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Depending on what you're fighting against, high evasion torp corvettes still seem to be useful for some time. Pop some shields on them and they handle PD and flak OK. Medium and larger mounts have trouble hitting them. Once you get flak cannons I'm not sure destroyers are worth it as picket ships anymore though, given that you can now load a PD weapon in medium slots on cruisers and BBs.
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Mar 29, 2017 01:24
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I'm strong enough now i think and the most opportune target to take is the nearby sleeping fallen empire (Holy Guardians). But is there any point to risking that? Are there any unique rewards or something?
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Mar 29, 2017 03:03
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You might get jump drives or psi jump drives, and you'll get whatever nice stuff they have on their homeworld, and can colonize their holy worlds safely.
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Mar 29, 2017 03:14
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If nothing else, kill 'em before they become awakened! Tho if there are other fallen empires still in the galaxy, that very act might also awaken those.
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Mar 29, 2017 03:28
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Owned them straight in their fallen b-hole  And got PSI-Jumpdrive Great success Edit: A empire woke up straight after that like you said, so i went over there and took about half their space before they managed to strand my fleet (shot down my wormhole generators) and god drat. Awakened empires have so sickeningly good surface buildings that produce like 18+ resources per tile :O Dongattack fucked around with this message at 04:49 on Mar 29, 2017 |
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Mar 29, 2017 04:01
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Dongattack posted:I'm strong enough now i think and the most opportune target to take is the nearby sleeping fallen empire (Holy Guardians). But is there any point to risking that? Are there any unique rewards or something? Always liberate and vassalize at least part of any fallen empire you dunk on. That gives you a vassal that can give you a research treaty for every named tech and up to 5 levels of each repeatable tech...or basically -25% research costs for the rest of the game.
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Mar 29, 2017 04:59
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Dongattack posted:Owned them straight in their fallen b-hole So do fallen ones (on their core worlds). Taking out the Keepers of Knowledge is an incredible boost for your economy, it gives you a couple of ringworlds with a total of 4-5 sections loaded with those structures. GotLag fucked around with this message at 10:32 on Mar 29, 2017 |
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Mar 29, 2017 10:28
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I've knocked over an FE to steal its goodies and I still don't think it's going to help me against the rampant AE in my game that has like 1.5 million fleet power.
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Mar 29, 2017 11:24
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I repeatedly clown the AE flying around with a million and then some fleet power with my 600k fleet, because he keeps his fleets in separate 75-200k fleets and my doomstack obliterates them one at a time. If they just stacked everything they'd roll me over, but AI is really dumb sometimes.
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Mar 29, 2017 11:27
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Dongattack posted:I'm strong enough now i think and the most opportune target to take is the nearby sleeping fallen empire (Holy Guardians). But is there any point to risking that? Are there any unique rewards or something? I'm attacking the Holy Guardians FE right next to me. Salvaging all their PSI Jumpdrive tech in a hyperdrive only game is nice, in addition to the top tier shields, armor, and disruptors. Colonizing all their holy worlds will be a nice boon too. The tech leverage it gives you is pretty extreme, and I think I might bowl over the other nearby FE as well just to cap it off nicely.
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Mar 29, 2017 14:12
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Fortresses would be worth it if they scaled to, say, doomstack size, instead of being battleship size with the engines taken out.
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Mar 29, 2017 17:01
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The Muffinlord posted:Fortresses would be worth it if they scaled to, say, doomstack size, instead of being battleship size with the engines taken out. The problem with forts is that you can only have one in a huge space. I don't know why we can pack 1000 battleships into a tight doom ball but stations needs half a solar system of breathing room. If we could make "fleets" of static defenses they might actually matter. Build 50k of defenses above your homeworld why not. You can park a fleet there why not park a network of stations?
