Ground Combat improvement

[NemoRow]

Hi all,

while considering improvements for planetary bombardment here, some ideas for ground combat have popped out.

Generally speaking:
* Planetary buildings and districts are the battlefield
* Battle width slots have some districts / buildings as their background
* There is at most one defending and one invasion army per battlefield slot
* Each building/district has its HP. Amount of HP increases with technology (mines, farms, generator, city) or with building level (research facilities, capital, etc). Some new special technologies can be introduced too (last one is needed more in case of bombardment)
* For an ongoing battle district/building can be ruined. Amount of HP of the building is visible on the battlefield view. When the district / building is ruined another district / building is chosen for the ongoing battle
* If there is no other district/building ruins or planetary feature is selected as battlefield slot
* Each defense army corresponds 1 to 1 to a pop having defense army job (when defense army is destroyed pop dies)

Military buildings:
* Military buildings have higher amount of HP
* Military buildings are chosen first for any battlefield, and only when there are no non military building left, another one is chosen
* Military buildings provide special bonus to defending armies: half of the damage goes to the building instead of the army.
* Military buildings do not suffer from collateral damage
* Military buildings and planetary capital work similar to shield regen, but for army regeneration/recruitment, using local 'free' pops as recruit
* 'Free' pops are pops under the territory of defense armies. As long as all battlefield slots are covered by defense armies all of the pops are free. Once there is a battlefield slot not covered by defense army - only the population having 'housing' type of building under defending armies is considered free

Recruitment:
* I propose a planetary decision 'call reserves', which would start recruitment of reservists with a speed calculated from available military type of buildings (planetary capital, academy, fort, police, psi corp) which have those number as constants. So recruitment speed is R = [how eager to fight pops are] x [number of 'free' pops] x [sum of military facilities recruitment capabilities]
* This decision is enabled automatically for free once the planet bombardment starts and is canceled once it stops (if the planet still belongs to the defending side)
* Decision rises defense army cap two fold, but those additional armies assign pops from planetary jobs to it, effectively slowing down economy. And the recruitment speed is defined by planetary military facilities - so it does not work as 'make twice more armies instantly'
* Thus ongoing planetary war would involve constantly recruiting to defense armies local population, providing defense with necessary depth and making battles less predictable and taking more time
* To make it fair, invading armies should also be created on 1-1 basis (1 pop 1 army). So invading army is a job for some pop somewhere and when army dies - pop also dies. Pop should be of a specialist class though, and use normal for pop resources (or an extra class for solders should be created with its own rights?)

Civilian:
* Each destroyed housing building have some constant + random number of pops die. Randomness depends on the size of the housing provided
* Each working building destroyed causes smaller random amount of pops to die (depending on a number of provided jobs)
* District ruins would be shown on planetary features as something to clean up
* The cost of building restoration is cost of the building + energy credits to clean up
* Each building can have it's own defense bonuses - so not only the military building would provide some bonus to defense army, but any building/district can have it's own bonuses set modelling the fight conditions. Bonuses can include morality regen, hp regen, taking some percent of damage instead of armies, providing some attack bonus

Ethos/Civics/Traits:
* Currently defense armies have small bonuses from several traits and there is one special trait for increasing their power
* Trait involving how fast species can be recruited can be introduced as 'in width' solution of the same problem
* Ethos/Traits giving all of the buildings some recruitment power can be introduced
* Civic involving building HP increase/defense bonuses can be introduced

Overall:
* Such a system would bring 'feeling' to ground battles, as they would be happening over 'real' buildings and districts. The flow of ground war would become traceable by ruins which would feel like 'battle over paradise dome'
* It would be much more difficult to predict outcome of the war, with constant recruitment of local population and non linear nature of their eagerness to fight in some cases (some traits can involve eagerness to fight to be higher when devastation is high)
* It would involve easy to feel results of ground war: reduced population and expensive prolonged restoration

 

[G S Palmer]

A few suggestions:

The Call Reserves decision should become available once the system starbase is taken, not when the planet starts being bombarded.

In most cases, the planetary capitol should be invaded last.

The decision should create a certain number of new Reservist jobs per/<insert amount of time>. This can be made more or less efficient by a new Military Service policy, which can be set to one extreme (giving army and reserve recruitment speed down, army starting experience up) or the other (army and reserve recruitment speed up, starting experience down). Each reservist job should provide a certain number of deference armies. They will also provide constant (slow) reinforcement, spawning new armies until killed if the number of defense armies is below the cap.

I don't think invading armies should suffer pop mortality, since that seems unrealistic. Assault armies are recruited out of the pops; you're not recruiting entire pops.

