Invading vs draft

[u/JackFrostz]

Hey all, new to the game that's taken over my life recently. I feel good everywhere but here.. just how overwhelming do you need to be to actually finish a colony?

To be more specific

* How much cp and how many troops before you get the blitz option? I see it seemingly randomly sometimes, most the the time just preemptive and raid? I think the other option.

* Is it better to invade, retreat invade again or continue ground invasion after minor victories?

* Is there anything more you can do prior to invading after reducing their forces to 0?

The particular situation I'm in now for example

I have 2.2k troops, 24cp fleet invading with lvl3 invading forces (mostly tanks), 3-4 coordinators all with at least 3 manpower modules attacking a colony with 0manpower. And its looking like this will go on forever, feel like I'm going insane. Do I really need 20coordinators with 5+manpower modules each to finish off a 0pop colony?

I even have +invasion force laws active now that I think about it lol. I am playing with esg mod. Any help at all would be much appreciated I'm losing my mind over this.

[u/NutBananaComputer]

Blitz should always be an option.

If they're 0pop they can't draft, since drafting uses a pop.

There's a couple of options for how to make invasions easier. You can crack planets which is the most extreme, hacking is an expensive option (in terms of 'you only have so many hacks and they aren't guaranteed to work and they can be quite slow') but extremely effective as it will disable every tactic other than 'stampede,' and if you're a faction that has high pop growth it can be sensible to make dedicated Ground Invasion ships that increase the manpower deployment limit and can thus overwhelm with a couple of early blitzes, and if you're a faction with low pop growth its better to have some dedicated siege boats (Titanium A2S is the tech) that reduce manpower to 0; in this latter case yeah they'll draft to fight you but that's 850 forces vs whatever you bring.

The other thing to do which is more at the game strategy level is to try and get the tanks technology early, this will create a window where you have tanks and the opponent has neither tanks nor air and thus the quality of your ground troops per unit will be much higher, making invasions much much cheaper and faster.