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Mar 29, 2017 17:52
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Ship power plants combined with a mod to reduce/remove station radii make fortresses useful. They won't stop a doomstack (nothing short of another doomstack will do that), but they work well after the initial phase of a war, in protecting frontier stations and the like from the dribs and drabs of ships that the AI likes to float around, following/merging with each other. (The initial phase of a war is when my doomstack jumps to where their fleet is and murders the everloving gently caress out of it, after that it's just a case of methodically invading one planet after another while) Edit: Ship Power Stations - if you want to combine the smaller station radii you'll have to edit this mod, they modify the same file so aren't compatible. GotLag fucked around with this message at 18:06 on Mar 29, 2017 |
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Mar 29, 2017 18:03
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GotLag posted:So do fallen ones (on their core worlds). Taking out the Keepers of Knowledge is an incredible boost for your economy, it gives you a couple of ringworlds with a total of 4-5 sections loaded with those structures. Yeah, spawning near a Materialist FE is always amazing.
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Mar 29, 2017 18:08
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Also nice: spawning two systems over from a ruined ring with a curator station. Why hello, tech boost. Edit: Of course that only ever happened once, I got tired of praying to RNGesus and now I use this mod: Unique Systems Spawn 100%. It's a lot of fun: you don't get gimped with galaxies missing most of the enclaves (I downloaded this mod after I got a galaxy that had only a single enclave, and it was the merchant selling +5% habitability gel), there's always some horrible space monster to find and kill for phat loot, drone base stations, etc. Edit 2: Actually, of all the unique systems in Stellaris, I think Sanctuary is my favourite. Sadly it's apparently quite rare, I only saw it once before using this mod. In case you've not yet encountered it, it's a ring world that hails you when you enter the system, warns you not to approach, and has something like 20k points of permanently-hostile fallen empire defensive stations. But if you kill those you get access to four ring world sections with primitives to murder/enslave/infiltrate, as well as some living metal. It makes a wonderful fleet construction base. GotLag fucked around with this message at 18:27 on Mar 29, 2017 |
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Mar 29, 2017 18:20
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Re: Fortresses & Doomstacks: I think the real solution is to break up the doomstacks, either with some kind of leadership limit, or a hard cap on fleet size. The doomstack combat just kinda sucks. As many others have said, wars boil down to 1-2 battles, then it's all done with. Before we start monkeying with fortresses/stations to compete, I'd say start with breaking up the stacks. LogisticEarth fucked around with this message at 18:43 on Mar 29, 2017 |
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Mar 29, 2017 18:41
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LogisticEarth posted:Re: Fortresses & Doomstacks: I think the real solution is to break up the doomstacks, either with some kind of leadership limit, or a hard cap on fleet size. There is really no way to prevent this, you can just send in separate fleets at once. This is what most RTS games boil down to. The only way around is is perhaps doing EUIV style unit creation where your shipyards/stations can mass crank out more ships and form a new fleet if you have the base of resources/production to continue the fight quickly. That might make it more fun and worthwhile. And buffing defenses in general. Massive investments in hardened defensive/choke systems would be good, which is why my modpack adds so much to defensive options. I used mods that scaled Citadels/defensive stations to T4 essentially, and then incrementally makes them stronger as the game progresses which mitigates this somewhat. Kimsemus fucked around with this message at 18:52 on Mar 29, 2017 |
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Mar 29, 2017 18:47
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Kimsemus posted:There is really no way to prevent this, you can just send in separate fleets at once. I would think a crowding malus would work. You creat diminishing returns for dumping fleets into the meat grinder. Like, HoI does (or used to) handle combat that way.
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Mar 29, 2017 18:56
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LogisticEarth posted:Re: Fortresses & Doomstacks: I think the real solution is to break up the doomstacks, either with some kind of leadership limit, or a hard cap on fleet size. Star Ruler 2 has an interesting system for limiting fleet sizes - the ship design in that game is a lot more freeform than Stellaris, but part of it would include having to outfit your capital ships with supply modules. When ships enter combat, they consume supply from those modules, and when supplies run out they do drastically reduced damage (supplies refilled automatically over time - although much quicker in friendly space). So a big fleet with few supply ships would hit hard, but burn out quickly, while having more supply would mean that your fleets would have more sustainability. Capital ships were expensive to maintain, so you wouldn't want to just build a ton of them, but you also wouldn't want to build a cap ship that was all supply modules because you'd be giving up a ton of firepower to do it. It created a nice organic system for capping fleets to reasonable sizes but also being flexible enough not to feel like an arbitrary limit. I'm not sure how well that would translate to Stellaris exactly, but there could be a similar idea of fleets in combat consuming some kind of local resource supplied by other ships or stations or whatever, so building too much of a doom blob just means that they'll get one volley off then have to retreat to rearm.
