Aliens arrive, put entire planet under Battle Royale rules.
Mayhem.
The most efficient way to invade would be to bring just a few "people" and adapt the local flora and fauna to be the "soldiers."
Cloning would work pretty well, as well.
The movie Oblivion with Tom Cruise did that. The movie didn't center around that but they touched on it.
Though I enjoy my own fair share of alien invasion flicks, I don't personally buy into the notion that anybody would come so far with so many of their own kind, to start a war out in remote space.
It's just not worth it.
Not only is it a pain in the butt to get that far, but you're left hanging out, far from home, in a win-or-die situation with backup centuries away and little recourse if things do not immediately go your way.
Plus, with how difficult it is in real life for even a larger force to occupy a country for long (notable exceptions such as China notwithstanding), I sincerely doubt any force could occupy an entire planet. Too many unruly guerillas. And really, all the damage caused by war on that scale would render almost anything you wanted from the planet unusable.
Much better idea to be friendly.
Or... and this is something I've used in my own Fantasy and Sci-Fi campaigns, have the "aliens" come from another dimension. Easier to invade when they can't see you coming at all until you suddenly appear right next to them.
You are talking hypotheticals, so there is no right answer. However, there are SOME answers:
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Star Trek: First Contact
Star Wars: The Phantom Menace
V
War of the Worlds
My own thought process believes an alien-human air war would be unlikely. A handful of well placed EMPs would shut down the power grid for all of North America. Add a few more for naval and air bases, and America would be mostly defenseless to an alien air attack with only 15-20 EMPs.
Repeat for the other major military powers of Russia, China, India, U.K., France, and Germany. Then round out the nuclear club (Pakistan, North Korea, Israel) and about 150 EMPs worldwide would wipe out any major air resistance as well as a significant portion of the human ground resistance. Do it in January, when most of the above countries are experiencing freezing temps, and millions of non-military humans would also be eliminated. The aliens would effectively own the skies before the first flying saucer was launched from the mothership. Considering that EMPs are a technology we as humans possess, it is likely any aliens would as well (only better).
Or, they could all be like E.T.
Yes, I am having them use conventional warfare. Because the person who started this topic was asking about an alien invasion using conventional warfare tactics.That makes about as much sense as Erich Van Daniken's asusmption that aliens who have the fantastic technology to master the difficulties of interstellar travel would require the services of a primitive runway made of loose rocks on the Nazcan plains.
Also... what's conventional warfare? The tanks and mustard gas of the first half of the last century?, the bunker busters of the turn of the millennium? Or the cyberwar which may already be in progress? If I cross the ocean with a nuclear powered aircraft carrier, I'm not going to be attacking the natives with bows and flintlocks. If for some reason, I've come all this way to topple human civilization, with the power I'd have in my hands, the easiest way to start would be to with massive EMP attacks. Trigger a coronal outburst on the sun aimed at the right time and just sit back and wait for our technological civilization to fold like a house of cards. Just sit in orbit for a few months and wait for the die-off and the collapse to do the bulk of the work for you.
Here is a copy of the opening post for you. It answers all of your questions nicely.
As a thought exercise (well, okay, as campaign prep) I'm trying to consider semi-realistically how many alien forces it would take to conquer Earth, to the level of say Falling Skies (IE not total conquest, but certainly down and out).
Assume the alien combat technology is superior but not invincible, and conventional war only (i.e. neither side uses mega weapons). Assume Earth has time to scramble resources. Assume most major countries are attacked.
For air combat, I figure roughly 24 battles of 500 fighters each on Earth's side would finish the fighters (this is based on some very loose internet searching suggesting the US has approximately 4000 fighter planes, then multiplying that by 6 for the rest of the world; rough guess)
So I figure 24 motherships with 200 fighter support to combat Earth's air defenses.
For the ground, I'm not sure. I'm assuming 175 million soldiers and police worldwide (roughly 25 in 1000). BUT, my thinking is invading aliens would not willingly enter a ground war until they'd pacified the skies in a given area. So, assuming large scale wins for the aliens in the air battles, how many of Earth's troops would still be alive to need "pacification", so to speak?
Suggestions on any aspect of the battle are welcome. Note this is to be a precursor to the campaign itself, so I don't need to go into great detail.
Note that long section I bolded.
