I´m back and ready to answer.
Right, but that's not the "doomstack problem."
I would say that this is the
effect (or maybe symptom?) of the doomstack problem.
We have to remember the changes to starbases as well. Starbases will now be on par with fleets. If an attacker takes enough losses in a fleet versus fleet engagement then he still might not be able to take the system because his ships will be too damaged to take on the starbase controlling said system. This gives the defender time to repair and rearm. Even if they lose that system then there's always another starbase waiting.
This is true, but remember the accepted definition of the term doomstack the forums have been using for the last few years: A force big enough that it can pretty much rampage through enemy territory unimpeded, with minimal (if any) losses.
Stronger starbases mean that, in the new system, a fleet will have to be bigger, in order to be considered a doomstack.
Which will encourage you to put even more ships in one place, at any time.
Depends on how small of a fleet... But if enough to actually capture the starbase, then it's a very viable tactic if you heavily outnumber the enemy. Attacking an undefended starbase is a hell of a lot better than attacking one guarded by a buffed fleet.
True, but remember that, in the new system, it will be required to have an Outpost in EVERY SINGLE SYSTEM: Considering maintenance costs (which will prevent you form upgrading every system), if you are facing only non-upgraded outposts, chances are that you are hitting only unimportant targets.
Also, if your fleet, while smaller than the enemy´s, is actually capable of defeating sucessive upgraded Starports (with low or zero losses) until you reach the enemy´s Core systems, then it is probably big enough to be used against the actual doomstack, if you position them around one of your own upgraded starbases, which would make that option... not really attractive.
And how have they solved Doomstacks? They havent, you cant really fully "solve" the doom stack problem. You can only mitigate it. Which is what exactly they have done. You will still generally lose against an overwhelming force. But now you can make this win very expensive for them and possibly reduce your own losses.
Have they mitigated it? 1- You still can put as many ships as you want in a system/battle; 2- Gutting Warp and Wormholes will remove strategic options for flanking and maneuvering, locking you into "artificial" choke points; 3- Starbases will be found in *every* *single* *enemy* *system*, and they can be a lot stronger than they were.
Fact 2- mean that you will often NOT be able to avoid enemy presence in a region you need to traverse, and Fact 3- mean that you WILL want overwhelming force when facing those static defenses, if only to reduce your own losses.
So you are STILL encouraged to put as many ships as possible in only one place., in other words, making doomstacks.
I'm not sure if someone else has pointed this out yet, but the real limit of what is possible to command in any kind of space combat has absolutely nothing to do with the capabilities of the admiral in question but the capabilities of the computers available. This is due to the distances involved. Ancient admirals did not need to deal with effectively infinite battle space and the difficulties of possible enemy positions spiraling into being completely unpredictable as time goes on. At space distances, even minor maneuvering of any of the ships involved at a large distance exponentially increases the difficulty of acquiring a firing solution, and that's without taking into affect any possible countermeasures that might exist (Such as physical CM like generating an expanding radiation cloud due to high energy particles firing through stellar gas, or electronic counter measures like bombarding incoming missiles/torpedos with fake positions of involved ships to confuse targeting sensors). The amount of factors that would need to be calculated simply to fire one weapon from one allied ship against a single enemy ship is astronomical, and even if we had instant communication of some kind eventually you would reach a point where every additional ship you add that has to be coordinated in the fleet wouldn't increase the capability of the fleet by the expected amount due to increasing the complexity of the calculations. And that's assuming that you have instant communications. If you had to deal with orders being given at the speed of light then in a large fleet you would likely be looking at minute or more delays to every order reaching the ends of the fleet further complicating any kind of calculations of enemy positions as you have to predict where they will be at that particular moment. You can just handwave it and say that the computers are perfect and can do it no problem but that's equally as arbitrary as saying that they can't and that there's a limit to what can feasibly be coordinated in each individual fleet.
This line of reasoning was born of a poster claiming that it is impossible for a
single admiral to command too many ships in a battle. The examples i gave proved him wrong.
Also, the capacity of command for a battle leader (an Admiral , in this case) isn´t
solely due to Computers or means of communication, but also (some might say:
chiefly) the Military Organization: For each decision-making officer, there are a greater number of sub-officers who will in turn relay, implement and, if necessary, adapt those orders.
