Stellaris Dev Diary #271 - Ready…? Fight!

[Calvax]

Except this is space combat, and a torpedo or missile detonating too close would only be a danger at point-blank range. In a game where "close range" might be 10,000 km, detonating too close should never be an issue.

You're right from a realism standpoint, but stellaris is basically all versions of classic science fiction rolled up into one. The fleet combat is less like the Expanse and more like that scene from Revenge of the Sith where spaceships in orbit were broadsiding each other with manually loaded guns.

Or at least it can be, given that it leaves a lot up to one's head canon.

 

[Ferrus Animus]

I agree. Traditions I think are fine, for now, but the effective number of ascension perks we have is actually more like 4, because we are specifically NOT making hard decisions. Species ascension and either hive/machine/arcology worlds are absolutely obligatory, Master Builders and Galactic Wonders are effectively the same. That's half of them right there. The current number isn't making us make hard decisions and use different perks, we're making no decisions and taking the exact same perks because some of them are just so obviously drastically better than others. I'm not sure whether adding more perk slots is a good solution, but the only alternative I can come up with is moving them (them being the auto-picks) over to tech only (no perk required) and tech really absolutely and definitively doesn't need that kind of buff.

I disagree with them being practically mandatory, but yes those do have heavy opportunity costs to forgo while others have a lesser one.
That does lead to an incentive to pick those and while that can be a minor blance concern, it is also a design and decision point one.

But yes, ascension, galactic wonders and one special world terraforming perk (for +10% or more production bonuses), means 3 perk slots and one tradition slot are more or less devoted to those. And master builders does make a difference in how fast you get megastructures online while they still can matter.

IMO more slots can be an option and after playing with them modded in, it does add much value to to more underpowered option (because I am not marking a hard choice. I can take a weaker perk now and without losing permanent access to a later more important one), so maybe a way to undo perks/traditions could help here.

Another aspect is a hard rebalancing that makes the choices actually hard, without makign them overwhelmingly limiting, which wont be easy either.

 

[Neilbert]

Battles are in vacuum so any shrapnel that is created by explosions will keep all momentum despite of travel distance. Should it be 10k km or 10M km. So we have to talk about distance-based chance to be hit by shrapnel created by any explosion. Then we come to the point where downed rockets can self-detonate and 'distribute' shrapnel around. Imagine the possibilities for friendly fire and tactical opportunities!

Or, if damaging factor of missiles isn't a shrapnel but rather explosion delivered to ship's interiors (e.g. HEAT ammo) then minimal arming distance don't make any sense.

Anyway, I wonder why whole codebreaking/espionage stuff still has nothing to do with all guided and smart weapons and stuff.

Well, given how big space is and how long it takes for objects to travel, you'd have to have something explode pretty close to a target to reliably hit something with shrapnel, and since the bits of shrapnel travel on divergent vectors, the further from the explosion they travel, the bigger the distance between each bit of shrapnel and the more likely a potential target will find itself in the empty space between shrapnel rather than being hit by it. 1 km away, probably an excellent chance for shrapnel to hit. 10km away, a bit unlikely, but still possible, 100km away, probably not. The thing is, even the smallest starships like corvettes or even transports seem have enough armor and shielding to tank bits of shrapnel (at least I figure if they can tank a direct hit from a nuclear missile and only suffer moderate damage, a bit of shrapnel doesn't seem too likely to hurt them more than a little, and the best shrapnel using weapon, flak artillery, only does about 2-6 damage to starships, and only does 25% versus armor). However, small fragile ships like strike craft are vulnerable to shrapnel, which is why the main point defense weapon used against fighters is the flak cannon, which fires exploding shells to destroy fragile strike craft with shrapnel.

Indeed. In atmosphere, nukes largely damage targets through shock waves and heat convection through the air. In space, nukes, antimatter warheads, and quantum warheads need to score a hit on a ship to be able to effectively damage them, since the air needed for shockwaves and heat convection isn't present, and transfer of heat by heat radiation is rather inefficient, but once you hit the ship itself, the heat of the explosion gets convected through the hull of the ship. Once a ship soaks up heat from a missile explosion, it's in trouble since getting rid of the heat is a problem, since there is no medium to expel the heat through convection, so it must be slowly radiated off - all while the ship is also generating heat with its engines, weapons, shields, and other powered systems.

