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Deathtrap fortress-worlds with the enforced hyperlane system and being able to Exterminatus the alien filth from the galaxy? Sign me up!
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Dec 22, 2017 00:18
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Psycho Landlord posted:You are aware that fleets aren't going to work like this anymore as part of the update this rework is dropping in, right? Fleets following other fleets will now jump together, single ship fleets will no longer be a thing with the fleet manager taking over, transports may well be able to be included in military fleets, so on and so forth. This is all part of a comprehensive rework of the game's war mechanics but everyone seems to want to argue about it in a vacuum and ignore the previous diaries. The AI argument doesn't even work anymore, seeing as how the AI is obviously going to be overhauled to take advantage of these new systems. Sniping transport fleets is not interesting and never has been. if fleets simply auto follow then I guess that's tolerable, but how are you supposed to snipe them in that scenario? Like, just imagine the flowchart: 1. Enemy has vastly superior spaceship fleet. Cool! Them landing on the planet should be a formality, right? But instead the plucky player intercepts the transport fleet, hurray! Now the AI sits around for 6-12 months rebuilding another one, at which point it invades, assuming it doesn't break entirely. Great. 2. Enemy has vastly inferior spaceship fleet. Their attack won't work and other than keeping an eye on their transports there's not much to consider. I get the value and reasons that one would contest the enemy combat fleet with their own fleet, try to establish superiority, and control space. I don't understand why there's a completely separate, vestigal fleet that needs to do the actual ground invasion, and I haven't seen any scenarios where it actually created interesting gameplay. So here's hoping there's some fun nuance that emerges when the patch drops.
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Dec 22, 2017 00:19
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I still think making transports ship modules is the way to go, and would open up the possibility of adding the ability to board and capture enemy ships with your troops. Hopefully a modder will do this at some point, I loved stealing stuff with marine frigates in Homeworld 2.
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Dec 22, 2017 00:37
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Ham Sandwiches posted:Sniping transport fleets is not interesting and never has been. if fleets simply auto follow then I guess that's tolerable, but how are you supposed to snipe them in that scenario? Remember that fleets will have caps, and as a result you will no longer be moving all of your ships in one stack. Also remember that fleets will have bonuses when outnumbered. So in this scenario, you attack the enemy fleet escorting their armies with one of your own. This draws them off a bit, combat is joined, if your guys are winning and can catch the transports, then great, issue resolved. If your guys are not winning, however, then you proceed to engage the now undefended transports from another direction with one of your other fleets. Transports destroyed, you pull your second fleet and whatever's left of your first out, now if the enemy wants to damage your worlds they have to commit that fleet to a lengthy bombardment and give you time to fortify or go on the offensive. That's assuming you attack in neutral ground, mind you. Alternatively, the enemy attacks one of your systems with a starbase in it. You have an FTL snare, you have defensive platforms, and you have your fleets. The enemy has two options - jump the transports in as part of the assault and risk them in the fighting but prevent them from being attacked without support, or leave them the next system over (remember the FTL changes) with fewer or no defenders, meaning when the assault jumps in you can sneak a fleet back over to those transports and knock them out, even if the enemy's assault is successful. You buy time, enemy wastes resources, war weariness happens. Behold, nuance. Again, this thread seems to be having difficulty imagining these changes through the lens of the other diaries and is treating the new ground combat system as if it's still going to be dictated by doomstacking and current issues with waypoints and following. Not to mention the fact that we have a rather loud group in this very thread that will refer to any combat system that isn't simply clicking a button once at war start as "pointless micro." Stellaris isn't SotS, but strategic and tactical thinking is still a large part of it, and the more you automate the less game there is to play. I'd been railing against ground combat for a while now, because it actually fit the definition of pointless micro, but choosing engagements and isolating targets is a major part of any strategy game and shouldn't happen without player input. If you really are genuinely overwhelmed, the game has time controls and a pause button for a reason.
