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The distinction between knocking out all the defenses of a planet and actually capturing it can matter so I don't have a problem with there being a separate "capture" phase, it's the micromanagement of it I mind. If I didn't have to shuffle around transport fleets I'd have 0 problems with the system as it stands.
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Aug 11, 2017 15:39
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It's just one of those things that a space 4x HAS TO HAVE because MOO2 had it. Maybe in a decade we'll get an indy reinvention of the genre, but it's not going to happen anytime soon
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Aug 11, 2017 15:46
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AI transport fleet ftl sniping is the most frustrating part of the game for me. I hate having to revert saves but that is just BS that they can instantly home in on ships that have fallen one or two systems behind without an escort. The one time you fall behind on micro, you end up having to rebuild your armies from scratch if they can't emergency jump out.
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Aug 11, 2017 15:47
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I think a way to improve ground combat would be to get rid of armies completely. Make transports into a new buildable class of ship. Planetary assaults now work like EUIV sieges. The number & power of combat ships in orbit works like the artillery in your EUIV army, and the number & power of transports works like the infantry. Planetary fortifications work like EUIV castles, planetary defense forces work like EUIV garrisons. This way you could make multiple dedicated planetary assault fleets & park them over planets & forget them until they conquer the planet. Or you could make one massive fleet & micromanage it flying around manually assaulting planets after a few days of breaking initial fortifications. Edit: Bold Robot posted:I would love to see things work more like EU4. Beat me to it.
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Aug 11, 2017 15:47
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Armies should be "hooked" to your fleets. Each ship can "carry" one army unit with the exception of battleships, which can carry two. That way invasion is part of the orbital bombardment (in a way). Ground combat needs much more depth as well with three components; you must occupy space, air and land to conquer a planet. earning your army must have some form of air units to counter enemy air units. You can conquer without air units but that risks your land armies taking heavy losses and potentially losing the war. Warscore would be calculated on different things; how many of the enemy army you destroyed, did you conquer the planet or just invade with space and air units (and destroying the enemy armies and infrastructure but not taking the planet). This could offer post-war bonuses. Occupying a planet could lead to faster/more rebellions/unhappy pops after the war ends on a conquered planet while just destroying the enemy armies for less warscore could lead to less rebellions and less happiness loss compared to outright occupying. I donno, this all could end up feeling tedious though. I don't know. I don't think the game would be better off with just space combat and no army component at all though.
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Aug 11, 2017 16:20
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I still say that removing armies entirely is a dumb move. Stellaris isn't a game about spaceships it's a game about space empires, and nearly every space empire has an iconic space army. The problems from ground combat come from the fact it's a pain in the arse to move troops around, and combat is always over very quickly because either you're crushed by the defenders or you crush them. If someone invades a world who sits there and thinks: "oh poo poo, time to move my armies over there and prevent a successful invasion"? No one, because combat is over before you could even move your armies there. After the invasion starts there's no reason to keep your fleet in orbit. Think about that for a moment, you have devastatingly powerful fleet in orbit capable of bombarding the enemy and keeping supply lines open in space. Yet mechanically as soon as you click "land" it makes no different. If armies are removed from the game I think the game will genuinely lose out, much better to make a planetary invasion a longer process that involves effort to win, rather than click button and win or park ships in orbit waiting for random chance to roll a dice i like.
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Aug 11, 2017 16:33
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Kitchner posted:If armies are removed from the game I think the game will genuinely lose out, much better to make a planetary invasion a longer process that involves effort to win, rather than click button and win or park ships in orbit waiting for random chance to roll a dice i like. This sounds insanely bad later when a war involves dozens of planets. Simple low micro abstractions and dice rolls are fine
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Aug 11, 2017 16:36
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Nuclearmonkee posted:This sounds insanely bad later when a war involves dozens of planets. Simple low micro abstractions and dice rolls are fine Not if you reduce the number of habitable planets in the galaxy, which is what's happening. Abstract dice rolls to represent your awesome space army would work, but would be boring and dull. You might as well do the same for everything.
