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I would tie fleet size and number of fleets to planets and pop. Each planet can support a fleet, the size of that fleet is based on the pops of the planet. This would give advantages and disadvantages to playing tall vs wide. The taller your planets get the bigger your fleets but the smaller amount of fleets you can field.
Armies that should not be tied to pops like clone armies and xenomorphs are already tied to pops, 2 armies for each pop, also that doesn't make much sense when you already got anchorages and tech.
That's a solid argument for missiles, but I'm not sure about strike craft. Adding all the life support, propulsion for a return trip, defensive countermeasures (pilots are expensive, and you want to get them back if at all possible), it all adds up. I'm not sure the pilot offers enough of a benefit to be worth the downsides, especially when you consider how smart a missile computer these futuristic civs could build. (Hmm... sapient missile components? Sapient strike craft?) A missile may be slightly less "smart", but all else being equal it will be smaller, faster, more maneuverable, and have more payload.
Where I would see strike craft being most useful, personally, would be at extreme short range, where the ability to project multiple points of attack is valuable. If your enemy is close enough to slip strike craft behind or inside their formation, that disruption could be extremely effective.
On the topic of strikecraft, logically they only really have small uses in planetary skirmishes and invasions as well as minor fleet battles were a squadron of missile carrying fighters should have the firepower to thousand cut smaller ships. It's a bit of a sci fi trope with real life influences, your big standard fighter on it's own isn't killing a Corvette let alone a Frigate/Destroyer.
What it can do is harm auxiliary systems and in larger numbers harm additional auxiliary systems if they can't outright kill a ship with additional strike craft. Thus fighter/bombers are force multipliers. They are essentially smarter missiles capable of damaging or disabling the smallest ships in large numbers and changing their attack patterns to break off and target other ships.
Well at least that's the logic used in most sci fi where fighters are used in space.
Though this kinda ignores that Stellaris combat ranges are registered in light minutes or in the case of XL weapons fucking light hours. Those will have to be some fast fighters to be viable.
Strikecraft have a range of 10, which is like still 16 millions kilometers and more than 10% of an AU since 90 distance is an AU, and speed of 550 for scout wings, 600 for basic, 650 for improved, 700 for advanced, (amoeba have 500 and swarm 400) and corvettes have 160 as base.
Usually strike craft are used in Scifi where big ships can't safely go (in unrealistically dense asteroid fields, or within range of a super-duper starbase that could knock them out) but neither of those are an issue in Stellaris. And ships are rarely costly, or take long, to replace, even if super-starbases existed.
If we saw PDX adding anti-class guns (e.g. anti-corvette, anti-battleship) that can outrange most vessels of that class, it might make the case for missiles - or strike craft - much stronger, at least against certain hard targets. Ditto on longer build/repair times for large ships. In a way, ION cannons already act as a threat VS capital ships ... they are just so bad when you look at the number of targets / fire rate involved, that it is a non-factor.
You only outrange them with ion cannons because everyone got large slots with 120 range weapons and corvette got missiles with range 100 or 120 with the swarmer missile.
I think I would probably make my first priority redoing the numbers on the primary mode of combat in stellaris - the four main hull sizes fighting each other with S/M/L slot weapons - so that they are balanced against each other with a counter system.
Namely, playing with evasion and adding resistances so that an end game fleet has a reason to use multiple hull sizes.
This might look something like each hull size (corvette/destroyer/cruiser/Battleship) being matched to a weapon slot size (S/M/L/X) such that the evasion of the hull and the tracking of the weapon cancel. There would be large gap between these tiers - say, 20% - and evasion/tracking upgrades would be such that extra evasion from thruster upgrades would be cancelled by extra tracking from sensor upgrades.
I would then layer on top of this hull resistances against weapons "smaller" than it's paired size. So destroyers might have a little resistance to S guns, Cruisers might resist S and M, etc.
The entire point of this numeracy scheme is to set up the core dynamic that each hull is most effectively defeated by particular sizes of weapons. By adjusting what hull sizes can carry which types of guns, we can set up a wonderful dynamic where one might kit destroyers with S guns to take on corvettes, but M guns to take on other destroyers. Etc. I envision X weapons to just be a larger size of turret (like what juggernauts use) instead of spinal mounts. You can think of them as the "main battery" of a battleship, and primarily useful for taking on other battleships.
The entire thing is enforced by the effective time to kill a hull size with a given slot, and this can be tuned precisely to be dramatic or noticeable but minor, depending on how we want things to go. The less dramatic it is, the more you can sort of "do whatever," the more dramatic the difference, the more important counter building becomes.
My second priority would be to make G/P/H slots actually function as a part of this system too. G is how small ships could take on much bigger ones, H is how big ships can deal with much smaller ones. I might also change the underlying code so everything is just straight simulated with numbers - there is no needing to fly the fighters and turn them for attack runs etc, they just appear on the screen as a representation of what's actually going on.
My third priority would be shaking up the energy/kinetic, shields/armor, and the way we budget ships using reactor power, to really deepen the possibilities.
That just sucks the fun out of fighting players in a maneuver war, though maybe it will stop the AI from going full hannibal and running amok in my backyard like assholes.
But for the players sake I don't think fleet logistics is a good idea.
The thing is even if you have really nice technology, you're tasked to build 1 Corvette within 60 days, and a year to build a Battleship.
If those are one-off prototype custom units, you can be as delicate as you can with ridiculous accuracy. But a factory model will just be so accurate up to a certain degree. Using 0.5° is an arbitrary number chosen for the example. It shows you the order of magnitude that accuracy matters.
You are absolutely right here. Even if we up 1000 times the order of magnitude, it's still very unrealistic for Stellaris's distances.
I'd say this is the very reason why Strikecrafts are made obsolete, because the extra distance they offer are like 2x your regular weapons (if my memories serve). But in reality, you'd expect your Strikecrafts to be able to hit at least 100x your max gun range.
Strikecraft have a range of 10, which is like still 16 millions kilometers and more than 10% of an AU since 90 distance is an AU, and speed of 550 for scout wings, 600 for basic, 650 for improved, 700 for advanced, (amoeba have 500 and swarm 400) and corvettes have 160 as base.
So the best strikecraft have more than quadruple speed of corvettes, and 10(neutron and tachyon)-20(ion cannons and perdition beams) times less range than other ships, but they're very fast.
If my argument on accuracy is taken with face value, then your normal ranges of engagement would not exceed 1000km. Even if we add some magic accuracy on top, then it'd still be around 10000km.
Then we need to think when we talk about missiles, what kind are we actually referring to? Tomahawk and Harpoon? Homing Missiles typically shot from fighters? Or even stuff with ranges like Ballistic Missiles?
In Stellaris when SF isn't seriously thought out, we just assume the Missiles can track. It isn't wrong per se. But the thing is longer ranged missiles usually are built on the assumption to hit a resting target, while shorter ranged missiles are more capable to tracking heat signature.
But the biggest question is now... do you shoot missiles and wait for hours before it hits? Or do you shoot missiles when you're already in an engagement that simply missiles offer greater range and accuracy? Do you shoot one single cruising missile with a nuclear warhead and wait for 4 hours until it hits? Or do you shoot a volley of missiles and create an explosion screen as the alpha strike expected to deliver in 10 seconds?
Long ranged missiles are accurate because they follow the coordinates they are told. But once they arrive, it's already hours later. Your target may already have left.
