old Panzer general games where each unit had short animations for attacking. A round window popping up when attacking that showed the specific unit shooting and the opposite unit had a window of it own shooting back. If one of the unit died or took a lot of beating then animation window showed that too. I think  simple animations like these would be sufficient enough for showing off the automated invasions.

Since the number of units differ a lot you would have to have rules how many of the units shooting and dying you want to animate so that the fights don´t take to long. That would require some testing out so that for even the biggest invasion the total number of animations would not take longer than 30-60 secs together.

Perhaps should there be up two 3 animation windows showing up for each side so that up to 6 unit animations would be visible at the same time speeding up things. But then 3 to 5 different marine shooting animations would be needed. Perhaps just the setup and positioning of the marines and sequence. There would also be a rush button so that you could skip the animations and go right for results much like the drop all button when bombarding.

Each race marines would have there own animations. Where it would be visible if you have the mayor ground combat techs such like power armor, anti gravity harness and personal shields. The different guns might simply be illustrated by different colored beams. There should also be animations for tank units, air fighters, planetary deference batteries  and battle mechs. I guess it is enough with generic animations for them that just use the colors of the units race. 

Also would the background of the animation should depend of the planet type. Maybe 3-4 of each planet type and some space variations for the ships bombarding.

These animations are simple and superficial but I think they would ad a lot of feeling and excitement to the now boring bombardment and invasion window. I  remember the very simple stick figure animations of MoO2 did the jobb pretty well.

By the way the automated star ship battles would also benefit greatly from similar animations showing off the ships shooting or blowing up. Since you already have all the 3D models now it should be fairly simple to create code for generating such battle animations. A skip animations button would be needed here too. And the option to turn them off completely if some people do not like them.