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Dec 22, 2017 00:41
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Firebert posted:I still think making transports ship modules is the way to go, and would open up the possibility of adding the ability to board and capture enemy ships with your troops. Hopefully a modder will do this at some point, I loved stealing stuff with marine frigates in Homeworld 2. It would be a pretty loving mean feat of modding.
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Dec 22, 2017 01:08
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Psycho Landlord posted:You are aware that fleets aren't going to work like this anymore as part of the update this rework is dropping in, right? Fleets following other fleets will now jump together, single ship fleets will no longer be a thing with the fleet manager taking over, transports may well be able to be included in military fleets, so on and so forth. This is all part of a comprehensive rework of the game's war mechanics but everyone seems to want to argue about it in a vacuum and ignore the previous diaries. The AI argument doesn't even work anymore, seeing as how the AI is obviously going to be overhauled to take advantage of these new systems. I'm not sure what fleets jumping at the same time has to do with anything. If you mean that everyone/the AI will just have their transports following a fleet at all times, I'm not sure what you meant wrt sniping them, since presumably they would be able to emergency ftl long before you killed the fleet unless you completely outclass the enemy. Transports being able to be included in normal fleets would indeed be a big improvement, though. However I would expect that to have been mentioned if it was the case, so I wouldn't hold my breath. I would assume that fleet reinforcements will rally to their assigned fleet instead of just teleporting, so they can still accidentally intercept your transports, just like before. And you seem to have far more faith in the AI than I do. Frankly making an AI that could properly snipe your transports without easily being lured into traps while trying to do so would be really impressive and I doubt Paradox has the AI budget for that. Psycho Landlord posted:Remember that fleets will have caps, and as a result you will no longer be moving all of your ships in one stack. Also remember that fleets will have bonuses when outnumbered. So in this scenario, you attack the enemy fleet escorting their armies with one of your own. This draws them off a bit, combat is joined, if your guys are winning and can catch the transports, then great, issue resolved. If your guys are not winning, however, then you proceed to engage the now undefended transports from another direction with one of your other fleets. Transports destroyed, you pull your second fleet and whatever's left of your first out, now if the enemy wants to damage your worlds they have to commit that fleet to a lengthy bombardment and give you time to fortify or go on the offensive. That's assuming you attack in neutral ground, mind you. In your first scenario, the transports will likely be drawn into the first battle, and will emergency ftl away before your second fleet can engage them. Also, you seem to be assuming you will outnumber the enemy 2:1, so I'm not sure why you'd need to do this in the first place. Just having both fleets attack the enemy fleet at once seems like a better idea. In the second scenario, again, the transports will just emergency ftl out if their fleet loses. You're hardly risking them in the fighting, I'm 99% sure that the combat AI doesn't target them until all armed ships in range are gone. And if they were targeted they'd actually become really good chaff with their evasion and low cost, so I really hope they aren't. The reason people complain about micro is that a lot of the micro in the game is pointless busywork. Sometimes they get overzealous about it, but I think it's undeniable that not having multi-build for buildings as well as robots, having to click on every building separately to upgrade them after getting a new tech etc is annoying and the UI could be improved. And the current war system where you destroy the enemy navy completely in the first 25% of the war and spend the rest of the war mopping up one planet at a time is also boring as hell. You're right though that it hasn't been mentioned that the move away from war score and assorted changes will hopefully remove that. If getting your navy chased down repeatedly and destroyed will get you enough war exhaustion to surrender, the tedium will be removed. And instead of occupying 80% of the enemy planets before you get what you want you might just take a status quo peace after occupying your claims. And if your enemy has a fortress world at the border you can't actually just annihilate the enemy navy since some of them will disengage and you can't get to the damaged ships after they emergency jump out. So hopefully what you do with your armies will actually feel meaningful instead of a mindless chore you have to do to finish the war. Though if you can't have transports in the same fleets as normal ships I'm pretty sure I'd still rather have them be ship components.