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The most efficient way to invade would be to bring just a few "people" and adapt the local flora and fauna to be the "soldiers."
David Gerrold's Chtorr series dealt with this sort of 'alien invasion' scenario, where, over a decade into the 'invasion' by an alien ecosystem, humanity was still not sure if they'd even met the enemy. Alien flora and fauna spread across the world, devouring the much less evolved (and less deadly) terrestrial flora and fauna.
The Swarm invasion in the Wild Card's series worked similarly, with the invaders being more of a bunch of invasive alien species, than the more traditional spaceships with energy weapons or mass drivers, pushing asteroid belt or oort cloud fragments on the planet's surface.
An alien race able to turn captured / compromised humans (or animals or plants) against itself, a la the Puppet Masters, or the harnessed kids in Falling Skies, or parasite-controlled Gould in Stargate, could also greatly increase their own numbers, by taking over / infiltrating local species. Similarly, a race might be able to propagate itself or increase it's own numbers by infecting / absorbing local biomass, as in the creature in The Thing, which, without Galactus like power, or super-technology, could still have pretty much taken over the earth, if it wanted.
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They might well be after the biosphere. Plants use quantum entanglement. That makes them valuable to any species with a biological quantum computer that needs to expand its possibility bandwidth (more being better than less). Adding you and yours to the biomass Fed to the megabrain is priority alpha.
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Another thought ..
Threshold, a series that barely made 1 season ( it was really good tho) has a few good ideas about invasion, no physical creatures come to earth, but a device that changes human DNA and makes them the invaders.
Also its old school, but Von Neumann machines would be more realistic ( hahaha) . Or interesting anyway. Like macro nanotech, they come and take existing materials to build more of themselves, and prepare the planet for colonists who are arriving later.
"Commander, our scouts have located a planet with extremely large deposits of <untranslatable>."
"Excellent. Prepare the mining craft immediately."
"There's just one problem, Commander. The planet is inhabited by a highly militarised civilisation with weapons technology more advanced than our own."
"Preposterous! If that were true, they would have used the <untranslatable> to expand into space!"
"Commander, it's hard to believe, but it appears... they can't see the <untranslatable> on their own planet. Their senses are completely blind to it."
"My god, that is tragic. A sapient civilisation that can never know <untranslatable>. Have the scouts provided predictions for a peaceful encounter?"
"I'm afraid, all predictions point to immediate and overwhelming hostile reaction upon contact. Perhaps it's because they can't see <untranslatable>. The lack of such a crucial thing makes their psyches fundamentally broken."
"Oh well. I suppose we'll have to look elsewhere for our <untranslatable> mining expedition."
]...I noted the long section you bolded. It' just that the OP's set of premises makes absolutely no sense.
If a species has the capability to master star travel to the extent of making a voyage of conquest pratical, There won't be a war to conquer the Earth... It would be a simple matter of extermination.
On that, we both agree. It would be extremely simple to pull off, and they don't even need weapons. Simple engineered virus would do the job without having to sacrifice the ship.
But any weapon designed to deal with a ship travelling at FTL speeds would easily be able to punch holes in the Earth's crust. After all, at the incredibly slow speeds we use interstellar dust and debris can be a death sentence for a craft. At relativistic speeds, you start adding the problem of light having effective mass on top of that... Which means they need some kind of shielding against light.
Which, in turn, is why no light-based weapon, such as a laser, would be useful for more than being a target designator. If they could do damage, the ship would be ripped apart by normal light every time it jumped to FTL. I wouldn't be too surprised if early FTL experimentation didn't consist mostly of trying to figure out how to keep the test ship from exploding.
The interstellar dust issue I discussed earlier; a ship armored enough to resist both that and radiation would need a railgun at minimum to punch through its armor and could shrug off direct hits from nukes.
So, overall, these would not be ships where our capacity to fire back would be really noticed.
What if you think in a kind of Dr. Who sense. The Aliens don't come to Earth via space ships, they come via a rift in Space Time. Perhaps there is an Alternate place next to our own and the Aliens invade from there. The OP gets his invasion.
I'd say the Aliens come through to find out what they are dealing with (tech level). If not overwelmingly superior, they my come through in small groups. It goes from there.
I know the idea is Aliens from space, but I am trying to think outside of the Blue Box.