Engagement used missiles are there giving you superior range and accuracy. But they are still powered by rockets. So they are themselves targets to be taken down by PD and flak guns. It will only ever be useful if you fire a whole volley of them as the alpha strike.
Stellaris missiles are strange creations. They work like fighter missiles because they don't work individually and you are firing them in a volley when you're already in an engagement. But the warhead it carries and the range are both of the ballistic missiles. So I don't know what to make of them.
Stellaris missiles (scourge included), torpedoes, and swarmer missiles have a retargeting range equal to their normal range, so they should have advanced enough computer to follow a moving ship. Also yes stellaris missiles are ballistic missiles, and the swarmer type of missile is the one you want to talk about:
These smaller missiles are launched in large volleys and have been specifically designed to saturate and overwhelm enemy point-defense systems through sheer numbers. Swarmer missiles carry a smaller payload and thus deal low damage, but have high survivability against point-defense.
They also do enough damage to do 3/4 of a nuclear missile alone or more than that when you upgrade them.
This cannot exist alone. Stellaris ranges are ridiculous. Flying from a few jumps takes a year or so. Returning home takes 4 years.
But the main issue is that each valid "step" in Stellaris is too big. One step is one star system and it takes 2 to 3 months to go 1 step. So there's really no room to make supply stations every X steps. Otherwise you'd just be flying in for 2 years, fight for 2 months and then fly back out for 2 years because you need supplies.
You mean it's the same distance for all type of stars? Or that they change it with very type of star?
Armies that should not be tied to pops like clone armies and xenomorphs are already tied to pops, 2 armies for each pop, also that doesn't make much sense when you already got anchorages and tech.
Strikecraft have a range of 10, which is like still 16 millions kilometers and more than 10% of an AU since 90 distance is an AU, and speed of 550 for scout wings, 600 for basic, 650 for improved, 700 for advanced, (amoeba have 500 and swarm 400) and corvettes have 160 as base.
You only outrange them with ion cannons because everyone got large slots with 120 range weapons and corvette got missiles with range 100 or 120 with the swarmer missile.
How many you need? 10? 20?
That sounds like taking away big guns.
That stops making sense when you get advanced reactors that create matter ex nihilo.
Yes plus advanced reactors make it pointless, just like with jump drives you can jump over hyperlanes.
Strikecraft have a range of 10, which is like still 16 millions kilometers and more than 10% of an AU since 90 distance is an AU, and speed of 550 for scout wings, 600 for basic, 650 for improved, 700 for advanced, (amoeba have 500 and swarm 400) and corvettes have 160 as base.
So the best strikecraft have more than quadruple speed of corvettes, and 10(neutron and tachyon)-20(ion cannons and perdition beams) times less range than other ships, but they're very fast.
Stellaris missiles (scourge included), torpedoes, and swarmer missiles have a retargeting range equal to their normal range, so they should have advanced enough computer to follow a moving ship. Also yes stellaris missiles are ballistic missiles, and the swarmer type of missile is the one you want to talk about:
These smaller missiles are launched in large volleys and have been specifically designed to saturate and overwhelm enemy point-defense systems through sheer numbers. Swarmer missiles carry a smaller payload and thus deal low damage, but have high survivability against point-defense.
They also do enough damage to do 3/4 of a nuclear missile alone or more than that when you upgrade them.
Yes plus with advanced reactor tech you're making energy ex nihilo so it would become useless as time passed.
Stellaris missiles are only Ballistic Missiles in name. They don't act like them.
You don't shoot and go drink tea to wait for the results. You shoot and watch it hit. It's more like homing missiles of air fighters.
If they're actually Ballistic Missiles, they should outrange strikecrafts by 100 times and regular weapons by 1000 or more times.
Stellaris ranges are actually just within a few hundreds of km, but only with graphics enlarged to look nice. And the missiles are just combat missiles instead of cruising or any longer range. Strikecrafts are unmanned drones with limited reception ranges.
That's why Dog Fights need to be a thing. Because at extreme distances, you aren't really shooting them with any plausible accuracy. And you don't have cruising missiles somehow.
Cruising Missiles should be shot at even longer ranges and you expect none to actually hit due to countermeasures when you have nothing else going on. But they can be shot at 5x engagement ranges. Then dog fights would be like 3x engagement ranges.
The 5x and 3x are compromises. You don't want a real-world tactic simulator.
Oh certainly not - just saying that "big guns" should really be used against "big targets" and not "small targets."
For example, under such a scheme, if one wanted to use a battleship to mete out punishment to smaller ships, it would pick the broadside sections full of S/M slots, and due to having resistance to those smaller weapons coming back the other way, it could fare well. You would build something closer to an artillery battleship or spinal mount battleship to deal with other battleships.
But, then, the clever enemy admiral would see you big targets and start equipping his corvettes with torpedoes, evening things out much more. Then you might bring in destroyers to put in a stop to that... etc.
I recognize that some people really prefer mono battleship fleets, but I think that wastes a lot of potential. If we all want monofleets, we should design the game around that then. I personally don't want that, though.
- Logistics. A wasted opportunity in a game like this that has actually complex production chains.
- Ground combat. Like seriously. Make it affect space combat, make planets being able to defend themselves from fleets. Also, where are my boarding actions?
- Crew experience having more of an effect in combat. Also, on a game so much focused around pops, soldiers affect too little our military power, I might say.
- Asymmetric warfare, guerrillas, and "hit and run" tactics. Make it so that a smaller force can beat bigger ones with a bit of effort. Everyone loves a "David VS Goliath" story
Stellaris missiles are only Ballistic Missiles in name. They don't act like them.
You don't shoot and go drink tea to wait for the results. You shoot and watch it hit. It's more like homing missiles of air fighters.
If they're actually Ballistic Missiles, they should outrange strikecrafts by 100 times and regular weapons by 1000 or more times.
Stellaris ranges are actually just within a few hundreds of km, but only with graphics enlarged to look nice. And the missiles are just combat missiles instead of cruising or any longer range. Strikecrafts are unmanned drones with limited reception ranges.
That's why Dog Fights need to be a thing. Because at extreme distances, you aren't really shooting them with any plausible accuracy. And you don't have cruising missiles somehow.
Cruising Missiles should be shot at even longer ranges and you expect none to actually hit due to countermeasures when you have nothing else going on. But they can be shot at 5x engagement ranges. Then dog fights would be like 3x engagement ranges.
The 5x and 3x are compromises. You don't want a real-world tactic simulator.
These manned strike craft are launched from a hangar or carrier mothership and rely on their speed, agility and small size to survive long enough to attack their targets. They are very effective against armor.
Cat fights are better than dog fights.
But shouldn't neutron torpedos and tachyon lances and every weapon that outrange missiles have more range? And what about ion cannons and perdition beams?
And if the dogfights happen that far, wouldn't they destroy all enemy strikecraft and missiles before attacking all the enemy ships?
The solution is to add fighters with battleship-grade tachyon lances like in R-Type and G-Darius:
Oh certainly not - just saying that "big guns" should really be used against "big targets" and not "small targets."
For example, under such a scheme, if one wanted to use a battleship to mete out punishment to smaller ships, it would pick the broadside sections full of S/M slots, and due to having resistance to those smaller weapons coming back the other way, it could fare well. You would build something closer to an artillery battleship or spinal mount battleship to deal with other battleships.
But, then, the clever enemy admiral would see you big targets and start equipping his corvettes with torpedoes, evening things out much more. Then you might bring in destroyers to put in a stop to that... etc.