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Aug 11, 2017 16:42
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Guilliman posted:Armies should be "hooked" to your fleets. Each ship can "carry" one army unit with the exception of battleships, which can carry two. That way invasion is part of the orbital bombardment (in a way).  I was going to post this exactly this. Troop
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Aug 11, 2017 16:43
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GunnerJ posted:The distinction between knocking out all the defenses of a planet and actually capturing it can matter so I don't have a problem with there being a separate "capture" phase, it's the micromanagement of it I mind. If I didn't have to shuffle around transport fleets I'd have 0 problems with the system as it stands. It can matter, but with the way combat is currently, it doesn't. The first thing you do is destroy the enemy fleet, and the second thing you do is destroy their shipyards, and then you do a bunch of stuff that doesn't really matter because the result of the war was decided as soon as you completed step 2. Everything else is just farming up warscore, because you only got 9% for obliterating everything except a few corvettes and some stray unarmed ships. Really, it was probably a bad idea from the beginning to base ship construction and planetary defenses entirely in a destructible, expensive spaceport that takes an entire year to build and another entire year to gain the ability to build anything bigger than a corvette. Basically the entire war usefulness of a planet is contained in the spaceport, and once it's gone the planet itself is completely harmless and will remain that way for a fair period of time. Once all your opponent's spaceports are gone (which is easy by midgame, because their armament doesn't upgrade), you've basically entirely removed their ability to wage war. After that, having to do anything else is mostly just pointlessly drawing it out. Or, in other words, ground combat can't be fixed until the overall space combat design is fixed. Even if they tinker around with armies and assaults, the core problem is that you've already knocked the enemy out of the war by the time transports even enter the picture, so your invasions don't have any meaningful effect - you're just forced to do them because it's the only way to score points.
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Aug 11, 2017 16:46
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Yeah I don't understand wanting to manage armies. There is no gameplay there, no payoff for babysitting a second set of ships that have to follow your combat ships to enemy planets. You don't have "sappers" in EU4 which are the only troops that can take forts but can't attach to regular armies if you did it would loving suck. I understand that comparisons to EU4 are highly illegal but given that the armies in that game can both fight and conquer, it would be cool if the fleets in this game had such technology in the future.
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Aug 11, 2017 16:48
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just put guns on the transports geez in fact just make "armed transport" an corvette hull option
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Aug 11, 2017 16:49
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Main Paineframe posted:It can matter, but with the way combat is currently, it doesn't. The first thing you do is destroy the enemy fleet, and the second thing you do is destroy their shipyards, and then you do a bunch of stuff that doesn't really matter because the result of the war was decided as soon as you completed step 2. Everything else is just farming up warscore, because you only got 9% for obliterating everything except a few corvettes and some stray unarmed ships. I'd suggest that the significance needs to be diplomatic and logistic. Actually capturing a planet denies the enemy any use of it and maybe turns its resources towards your use, improves warscore massively/allows it to tick, improves your position relative to anyone else at war with the same empire, gives you opportunities to mess with hist on the planet in cool ways, etc. That would make a capture phase worthwhile. But nothing makes the transport fleet system anything but an annoying mess imo.
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Aug 11, 2017 16:51
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I just want to be able to raze all of their buildings with my shock troopers if we're going to keep trooping as a thing. Loot their entire planet and burn the infrastructure to the ground.
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Aug 11, 2017 16:52
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Nuclearmonkee posted:I just want to be able to raze all of their buildings with my shock troopers if we're going to keep trooping as a thing. Loot their entire planet and burn the infrastructure to the ground. An idea for a mod I'd been considering for a while makes an event pop up when you capture a planet that allows different courses of action roughly analogous to varying degrees of looting, good treatment, razing, etc. of cities in Total War games. They all have profound diplomatic repercussions though.
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Aug 11, 2017 16:56
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It'd be cool if they could abstract ground combat to make it a really long term affair without clear battle lines. You'd have multiple partisans after the war and you could embed strike troops and special forces to mess with a planet without committing to a full invasion. This could make some troops types like the xeno army a terror weapon rather than an army.
