Warrior Culture needs a rework

[Jazzbanana]

Like seriously, not the most urgent fix, but this civic is useless. It could give a 50% army damage and army upkeep reduction (instead of -20%) and still not be worth a civic point. Not when army management and land warfare are such negligible aspects of game mechanics, and not when there are other civics like Technocracy that give you ruler jobs and whatnot.
This hits me hard, because it's such a cool concept that I want to pick it everytime, but it's just not viable. Why not make it spawn its own rulers, like warchiefs or something, and give it some more substantial bonus?

 

[Dream State]

The army is such a unimportant point in the game, everything giving +army dmg is mostly useless. Either the need to make army more important or everything that boost army cheaper.

 

[Mastikator]

IMO should just be rolled into Citizen Service. Getting the combined effects of both would make it an okayish civic.

 

[Typee]

I can't think of any space 4X game that solved the army issue anyway. Ground combat is always unimportant because the only thing that matters is controlling the sky so you can bring in your troops.
Troop bonuses would only matter if you were able to sneak in your troop transports through enemy lines to directly assault their worlds.

 

[methegrate]

If they wanted to make armies relevant, it seems like the first solution would be solving army spam. Maybe some sort of manpower mechanic that limits how many armies you can crank out.

Otherwise, as @Typee says, you're back in the same place as pretty much every space 4X ever. The only thing that matters is winning in space. From there army damage is irrelevant. You can just wear the planet down with bombardment and throw units at it in a horrifying human/blorg wave until you win. Unless that changes, there's really not much point to having ground warfare as a part of the game.

We might want to think a little bit about how capturing territory works in this case though. I feel like emphasizing land warfare might invite Swiss cheese empires, where the space empire can capture all of the stars and the warrior empire holds all of its planets.

Tbh, I think we'd also need players to want ground warfare as an equal part of the game. Personally I'm onboard with the idea of a warrior culture that can take with the bat'leth what it can't with its cruisers. But I think you'd risk player frustration at feeling like they won the war but couldn't finish the job. ("I've beaten all their fleets but can't take the freaking planets!")

But as an added bonus this could actually create a reason to introduce boarding mechanics, which are usually a meaningless toy but could be cool if warrior races were viable. They could fight like Reavers from Firefly; rickety ships with little firepower, but can tear into an enemy fleet if they get close enough to get onboard.

 

[Vladisi]

I think making it akin to Technocracy or Exalted Priesthood would be nice - leave the army damage there, as it's mostly useless anyway and one administrator (two with the highest level of capital) could be replaced with a job that gives unity, defensive armies and naval cap, like a super soldier job.

 

[wundte]

I think making it akin to Technocracy or Exalted Priesthood would be nice - leave the army damage there, as it's mostly useless anyway and one administrator (two with the highest level of capital) could be replaced with a job that gives unity, defensive armies and naval cap, like a super soldier job.

That's a damn good idea. Like we have super version of priests (aka high priests) we should have one for soldoers too. This should also apply for citizen cervice

 

[Scholar-at-Arms]

A lot of traits and civics need rework or removal. Warrior Culture is probably up there with Resilient for most useless, since armies are nearly irrelevant.

 

[Bouchart]

The army is such a unimportant point in the game, everything giving +army dmg is mostly useless. Either the need to make army more important or everything that boost army cheaper.

An exception is invading Fallen Empire/Awakened Empire worlds. They have major numbers of troops and many levels of repeatable tech. You also don't want to spend time bombarding the planet or for combat to drag on because you risk destroying their unique buildings.

 

[Snoipah]

The best thing about this civic is actually the militarist government attraction, which is sad.

 

[Andrzej2]

Maybe they should directly connect soldier jobs with armies like in Victoria? Every army would be associated with soldier pop and in case of army anihilation pop would also be destroyed. Of course maximum number of armies would be equal to number of soldier pops.

With that solution losing army would hurt quite badly and thus those civics would be much more useful.

 

[Dream State]

Maybe they should directly connect soldier jobs with armies like in Victoria? Every army would be associated with soldier pop and in case of army anihilation pop would also be destroyed. Of course maximum number of armies would be equal to number of soldier pops.

With that solution losing army would hurt quite badly and thus those civics would be much more useful.

This is interesting yet maybe too punishing.

 

[Sinister2202]

Maybe they should directly connect soldier jobs with armies like in Victoria? Every army would be associated with soldier pop and in case of army anihilation pop would also be destroyed. Of course maximum number of armies would be equal to number of soldier pops.

With that solution losing army would hurt quite badly and thus those civics would be much more useful.

That could also make thorough bombardment more important though. Bombing and capturing is what makes armies less essential than navy. Also you risk losing defense armies on your own planets if you lose soldiers.

This game could learn from our own history as well, and make army's role just as important as the navy's. War in the pacific was mostly about capturing air fields to hop islands. First few naval battles were important to isolate the islands and then the army became important in capturing the islands. Americans bombed Iwo Jima for days, but barely took out its garrison. Since the rudimentary tactics in Stellaris is to bomb, why can't the empires have subterranean bases and garrisons that are safe from bombardments?