I recognize that some people really prefer mono battleship fleets, but I think that wastes a lot of potential. If we all want monofleets, we should design the game around that then. I personally don't want that, though.
But neutron torpedos are L and they should work against small ship too since they are guided energy weapons, also stellaris used to have armor that gave % resistance but was taken away. Also you don't need destroyers if you want to stop torpedo corvettes, you just put some carrier battleships with strikecraft and point defense.
Also big fleets of battleships are good, but if you want to make smaller ships better you need to make them do this:
- Logistics. A wasted opportunity in a game like this that has actually complex production chains.
- Ground combat. Like seriously. Make it affect space combat, make planets being able to defend themselves from fleets. Also, where are my boarding actions?
- Crew experience having more of an effect in combat. Also, on a game so much focused around pops, soldiers affect too little our military power, I might say.
- Asymmetric warfare, guerrillas, and "hit and run" tactics. Make it so that a smaller force can beat bigger ones with a bit of effort. Everyone loves a "David VS Goliath" story
Logistics don't work when you need years to move between 10-20 systems and months for some systems, and in the late game you have jump drives, faster sublight speed due to thrusters and strategic coordination centers and afterburners and some events and maybe some federation and galactic community bonus, and then there are gateways and advanced reactors that create matter ex nihilo.
How does ground combat affect space? Unless you have coastal batteries like EU4? And how do you do boarding actions, with troop transports with millions of soldiers going on enemy battleships with just some crew of 1000-10000 crewmen?
And how do you do a guerrilla in space? Also David killed Goliath with a slinged rock, and those can break skulls unless you wear an helmet and Goliath didn't have one(or was uncovered in the front of the face), they tried it on history channel(or mythbuster I don't remember which one) I think and showed cow skulls breaking and bronze helmets just ondulating, although I can't find it, ehre are other videos:
I think Stellaris has a problem of "stale meta" when it comes to combat that makes it less interesting than it could be. After each patch the most effective tactic available will be found and used rather quickly. In other games there are different design strategies to counter this, some games try a constantly changing rosters of units (lots of patches, lots of changes... lots of bugs), or more randomization within each game (Sword of the Stars has almost identical weapon numbers and even weapon names... but much more randomized offerings).
Thinking in terms of cause and effect, if weapons and defences are developed as a response to the enemies you encounter... then we need to encounter more varied spaceborn enemies, and these need to be a larger threat, or more rewarding to fight, so that you are encouraged to specialize long before your first war. Specialize early and fast and get the most out of those juicy loot Piñatas.
How to make Spaceborn aliens strong threats without blocking expansion:
To start with I'd make most Spaceborn enemies split between a Hostile form that you automatically fight and a powerful Neutral "Spawner" form (a base, asteroid, mother, anomaly, planet or even star) that occasionally creates more hostiles and blocks a rather valuable space deposit/planet or even starbase location. That way you could defeat the mining drones, build an outpost on the star but leave their neutral dormant mining base intact. As for rewards, the base of these spaceborn aliens could be blocking a valuable 6-mineral or 2-alloy deposits, or like Tiyanki defeating them could grant lump-sums of resources.
So technically you can attack or otherwise clear the spawner at any time, but doing so triggers a reprisal and activation of more, much stronger enemies and the overwhelming total fleet power they represent forces you to leave them as minor nuisances for a while. In the mid-game there could be raids from the home systems of each spaceborn entity that start sending larger fleets to rebuild spawners or build new ones. This would also mean the neutral entities provide an ongoing issue that rewards investing in early fleets or static defences to clear deposits without making these spaceborn enemies so strong that you are trapped at any point. (Also for pacifists they could build observation posts over the spawners, with settings that boost spawning rate and to hire/use them defensively so they aren't completely left-out, perhaps with event chains like observing Primitive civilizations).
Next I'd make the designs and fleet composition of spaceborn enemies slightly less predictable, more interesting and more randomized between games. So you can't beat every single spaceborn alien with missiles for example but instead require more varied ship designs to beat them efficiently.
Mining drones
Keep the current high-armour anti-armour version, add alternative shield-heavy design variants, or tiny (-50% model size) high-evasion designs, or massive (+100% model size) designs with no evasion... and for the larger variant, if I could redesign combat I'd add damage-thresholds with a minimum 1 damage, then an enemy with 10 points of damage-threshold would partially negate attacks from S-weapons - needing G or M weapons minimum to combat, S/H weapons barely tickle them, sometimes only doing 1-point of scratch damage.
The specifics aren't that important, more the weapons and defences that the chosen design encourages you to use as a counter. Instead of just encouraging shields and lasers they could encourage a host of different research paths.
Crystals
Have a different colour each game, with different weapons, sizes, stats and behaviours for the existing red, green and blue crystals. Perhaps add in some exotic rare variants like purple crystals that merge with one another and keep growing larger over time, or pink crystals that reflect energy weapon damage back at the attacker/do extra damage or have faster weapon cooldown after being hit by energy weapons, or black crystals that explode instead of disengaging doing AOE damage in a short radius, or white crystals attack with bursts of crystal flak.
Void Clouds
These look amazing... but I barely bother to fight them since the black holes and dark matter they guard is useless before the late game. They need some work.
Perhaps they could wander between black hole spawners with their current L-size lightning weapons rather than being easily ignored. Variants could instead roam nebulas, or use point-blank range weapons that engulf ships disabling them/redirecting some enemy fire to the engulfed ship. There could be a puslar design that reduces all incoming attacks to 1 point of damage but has very low health and no shields (vulnerable to rapid-fire weapons like autocannons, strike craft and swarmer missiles). There could be designs that instead of L-slot cloud lightning have M and PD Disruptors, negating the normal strikecraft/missile approach and encouraging the use of kinetics instead.
Amoeba
Small/Medium/Large variants. Normal ones with strike craft and natural regeneration, smaller ones that heal on draining shields with energy siphons. Larger ones that have new and special large weapons (and let Bubbles eventually grow into the larger variant).
Tiyanki Space Whales
Very similar to now, but they block the deposits they orbit. Also can be far, far larger and stronger... so they're harder to completely ignore but passively limit access to the best orbital deposits until the mid-game.
With a few tweaks to make neutral enemies a bigger and more prolonged threat then the optimal early-game ship configuration is different from game to game. Perhaps you're encouraged to get better missiles early to bypass shields, then you go a bit further to tackle a particularly stubborn neutral that is camping a valuable deposit, by the time you fight an enemy empire you're already specialised and they are specialised to fight their own early spaceborn enemies.
All of the above isn't a particularly large or dramatic change, but I think it would help make each empire feel a little different without any drastic changes...
...as for drastic changes:
1. Significantly fewer ships at all points of the game, but each ship to be proportionally more powerful.
For better performance and so you actually care about individual ships.
2. Prototype versions of the larger hulls available (at extreme cost) from the start of the game to give players lots of options.
This is more for roleplay than for optimal strategy. There are games where I've wanted to go full strikecraft from the start... but can't, or where I want to use the largest ship sizes available to me (like Borg Cubes... but can't). A side-effect is that your first war could be fighting against enemies with expensive prototype cruiser carriers rather than always fighting that swarm of corvettes and the odd destroyer. There would be more surprises and variety in enemy fleet composition rather than the ship progression being almost purely a function of time.