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Mar 29, 2017 19:02
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Limit fleet size by admiral skill + tech. Number of Admirals is already limited by leader cap. Suddenly leader cap increases are really good and you can choose to specialize in military power by spending your leader capacity on admirals (and generals?) instead of governors and scientists. Or you know, the system logistics idea that's been brought up before (and is very much the HoI4 logistics mechanic, which is quite good), or some of the other ways that have been brought up. There's ways to solve doomstacking.
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Mar 29, 2017 19:11
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Yeah some kind of combat width or supply limit/logistics type thing is the easiest way to cut down on doomstacks. If you cap fleet size all that adds is another level of micro where I have to select 5 small fleets instead of 1 doomstack before right-clicking the enemy capital and alt-tabbing.
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Mar 29, 2017 19:27
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Just having an arbitrary thing where you can't have more than X ships in a fleet won't work, or won't really address the core issue that there's no reason to spread your fleet out because there's no "front" in wars, geography doesn't matter, your fleets have infinite range and supplies and can just zoom around deep striking anywhere. Every war is the same, you play chase with their fleet and eliminate it then mop up. So how to make stellaris combat better? How to make wars not a single decisive all or nothing battle and then tedious horrible invasion/mop up? I'm sure wiz already has some good ideas. But I think the key points would be: -More limits to movements ala EU4 forts. You can't attack system B until you've taken system A because system A has a ton of defenses that are blocking your fleet. There needs to be fronts in a war. -More risk to undefended systems. The enemy should be able to hurt you a lot more simply by getting into your system and pillaging it. If you have 4 border systems in your war, you'd want to spread your fleet and defenses in a way that protects all 4, a doomstack would keep 3 of them open. -Less decisive battles. Have ships engage their emergency FTL or fall back before being totally destroyed. Have fleets limp back to the nearest star base for repairs. -Some sort of morale/org/supply system? No no not actual supply management or supply lines, but something that even a victorious fleet needs to wait a bit to replenish, with the rate being lower the farther from home/deeper in enemy territory. You throw your entire fleet into a ball it's going to be spending a lot more time rebuilding its combat readiness. Basically some sort of war/combat changes that create a situation where you don't make a doom stacks because it would open holes in your front. If you have 100k worth of ships and 4 border systems, you'd end up naturally having 4 25k fleets because sitting across the border because you can see the enemy has 4 15k fleets guarding their border systems, plus some static defenses. You see you can attack one of their systems from 2 of yours, but will they move to reinforce their defenses, or strike at the hole you just opened up and destroy half the buildings in your system before you can pull back to rally your own defense? Maybe you should do a hit and run attack to try to pick at their static defenses? Maybe throw everything at one system to break through and hope they scramble to defend? Maybe sit here staring at each other over the border in a stalemate until your plot to instigate a slave uprising on the other side of their empire forces them to divert their fleet? You know, actual interesting strategies.
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Mar 29, 2017 19:29
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LogisticEarth posted:I would think a crowding malus would work. You creat diminishing returns for dumping fleets into the meat grinder. Like, HoI does (or used to) handle combat that way. This doesn't really work without something extra, because you'd still be better off creating the largest ball possible even if there's some diminishing returns on size. Unless you crank it up to the point where larger fleets actually take more losses rather than fewer, I guess, but that would cause its own problems.