That is an excellent question. They do effect tracking and evasion a bit from the tradition tree, but they otherwise don't, though I agree they probably should at least a bit, with encryption boosting evasion (electronic countermeasures) and codebreaking boosting tracking (electronic counter-countermeasures). Mostly, it would allow an empire with higher codebreaking bonuses to better hit ships of empires with low encryption and worse chances to hit for low codebreaking empires attempting to hit ships of empires with high encryption, if it were utilized. I fully support this, as it would give players more reason to take codebreaking and encryption techs, which mostly get ignored in the current meta.

Anyhow, off to play some Stellaris now and enjoy the beta. Other than doubting SOME of the combat changes (I do like the launchers being made into G slot weapons, and I like the more effective point defense weapons), all of the non-combat changes in the beta are top notch, with the new political tradition tree and ascension tradition trees looking very interesting, and I love what they've done with the ringworld origin. Honestly, the worst I can say is maybe the cybernetic tradition tree needs a slight bit of tweaking (maybe), and everything else is great!

 

[Neilbert]

You're right from a realism standpoint, but stellaris is basically all versions of classic science fiction rolled up into one. The fleet combat is less like the Expanse and more like that scene from Revenge of the Sith where spaceships in orbit were broadsiding each other with manually loaded guns.

Or at least it can be, given that it leaves a lot up to one's head canon.

Good point, though Stellaris does give the impression that ships are firing at each other over vast distances, but on the other hand, ships in Stellaris are shown to be the size of planets, so scale is a bit wonky, TBH.

 

[HFY]

Good point, though Stellaris does give the impression that ships are firing at each other over vast distances, but on the other hand, ships in Stellaris are shown to be the size of planets, so scale is a bit wonky, TBH.

Stellaris combat must take place over a short enough distance that lasers are "instantaneous".

1 light second is a reasonable upper bound for maximum instant weapon range (250 base, then modified various +% range effects).

 

[Neilbert]

Stellaris combat must take place over a short enough distance that lasers are "instantaneous".

1 light second is a reasonable upper bound for maximum instant weapon range (250 base, then modified various +% range effects).

That is all true, but remember that one light second is 299,792 km, which is more than 78% of the way to the moon (384,400 km).

Also keep in mind that rate of fire for Stellaris weapons is measured in days, with a RoF of 1 being one shot per day, so what looks like instant in the game might be a distance of light minutes (17,987,548 km, about one third of the distance to the orbit of Venus from Earth) or even light hours (1,079,000,000 km, past the orbit of Jupiter from Earth and almost to the orbit of Saturn). What looks like a shot that travels from near the orbit of one planet to the orbit of another planet in the game could actually cover that distance.

 

[HFY]

That is all true, but remember that one light second is 299,792 km, which is more than 78% of the way to the moon (384,400 km).

Yeah, it's not a walkable distance.

I'm just saying there is a reasonable upper bound on what distance the arbitrary Stellaris units might use, and it's not that big.

Also keep in mind that rate of fire for Stellaris weapons is measured in days, with a RoF of 1 being one shot per day, so what looks like instant in the game might be a distance of light minutes (17,987,548 km, about one third of the distance to the orbit of Venus from Earth) or even light hours (1,079,000,000 km, past the orbit of Jupiter from Earth and almost to the orbit of Saturn). What looks like a shot that travels from near the orbit of one planet to the orbit of another planet in the game could actually cover that distance.

Mmm, don't agree about that. We see the beams appear end-to-end and all at once, not growing towards the target over the course of a game day. Instant means less than what a person can perceive, which is on the order of 40 ms.

Remember, it's not just instant to us, it's described as instant in-universe too -- the simulated UNE humans see the lasers & particle beams working at "normal" speed.

 

[Shirasik]

Once a ship soaks up heat from a missile explosion, it's in trouble since getting rid of the heat is a problem, since there is no medium to expel the heat through convection, so it must be slowly radiated off - all while the ship is also generating heat with its engines, weapons, shields, and other powered systems.

Digging into this, we easily coming to overheat damage mechanics that works like DoT and can be mitigated better using excess of ship's power. Or whole new heat dissipation components.