3. Most powerful weapons of each category cost far more rare resources.
Bit of economic balance of weapons and modules that should be powerful, and so that you can really feel the difference between low and high-tech fleets. If X-slot weapons were unaffordable then the other forward battleship sections would get some use when you are saving money.
4. Restore cut content in terms of larger defence platforms, mines (AOE damage), FTL-traps (teleporting fleets within a system) and positioning starbases.
More content is good, cutting content in general feels rather wasteful. Restoring these would require some new models for the new ship designs and new mechanics so they don't hurt performance or otherwise break things.
5. Rebalance bypass weapons, pulsars and shields
I'm not a big fan of how much these can make shields and armour completely useless, especially considering that shields cost so much power that you'd struggle to use many in ship designs anyway... and that HP modules are RNG to access with no repeatables making things more alpha-strike heavy in the late game.
So I'd rather disruptors and pulsars were reworked to block shield regeneration/healing, or apply temporary % shield reduction, or lower enemy attack speed/evasion/disengage chance etc. Give these weapons more of a supporting role against rapidly healing/evading/retreating/shielding targets... perhaps with a few more variants of "support" weapons, like kinetic shield leeches or whatever.
For the other bypass weapons I'd like the default bypass to be less than 100% effective so it's still useful to mix weapons. Perhaps using the same number range as espionage uses for relative encryption, so 50 as a default +/-40% maximum, +5 per asset Auxiliary component like Enigmatic Encoder/Decoder.
Strike craft simple 50 +/- 40% bypass, so 90% bypass for Advanced strike craft with repeatable techs vs shields, or 10% bypass using scout craft against dark matter shields with repeatble techs.
Missiles could have lower shield bypass (-1) but torpedoes have (+2) to tier for determining bypass.
Cloud lightning, Arc Emitter and Focused Arc Emitter could all have additional base/max bypass. Letting them reach 100% bypass.
More expensive shield variants could have a bonus to effective tier for determining the relative level, or sacrifice relative bypass for extra strength or regeneration making them more powerful against normal weapons but much weaker to enemy bypassing counter-designs.
6. Ship engagement ranges and distances need work.
I'd let corvettes have line/artillery stance and for those stances to actually stay at long range pelting the enemy with missiles. I really hate the hard-to-parse death-ball that forms in battle currently with swarm and picket combat computers and ships of all sizes careening into the starbase instead of hanging back.
Also I'd like clear indicator, perhaps as a shadow or series of concentric circles around fleets and starbases when selected that shows the actual weapon ranges AND engagement distances - it's really not obvious how far away ships can shoot as there aren't any scale markers currently. (engagmenet distance being separate when the two are different for some reason, like strikecraft technically only having 10 range but launching whenever the fleet is engaged no matter the distance.)
I hate building a starbase, adding long range weapons and the Target Uplink Computer and watching enemy fleets pass out of range... so I'd also like the Target Uplink Computer to scale with gravity well size so it functions as a poor-mans FTL-inhibitor... a better one actually as it doesn't break pathing.
7. Starbases designs are disappointingly bad.
I don't let the AI design my ships and I dislike having to let the AI put anti-shield weapons on a starbase in a pulsar system, or only medium range guns when the enemy is going to be firing with big ships at extremely long range, or a swarm of corvettes at point blank-range. There doesn't have to be a whole new section of the ship designer, just a few more modules and buildings. Perhaps a drop-down on clicking guns that lets you pick the gun sizes, basic PD/S/M/L, then the special rare guns like Autocannon/Plasma/Disruptor, and lastly X guns (with X-guns costing more). If defences weren't added automatically but were added as separate modules there could be a drop-down for balanced, or extra Armour/Shields/Plating.
...which ends up being pretty much the ship designer but in a more convoluted way.
8. Platforms are also disappointingly bad.
There's lots of ideas for how to fix these. The simplest I can think of is linking them to the starbase so they share stats and die when the starbase dies. But instead of just vanishing having them ruined on starbase capture, requiring a lengthy repair before they can be used again (not possible for the attacker during a war). Simple. Not perfect, but at least I'd build them more often without them feeling like a liability.
9. Fleet Power is sometimes worse than useless... we could use something more accurate and reliable.
It's a bit convoluted, but I'd like a system for having war-game simulations:
Designate a system to host wargames via decision, then spawn in holographic versions of known ship designs and pit them against each other. The simulations would require energy upkeep while running and each simulation could have a large upfront energy cost, or cooldown as you prepare things.
With enough intel you could set-up mock battles between a starbase and holographic copies of enemy fleets you have eyes on, or whatever battles you want to play around with. Doing this could provide a buff for the next few years against those ship designs or a general empire-wide training buff (XP gain modifier), perhaps with fun diplomatic repercussions if you keep simulating battles against the fleet of a neighbour showing just how easily you could crush them... much more fun than sending insults.
In general, I don't actually think Stellaris is that bad when it comes to combat. There's a lot of content and a... fairly robust foundation to build on (once the bugs are fixed). There just needs to be stronger incentives and mechanisms to specialize early, ensure there are counters to every build, a few more design and fleet options so you aren't always building the same ships in the same order every game, and lastly better UI to show what's actually going on so you can plan better.
ALogistics don't work when you need years to move between 10-20 systems and months for some systems, and in the late game you have jump drives, faster sublight speed due to thrusters and strategic coordination centers and afterburners and some events and maybe some federation and galactic community bonus, and then there are gateways and advanced reactors that create matter ex nihilo.
How does ground combat affect space? Unless you have coastal batteries like EU4? And how do you do boarding actions, with troop transports with millions of soldiers going on enemy battleships with just some crew of 1000-10000 crewmen?
And how do you do a guerrilla in space? Also David killed Goliath with a slinged rock, and those can break skulls unless you wear an helmet and Goliath didn't have one(or was uncovered in the front of the face), they tried it on history channel(or mythbuster I don't remember which one) I think and showed cow skulls breaking and bronze helmets just ondulating, although I can't find it, ehre are other videos:
Logistics works in the sense that supply routes can add an additional depth to combat operations, just as it does in the real world. Several other posters have come with good ideas.
Ground combat affecting space battles is a longstanding sci-fi trope, from ground batteries to planetary shields and heroic boarding actions. I am sure that I am not the only Warhammer 40K fan here.
As for David VS Goliath, it was a metaphor, LOL. Rebels and plucky resistance fighters putting up a fight against a much bigger empire is Star Wars in a nutshell.
Logistics works in the sense that supply routes can add an additional depth to combat operations, just as it does in the real world. Several other posters have come with good ideas.
Ground combat affecting space battles is a longstanding sci-fi trope, from ground batteries to planetary shields and heroic boarding actions. I am sure that I am not the only Warhammer 40K fan here.
As for David VS Goliath, it was a metaphor, LOL. Rebels and plucky resistance fighters putting up a fight against a much bigger empire is Star Wars in a nutshell.
Yes but with stellaris mid-late game tech supply routes would be trivial since they can use gateways and jump drives.
Planetary shields are already in the game, ground batteries could be copied from EU4 but they wouldn't be too much effective when you drop 50 Xenomorph-Gene Warrior Army on the planet at once. And how you do boarding action on stellaris? With transport ships ramming on enemy ships?
I played Warhammer games and in stellaris easter eggs page warhammer is the most quoted so you're not (There were Commissar attachment for armies):
is, almost always, only fun to play if you are the rebels.
It's very difficult to design a satisfactory gameplay loop for counterinsurgency operations, since the whole point of insurgency is to harass, disrupt, and frustrate.