Army right now is very essential in taking down the planetary FTL traps, but the opponents (AIs mostly) barely build fortresses. That's another problem. Another issue is that it's so easy to capture enemy planets. Resistance is futile most of the time, despite the buffs given to defense armies.

There should be some sort of infrastructure and garrisons that naval bombardments cannot get to, that also does not allow enemy navy to proceed to the next system like the FTL inhibitors. Only the army would be able to get in and clear these areas.

I have few ideas like section based planetary warfare, and how un-captured planets should re-capture the local star base if enemy fleet is not present in the area, cutting them off. Also, introduce manpower system, which scales with the number of soldier Pops you have in your empire. On top of that add reinforcements as well. If you are cut off by skipping over an enemy planet, your army shouldn't receive reinforcements (healing to full strength).

 

[Tindalosihound]

Maybe it could make pops spawn more defensive armies (to represent the populace being natural fighters, resisting even when not trained)

 

[M@ni@c]

I'm wondering if it's possible to mod in a 1-on-1 relation between a pop and an army. I'm just looking at the army files. Would it be possible to disable normal army creation; but then set armies to "defensive = no" and "is_pop_spawned = yes"? I can't seem to find a define for how fast armies are pop-spawned though.

 

[Nakkivene]

What if it gave a warrior job in every city?

 

[FiddleSticks96]

I think making it akin to Technocracy or Exalted Priesthood would be nice - leave the army damage there, as it's mostly useless anyway and one administrator (two with the highest level of capital) could be replaced with a job that gives unity, defensive armies and naval cap, like a super soldier job.

I'm wondering if it's possible to mod in a 1-on-1 relation between a pop and an army. I'm just looking at the army files. Would it be possible to disable normal army creation; but then set armies to "defensive = no" and "is_pop_spawned = yes"? I can't seem to find a define for how fast armies are pop-spawned though.

What if it gave a warrior job in every city?

I think there's enough going on here in this thread to come up with a good solution.

A major focus of 2.0, and to a lesser extend 2.2, was to reduce the number of ships in play. This made each ship more valuable and wars become more strategic. This same logic can be applied to ground warfare for similar results.

For starters, manpower is already sort of represented in the game. The number of armies of a particular species you can build is already limited by the number of pops of that species living in your empire. I don't know the exact ratio, but it is high enough that armies are easily spammable. A reduction to, say, 1 army per 5 pops, calculated separately for each species in your empire, would reduce the number of armies in play to the point that each one becomes much more important. It also makes defense armies in general, and fortress worlds in particular, much more resistant to ground assault.

Alternatively, a "Logistics" resource could be introduced to the game. This resource is a required maintenance for non-defense armies and is generated by pops in smaller amounts and by enforcer/soldier jobs in larger amounts. The army based techs could also be changed to give a bonus to Logistics on top of what they already do. This allows greater control over army composition and gives you a direct representation of how large of a ground force you can reasonably maintain. It should also be a soft cap, but going over it should impose increasing penalties to army damage/morale. Different armies can even have different maintenance costs. For example, a regular Assault Army would have a Logistics upkeep of 1 while a Slave Army would have an upkeep of 0.5.

The next issue that has to be dealt with is bombardment. I don't think defense armies generated by enforcer jobs should be safe from bombardment, but defense armies from soldier jobs should. Fortress armies were immune to bombardment before and that needs to be brought back, unless I'm mistaken and they are still immune. This would make fortress worlds actually meaningful (at least ocne the AI is completely broken), requiring great effort to invade by ground (meaning Federations, with their greater numbers, could have an easier time breaking through) or straight up cracking the planet. Pops could still be killed via bombardment though, thus ruining forts, and I'm not sure what to do about this short of making Fortresses causing 5 pops (10 for the upgraded versions) to also be immune to bombardment. Unless this happens, no amount of defense armies will ever matter.

As for the Warrior Culture civic, I think making it more like the Technocracy/Exalted Priesthood civics is a step in the right direction. Wiz himself said that the code now allows for things like resource generation to be dynamically based off of things like Barbaric Despoilers having armies on an occupied planet. Theoretically, Warrior Culture could make all armies generate 1 unity and also replace some administrator jobs with a Commander job that produces stability, defense armies, and Logistics.

 

[Theter]

Warrior Culture : +1 Soldier Job from City Districts.

 

[FiddleSticks96]

Warrior Culture : +1 Soldier Job from City Districts.

That is another possible solution, although the problem is that Warrior Culture by definition interacts with armies, so for Warrior Culture to mean anything, armies have to have meaning.

 

[scaper12123]

I use it for one of my races for roleplay purposes, but it really is useless. It needs to either give a benefit to having lots of armies and enforcers or it needs to give a special bonus when conquering planets.