That is an excellent question. They do effect tracking and evasion a bit from the tradition tree, but they otherwise don't, though I agree they probably should at least a bit, with encryption boosting evasion (electronic countermeasures) and codebreaking boosting tracking (electronic counter-countermeasures). Mostly, it would allow an empire with higher codebreaking bonuses to better hit ships of empires with low encryption and worse chances to hit for low codebreaking empires attempting to hit ships of empires with high encryption, if it were utilized. I fully support this, as it would give players more reason to take codebreaking and encryption techs, which mostly get ignored in the current meta.

Looking at starbase's comms jammer, codebreaking/encryption ratio shall affect movement speed and chance to disengage too.

 

[Kitschy]

It's a bit strange that plasma weapons didn't become anti-armor brawling weapons and Reactor Booster didn't get any love.

 

[Carolus Judart]

Si vous modifiez les combats, vous pouvez aussi toucher aux interfaces de gestions de flottes ?
If you modify the fights, can you also touch the fleet management interfaces?

 

[Dr_Gentech]

Am I crazy or is it time for another Dev diary?

 

[HFY]

Am I crazy or is it time for another Dev diary?

Yes.

 

[Dr_Gentech]

Yes.

I knew it

 

[aadf97799c]

not sure what is the point of new tradition tree
shouldn't all the galactic community buff be in the diplomacy tree
limit diplomacy to just federation buff never made much sense

 

[Neilbert]

It's a bit strange that plasma weapons didn't become anti-armor brawling weapons and Reactor Booster didn't get any love.

I totally agree, since by the way plasma weapons in most science fiction franchises I've seen them appear in tend to be powerful but short ranged weapons that dissipate much faster than other energy weapons, due to being high energy plasma bolts contained within magnetic fields that weaken the further they travel from the weapon that fired them. The fact that large plasma weapons not only aren't anti-armor brawling weapons but actually have MINIMUM ranges is nothing short of baffling.

 

[Neilbert]

Yeah, it's not a walkable distance.

I'm just saying there is a reasonable upper bound on what distance the arbitrary Stellaris units might use, and it's not that big.



Mmm, don't agree about that. We see the beams appear end-to-end and all at once, not growing towards the target over the course of a game day. Instant means less than what a person can perceive, which is on the order of 40 ms.

Remember, it's not just instant to us, it's described as instant in-universe too -- the simulated UNE humans see the lasers & particle beams working at "normal" speed.

Even if we limit it to being 1/10th that range, that's still 30,000 km, which means that weapons like the perdition beam with a range of 250, assuming that 30,000 km = 300 range units, has a range of 25,000 km. That means that a large plasma cannon, which has a minimum range of 40, can't hit anything closer than 4,000 km, which is still ridiculous (even not considering that the majority of science fiction properties I've seen plasma weapons in have them being relatively powerful but short ranged weapons, and should be brawler weapons - which they practically were until their range was increased in 3.6). I'm sorry, but this doesn't make sense to me.

It all comes down to minimum range being a gimmick introduced to allow the low evasion frigates not to get blown up by battleships while still able to be hit by corvettes. Instead, we could just allow frigates to have high evasion to not get hit by bigger ships the old-fashioned way, and likewise allow high evasion corvettes to add some portion of their evasion to their tracking (simulating their high maneuverability giving them better firing positions and targeting solutions) to their weapons to allow them to be the counter to high evasion frigates, which is also a new gimmick, but one that makes more sense.

However, if reasonable explanations are given, I can be sold on the minimum range concept for certain weapon types. Perhaps artillery type weapons could justify this by defining them as self-guided shells that activate their guidance past a certain range, and perhaps energy artillery (which we don't have anymore - both ships with the brawler role and the artillery role no longer have anti-armor weapons designed for those roles like we have in the form of anti-shield brawler and artillery weapons like autocannons and kinetic artillery) that fires shells with laser warheads that detonate past a certain point. X class projectile weapons could likewise use guided shells, and X and titan class energy weapons could use exotic particles like mesons and tachyons to justify their ability to pass through targets harmlessly. However, I'm not sold on general purpose weapons like the mass driver series and especially plasma series weapons having minimum ranges.