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Aug 11, 2017 16:58
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GunnerJ posted:An idea for a mod I'd been considering for a while makes an event pop up when you capture a planet that allows different courses of action roughly analogous to varying degrees of looting, good treatment, razing, etc. of cities in Total War games. They all have profound diplomatic repercussions though. I like it. It would add something meaningful to ground combat without needing a dozen or so extra clicks and above all makes sense. I mean if an alien species took over Earth tomorrow we wouldn't all just take unpaid leave and otherwise carry on life as normal, something would happen.
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Aug 11, 2017 17:02
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It's pretty easy to keep armies - make them modules that your ships carry and then you click the "invade" button while in orbit and the space marines or alien hordes whatever begin to attack at that point. That way you can still see army combat with all its details but you don't have to micro a second stack that is not combat capable and serves no purpose other than to gate the ground attack portion of the invasion.
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Aug 11, 2017 17:02
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Ham Sandwiches posted:It's pretty easy to keep armies - make them modules that your ships carry and then you click the "invade" button while in orbit and the space marines or alien hordes whatever begin to attack at that point. That way you can still see army combat with all its details but you don't have to micro a second stack that is not combat capable and serves no purpose other than to gate the ground attack portion of the invasion. Something like this is what I would like to see happen.
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Aug 11, 2017 17:09
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Occupation Policy o Non disruptive occupation o Limited Looting X EYY BOYS LETS LOAD THIS BABY GRAND BACK INTO THE SHIP
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Aug 11, 2017 17:09
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Armies and related combat are by far the most tedious and unfun part of the game. As mentioned by several people here, the war is already won once you annihilate the enemy fleet and shipyards. After that, it's just going planet by planet and clicking land -> waiting to heal -> depart to next planet and repeat. Having each army unit be its own individual entity is the largest problem. Having to equip each individual army with addons is The Dumbest thing as it's currently implemented. If armies were similar to ships, then it'd be infinitely better and more could be done with them: - Instead of a stack of x armies, each separate force that you wanted would be one Object - That one Object could (should) have a General attached to it - That one Object should have a window similar to ship build where you can assign gear to the entire army - That one Object should have a window while on a planet to Add Additional Troops (of whatever kind is on the planet) that increases that Object's power respectively - On the map, the Object would still be represented by a group of Transport Ships- however you couldn't split them up - There should be a function similar to Federation Fleets to build dedicated escorts that fly with a given army Object (in theory this means that your primary fleet could just be a fleet wrapped around your army, but then it'd be stuck with your army the entire time until you split it off) This way, at least you could grow and adapt armies over time via one Object rather than dealing with tens/hundreds of individual armies and having to split them appropriately to invade planets etc. Just reduces the tedium of dealing with invasions, as it currently is loving garbage. Hell, you could eventually make each of these army objects have some sort of faction influence within your empire if they get large enough (!)
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Aug 11, 2017 17:47
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Nuclearmonkee posted:Occupation Policy Rename option 3 colonial britain.
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Aug 11, 2017 17:53
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imweasel09 posted:Rename option 3 colonial britain. Those museums won't fill themselves!
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Aug 11, 2017 18:08
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Letting you integrate transports into fleets and a fleet manager to let you design and refill fleets would basically solve all the army problems, because your defense reduction and your invasion is in the same place and you don't have to micro all your shipyards and army production.
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Aug 11, 2017 18:08
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DatonKallandor posted:Letting you integrate transports into fleets and a fleet manager to let you design and refill fleets would basically solve all the army problems, because your defense reduction and your invasion is in the same place and you don't have to micro all your shipyards and army production. What we need more than anything is some kind of production management system, because going around and queuing up 10 battleships and armies on all my core planets is boring as poo poo and my naval capacity advances faster than my fleet once things get going. It's like there's two squabbling programming philosophies at work in this game, because they obviously want to make you delegate with the existence of Sectors and core planet limits, but they also want to make you do all the military stuff yourself. Why the gently caress would I want to attach a clone commando unit to every single army?