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Dec 22, 2017 01:26
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Staltran posted:In your first scenario, the transports will likely be drawn into the first battle, and will emergency ftl away before your second fleet can engage them. Also, you seem to be assuming you will outnumber the enemy 2:1, so I'm not sure why you'd need to do this in the first place. Just having both fleets attack the enemy fleet at once seems like a better idea. You misunderstood me a bit with the first one. I was talking about the enemy fleet being superior, and it no longer being entirely pointless to engage them with the bonuses outnumbered fleets will get against the things that outnumber them, meaning delaying actions (hopefully) will be a much more viable option. So you engage with a smaller force to get the enemy ships all spread to poo poo and then pop in your transport killers, and your first force isn't getting totally annihilated thanks to the bonuses outnumbered ships will be getting. As for the transports bugging out, well that just sorta comes back to "the Defender has successfully bought time," so I'm not sure why forcing a transport fleet to E-jump is a being touted as a loss here. Sure, destroying them would be ideal, but with the more restrictive FTL mechanics in place compounded with missing in action time, you're still unlikely to see those ships make a come back for several months. Staltran posted:The reason people complain about micro is that a lot of the micro in the game is pointless busywork. Sometimes they get overzealous about it, but I think it's undeniable that not having multi-build for buildings as well as robots, having to click on every building separately to upgrade them after getting a new tech etc is annoying and the UI could be improved. And the current war system where you destroy the enemy navy completely in the first 25% of the war and spend the rest of the war mopping up one planet at a time is also boring as hell. No, that's fair, Stellaris has a shitload of micromanagement that isn't necessary, like the current army implementation. It's just that fleet movement and engagement management is decidedly not pointless (or particularly micro-intensive, if we're being honest) , and it seems to me that the direction warfare is currently moving backs opinion up. If you want to make the most of the new warfare and army systems, you get good at handling your fleets. EDIT: I would add that while I do think transports should be separate ships, I do think it would be cool if transport ships had a single PD slot, if only just so they could see off single raiders (not that single raiders should really be a thing in Cherryh based on what's been presented). Psycho Landlord fucked around with this message at 01:52 on Dec 22, 2017 |
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Dec 22, 2017 01:48
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If you used a bunch of corvettes for that it might actually be worth it, depending on just how high their disengagement chance is. However I'm not sure how well it would work, the enemy warships and transports would need to get far away enough from each other that your second fleet that it wouldn't just switch targets to the actual fleet before forcing the transports to bug out. I think that a lot of the antipathy for fleet/transport movement comes from the fact that a lot of the time, it is basically pointless, because the enemy can no longer meaningfully resist and you're just going through the motions of occupying their planets and trying not to screw up and lose your transports to a stupid mistake. But hopefully that won't happen in Cherryh anymore, giving the army system more space to be actually interesting. Also yeah having a stray corvette run into your transports while presumably rallying to a fleet doesn't happen too often, but it's infuriating when it does. Adding some minimal combat capability to transports might be nice. It's even worse when the enemy has poo poo tech and can't actually get your transports shields down, but your transports can't just ignore it and are locked in combat. Still not as bad as when you stop bombarding and move on to another planet in another system while your transports are approaching (I've found it often quicker to partially bombard and let the army take their time killing the defence armies than bombarding every planet to 0%), and then your transports get engaged by a starport under construction. It won't be able to actually shoot for another ten months, just invade the drat planet!
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Dec 22, 2017 02:09
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So is the best ship ai upgrade only an issue if you don’t go cybernetic?
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Dec 22, 2017 02:17
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Sniping transports from under the nose of an escort fleet doesn't really buy time, though - if anything, it costs you time, because the fleet that was tied up escorting transports has now been freed up to go blow up your fleets and occupy your starbases. The planet is only really important for the economic snowball and solidifying your end-of-war position; from the sound of the dev diaries, the battles that will decide the course of the war will still be in space.
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Dec 22, 2017 03:29
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It certainly does when that planet is in a chokepoint system and has an FTL inhibitor on it, something directly mentioned in the diary today. You guys wanted strategic chokepoints. Now you have them.