Logistics works in the sense that supply routes can add an additional depth to combat operations, just as it does in the real world. Several other posters have come with good ideas.
Ground combat affecting space battles is a longstanding sci-fi trope, from ground batteries to planetary shields and heroic boarding actions. I am sure that I am not the only Warhammer 40K fan here.
As for David VS Goliath, it was a metaphor, LOL. Rebels and plucky resistance fighters putting up a fight against a much bigger empire is Star Wars in a nutshell.
The way it is bad right now is because our Army-and-Invasion system is a legacy placeholder. It's here because it was here back when we only had Minerals. The Army's costs and upkeep don't make sense. Your Duelists have Alloy upkeep but your Invasion Army costs 100 Minerals and 1 Energy Upkeep. It's just a game where you just spam it to win.
And it also doesn't make sense if we're using Space Fleets in space, but now we're invading, let's just bring in foot soldiers without similar war machines. I think you need at least some tanks, airplanes, sea ships and combat robots. And there will be no reason to never build war machines similar in scope to the spaceships but adapted for surface combats.
So I guess to make the ground combat make at least the minimum sense, they should at least be produced by using alloys and have an alloy upkeep. And the amount should be tuned so that you are using at least a non-trivial amount of resources for ground forces.
Then you are presented a choice: Either you go specialised Space and Ground Forces, or you use Hybrid fleets that can fight in Space and land onto surface, but with reduced performances compared to specialised forces. Or the third choice would be a mix of two.
The thing is Stellaris has a lot of inspiration from the exploration SF genres, but it lacks consistent combat designs. I think the team should really spend some time watching a few curated Anime. I recommend at least Space Battleship Yamato and Super Dimensional Fortress Macross and Macross 7. Some Gundam also doesn't hurt.
1. Significantly fewer ships at all points of the game, but each ship to be proportionally more powerful.
For better performance and so you actually care about individual ships.
being more likely to survive fleet-on-fleet battles
And less likely to survive emergency retreats from battles vs a starbase (or a titan) with an FTL inhibitor [making those battles more risky].
Whilst increasing construction and repair times by a factor of 3-5 (you already end up with a 33% reduction - or more by late game, doubly so with increased shipyard-counts so this wouldnt be as bad as it first seems) and making it impossible to repair at anything other than a shipyard.
I think to justify making ships stronger, they must be restricted on a per-class basis - not just a net fleetcap reduction. If I made battleships 3x as strong, but reduced the number of ships overall by 3x... i'd still just field BBs - they'd need a sub-reduction by some amount too.
This is using an inflexible method, same way titans are restricted, however scripting allows for more dynamic controls (like scaling these caps up and down, based on GC / Imperial resolutions).
Now, sure, different empires/ethics should be given ways to increase this (militarism, building more forts for a general increase in naval cap, maybe "corvette pen" buildings to increase their ratio of corvettes - for those that want to make swarms of the buggers, etc)
2. Prototype versions of the larger hulls available (at extreme cost) from the start of the game to give players lots of options.
This is more for roleplay than for optimal strategy. There are games where I've wanted to go full strikecraft from the start... but can't, or where I want to use the largest ship sizes available to me (like Borg Cubes... but can't). A side-effect is that your first war could be fighting against enemies with expensive prototype cruiser carriers rather than always fighting that swarm of corvettes and the odd destroyer. There would be more surprises and variety in enemy fleet composition rather than the ship progression being almost purely a function of time.
What if Fleet power ... was just #guns in a fleet * size of guns (S=1 G/M=2 L=3 etc)?
Part of the AIs hesitancy to engage is it cant gauge how strong an enemy fleet is - and stuff like SP/AP penetration over-inflates FP values - even if they wouldnt work against a certain fleet so well.
Either you'd have to compute a specific FP bilaterally for every fleet in the game [seeing what your own shield DPS is vs their net Shield:Armor:Hull ratio etc].
Or just dump weighting entirely. and let the AI just go based on # guns*size it's facing (so a corvette has an FP of 3*1, as it has 3 small guns, a battleship with 6-L guns has 6*3 [3 as L-slot size] FP).
being more likely to survive fleet-on-fleet battles
And less likely to survive emergency retreats from battles vs a starbase (or a titan) with an FTL inhibitor [making those battles more risky].
Whilst increasing construction and repair times by a factor of 3-5 (you already end up with a 33% reduction - or more by late game, doubly so with increased shipyard-counts so this wouldnt be as bad as it first seems) and making it impossible to repair at anything other than a shipyard.
I think to justify making ships stronger, they must be restricted on a per-class basis - not just a net fleetcap reduction. If I made battleships 3x as strong, but reduced the number of ships overall by 3x... i'd still just field BBs - they'd need a sub-reduction by some amount too. View attachment 720213
This is using an inflexible method, same way titans are restricted, however scripting allows for more dynamic controls (like scaling these caps up and down, based on GC / Imperial resolutions).
Now, sure, different empires/ethics should be given ways to increase this (militarism, building more forts for a general increase in naval cap, maybe "corvette pen" buildings to increase their ratio of corvettes - for those that want to make swarms of the buggers, etc)
I did this for a personal mod I'm working on and really enjoyed how it changed up the gameplay.
Another thing I discussed with someone on the modding den discord was forcing specialization of weapon techs, locking the higher tiers behind a specialized weapon type, shifting the cost of ships more towards weapons (away from hull, shields and armor), and drastically reducing the cost of the less attractive weapons.
That way it could be more viable to run a fleet of ships with missiles since you could spam them easier then, say, neutron launcher BB's (and those Neutron Launcher BB's would be locked behind you pursuing missile specialization, etc).
Another thing I discussed with someone on the modding den discord was forcing specialization of weapon techs, locking the higher tiers behind a specialized weapon type, shifting the cost of ships more towards weapons (away from hull, shields and armor), and drastically reducing the cost of the less attractive weapons.
That way it could be more viable to run a fleet of ships with missiles since you could spam them easier then, say, neutron launcher BB's (and those Neutron Launcher BB's would be locked behind you pursuing missile specialization, etc).
True. I've tested this too, but did so by ripping out strategic resources and making weapons consume scaled science instead [with strike craft taking soc rather than engineering]. This lead to high-tech nations fielding tier 5 guns whilst large empires couldnt afford to field all their ships with max techs. An advanced start AI I went up against had 1-2 fleets of tier 4 ships, and about 8 or 9 with tier 3 or so. It has its problems as a method, but this was more because I was trying to add inflation into the game, too.
It is possible to also construct AI science plans, without using gateway techs, and have these randomly vary, or vary with AI ethos/civics (so one Ai might go for missiles whenever it can) see linked post below,
Science breakthroughs - this could be a way to encourage players (and AIs) to fill out more of each tier of tech tree before moving on to Tier 2-N I.e. each month the game rolls research progress to be below average - 10%-99% science...
forum.paradoxplaza.com
Unfortunately its quite a laborious method, even if you use scripted triggers to save on replication, and involves heavily editing and flagging the technology files + a flag manager script for AIs (so no real mod-compatibility). But it would allow an AI to gun for KA - battleships, whilst another pursues every missile and (for example) farming tech it can find.
A similar, but simpler, flagging system can be used to disable gateway techs too - combined with debris / research pacts / tech-theft, you could make it so that some trees simply can not be given to you on game start (eg. disruptor tech) youll have to steal, reverse engineer or otherwise cooperatively gain that potential tech choice before researching it (though the structure of the tech tree, being quite flat, makes this harder to do). Adding a "give us science tips" option to science enclaves, could be a fallback too.