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Aug 11, 2017 18:16
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All IŽd actually need for happiness would be some sort of abstraction of combat entirely, like HOI3 and 4, where you no longer assign single units but squadrons and armies to fronts with their respective command structure and the AI fights the fight, depending on your supply, combat doctrine and technology. That could be fun. It could also suck on an entirely new level :/
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Aug 11, 2017 18:31
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If it's possible with the way the game is coded, I think a good solution would be this: Remove individual "assault army" recruitment, replace it with Transport construction. Each transport has one section with troop slot and attachment slot. Perhaps you could include advanced modules for Titanic Life, or maybe additional attachments. Transports are actual ships that can be merged with the regular fleet, and can be armed. The assault armies still exist, they just spawn in the planet seige screen as normal. Transport ships, and the attached fleet, remain locked in orbit until the battle is done, at which point you can turn things over to an abstracted garrison. If possible, allow ant ships still in orbit to be split off into a separate fleet so they can move on. Keep the concept if defensive armies, but keep it a slider or maintenance-esque feature. E.g. planets will auto-build the correct number of armies based on their planet size and funding level. Finally, dramatically reduce the bonuses/maluses associated with planetary fortification, and allow planets to surrender to a seige a la EU/CK seiges.
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Aug 11, 2017 18:34
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I think ground combat should deff be in, it's an important part of a ton of sci fi. It should also be fun. Also xeno hordes as terror weapons that count as atrocities for the stop doing atrocities war goal is cool to me. I agree that the ability to wage war is based totally on spaceports and it's completely impossible to send new troops to reverse an invasion or cement your success. Maybe some ways to turn this around would be to make recruitment and transports significantly faster, and letting planets themselves build smallish ships? If ground armies were much more of a rapid response thing, you have the potential to make decisions like sniping someone's spaceport-less planet, but also adding in other things like ground based buildings to try and prevent it. Maybe you don't want to build spaceports on every drat planet but you're willing to sacrifice a tile or two to harden the target? If stellaris moved away from a spaceport centric design you could also have things like weapons arrays that shoot space ships and stuff like that. On the one hand people would be more likely to build ports on small planets to insure they're somewhat protected (and not waste tiles on it), but on the other hand you could have a port and space defence tiles on a big planet and make it a tough nut to crack. So maybe a planet has some defense tiles. You could send armies by themselves and take attrition until they land, or you could blow up the tiles with bombardment and then land your guys. Would wars be too hard to manage? I dunno.
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Aug 11, 2017 18:52
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Omniblivion posted:After that, it's just going planet by planet and clicking land -> waiting to heal -> depart to next planet and repeat. They'll heal as they fly to the next planet, no need to wait it out on the ground.
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Aug 11, 2017 18:58
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I think part of the problem is that in Stellaris, there's really no mechanism to get back in the fight after an early setback. Once your fleet is gone, your spaceports are defenseless, without spaceports you can't build a new fleet, spaceports take so long to build that it's functionally impossible to come back from it within war timespans, and there's no alternate way to get some ships out there. Most other Paradox mapgames have mechanics that let you circumvent build-time limitations in exchange for hefty risks or costs, so that even if you take heavy losses in the first battle, you can still get some makeshift replacements out there without having to deal with normal build times. I realize that this isn't any other Paradox mapgame, but come on - it takes a whole year to build a spaceport, another whole year to upgrade it enough to build destroyers, and a month or two to build each destroyer. That's fine when you're first building up, but it's utterly useless when a whole fleet of enemy cruisers are marauding through your space blowing up your spaceports and essentially guarantees that the war is over after the first decisive battle. Of course, players are rarely on the receiving end of this, since the AI doesn't really bother with spaceports and will happily sit around blockading one planet for the several years it takes a player to rebuild a midgame-size fleet. When a player wins the fleet battle, though, the loser will quickly be reduced to a passing punching bag unable to do anything more than just watch their economy be slowly dismantled.
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Aug 11, 2017 19:10
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Main Paineframe posted:I think part of the problem is that in Stellaris, there's really no mechanism to get back in the fight after an early setback. Once your fleet is gone, your spaceports are defenseless, without spaceports you can't build a new fleet, spaceports take so long to build that it's functionally impossible to come back from it within war timespans, and there's no alternate way to get some ships out there. To me, the obvious solution to this is to limit fleet size in some way, so that you don't end up with one giant deathball per empire. Once it's gone, it's gone. If instead, you were only able to engage a portion of the enemy strength at once, it would give both sides more of a chance to maneuver and recover.