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Dec 22, 2017 03:43
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Aleth posted:Deathtrap fortress-worlds with the enforced hyperlane system and being able to Exterminatus the alien filth from the galaxy? Sign me up! Yeah I am 100% down with these changes. I can see why people are unhappy micro doesn't look to be much reduced, but honestly this looks like I'm going to be able to go Full Cadia and I am absolutely here for that.
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Dec 22, 2017 04:02
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I tend to agree that armies should just embark on normal ships, with each ship in the fleet having a certain amount of troop capacity. Instead of having any distinction between defensive and offensive armies, you just have to transport the armies with your fleet since you're keeping them together anyway.
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Dec 22, 2017 05:28
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gently caress transport ships. Lemme ferry my troops on my battleships. 
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Dec 22, 2017 07:17
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Mortabis posted:I tend to agree that armies should just embark on normal ships, with each ship in the fleet having a certain amount of troop capacity. Instead of having any distinction between defensive and offensive armies, you just have to transport the armies with your fleet since you're keeping them together anyway. it would be too risky to put those expensive armies into space combat, so you'd still end up with a 'transport fleet' that you keep back.
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Dec 22, 2017 07:20
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Whatya think we do in the Navy with Marines? If we go down they’re coming with us!
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Dec 22, 2017 07:34
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Mortabis posted:I tend to agree that armies should just embark on normal ships, with each ship in the fleet having a certain amount of troop capacity. Instead of having any distinction between defensive and offensive armies, you just have to transport the armies with your fleet since you're keeping them together anyway. Staltran posted:I think that a lot of the antipathy for fleet/transport movement comes from the fact that a lot of the time, it is basically pointless, because the enemy can no longer meaningfully resist and you're just going through the motions of occupying their planets and trying not to screw up and lose your transports to a stupid mistake. But hopefully that won't happen in Cherryh anymore, giving the army system more space to be actually interesting. It seems like the intent in Cherryh is to keep pivotal engagements tense and player attentiony ("micro heavy") while keeping the total number of these engagements per war to a manageable amount whether it's four planets vs four or four hundred vs four hundred (e: I mean I expect it to go up a bit, but in the order of log(n) rather than the current n). Meanwhile the cleanup stuff (troops) have had their micro significantly reduced and further decoupled from the pivotal engagement stuff (fleets) while introducing meaningful but low attention decision points to the phase (the new collateral damage stuff). It looks good. Splicer fucked around with this message at 09:50 on Dec 22, 2017 |
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Dec 22, 2017 09:40
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Psycho Landlord posted:Remember that fleets will have caps, and as a result you will no longer be moving all of your ships in one stack. Except there is literally nothing stopping you from just doomstacking anyway, because you can have your secondary fleets follow the main fleet. They'll even FTL together, so it's literally like having a single fleet aside from needing additional Admirals. "But but they can split their fleets up to attack multiple places!" Sure, I'll believe that when I see it.
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Dec 22, 2017 11:19
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Why do you always assume incompetence from paradox, shadowlyger? Did the jump nerf really hurt you so? On a more serious note, yes, you can move all of your ships in one big armada but they will be separate entities that can be given differing orders without having to make the effort to split them up in any fleet windows or whatever, meaning dictating engagements will be much easier even if all your fleets are concentrated. That was the point of that scenario. What you said had little bearing on how that scenario plays out. Plus, with the outnumbering mechanic, assuming it winds up anywhere near the numbers presented in the dev diary it was talked about in, doomstacking seems like a surefire way to just take a shitload of unnecessary attrition losses unless you have a pretty wild tech advantage over the other guy. You're likely going to be better off engaging only with what you need to instead of letting your entire force be blunted by a couple of fights early in the war.
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Dec 22, 2017 11:34
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Personally, I'm looking forward to using a swarm of torpedo corvettes as a really annoying raiding force that opponents can't quite kill.