Oh yeah and make it so we can redesign starbases. and change slot sizes so i can put xl weapons and neutron launchers on starbases so they will be useful in the endgame.
A similar, but simpler, flagging system can be used to disable gateway techs too - combined with debris / research pacts / tech-theft, you could make it so that some trees simply can not be given to you on game start (eg. disruptor tech) youll have to steal, reverse engineer or otherwise cooperatively gain that potential tech choice before researching it (though the structure of the tech tree, being quite flat, makes this harder to do). Adding a "give us science tips" option to science enclaves, could be a fallback too.
That's kinda what I'm looking for; much like the caps on the different hull sizes I would prefer a more brute force method of limiting and diversifying tech.
being more likely to survive fleet-on-fleet battles
And less likely to survive emergency retreats from battles vs a starbase (or a titan) with an FTL inhibitor [making those battles more risky].
Whilst increasing construction and repair times by a factor of 3-5 (you already end up with a 33% reduction - or more by late game, doubly so with increased shipyard-counts so this wouldnt be as bad as it first seems) and making it impossible to repair at anything other than a shipyard.
I would like it if fleets did stand and fight more rather than cowardly jumping away over and over.
It can be annoying watching enemy fleets emergency FTL away the moment your fleet enters the gravity well, taking almost no damage or losses when they do:
Code:
COMBAT_EMERGENCY_FTL_LOST_RISK = 0.01 # x% risk of ship becoming forever lost when jumping.
COMBAT_EMERGENCY_FTL_DAMAGE_RISK = 0.10 # x% chance of ship taking damage in emergency ftl jump
COMBAT_EMERGENCY_FTL_DAMAGE_AMOUNT = 0.20 # x% of damage that emergency ftl can potentially cause
COMBAT_BASE_DAYS_UNTIL_EMERGENCY_FTL = 30.0 # how many days a fleet should be in combat until they can emergency ftl
You could probably situationally increase the FTL damage amount to 0.4 and FTL lost risk up to 0.05 (as bad as rolling a 1 on a D20) if you wanted emergency FTL to be more lethal (e.g. have FTL Jump Cooldown modifiers also apply Emergency FTL Damage Risk modifiers to enemy ships, like the -25% from Hit and Run War Doctrine policy).
I just fear that this could cripple AI wars if they remain retreat-happy. Currently this behaviour isn't very costly (few losses + rapid repair), if that changed they could burn themselves over and over for no gain. So I'd want to work to make the AI stand and fight when it's appropriate to do so, or pick better engagements instead of letting the AI die without many shots being fired.
The wiki says:
"The 30 day charge time can be increased by Emergency FTL Jump Cooldown modifiers:"
"FTL Inhibitor starbase aura +100%"
I can't seem to find any references, but I suspect the 30 day charge time is secretly halved against basic outposts with no ships involved on the other side, and obviously the timer doesn't refresh when a new fleet joins the battle (or you could cheese it with reinforcements joining battle after 29 days). Those things combined give the AI the funny trick of pathetically failing to kill a weak starbase with their reinforcement ships only for those ships to instantly vanish the second your fleet joins the battle.
I think to justify making ships stronger, they must be restricted on a per-class basis - not just a net fleetcap reduction. If I made battleships 3x as strong, but reduced the number of ships overall by 3x... i'd still just field BBs - they'd need a sub-reduction by some amount too. View attachment 720213
This is using an inflexible method, same way titans are restricted, however scripting allows for more dynamic controls (like scaling these caps up and down, based on GC / Imperial resolutions).
Now, sure, different empires/ethics should be given ways to increase this (militarism, building more forts for a general increase in naval cap, maybe "corvette pen" buildings to increase their ratio of corvettes - for those that want to make swarms of the buggers, etc)
I'm not really a fan of per-ship hard-caps if I'm honest. It feels like the equivalent of forcing children to eat 5 portions of sprouts for every 1 portion of [insert any other food] that they actually want to eat. I'd much rather work on encouraging the less used ship sizes to have a purpose and be enjoyable to use. It also feels quite artificial and gamey, like having a limited number of houses available in monopoly no matter how rich you are... it certainly serves an important function, but it's still a bit awkward.
That said I'd love to keep that UI just to see how many of each ship class you've actually built, and how many more you could field before reaching your naval cap. Also I wouldn't be opposed if you could make it into a soft-cap instead, as that is much less restrictive.
So, I'm not sold on the idea, but I do like how well your implementation integrates with the existing large ship limits.
Although it does show the problem I have with the ship limits as they stand:
1. The tooltip describes how naval capacity is a soft-cap that can be freely exceeded and just costs more upkeep... that's great...
2. ...But the ship limits for Titans/Juggernauts/Colossus etc are actually hard-caps, that cannot be exceeded, no matter how flush you are with resources or megastructures... that's bad.
3. The tooltip fails to indicate how to increase hard-caps, upper limits for those hard-caps, and why you can't increase juggernaut/colossus caps... that's bad.
The wiki says:
"Each empire can build a Titan for each 200 Naval Capacity, up to a maximum of 20 Titans at 3800 naval capacity. "
It's a bit peculiar that an empire can afford to build multiple ringworlds but can't build more than one juggernaut... or that you can go 500% over your naval capacity without flinching but can't build one extra Titan. Soft caps would be far more logical to me.
I'm glad you like it, though I'm not sure how to balance it properly. As you say battleships can be so strong that your suggestion was to put a hard cap on them so you can't just spam them.
Perhaps if there was a soft-cap instead of a hard-cap for your proposed per-ship limits, then before you research the ship size (or whatever gives you the first bit of Destroyer/Cruiser/Battleship cap) and you're going over cap by building a prototype, then the ships are automatically flagged as expensive prototypes...
Also the presence of prototype units in your empire (ships over per-class capacity) could increase the weight of certain techs:
x1.25 to Cruiser tech if you own at least 1 cruiser prototype
x1.25 to Standardized Cruiser Patterns/Doctrine:Support Vessels if you own any prototype cruisers
(boosting the weight of any tech that increases naval capacity when you're over capacity)
So you can build a cruiser at the start but you'd be 1/0 to the Cruiser soft-cap, with each cruiser built being a special "prototype" with +100% build cost, time and upkeep costs, perhaps with a slightly smaller or larger model than normal (like the old one-off ruler ships that had a special oversized model). Be nice for thematic reasons to see your first ever cruiser stand out a little in some way, be it a special name/prefix/undersized/oversized or otherwise different.
What if Fleet power ... was just #guns in a fleet * size of guns (S=1 G/M=2 L=3 etc)?
Part of the AIs hesitancy to engage is it cant gauge how strong an enemy fleet is - and stuff like SP/AP penetration over-inflates FP values - even if they wouldnt work against a certain fleet so well.
Either you'd have to compute a specific FP bilaterally for every fleet in the game [seeing what your own shield DPS is vs their net Shield:Armor:Hull ratio etc].
Or just dump weighting entirely. and let the AI just go based on # guns*size it's facing (so a corvette has an FP of 3*1, as it has 3 small guns, a battleship with 6-L guns has 6*3 [3 as L-slot size] FP).
I was thinking about the fleet power calculations the other day and couldn't think of a good, simple solution for the reasons you mention. Comparing all fleets against each other all the time would be a performance nightmare, not to mention a UI nightmare as you have to show a huge list of targets that the fleet can and cannot defeat... or if you're just creating a dynamic number it would shoot up and down as known empires change their loadouts and circumstances change... in short, a mess.
