Uranium, pretending it's a real military/economy simulation and not just a game for a minute, even if the local population's leadership practiced a scorched earth policy as they went down to defeat, at minimum the invading force gets a huge boost in the net amount of recyclable stuff that's sitting around waiting for the first available forge. Even a razed city, unless it's been completely nuked and is radioactive for centuries, is going to be full of metal girders that are much easier and faster to access and process than orbital shipments from an asteroid that must be mined would be.-- Retro
Just because Saddam had an assload of palaces didn't mean we were able to get power to Baghdad any faster. Hell they still have blackouts.
It's infrastructure, that's what the upgrades are called. When you're dropping bombs in the upper megaton range like the TEC are doing, you're wiping out that infrastructure. You've not only uprooted the government, you've displaced millions of people (certainly killed quite a few, too). You have refugees in camps, their cities are full of insurgents, rioting, and anarchy. When you first take over, your government only controls a small part of that planet, a "green zone". It's taking a lot of money to deal with the starving population who are lacking proper hospital care, food, water, and power. These people need to get back to their homes in the cities, and that's where spending money on relocation, reconstruction.
Taking care of these refugees and re-naturalizing them is a time-consuming and costly process. As you spend money, you make major population areas livable. Refugees in camps don't pay taxes - a working legal citizen DOES.
You COULD make a case for retaining this infrastructure via culture flip, and maybe that's a nice incentive to do so vs. invasion. But to say that you can just use this twisted radioactive debris and should be able to keep it is insanity. It makes absolutely perfect sense to me both in regards to the population and the infrastructure costs.