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Dec 22, 2017 11:42
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Main Paineframe posted:
This is only half true. The "costs" of having another planet are: Increased research cost, increased unity costs, building maintenence, consumer goods consumption, food consumption. You can offset these with: research labs, unity buildings, power plants, mines, and farms. After you cover these costs, the resources a planet can generate are: minerals, energy, unity, research, and naval cap. If you have a planet that produces enough of each of these to cover its increases, the planet breaks even. If the planet breaks even on every other resource, it will still give you extra naval cap and reduce the liklihood that you can have all your planets taken in a war or two. A planet that breaks even is neither good nor bad by definition, it just exists with no cost to the empire that has it. Even if you didn't need the naval cap, in the new patch you cant capture a system without taking control of the planet, and since it's all hyperlane based having a size 10 planet covered in fortifications on a choke point with a massive space station defending it would be a pretty good "gate" for your empire. Main Paineframe posted:Also, sacrificing output is super bad, because you're paying that cost every month, while you only get the benefits on the off-chance that your space is invaded by an enemy whose fleet you couldn't stop now but might be able to stop in a few months. In the long run, there's always this question: if you'd built mines on those tiles instead of fortresses, how many more ships could you have built over all those years since you got that planet? If this was true then I'm sure you've cracked the secret and no one will ever build fortresses, not even on choke points. Now this is actually something that may happen if it's still no hassle to invade a world without it having tons of fortresses, but that, a problem with implementation rather than the concept. It also doesn't change the fact that the more economically viable the world is the less of a trade off it is to build defences, not least because you don't want to lose the world without a fight.
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Dec 22, 2017 11:49
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Also, on a planet that still has room for pops you don't have to work the fortresses in peace time, you can have the pops assigned to other tiles. So you're only sacrificing output when the planet gets full or nearly so. (Sector AI may or may not realize this.)
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Dec 22, 2017 13:09
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Mods that allow you to increase planet/habitat size will be more important. On another note, they're making a mechanic that has been in place since day 1(auto-spawned 'potential troops') an actual thing, by making the troops actually of use(The 'garrison troops' were never of use). Did any mods ever use the potential troops for anything?
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Dec 22, 2017 13:41
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The Citizen Service civic being changed to give you a real-rear end defensive army for every pop on a planet (of a species with the appropriate military service rights) seems like a logical change.
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Dec 22, 2017 14:16
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There is something incredibly satisfying about watching all the fallen empires realize you are now a credible threat.
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Dec 22, 2017 15:10
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Psycho Landlord posted:It certainly does when that planet is in a chokepoint system and has an FTL inhibitor on it, something directly mentioned in the diary today. We already got strategic chokepoints, back with the new starbase system. I really just think fortifying a planet isn't going to be nearly as important as fortifying the station is, since a) the station can actually damage the enemy fleet, b) as the place where ships are built, the station is the place you need to hit to turn the war of attrition your way, and c) even with these changes, armies are still going to be a tacked-on system that mainly just exist to turn your victories into victory points after your fleet has already won space superiority in an area.
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Dec 22, 2017 15:23
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The only way armies matter is if they can influence the fleet combat. Paradox is adding a single mechanism for this, namely planetary ftl inhibitors, but I doubt it's enough. The anti-blobbing stuff is clearly insufficient. You're still going to blob but it'll be mildly more annoying. In order to get rid of stacks of doom there needs to be some kind of penalty for the enemy fleet getting behind your lines. For that there needs to be a coherent idea of a front line.
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Dec 22, 2017 15:31
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I forget all of what's been implied by past dev diaries, but an interesting possibility is if there's a strategic difference between just taking a system's outpost and fully capturing the system plus all inhabited bodies. You could ignore ground combat but it might for various reasons make the overall war effort harder or mean forgoing opportunities in the peace. Just sticking FTL inhibitors on planets seems like a very blunt way of providing such a distinction. eta: I guess what I am going for here is that capturing planets is something I think there should be a strong positive (you gain something very useful) rather than negative (you can't leave until you do it) incentive for. Which means that investing in defensive armies is more useful for denying benefits to an opponent than for guarding specific worlds with some kind of strategic gimmick (FTL inhibitor).