An Admiral isn´t controlling the actions of each individual crewmenber if his fleet; Instead he is sending order to the Battle group commanders, who, in turn, relay orders to the ship captains, who then relay orders to their Second officers, and so on. Thats how a single officer commands a force numbered in the thousands.
As for how the firing speed increase doesn't make sense from a realistic or immersion perspective, I'm thinking about it like this. Any form of space targeting is all about probabilities. There is no 100% exact targeting unless your weapon hits instantly regardless of distance, your sensors give instant information of enemy positions, that information is processed and coordinated with allied ships instantly, and is sent to your weapons instantly. In a situation where the enemy has, lets say, double the ships in the same arbitrary amount of space that you do, it could feasibly be faster for each of your weapons to target due to them having the possibility of calculating a solution that has high probabilities of hitting one out of several enemy ships. And if you say that the fire rate of a weapon is based significantly on the time it takes to acquire a firing solution, then it makes sense of a kind. Does it make perfect sense? No, but it's good enough for me.
I acknowledge you reasoning, but I could argue that, since this is SPACE, the enemy ships will (obviously) be hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) of kilometers apart form each others, so no trageting bonus should apply.
In fact, I could argue that, when faced with double the ships you have, The outnumbered fleet should be forced to disengage earlier.
Last but not least, You do realize that, when you say "its good enough for me", you are authorizing me to answer "No, it is not good enough for me", do you? And them the discussion would not go anywhere.
As for how this update deals with doomstacks, I think it remains to be seen.
I consider this a dangerous line of thougth.
We have information. We are capable of using said information to predict how the system will work. We can make educated guesses and semi-precise predictions about how the system will work.
I say that we should keep making those predictions and, hopefully, get changes/ajustments while the update is still in development, instead of "waiting and seeing".
It might be too late then.
Hope you're exams go well.
I´m OK. Just a slight deficiency in Vitamins b and D.
I disagree that this just adds more clicks to doomstacking. I think the scenario in most people's heads are two navies clashing over two opposing starforts. Since the likelihood of bordering another person with just a single chokepoint is laughable, let's assume that our empires have multiple contact points, entrances and star forts. Sure you can shove all your ships into one area, but you'd just make it easy for another player to beat you unless you had a significant advantage in size.
If one side does NOT has a significant advantage in numbers, then we are NOT discussing Doomstacks, are we?
For example, if we both had 25k FP and we each had 3 star forts relatively along our border (A-C) and (D-F), you could take all of your navy to attack my fort D. Say I saw you massing for the war-dec and moved 15k FP up to fort D. Let's say all our forts are 10k FP. You come in expecting to stomp my navy and my defenses, cause 1.8 is fresh on your mind where defense stations are little more than beefy roadblocks. However, I don't keep my fleet anywhere near the front of the starfort. In fact, I place them behind the fort on the outskirts of the system. You engage the fort, while I meander around the outside waiting for your cruisers and corvettes to over commit to the fort. I then come in at an angle to your larger fleet and being pounding your back line. Your vettes and bruisers now have to peel off of the fort which continues blazing away at your ships while they attempt to shield your back line.
If YOU can see my fleet coming, then *I* probably can see yours, too. Remember: the whole point of doomstacking is to get an overwhelming advantage: In this case, I would simply NOT engage, if I knew you would get reinforcements in time.
This whole time, my cruisers and corvettes get a bit of free time chunking your battleships and destroyers down before the combat system forces them to intercept your cruisers. I'm not sure if the smaller fleet bonus is added since my fort equalizes the total fleet power between us, but if it does, this battle goes even worse for you. I don't need to win. I just need to hurt you badly and stall. Since my ships won't be insta-wiped now and I can pull back with limping ships, I can confidently engage in this battle knowing that I have my other 10k FP attacking your fort C which is 15 systems away across from fort F. In that even fight, let's say I pull ahead and begin winning. It hurts me, but you can see that I will capture your fort C.
Didn´t you say that the Forts are 10k strong? if you send a 10k fleet to attack it, chances are that you will lose most of it even if you win. In this particular case I wouldn´t exactly mind, as the Starport is indestructible and would be retaken later easily, because after that 10kvs10k battle, you would almost certaily have to retreat that fleet.