So that's why I was thinking of a fun, thematic way of comparing fleets one at a time and using the results to update the fleet power numbers in-game with numbers that actually take into account real combat performance.
The AI compares their main fleet with the highest value known military target of their current rival (border starbase or the largest fleet they can see). The losing ship/starbase design could have its fleetpower reduced by a % for that empire for the next 10 years encouraging the AI to pick a fight it can actually win and not to give up and hit the emergency FTL button... or instead encourage the AI to build more ships if the design it's using has an inflated fleetpower but can't actually win a fight against its rivals.
Currently:
Code:
MILITARY_POWER_HEALTH_WEIGHT = 0.5
MILITARY_POWER_ARMOR_WEIGHT = 1.0 # compared to health
MILITARY_POWER_SHIELD_WEIGHT = 1.0 # compared to health
MILITARY_POWER_DAMAGE_WEIGHT = 0.5
MILITARY_POWER_SCALE = 0.25
MILITARY_POWER_EXPONENT = 0.65 # math: power = ( ( effective_health * damage_per_day ) ^ exponent ) * scale
# below values determine how large an effect special values such as shield penetration have on the military power of a weapon
MILITARY_POWER_ARMOR_PENETRATION_WEIGHT = 0.5 # larger value = adds more military power
MILITARY_POWER_SHIELD_PENETRATION_WEIGHT = 0.5
MILITARY_POWER_HULL_DAMAGE_WEIGHT = 0.33
MILITARY_POWER_ARMOR_DAMAGE_WEIGHT = 0.33
MILITARY_POWER_SHIELD_DAMAGE_WEIGHT = 0.33
MILITARY_POWER_TRACKING_WEIGHT = -0.5 # at 0% tracking
MILITARY_POWER_RANGE_DIV = 100 # smaller value = adds more military power
MILITARY_POWER_MISSILE_MULT = 0.75 # overall military power of missiles is lowered due to being vulnerable to PD
MILITARY_POWER_PD_MULT = 1.15 # overall military power of PD is increased to compensate for relatively bad DPS/range
It's quite a lot of numbers for something that doesn't work so well and confuses the AI... I wouldn't object to changing or simplifying it a little, or running some test combats to figure out more appropriate values for each setting so it doesn't massively over or undervalue certain ships... (that's what inspired the idea actually) which could be a lot of work and will never be perfect. But there's probably some combination of the above that gives reasonable results for starbases vs fleets and fleets vs fleets... maybe...
...also effective HP is somewhat useful even if it's got much too large a weighting currently, and it would be strange if a corvette with Dark matter Shields, Dragonscale armour and Crystal-Forged Plating had less fleet power as a naked corvette (due to less excess energy to weapons)... it's nice to see the numbers go up after an upgrade rather than stay the same or go down. But yes, perhaps weapon slots should be the primary factor.
But going with just a highly simplified number of guns only calculation for hypothetical illustrative purposes:
The AI Empire A has a fleetpower of 60 (20 corvettes using your basic all-guns fleetpower calculation) and wants to attack another empire, but is afraid:
Empire B has a fleetpower of 72 (4 battleships).
With the simulated combat idea, the player or the AI can run a simulation to check rather than relying on the simple fleet power calculation. Two cloned fleets fight. If the corvettes of Empire A are super evasive with weapons that perfectly counter the battleships then perhaps they win despite having fewer weapons. In that case the AI or Player could overrule the basic fleetpower calculation.
e.g. reducing the fleetpower for the losing fleet for the next 10 years.
So if the battleships lost they'd go from 72 fleetpower to having an updated fleet power of <60, via a modifier that reduced FP by ~25%. If the simulation was run against a smaller 10 corvette fleet and they somehow won again the fleetpower of Empire B would be updated to <30 for the battleships, via a modifier that reduces the fleetpower of those ships by ~40% for the next 10 years. Then either the player or Empire A can attack at will.
Also I imagine it would be entertaining for players if you could more easily set-up fun hypothetical battles in periods of downtime, like working out how many ships you need to beat a leviathan or kill at least one fallen empire ship, even if it costs energy proportional to the size of the fleet simulated.
I'm glad you like it, though I'm not sure how to balance it properly. As you say battleships can be so strong that your suggestion was to put a hard cap on them so you can't just spam them.
Perhaps if there was a soft-cap instead of a hard-cap for your proposed per-ship limits, then before you research the ship size (or whatever gives you the first bit of Destroyer/Cruiser/Battleship cap) and you're going over cap by building a prototype, then the ships are automatically flagged as expensive prototypes...
Also the presence of prototype units in your empire (ships over per-class capacity) could increase the weight of certain techs:
x1.25 to Cruiser tech if you own at least 1 cruiser prototype
x1.25 to Standardized Cruiser Patterns/Doctrine:Support Vessels if you own any prototype cruisers
(boosting the weight of any tech that increases naval capacity when you're over capacity)
So you can build a cruiser at the start but you'd be 1/0 to the Cruiser soft-cap, with each cruiser built being a special "prototype" with +100% build cost, time and upkeep costs, perhaps with a slightly smaller or larger model than normal (like the old one-off ruler ships that had a special oversized model). Be nice for thematic reasons to see your first ever cruiser stand out a little in some way, be it a special name/prefix/undersized/oversized or otherwise different.
It goes beyond that, a BB with tier 1 mass drivers or lasers, just isnt going to be very good, it'll be fitted with an undersized reactor and it'll cost a bomb to both run and build whilst mostly going up against corvettes that will rip it apart.
I think the answer in controlling numbers may lie in a very old feature. The Ruler Ship. Way back in the mists of time, Dictatorial or military governments could build a super ship (once per ruler I think). This was just a scaled up, buffed up, corvette - or whatever ship class - and was ultimately dropped when governments got reworked, but it was a cool thing for RP - your own flagship, without having to wait for Titans. I'd have to go digging to figure out how they did it, but I bet I can create buildable "variant" designs on the modern game too; "Design Name [Experimental]".
I think experimental ships in scifi usually follow one of three paths
The uber-flagship - see anything particularly large/old in the 40k universe
The wunderwaffen - a hail mary weapon usually produced in small numbers / limited runs.
An esoteric ship capable of doing something no other can - usually not combat related - like the normandy's stealth in ME1-3
All 3 could be done
#1 rather than just copying/re-scaling a corvette, you gain access to a ship class in the tier above.
(done by duplicating the destroyer/cruiser/BB ship_type, calling it destroyer_exp etc. and giving it an internal cap of 1, or some low number, like 1/50th Fleet cap, as with titans).
Then when you get destroyer tech, you lose access to experimental destroyers, get access to experimental cruisers, and then later experimental BBs,doing the same thing again - and the next time any remaining experimental destroyers are at a friendly starbase (trigger with on_action for orbits), a script converts them in to "regular" destroyers.
If you have apocalypse could do this with experimental titans too... though starbase limits make this a bit weirder.
In this way you can make experimental ships radically different, applying all sorts of modifiers (you can even apply random mods on construction, with a popup saying "we tested faster autoloaders on this model +kinetic fire rate etc", without keeping them around for unrealistic amounts of time. And this means that you dont break the AI's bank by them getting BBs in 2201 and not having resources for any corvettes too.
#2 The hail mary.
In a war, you get the option to build wunderwaffen if you're losing.