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Dec 22, 2017 15:44
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To get this straight, you can build a fortress on a planet in a chokepoint star system and put an FTL inhibitor on it so that enemy ships can't warp out of that system until they take the fortress, right? If so, that owns because you can build actual walls in your space that require the enemy to defeat you in land combat instead of space combat, or at least spend ages bombarding your fortress planet into glass to shut down the inhibitor. Armies will actually matter and you can rely on the strength of your clone warriors or robot troopers to defend your space even if you have a smaller fleet. I hope FTL inhibitors aren't a super late game tech. Or have I misunderstood and these are just FTL snares like the sort that were on defense platforms before?
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Dec 22, 2017 15:45
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GunnerJ posted:I forget all of what's been implied by past dev diaries, but an interesting possibility is if there's a strategic difference between just taking a system's outpost and fully capturing the system plus all inhabited bodies. You could ignore ground combat but it might for various reasons make the overall war effort harder or mean forgoing opportunities in the peace. Just sticking FTL inhibitors on planets seems like a very blunt way of providing such a distinction.
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Dec 22, 2017 15:46
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I wonder if you can move pops around to other planets when you are occupying an enemy planet but the war is ongoing.
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Dec 22, 2017 16:01
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Boing posted:To get this straight, you can build a fortress on a planet in a chokepoint star system and put an FTL inhibitor on it so that enemy ships can't warp out of that system until they take the fortress, right? You are correct and it's a mid-game tech. They enemy can emergency FTL out of the system, but they can't proceed further into your space unless they bring down the planet.
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Dec 22, 2017 18:06
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Boing posted:To get this straight, you can build a fortress on a planet in a chokepoint star system and put an FTL inhibitor on it so that enemy ships can't warp out of that system until they take the fortress, right? You got it. Inhibitors will prevent warping out, except for emergency jumps. Yes, it does own. *edit* Wiz!
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Dec 22, 2017 18:06
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Wiz posted:You are correct and it's a mid-game tech. They enemy can emergency FTL out of the system, but they can't proceed further into your space unless they bring down the planet. Can we have multiple inhibitors in a multi-planet system? I assume they are planet uniques to begin with so we can't stack them on a single planet.
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Dec 22, 2017 18:13
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Wiz posted:You are correct and it's a mid-game tech. They enemy can emergency FTL out of the system, but they can't proceed further into your space unless they bring down the planet. Until late game and they can use jumpdrive to potentially bypass the fortress system though, right? Or is that still being tinkered with?
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Dec 22, 2017 18:16
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Wiz posted:You are correct and it's a mid-game tech. They enemy can emergency FTL out of the system, but they can't proceed further into your space unless they bring down the planet. Wiz, can I confirm that assault armies can use the Fleet Manager to replenish themselves with one click after invasions?
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Dec 22, 2017 18:28
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Wiz posted:You are correct and it's a mid-game tech. They enemy can emergency FTL out of the system, but they can't proceed further into your space unless they bring down the planet. What impact do armies have on the space fight in the early game? That is, to balance out the impact that ships have on the ground fight via bombardment.
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Dec 22, 2017 18:34
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Armies don't need to impact the space fight: the whole point of fighting in space is to make ground invasions possible, not the other way around. Ground invasions are the way to capture planets, and capturing planets is the reason you go to war most of the time anyway. With the changes to warscore & peace negotiations being able to take planets is very important. The Status Quo option is alot cheaper than total victory, and allows each side to keep whatever planets they are currently occupying. In close fights now a viable strategy is to declare war on an unprepared enemy & snipe a few mostly undefended planets with your armies, then try and stall the war long enough so war exhaustion brings your opponent to the negotiation table where you can snag those planet's you've occupied since day 1.
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Dec 22, 2017 19:01
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https://twitter.com/martin_anward/status/944269351179440128 Tomb World starts confirmed! Kinda hoping it’s a start-locked civic.
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Dec 22, 2017 19:15
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| # ? May 26, 2024 04:16 |
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Soup du Jour posted:https://twitter.com/martin_anward/status/944269351179440128 Aw yeah, looking good!
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Dec 22, 2017 19:28
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