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Aug 11, 2017 19:35
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LogisticEarth posted:To me, the obvious solution to this is to limit fleet size in some way, so that you don't end up with one giant deathball per empire. Once it's gone, it's gone. If instead, you were only able to engage a portion of the enemy strength at once, it would give both sides more of a chance to maneuver and recover. Limiting fleet size won't actually stop this unless you also limit how many ships can be in a single star system. The deathball is still basically just as effective it's just harder to manage.
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Aug 11, 2017 19:43
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Bold Robot posted:It's not gonna happen but I would love to see ground combat taken out of the game entirely. You nailed it - if you get to the point of landing troops, there's almost no question that you are eventually going to take the planet. The whole system, from building the armies to moving them around to attacking, is pure tedium. It's probably the most micro-intensive part of the game, other than maybe pop management, but at least that gets you something. I would love to see things work more like EU4. You park your fleet in orbit, maybe you need to have some sort of ground assault module, a bar ticks down based on offense vs. defense and whatever other factors, and then eventually you get the planet. If I had my ideal, I would make both ground and space combat take place in submaps and make them more like Sword of the Stars or similar games where you order your units round and try to bring guns to bear on target, the planetary assaults would involve one side commanding the fleet in orbit and the other side commanding the planetary defence forces. Instead of armies you can build garrison ships for the planet and battle takes place over the planet which launches its ships to defend, and can provide ground fire if a ground battery is under the ships on the battle map. All buildings on the tile grid are on the battle map and your objective is to defend the planetary capital and attacking ships can bombard buildings below them. Different buildings could have different effects on ships in orbit above them so you get some terrain and you could have things like minefields, orbital weapon platforms and anti-space ground weapons providing all sorts of different elements to the combat. Use the same ship models and rendering engine, but give control over the units individually. This wouldn't work for multiplayer though obviously, too slow. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 19:48 on Aug 11, 2017 |
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Aug 11, 2017 19:44
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I like the thing that the Star Trek mod does with space combat: make the ships very expensive but allow them to have numerous options and greater longevity with tech.
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Aug 11, 2017 19:46
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While we're redesigning combat, I want a tech that lets me martyr my planets for Unity bonuses rather than surrendering them, but you have to be fanatically faithful to use it.
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Aug 11, 2017 19:56
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Ham Sandwiches posted:It's pretty easy to keep armies - make them modules that your ships carry and then you click the "invade" button while in orbit and the space marines or alien hordes whatever begin to attack at that point. That way you can still see army combat with all its details but you don't have to micro a second stack that is not combat capable and serves no purpose other than to gate the ground attack portion of the invasion. GunnerJ posted:An idea for a mod I'd been considering for a while makes an event pop up when you capture a planet that allows different courses of action roughly analogous to varying degrees of looting, good treatment, razing, etc. of cities in Total War games. They all have profound diplomatic repercussions though. e: Maybe you can only build/refit ships with certain army types above the appropriate planets. Splicer fucked around with this message at 20:01 on Aug 11, 2017 |
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Aug 11, 2017 19:57
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Relevant Tangent posted:While we're redesigning combat, I want a tech that lets me martyr my planets for Unity bonuses rather than surrendering them, but you have to be fanatically faithful to use it. That would be pretty drat dope. gently caress you idiots! *turns planet into tomb world and gets three supremacy picks*
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Aug 11, 2017 20:03
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A problem with a lot of these proposals is that currently changing any ship's loadout requires updating to a completely new design.
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Aug 11, 2017 20:04
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GunnerJ posted:A problem with a lot of these proposals is that currently changing any ship's loadout requires updating to a completely new design.
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Aug 11, 2017 20:12
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wiegieman posted:Those museums won't fill themselves! Get a free cultural relic building for every homeworld you succesfully invade! Generates 5 unity.
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Aug 11, 2017 20:16
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