Say you were the ruler of a space empire with a single planet of about Star Wars level techology

Hence the need for space-conquest. Keep up chum.

>AI's doing war plans

Kids these days

I'll just do everything every leader has dreamed of forever but this time it will work because I did it!

Droids are horribly incompetent. Conscripted moisture farmers can't hit the side of a Bantha from 3 yards out. Clones are pretty much the only reliable soldier, aside from [as many as the plot demands] sith soldiers.

The better idea would be to prep technologically inclined orphans to start building shipyards. The plucky go-getters will invariably be broody, however, so cloned waifus/husbandos to make sure that unnecessary drama didn't strike at an inopportune moment.

The ships will have ion torpedoes for ship-to-ship combat, we'll salvage any ship the fleets take (rag-tag fleets make for the most powerful kind in Star Wars) and field aforementioned tech nerd scavengers and smugglers pretty much exclusively.

Won't send drop troops at all, instead, send a single party of smugglers/tech nerds to disable planetary defenses before glassing the whole world—but it must be morally justifiable or else nothing will go to plan. So most of the conquest will be in the hearts and minds of the easily manipulated citizens of the Galaxy first.

If ships can go lightspeed wouldn't it be better to have light speed missiles that crack planets due to E=MC^2

Lets assume that your "empire" is a single star system with uninhabited or colonized but not yet up to par planets.
>First off, start mining asteroids and shit for raw resources if you haven't already.
>Second, offer incentives for families to have multiple children, especially if they have a child enter military service or just pull an Israel and make everyone serve when they hit 18.
>third, develop better weaponry. plasma weapons are horribly inefficient for power regulation/energy expenditure in almost every setting. focus on rail-gun tech instead. a metal slug accelerated to an appreciable percentage of light will have much more devastating results than what they currently have
>fourth, develop better shielding. its shit. in tens of thousands of years, they couldn't do what star trek had by the 24th century.
>fifth, scout a small, nearby system that has few or no inhabitants and take it over.
>sixth, start colonies there. repeat steps, 1, 2, 5 as needed.

Step 1: Form or join some sort of interstellar congress made up of various races
Step 2: Work your way up to being a high ranking member of that organization
Step 3: Divert money to secretly fund the construction of an army
Step 4: Disguise yourself and stir up animosity towards the congress with some of the more vocal planets, split along party lines if need be
Step 5: Divert funds to them to make their own army, have them start a civil war
Step 6: 'discover' your own secret army and use it to wage a war while leading both sides
Step 7: Appoint yourself an even higher rank in the congress to lead more directly during the crisis
Step 8: Put anyone important who you think might object to the war in positions supervising logistics or troops. Hard to speak against the war when they're leading it
Step 8: wait until both sides are weakened and crippled, use the conflict to kill and replace anyone on either side who opposes you
Step 9: Appoint yourself grand emperor to solve the crisis, crush the rebel army, keep being emperor

Unless the setting has anyone clairvoyant or who could otherwise sense your emotions or thoughts, its flawless

I bombard the little shits and then send out army of commando drones

Depends on the setting.

Robots don't reproduce and create new settlers for recently conquered planets when they're done fighting.

>space empire
>single planet

That's not an empire at all.

I like robots

>Star Wars tech
>Let AIs do our war plans for us

Aaaaaaaaand you killed us all.

>Let AIs do our war plans for us
>Two groups with sufficiently advanced AI strategists plan a fight
>Calculating
>Both AIs decide to try diplomacy.

You realise using a clone army to breed would result in like....super incest right?

>cloning the same guy thousands of times
Why would you use the same genetic stock for all the clones? I was assuming you just take genetic stock at random from your populace and use it to create clone armies.

Massive warships that are also colony ships.

Cultural victory.
Those aliens are going to love my space blue jeans.

Conquering? Just dissasemble the system and build a Dyson Sphere. You can also extract the materials from the star itself [starlifting]. After a couple of decades, you have a partial Dyson Sphere and you can start manufacturing proton-sized Black Holes for powering your ships or propel ships at near-lightspeed.

Also, you can send RKV and roast planets from afar by concentrating the light of the star into murder rays.

The Tactical Command Droids and Super Tactical Command Droids were actually competent and generally good planners, just remove what ever made them arrogant. Maybe not so much on the Supers though, they could actually win. There aren't no Heros with Plot Armour that make everyone on the other side become ridiculously incompetent this time, they'll be fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine.

By genetically engineering some hardy boys and making super-soldiers, of course!

>war
>in space
Please. It's too costly.

Anyway. Ground invasion is out of question. So just get the fleet on the orbit and deliver the ultimatum "surrender, or we start dropping the bombs daily".

Are swarm ships smart?

Like macro nanobots

Yes but only if you like small guns

Use kinetic weapons and force the enemy to surrender without a fight. If they don't surrender, hit them with an FTL asteroid that generates enough kinetic energy to splatter the planet.

I go full total, total extermination, fuck the natives approach while turning my people into a Borg/Tyranid like civilization in terms of how it operates.

>Build absolutely giant space ships using lasers for point defense, railguns for the big guns, and super-nukes which are solid missiles made out of the densest metal available with FTL drives slapped on to creation frictionless kinetic slugs.

>When the new fleet arrives upon an unconquered world, detonate Cobalt Bombs over the planet at multiple positions to kill literally everything from the radiation in a couple minutes. Deploy troops wearing radiation-shielded power armor to exterminate any surviving life

>Strip mine the world of all resources and feed it into atomic forges upon the large ships to spit out goods.

>Rince and repeat, constantly growing the fleet in size and the population able to conscript in size until you have billions upon billions of forces traveling the stars, with no need for any pathetic planets. You are the planet.

sauce?

Because that guy has better genes than everyone else. I mean if you are cloning everyone just use regular troops.
kinky.

If we have the full tech of star wars in all ways and in all factions. I would likely honestly just build robot armies and massive cloning facilities to breed up the population for colonization attempts. Have the machines constantly shipping back materials from uninhabited regions that will rapidly be mined out to support building more infrastructure. Then keep the process going Ad-infinitude

I would clone max rebo so they can all march down and play music across the galaxy

Build a bunch of corvettes and send them at your neighbor. That always works.