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Mar 29, 2017 19:36
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Having the same mechanics but making me manage two or three fleets instead of one is not going to be more interesting, just more tedious. I rarely enjoy having to constantly change my army size in EU4 to deal with attrition and supply limits, or to siege with the minimum effective stack and do the general shuffle. SOTS forces you have to have several fleets since the travel times and combat mechanics mean that it's generally useful to have 2-3 on different sides of your empire. Some races like Morrigi are super fast and can respond very quickly. Some races like the Humans can expand very quickly. And some races like the Hivers are slow but can basically put their fleet in a giant deathball and throw it at people. They can also respond in force to invasions. Those things really don't transfer over into Stellaris. When I'm at war with an empire, I'm at war with that empire. I probably don't have as many concurrent wars going as I do in SOTS, which means I don't have as many fronts. The two levels of details really works against this. Like ok, let's say you have 3 fleets and you need to micro those 3 fleets to engage an AI enemy. We've implemented the stuff that prevents deathstacks. Now what? Now I micro these 3 fleets to do whatever I would have done originally. One is popping stations, one is escorting transports, and one is patrolling around. If any of them have combat I need to zoom into the system and give them orders, or if it's very simplified, then I'm just clicking poo poo with these mini fleets. What I'm trying to say is there's just lots of fundamental issues like: -How involved is the combat going to be -What is the intended role of fleets and systems and space in taking territory -What is the desired flow of interactions once a player declares war on someone -What is the way to get the desired amount of ships / fleets / units in the mix to support that So I really don't think simply splitting up fleets is the solution. I don't think doomstacks are a problem, and I hate the way people use that word as a pejorative. In some games it's wise to spread out your forces, in some games it's wise to concentrate them, one is not inherently better than the other. It's just a question of whether how it's implemented in the game leads to fun fights or not.
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Mar 29, 2017 19:38
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Game needs boarding pods for ships, to make +combat modifiers more useful. One of my favorite things in moo was putting bulrathi in power armor, loading up a cruiser full of assault shuttles, and taking over enemy fleets.
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Mar 29, 2017 19:39
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Yeah, alternatively just keep the doom stacks and single decisive battle but make it actually decisive, destroying 99% of the enemy fleet should gain a ton of warscore and let me skip the horrible mop-up phase.
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Mar 29, 2017 19:50
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Strudel Man posted:Game needs boarding pods for ships, to make +combat modifiers more useful. One of my favorite things in moo was putting bulrathi in power armor, loading up a cruiser full of assault shuttles, and taking over enemy fleets. TBH, if they replaced fighters/bombers with boarding shuttles, whose AI would specifically target the mostly intact big targets, base their strength/PD resistance on the types of ground armies you have unlocked while keeping the hangars, I'd be a-ok with that. Not sure how IMBA it might be or not, but yea - it'd be a fair punishment for anyone that skimps on point-defense to have their battleships/cruisers get yoinked one by one. Or the dreadnought lol.
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Mar 29, 2017 19:52
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Kimsemus posted:There is really no way to prevent this, you can just send in separate fleets at once. This is what most RTS games boil down to. The only way around is is perhaps doing EUIV style unit creation where your shipyards/stations can mass crank out more ships and form a new fleet if you have the base of resources/production to continue the fight quickly. That might make it more fun and worthwhile. And buffing defenses in general. Massive investments in hardened defensive/choke systems would be good, which is why my modpack adds so much to defensive options. I think basically every paradox game has some variant of combat width that makes having a massive army only useful for reserves.
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Mar 29, 2017 20:46
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No paradox game has taken place in space though where there isn't some narrow mountain pass you're fighting in to limit your combat width. What is combat width in space? What's the bottleneck or restriction? I guess we could make something up. But if the mechanic just breaks up fleets but doesn't make war more interesting what's the point? It's just more micro.
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Mar 29, 2017 20:57
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Baronjutter posted:No paradox game has taken place in space though where there isn't some narrow mountain pass you're fighting in to limit your combat width. What is combat width in space? What is it in the open sea?
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Mar 29, 2017 21:02
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spectralent posted:I think basically every paradox game has some variant of combat width that makes having a massive army only useful for reserves. While I agree, Stellaris is pretty far outside the normal Paradox formula when it comes to combat itself. Ainsley McTree posted:What is it in the open sea? Historically the ocean is still two dimensional when it comes to surface combat so you can't LOS across other ships and your engagement width can only be so much. Space is a 3D plane so in theory you can stack a ton more poo poo into the same space. Also it's a sci-fi game so we can forego historical limitations. Kimsemus fucked around with this message at 21:06 on Mar 29, 2017 |
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Mar 29, 2017 21:03
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Ainsley McTree posted:What is it in the open sea? historically the "make a giant death ball" tactic has been pretty common when two comparable naval powers fight each other though (and I haven't played EU in a while but iirc if you're fighting someone with a similar-sized fleet you generally want most of your fleet in one place when you do so. with the caveat that in EU you can hide your fleet in port and avoid engagement altogether)
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Mar 29, 2017 21:14
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EUIV added a naval combat width a while back. When it was first introduced it was just x ships in combat at a time, so you wanted all heavy ships and any non-heavies would actually be worse than useless in the battle. It's been since modified so that you can have 3 light ships instead of a heavy or something like that. but anyway you don't need to have everything in a deathball, you can just reinforce once a fight starts. What I really want is an army slot for cruisers/battleships, so you don't need to micro separate dedicated transport ships around. Maybe have transports as an option for hangar slot instead of making a new one.