 

[NemoRow]

I have thought of the Military Service Policy, but polices are frozen for 10 years so finally I came to the conclusion that most of the things should be solved on the planetary decision level - as at war we often do things in parallel and while on one planet under attack we might want to have recruits as fast as possible, on another one we might want to have high quality ones.
But the 'slider' you speak of makes a lot of sense.
Armies being recruited I see as an artifact of the old game mechanics - without jobs as such and pops modelling only how much the planet is populated and not the depth of it as it is now.

The point is, that if defense armies are taking pop jobs, than having offense armies not using pops dis-balances offense over defense. Because population is power, often it is a waste of resources to focus on any defense armies (at the moment) - because for most of the game time they would be waiting for invasion which would never come or they would never be able to stop. Offensive armies not using pops are exploit which allows to retake planets easily by offensive armies.

So with the new pop system for me it's only makes sense to have armies (both defense and offense) to be defined as pop jobs - I don't think that army is less people than working on the gas refinery as an example (whatever the pop is). And still we are playing a game so reasonable inconsistency even if they are are okay on some level (like space dragon or whale). Making offensive army a job/use a pop of course would require some redefinition of armies power, as proportion would be different. Also it might involve update of the planetary battle width to make sense. But it has a lot of advantages - army becomes a social measurable part of population, not just some disconnected mini-game as it is now. When military pops are connected to social structure it means that they may have their party, part of military can rebel and many other simulation things - which require army to be measurable fraction of population.

Final (simple) solution can look like - military academy is required to build offensive armies. It has a single job, which is of recruit, and the process of building army takes this pop and transfers it into the transport ship as a solder. And there is one pop less on the planet. Similarly, fortress have a job of defense soldier, but pop can be assigned another job in this case.

More complicated solution - there is a limited amount of jobs per military academy (like 5, 10 on the second level). Army training would look in the similar way, but pops still would be shown as of 'that' planet specialists even when they travel in transport ships. Solders would start to have additional icon on their pops on population view - embarked. So offense armies can also be returned to their home planets and when they are on the planet - assigned a new job.
Staff like xenomorph army / warbots would require special building / robot factory to grow that pop and assign it to its job. The pop would be added to the robot factory queue to be built.
This solution allows transport ships not to stay always in space, adds the vibe of 'family grief' to the whole offensive war thing etc.

 

[G S Palmer]

Alternatively, they could allow defensive armies to be trained/recruited similar to offensive armies, so you could have a vast number on the planet if you're willing to pay the upkeep. In that situation, fortresses could instead provide bonuses to defensive army damage/health, OR they could reduce army upkeep on the planet.

 

[shadowclasper]

one of the ideas I had is that armies should be attached to fleets rather than their own transport type, though I wonder how compatible that would be with this. (See the Fleet Attachements Suggestion in my sig)

 

[NemoRow]

@shadowclasper I like your idea of having no transports for armies, as it might feel better. But the only way for it I can currently see is to use a special hull configuration on for different ship types capacity of armies can be different (S - 1 army, M - 2 armies, L - 4 armies). It has no conflicts with my proposition and I don't think that those two are greatly related. However it is a different topic and also I understand devs decision to keep transports separated for usability reasons and interface simplification.

While reading your post I got an idea about requiring pops to crew ships.. And ability to collect pops from the battlefield and sell them on the slavemarket.

 

[G S Palmer]

Another-nother thought, perhaps defense armies increase unrest (armies have, historically, been known to misbehave when left in one place for one time). In that case, fortresses could both decrease army upkeep and decrease unrest from armies.

 

[NemoRow]

Offense/Defense armies:
* I think that it would be better to think about them as of professional / not professional (national guard or reserves)
* Offensive armies can be build only on planets with military academy
* With no military academy on planet only defensive armies can be recruited
* During ground combat only defensive armies are built/regenerated
* Each offensive army should have its barracks (whey it stations as a pop job)
* Recruiting a solder would take one pop from worker class and put it to the solder job once training is completed (or when it is in progress)
* There is a special button in GUI to embark all of the offensive armies from selected planets and to gather them in one place

So basically:
* Offensive armies become similar to fleets and are assigned to planets
* Each planet have a limited number of solder jobs it can support, which can be expanded by military construction
* On each planet solder jobs can be taken by both offensive or defensive armies
* Offensive armies can be created on one planet and transferred to another
* During ground war, local planetary government recruits defensive armies as much as it can automatically, unless 2x[planetary solder job cap] is reached

It would solve some inconvenience about having armies disconnected from pop jobs (building is enough), inability to use more professional solders to protect key cities. At the same time defensive army size is limited by jobs there, so early Stellaris problems of having 25 armies on 25 big planet won't happen

 

[G S Palmer]

* Offensive armies can be build only on planets with military academy

That wouldn't work since you don't get military academy till relatively late in the game.