 

[Neilbert]

Let's look at modern navies then. Battleships went obsolete towards the end of World War 2, and now the modern navies of the world mostly operate carriers, destroyers, and submarines. Some nations operate cruisers. But even before the modern world, nations have always needed a mixture of ship types from the late 1800s through WW2.

Destroyers were initially "torpedo boat destroyers" as in a ship designed to destroy torpedo boats. Torpedo boats were a very small and fast ship that was too difficult if not impossible for a battleship of the time to hit with its big guns. Then, destroyers started carrying around their own torpedoes to use against battleships, since they were still quite small and fast themselves, just bigger than torpedo boats.

Cruisers had the firepower and armor to effectively take on destroyers and were faster and more maneuverable than battleships, but were inferior to battleships in range, firepower, and protection.

Battleships were the longest ranged and most powerful threats on the battlefield, but the ships and their main turrets turned too slowly to track targets at close ranges which is why escorts were needed. Once carriers came along and airplane technology evolved to the point of being more effective at taking out ships compared to other ships, battleships lost their niche as the longest range most powerful attacking ship, and became obsolete. Destroyers stayed useful as escorts though, as carriers still need protection.

Then guided missile technology came along and made naval artillery mostly obsolete. Guided missiles gave smaller ships the ability to carry the same firepower and range as bigger ships. Due to economics, it's better to have a bunch of cheaper and smaller launch platforms than fewer and more expensive ones(cruisers).

There was basically a five-way Rock-Paper-Scissors in real life that made mixed navies viable and necessary. Torpedo Boat/Submarine< Destroyer < Cruiser < Battleship < Torpedo Boat/Destroyer/Submarine. All of those types of ships were continually built and upgraded over the years. There were battleships and destroyers built in 1890 and battleships and destroyers built in 1945, but there were continuous advancements in tech in both ship types.

Carriers and long range missiles disrupted that pattern because planes could effectively engage all types of targets. It basically split surface combat into "carriers sink enemy surface vessels with planes, and destroyers protect the carriers from missiles and torpedoes and also shoot their own anti-ship missiles at enemy ships.

Submarines IRL have a role that doesn't exist in Stellaris which is that of a stealth ship. They are still useful today because they can sneak up on valuable enemy targets like carriers, evade their screens, and take out those valuable targets. Attack submarines are also necessary because they are one of the most effective ways to track and engage strategic ballistic missile submarines, which don't really play a role in normal navy combat.

IRL, bigger does not always mean better. Space fantasy game mechanics don't necessarily have to work the same way, but I think the Stellaris devs are trying to model the combat in-game on IRL naval warfare from the early 20th century. If that is the case, then it makes sense for every ship type to have a valuable role.

I agree to a point, but historically, navies always tended to have bigger ships being the backbones of their fleets with smaller ships supporting them, except for short periods of time when new weapons were introduced that allowed smaller ships to take on bigger, obsolete ships with their better technology, at which point the new technology got put into bigger and bigger ships using the new technology, with the largest ships again being the point of the spear and smaller ships performing supporting roles.

During the age of sail, the ships of the line were made to be as big as possible in order to carry as many of the largest guns that they could, with some concessions being made for speed and maneuverability and of course the structural limitations of building ships out of wood. Smaller ships were still used, but in the end winning the battle usually consisted of putting more, larger holes into an enemy ship in a shorter time than it could do to your ship. Flukes happened like lucky shots allowing smaller ships to defeat larger ships, or clever maneuvering to allow a group of inferior ships to beat a fleet of superior ships by "crossing the T", but usually bigger ships with more guns and bigger guns won the day.

When ironclads were introduced, armor and later explosive shells allowed smaller ships using the new technologies to take on larger wooden vessels and beat them reliably. However, soon larger and larger ironclads were built until once again the largest ships with the biggest guns and thickest armor ruled the seas in the form of the battleships. Destroyers and submarines threatened this supremacy with torpedoes, but the invention of armor bulges relegated destroyers to support roles along with cruisers and submarines mostly to commerce raiding. Smaller ships could get lucky and destroy a battleship, but usually any smaller ship would just get blown out of the water by a battleship (which usually had smaller guns to hit smaller ships in addition to their big guns, and even the big guns could sometimes hit smaller ships with spectacular results). The battle of the Bismark is a good illustration of this (and leads into the next paragraph, as it was finally sunk by British naval aircraft).