Now you have to make a choice, do you pull away from our battle over D, or do you press on with a severely softened battleship group and bet all the marbles? We've both taken similar losses over D, but the power I lost to my fleet was mainly front line, while I took out a few of your battleships costing you more in resources to replace. You decide this isn't going to plan and back out. Now I have your fort and you've gotten nothing for your doom stack. Keep in mind that this ignores the bonus from the defensive ascension which would have given my ships more fire power and increases my build speed for replacement ships. This also ignores any auras coming off of the fort that would have weakened your ships. With those factored in, your mindless doomstack rush looks like a bad idea. We could push the scenario further with me bringing my full power to crush your defenses over A while you try to reclaim C, then putting my 15k FP over E while waiting for you to doomstack your way over to retake A while my other 10k FP takes C away again, and then attacking B while you're committed to taking A, but by now you should see that these changes seriously wreck all plausibility of doomstacking. This is without even mentioning about how you now have to have at least 2 or 3 admirals of varying strength in control of your doomstack.
Considering my answers just above, I think this specific scenario changed enough to warrant different questions.
Taken in conjunction with all that's been revealed so far, warfare in this game is getting a vast systematic improvement. I offer anyone the chance to play me in a match after the patch hits. I have found ways to use tactics/strategy in the doomstack era other than "let the ai doomstack pound a planet while I snipe it's armies". All I see in these DD's are opportunities to have more strategic wars.
Sorry, but no. The mere fact that 2/3 of the movement options are being gutted shows that things are getting worse. The fact that EVERYWHERE will be defended (in different degrees) is a thinly-veiled way to include attrition where none should exist. This is NOT a facilitator for strategic maneuvering or thinking.
I will admit though that fighting other players who outstrip you in FP is virtually impossible to beat currently atm and in 2.0, will by no means be a cake walk, but in 2.0, I can picture scenarios where a decent strategy will prevent total annihilation, if fleet power isn't vastly different, forcing status quo or even white peace (PLEASE GIVE US WHITE PEACE WIZ). But if it's like 140k FP vs. 60k FP...then you toast in a 1v1 bruh, no matter what you do, 2.0 or not. Rage quit, ask to be a vassal, delete the file... I don't know.
I don´t picture any scenarios in the new system, where a 140k FP vs 60K FP won´t stomp the other even harder than now. Specially when the smaller one will almost certainly take more losses to static defenses than the bigger one. Sure, the bigger one will lose more ships than now, but the smaller one will be even less capable of actually damaging the enemy core systems.
Currently, the smaller fleet can evade doomstacks and defenses and hit SpacePorts/mining stations to cripple/damage the enemy´s production capacity. This will almost certailny not be possible in the update.
i see this showing up a lot, and this was mostly to deal with needing only 1 admiral for your nation, a side effect of doomstack, not to outright get rid of them. now you don't outright lose admiral bonuses by splitting your fleet, and so might feel less reluctant to split on a moments notice.
I agree on the 1 admiral per empire. In my games I tend to have 3-4 fleets, because my emprie gets big in the mid-late game, and, since I Purge, my wars tend to involve a LOT of territory.
However, you realize that, in the new system, the onyl reason why you WON´T lose admiral bonuses when spliting fleets is because you won´t have them in the first place? Because the admiral will only command one fleet and the rest will be following him?
Nowadays we have unmanned drones, self-driving cars... why is there a need for a fleet crew? In the future you could probably control all forms of transportation from a main computer very much like a videogame. So, an admiral could control large fleets from a main computer, no problems. It would of course kill much of the roleplaying fun of the game...
I do think those things work better as an abstraction, in the game. (unless, of course, managing those systems is the point of the game, like FTL)
So you can sned them one hyperlane further, unleass you are fighting a 1-3 system empire connected to hyperlanses that are also connected to you, in which case there is no need for a recon force, is there ?
well, I think the practical effect is the same: if the enemy sends a smaller force and it is destroyed by a upgraded Starbase, your territory isn´t invaded. If the enemy scouts the area and finds said Starbase, he won´t send his smaller force to die a pointless death, so your territory remains uninvaded.
Don´t you agree?
P.S: What a wall of text, heh?
I THINK I have now said Everything I had to say about this issue. I hope I have been clear.