 

[NemoRow]

Oh, technology is not a problem - the building can be unlocked form the beginning of the game and it is really easy to do
What the old 'academy' does can be added as the second level of academy using some strategic resource for maintenance.

 

[PK_AZ]

At the same time defensive army size is limited by jobs there, so early Stellaris problems of having 25 armies on 25 big planet won't happen

Whats exactly the problem with big planet spawning 25 defensive armies?

 

[NemoRow]

Oh it is very simple - what is the 'spawning'? Some automagical process generating armies basing on the size of population/planet. But army size from all what we know from our human history was a political decision. Simply put a productive portion of population is put to army instead of bringing some economic benefits. Ethos have a huge impact on army size too, policies - on the defense.
Think of Switzerland of WW2 when every man had a weapon - such a country is very expensive to conquer. Or of pacifist modern Germany of a very weak army. Our current stellaris model would say that they need to spawn amount of armies proportional to population size, but it just does not take into account many things.

With a pop system in place and jobs introduced I just cannot see practical reason why solder is not considered a job - with examples of modern USA, Israel, Russia. Similarly a proposed model of defense armies generation is what has happened in USSR during WW2 or most of the sides of WW1.

If clerk is a job, why solder (no matter what kind of) is not a job? If buildings automatically spawn armies with no population cost, why don't they spawn clerks or scientists? If you say that an army is much smaller than a single pop job, please count how many scientists you have in countries (I'm a scientist by the way) and how many solders, and why than research center has 2 jobs for any society and an army - none?

So my proposition is simply to unify the vision for jobs and make a ground combat synchronized and complementing sub-system, with its necessary depth. : )


EDIT: currently ground combat is a necessary pain required to conquer other planets. There is nothing special about any battle, no feeling of it. Invader just need to have enough armies (which can be created in parallel on many worlds within several years), and with their qualitative and quantitative advantage defense have just no say. So it becomes a boring ritual of war instead of one of the most popular sci-fi elements of the game.
Defending side have no say about it, as the mechanism of the game does not allow it. And the funny thing is that even a correct prediction of what planet would be under attack, the planet can not have even a temporal policy of 'call to arms' which is just what happens during any war. And all they can do is wait for slaughter, even when the empire have good quality armies which can defend the planet better.

 

[PK_AZ]

Oh it is very simple - what is the 'spawning'? Some automagical process generating armies basing on the size of population/planet.

In this case, "spawning" is procedure of registering in-World (in programming sense) some entities, that were not registered in this World before. Reason for their non-existence may be different: they may not exist (in conceptual sense) before, or they may exist (in conceptual sense), but be unimportant in scope of the game and therefore abstracted away. In second case, obviously, armies are not automagically generated, they are only moved from the world of concept ("my planet is able to call 250.000.000 reservists") to the world of game ("there are X instances of MilitiaArmy, 25 of them on my planet").

Or of pacifist modern Germany of a very weak army. Our current stellaris model would say that they need to spawn amount of armies proportional to population size, but it just does not take into account many things.

I took loooong vacation from Stellaris, so correct me if i'm wrong, but we are talking about long-gone mechanics of spawning one militia unit per POP, thats correct?
Then, your analysis is wrong. What that system says, is that in case of total war and direct danger for whole territory of Germany, German government would mobilise every man able to use gun and not needed to make more guns.

Of course, it doesn't take many things into account, but that's because Stellaris scope is galactic, not local. Obviously, some details have to be abstracted away.

If clerk is a job, why solder (no matter what kind of) is not a job? If buildings automatically spawn armies with no population cost, why don't they spawn clerks or scientists?

Design-wise, I can see at least one reason why similar system - through tempting - was never implemented. Part of soldier job is dying. Of course, clerks and scientists sometimes die in line of duty, but it is unfortunate accident, not daily routine. Clerks system doesnt need to implement any way to deal with death, soldier system do need.

If you say that an army is much smaller than a single pop job

Honestly my problem is opposite. WIth "One POP = one army approach", you end with very small number of assault armies (one per 25 POPs, one per 50? What's current num of POPs for proper empire, by the way? More like two hundreds, or two thousands, or twenty thousands?). What I mean is that to complete generic mission tree in EU4 I need to have 100 regiments. When I play HoI4 as any major nation, I have like 150 divisions. I don't think I like the idea of going below that number in Stellaris.