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Mar 29, 2017 21:26
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Staltran posted:EUIV added a naval combat width a while back. When it was first introduced it was just x ships in combat at a time, so you wanted all heavy ships and any non-heavies would actually be worse than useless in the battle. It's been since modified so that you can have 3 light ships instead of a heavy or something like that. but anyway you don't need to have everything in a deathball, you can just reinforce once a fight starts. This is kinda true. They did implement a combat width for ships, for much of the game it won't come into play. As you approach later in the game when fleets get big and alliances go to war you get the above stuff, which really means you get to play the reinforce game just like you do with armies. I am not sure it improved things, but it's in there. In general I always preferred the naval stuff since it plays more to the Player type strengths of positioning and decisive engagements, and less to the AI strength of real time micro of multiple stacks and putting them where it wants them. For players to match that functionality they either have to pause or choose which battle to focus on. I enjoy land combat less and less the more armies there are running around, reason #735 that I enjoy the early game of EU4 more than the lategame. I hope Stellaris finds a more interesting solution other than "You have a reserve stack that needs to come into the fight some point through, timing this is really annoying and something you constantly do and it favors the AI and not you, enjoy"
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Mar 29, 2017 21:35
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Rakthar posted:This is kinda true. They did implement a combat width for ships, for much of the game it won't come into play. As you approach later in the game when fleets get big and alliances go to war you get the above stuff, which really means you get to play the reinforce game just like you do with armies. I am not sure it improved things, but it's in there. Buffing defensive stations, and having them adopt a castle system with a radial defense for taking systems around them, al la EU4, will help a lot with this IMO
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Mar 29, 2017 21:39
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Kimsemus posted:While I agree, Stellaris is pretty far outside the normal Paradox formula when it comes to combat itself. Sure, but it seems a bit weird to go "most RTS games have this issue" when Paradox makes RTS games that have a workaround for the issue.
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Mar 29, 2017 21:39
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I'm personally okay with war being uninteresting and trivial once it actually happens, with the relevant strategic tradeoffs being prior to war ("how many resources do I want to divert from the civilian economy?," "what kind of sabre-rattling/appeasement/whatever do I want to make in diplomacy?") or after it ("how do I politically integrate all these new populations/territory?") But I can certainly see how that's not the only opinion out there.
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Mar 29, 2017 21:40
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Kimsemus posted:Buffing defensive stations, and having them adopt a castle system with a radial defense for taking systems around them, al la EU4, will help a lot with this IMO Yeah space and terrain and defensive structures need to be implemented in a way that matter during warfare. EU4's fort patch was the single greatest improvement to that game's combat system and made land warfare go from "stuff I dreaded" to "acceptable part of the game and sometimes make fun scenarios." I hope they also revisit the way temporary defenses like minefields are used and deployed, as well as finding a way you can messing with other empires - cloaking ships and bio warfare and all that stuff would be neat if there's an acceptable way to implement asymmetric fuckery.
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Mar 29, 2017 21:43
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Another option is just to make pirates and stuff an actual thing so you're forced to split your fleets. Having non-empire stuff that's actually dangerous wandering through at various intervals would mean 2 or 3 fleets would be useful.
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Mar 29, 2017 22:02
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Zore posted:Another option is just to make pirates and stuff an actual thing so you're forced to split your fleets. Having non-empire stuff that's actually dangerous wandering through at various intervals would mean 2 or 3 fleets would be useful. Playing rebel whack a mole is always a thing people love in paradox games.
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Mar 29, 2017 22:03
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