What finally overthrew the supremacy of battleships was the use of aircraft by aircraft carriers during WW2. At first, aircraft carriers were smaller than battleships, but their aircraft allowed them to defeat battleships and other ships at long range, rendering battleships obsolete like the wooden sailing ships before them. However, aircraft carriers grew bigger and bigger to carry larger, longer range, and more capable aircraft to the point where aircraft carriers are the biggest and best ships in the current era. Submarines, destroyers, cruisers, and battleships could sink one if they got close enough and got lucky, but usually they couldn't get anywhere close before the carrier's planes or escorts sunk them. Eventually, I suppose some other weapon system will make aircraft carriers obsolete with some smaller ship having that weapon, but then whatever that new type of ship with the new weapon type will eventually grow in size to be the biggest ship around once again, with smaller ships to support it.

The trend of navies thus always followed the trend of the most advanced and most effective weapon system being put on the biggest ship possible to allow it to be the biggest version and/or have most numerous instances of the weapon system possible to be onboard, with smaller ships escorting ships of this type to perform useful supporting roles, but always it's the big ship with the "big guns" (or planes) that does the heavy lifting for the fleet.

Instead of trying to undermine battleships in Stellaris, which seems to be the case as they are being nerfed in multiple ways - there now isn't even a good anti-armor artillery weapon anymore (sure, neutron launchers were outrageous, and moving them to frigates and cruisers is interesting, but battleships should have some sort of armor penetrating counter-part to kinetic artillery, maybe doing about half the damage as neutron launchers did and about equivalent to kinetic artillery), what they should be doing instead is making smaller ships be better at being support ships to the larger ships. When destroyers are researched, have corvettes have good supporting roles to aid destroyers in defending against frigates. When cruisers come along, have destroyer be effective anti-missile and anti-strike craft platforms. When Battleships come along, let all the other ships be the best support ships they can be, and by all means let frigates support their battleships in destroying enemy battleships. However, the tip of the spear should be the biggest and best ships. When one age of sails naval power built large ships-of-the-line, their opponents always made their own ships-of-the-line to counter them, not vast fleets of smaller sailing vessels. When the British built their big battleship fleet in the early 1900s before WW1, the Germans built their own battleship fleet to counter them, not a large fleet of cruisers or destroyers. When the Japanese carriers destroyed the Pacific battleship fleets of the British and Americans, they didn't build more battleships to fight the Japanese carriers, they built carriers themselves, and bigger and bigger ones as the war went on. History proves bigger ships are better fighting ships, but it also proves that smaller ships are also important because the best overall fighting ships aren't the best at every type of fighting or noncombat roles. Having support ships for support roles like screening, anti-aircraft, anti-submarine, and logistics (there's an idea) is very important and indeed vital, but the big ships rightly rule the roost. Encouraging players to build smaller ships not as substitutes for battleships, but instead supplements to the battleships to let battleships do their job should be the goal. The player with the most battleships should beat the player with less battleships when both players have proper fleets with support ships, but any player with a pure battleship fleet with no support ships should lose against someone with a battleship fleet with support ships even if they do outnumber them, unless it's by a large amount.

 

[Neilbert]

I'm clearly in the minority here, but I'm still not convinced that making multiple ship types viable in the late game is a worthwhile goal. As I see it, larger ship types are more advanced technologies than earlier ship types, so it's only reasonable that the former would make the latter obsolete. After all, no one's arguing that red lasers need to be competitive with gamma lasers.

I mostly agree. Historically, any navy that could build the biggest, most advanced ships did. Naval powers that could build ships-of-the-line built as many of those as they could during the age of sail, naval powers that could build battleships built as many of those as they could during the late 1800s and early 1900s, and naval powers from the time of WW2 to the current era build as many aircraft carriers as they can support, if they wish to be a global naval power. Building battleships late game should be the key to victory, though that being said, I'd be totally fine with needing smaller ships be required for support roles, since IRL ships-of-the-line were often accompanied by smaller ships, battleships usually had escort fleets of cruisers and destroyers, and even modern day carriers have destroyers and cruisers escorting them. Having corvettes, frigates, destroyers, and cruisers being important support ships seems like an acceptable idea, but battleships should be the core and workhorse of any Stellaris fleet, and any fleet without them should be in trouble unless they outnumber the battleships by a good margin.