EDIT: currently ground combat is a necessary pain required to conquer other planets. There is nothing special about any battle, no feeling of it. Invader just need to have enough armies (which can be created in parallel on many worlds within several years), and with their qualitative and quantitative advantage defense have just no say. So it becomes a boring ritual of war instead of one of the most popular sci-fi elements of the game.

Ok, I think there is one thing that have to be wrote, and then linked every time someone use that argument.

Funny thing about Stellaris is that it is grand strategy set in generic space opera setting. The twist is, generic space opera is absolutely non-grand strategic. Space operas scope is personal, where grand strategy scope is global (or, in this case, galactic). Battle that claimed one thousand lives may be life-changing experience for hero, and 'all silent on the final frontier' for nation as a whole. Space opera is about epic battles. Grand strategy is about measuring how many tanks, aircrafts and bayonets you need to take down that fortified position. Trying to put epic battles into grand strategy is working against natural flow of things, and it has to have grave consequences.
What could be done instead is maybe some kind of 'news from frontline' events.

Defending side have no say about it, as the mechanism of the game does not allow it. And the funny thing is that even a correct prediction of what planet would be under attack, the planet can not have even a temporal policy of 'call to arms' which is just what happens during any war.

Call to arms is what happened in vanilla Stellaris - every time planet is invaded, it spawn militia units.

As for defender side, it should use its resources to retake control over space. Trying to defend planet only with forces on the planet is against logic. Any well-prepared aggressor will take planet (after some time) for the single reason that he have strategical initiative, freedom of movement, and powerbase big enough to take single planet (aggressor can concentrate forces from all his planets on one planet, when defender can use only forces from one planet; unless he retake space, I mean). Therefore, objective of defending forces is not to repel aggressor, but to deny him control over whole planet for the longest time possible, to buy time for rest of empire to come to rescue.

 

[NemoRow]

Thank you for your arguments, but still I don't feel convinced in any way.

I start from simple observations:
* Current ground combat is boring and brings almost nothing but symbolic action into the game
* Current ground combat have superficial limitation of not being able to use professional armies for defense
* Current ground combat system does not model in any way population resistance
* Current ground combat system makes armies live on transports all the time
* Current ground combat is disconnected from the job-philosophy and does not use population as resource to 'spawn'
* Current ground system does not include planetary landscape and features

I continue to small goals:
* Consistency and integrity of approach to problems (if policemen is job than why solder won't be a job?; if solder can die at war - why the population stays the same?)
* Golden middle simulating - going down to divisions level, or ground tanks is an overkill, bombarding for a short amount of time the planet to take it is an underkill. Current system feels still as underkill and not relevant for a whole game. So something more should be introduced

And with all of it I come up with a solution, which of course has its downsides, but solves existing problems and in my imagination simulations feels much better to play. Additionally it solves another problem of the latest Stellaris - Galaxy population grow all the time and there not that many ways to reduce the population. I can bombard ecumenopolis to ruins with only few pops dying, I can have a bloody war down there - and only few more would die, and the whole planet can be rebuilt in few years despite horrific devastation. Wars does not reduce population, so economically and demographically it is not simulated nicely enough.

I see that ground combat wasn't upgrading not because no one wanted pops to die on the battlefield, but because there was not enough time for the system rework. And no one wanted to risk moving something whats working, as it would require further tweaking, technologies update and other time-consuming things. So in this thread I had just accumulated something what I think to be a natural evolution of current stellaris, as many things made this step much easier (Many jobs tab UI things can be taken to the ground combat view, jobs make armies to be only one step away from solder-jobs).

 

[shadowclasper]

@shadowclasper I like your idea of having no transports for armies, as it might feel better. But the only way for it I can currently see is to use a special hull configuration on for different ship types capacity of armies can be different (S - 1 army, M - 2 armies, L - 4 armies). It has no conflicts with my proposition and I don't think that those two are greatly related. However it is a different topic and also I understand devs decision to keep transports separated for usability reasons and interface simplification.

While reading your post I got an idea about requiring pops to crew ships.. And ability to collect pops from the battlefield and sell them on the slavemarket.

off topic, but still important: pops should crew -fleets- not individual ships imo. Every so many points in naval/fleet capacity used = requires a new pop.

 

[NemoRow]

I like your idea, and I have replied you in this thread, were the idea is on the topic : )

Pop to fleet I don't really think that would work, so there were several ideas of how to solve it. One of the key ones is to increase amount of pops around tenfold or similar, so it feels ok that 1 pop = 1 crew = 1 corvette. Of course increasing amount of pops should come with re-scaling of buildings, districts etc.