This would either be upscaled/buffed ships of existing ship-hulls (like old Ruler ships) OR follow similar rules to #1 above, but with a higher cap.
#3 Arch-tech.
Something I've been wondering about for a while. What if you could use ancient relics to build experimental ships.
Either using direct designs with really strong random modifiers (basically #1 on steroids + relics for construction)
OR Handled via an archaeology style chain, you select your desired ship class (all the way up to BB or later Titan) and the kind of guns, based on family (disruptor, laser etc), and some other things like ship role. Then you get an RNG design at the end with massively buffed stats.
But you can only field a very low number of Arch-tech ships - either a mechanical cap, or have them consume Arcane relic resources over time in upkeep
This would require more plentiful sources of Relics in the galaxy.
I've recently (i.e. in the last 2 hours) worked out how to create exhaustable deposits on planets (and in space) - so you could have a deposit on a world spawning an archaeologist job outputting X relics a month "Relic cache (small/m/L)" with a counter tracking - say 500 relics on the planet, deducting the archaeologist's output each month (e.g. 10 relics a month, 50 months and the ruins run dry, and the job is deleted when the mod_planet_relic_remain_var <= 0 on the start of a month).
Arch-tech ships would allow for potent designs early in a game, but later as relics become scarce and tech advances they'd become almost like 40k relics - a handful still exist and can turn the tide of a fight. Think 40k-lite. The "lore" would be that you really dont know how this thing works, exactly, and have only decrypted designs inherent in these relics (A la Destiny 1/2 style Golden-Age engrams lol).
I'm not really a fan of per-ship hard-caps if I'm honest. It feels like the equivalent of forcing children to eat 5 portions of sprouts for every 1 portion of [insert any other food] that they actually want to eat. I'd much rather work on encouraging the less used ship sizes to have a purpose and be enjoyable to use. It also feels quite artificial and gamey, like having a limited number of houses available in monopoly no matter how rich you are... it certainly serves an important function, but it's still a bit awkward.
That said I'd love to keep that UI just to see how many of each ship class you've actually built, and how many more you could field before reaching your naval cap. Also I wouldn't be opposed if you could make it into a soft-cap instead, as that is much less restrictive.
So, I'm not sold on the idea, but I do like how well your implementation integrates with the existing large ship limits.
Although it does show the problem I have with the ship limits as they stand:
1. The tooltip describes how naval capacity is a soft-cap that can be freely exceeded and just costs more upkeep... that's great...
2. ...But the ship limits for Titans/Juggernauts/Colossus etc are actually hard-caps, that cannot be exceeded, no matter how flush you are with resources or megastructures... that's bad.
3. The tooltip fails to indicate how to increase hard-caps, upper limits for those hard-caps, and why you can't increase juggernaut/colossus caps... that's bad.
The wiki says:
"Each empire can build a Titan for each 200 Naval Capacity, up to a maximum of 20 Titans at 3800 naval capacity. "
It's a bit peculiar that an empire can afford to build multiple ringworlds but can't build more than one juggernaut... or that you can go 500% over your naval capacity without flinching but can't build one extra Titan. Soft caps would be far more logical to me.
Nobody likes caps, but the simple fact is, we Do Not have proper AI access, and have to play with a hand behind our backs if we're going to see any measure of competitiveness. Being able to overflow my fleet cap by 2x destroys difficulty when the AI doesn't 1) consider aggressively raising its FC 2) consider aggressively going over its FC (because its shite economy couldn't support it anyway).
Sure you can increase exceed_naval_cap penalties by a factor of 10x, or increase individual ship upkeep costs, but that accomplishes the same thing - whilst also shattering the AIs economy when it loses a starbase, sending it into a death spiral.
Caps, IMO, are the lesser evil.
Hard caps using the "titan code", as I'm calling it, are very binary (though do integrate into the game well as you say).
Rather, scripted caps appear in tooltips (with the checks and crosses) and are more flexible and respond to different conditions + can take variables that are scaled dynamically - they'd be what I use.
I would like it if fleets did stand and fight more rather than cowardly jumping away over and over.
It can be annoying watching enemy fleets emergency FTL away the moment your fleet enters the gravity well, taking almost no damage or losses when they do:
Code:
COMBAT_EMERGENCY_FTL_LOST_RISK = 0.01 # x% risk of ship becoming forever lost when jumping.
COMBAT_EMERGENCY_FTL_DAMAGE_RISK = 0.10 # x% chance of ship taking damage in emergency ftl jump
COMBAT_EMERGENCY_FTL_DAMAGE_AMOUNT = 0.20 # x% of damage that emergency ftl can potentially cause
COMBAT_BASE_DAYS_UNTIL_EMERGENCY_FTL = 30.0 # how many days a fleet should be in combat until they can emergency ftl
You could probably situationally increase the FTL damage amount to 0.4 and FTL lost risk up to 0.05 (as bad as rolling a 1 on a D20) if you wanted emergency FTL to be more lethal (e.g. have FTL Jump Cooldown modifiers also apply Emergency FTL Damage Risk modifiers to enemy ships, like the -25% from Hit and Run War Doctrine policy).
I just fear that this could cripple AI wars if they remain retreat-happy. Currently this behaviour isn't very costly (few losses + rapid repair), if that changed they could burn themselves over and over for no gain. So I'd want to work to make the AI stand and fight when it's appropriate to do so, or pick better engagements instead of letting the AI die without many shots being fired.
The wiki says:
"The 30 day charge time can be increased by Emergency FTL Jump Cooldown modifiers:"
"FTL Inhibitor starbase aura +100%"
I can't seem to find any references, but I suspect the 30 day charge time is secretly halved against basic outposts with no ships involved on the other side, and obviously the timer doesn't refresh when a new fleet joins the battle (or you could cheese it with reinforcements joining battle after 29 days). Those things combined give the AI the funny trick of pathetically failing to kill a weak starbase with their reinforcement ships only for those ships to instantly vanish the second your fleet joins the battle.
On Emergency FTl... It personally doesn't make sense to me for a ship to stand and fight over invaluable systems.
If an AI does not have an advantage and it's defending a "tactically insignificant" system (yes, that's hard to define - colonies, starbases, strategic orbital deposits and potentially anything flagged as "internal space" via a script testing jumps from colonies would count), it should retreat and regroup.
or attacking a hard system it lacks a claim on, fall back too.
Whilst fighting over tactically significant systems or defending any core-sector system, they should basically fight to the death, unless they have a fortress or can fall back to the capital.
Alternatively AIs could skew retreat chance based on ethics, policies or even Admiral traits, so some empires are flighty buggers, others fight to the death.
This could be implemented via on_battle_start scripts using some of the below on the fleet in question.
Also, the thing you mentioned about cooldowns and multiple fleets jumping sounds like a bug, if I'm honest.
But the retreat logic comes from AI fleet power comparisons. I've thrown my fleets at AI's in the past expecting to 'not lose the battle, but lose the war' as attrition or follow-up AI fleets grind me down, but instead the AI runs away. So I do think fleet power needs some reworking.
The other problem with emergency retreat is it doesn't allow you to "gun down" the enemy (though understandably why), I think it'd be more tolerated by players if ships had to flee to the edge of a system (any edge, not a HL node) to initiate a retreat, maybe with a 2x/3x emergency-boost speed modifier, so your troops could harass them and get a few more kills in. Though this would likely mean the utter death of all enemies with the L/XL meta right now.
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