Unfortunately, it appears that battleships are being given the "ringworld origin treatment" and likely will end up nerfed into oblivion for a couple years until they get around to (hopefully) correcting their mistake of over-correction and actually, the current system isn't too bad. If anything, more and more I think I'd just multiply the damage of torpedoes by a certain amount (and just let them do the same damage to every ship type) and nerf neutron launchers (leaving them as L slot weapons) by doubling their RoF and halving their damage so they would be roughly equivalent to kinetic artillery and call it a day (moving launchers to be G slot weapons is sort of cool, but now there is no anti-armor artillery weapon, which is bad). I pretty much LOVE all the non-combat changes in 3.6, but the changes to the combat system increasingly looks like it'll be bad, all centered around gimmicky low evasion frigates allowed to function because of the gimmicky minimum range mechanic to fire gimmicky torpedoes which somehow can do serious damage to battleships while not being able to destroy corvettes or destroyers outright, likely to protect frigates from destroying each other in another gimmicky fashion (if a weapon can do serious damage to a battleship, if it hit a corvette, frigate, or destroyer, it should be vaporized - how does that even work?). Evasion is a thing that is a thing that exists, and using it would avoid all these verisimilitude violating, emersion breaking changes like weapons not being able to hit other ships closer then 4000 km away and variable damage torpedoes by just letting frigates avoid damage the tried and true way of avoiding damage by dodging shots of weapons that would blow them up. If they want torpedo bombers that do torpedo runs, just make a second type of strike craft called a torpedo bomber.

 

[Neilbert]

Is there a reason why large lasers have no minimum range, but large mass drivers do?

Yes. It's a game mechanic gimmick to allow frigates not to get blown up by battleships so easily because frigates have low evasion. It doesn't make any sense, but there you go.

Edit: I could buy it for specifically long range weapons like artillery weaponry like kinetic artillery, x slot weapons and titan-class weapons, using the logic that self-guided shells that only activate past a certain range with kinetic weapons, and exotic particles that pass through objects at closer ranges for energy long ranged weapons. More general purpose weapons like mass drivers, and even more so plasma weapons (which should be the energy counter-part to autocannons and be brawler weapons, in my opinion) maybe could have slightly lower ranges but not have minimum ranges.

 

[Kitschy]

I totally agree, since by the way plasma weapons in most science fiction franchises I've seen them appear in tend to be powerful but short ranged weapons that dissipate much faster than other energy weapons, due to being high energy plasma bolts contained within magnetic fields that weaken the further they travel from the weapon that fired them. The fact that large plasma weapons not only aren't anti-armor brawling weapons but actually have MINIMUM ranges is nothing short of baffling.

My guess that devs are concerned that Disruptors will compete with Plasma weapons. If that's so I strongly disagree 'cause one can be short range penetrating weapon other can be short range anti-armor weapon, but mb I'm missing something.

Evasion is a thing that is a thing that exists, and using it would avoid all these verisimilitude violating, emersion breaking changes like weapons not being able to hit other ships closer then 4000 km away and variable damage torpedoes by just letting frigates avoid damage the tried and true way of avoiding damage by dodging shots of weapons that would blow them up. If they want torpedo bombers that do torpedo runs, just make a second type of strike craft called a torpedo bomber.

That's the thing, evasion vs tracking dichotomy didn't work out, introduction of minimum range is basically an admission of that. Devs either don't know how to fix evasion vs tracking or they thought that it would take unreasonable amount of time to fix it, so minimum range was introduced as a crutch for evasion vs tracking mechanics.

... (moving launchers to be G slot weapons is sort of cool, but now there is no anti-armor artillery weapon, which is bad) ...

Imo that could be an interesting balance decision, anti-armor and shield/armor penetrating weapons are mid to short range (preferably no minimum range) vs anti-shield and shield penetrating weapons that are long to mid range with minimum range.