2.2.4 Beta - The AI is splitting its fleet, hitting me with half of it and losing the war

[Taritu]

I like the inefficient command penalty idea.

Personally the AI weakness is why I've been playing so little lately. Even with Glavius, it's garbage. In 1.91 it was actually pretty good.

 

[Danny Pockets]

Glavius AI mod goes some way to fixing this. If you haven't tried, it really does make a huge improvement to the AI.

 

[Xshu]

The only way to make doomstacks not the optimal way to play is to add some dumb attrition mechanic, and also make battles less important than invading planets and occupying systems.

Honestly, I never minded the doomstacks. Giant space battles are fun to watch.

 

[Simal]

Not the stupidest act. I have seen:
Flew past when I attacked his base. His fleet was 2 times larger.
In the middle of the war he set rockets on corvettes, against PD.
And everything else that is written here, of course.

 

[King Travis]

Why are we forced to use mods to have decent AI?

 

[_Drizzt_]

For a "you cant put two units in one hex" sort of solution that isn't nearly as restrictive or unrealistic as just straight up forbidding multiple fleets to be in one spot, they could add an "inefficient command" penalty where each fleet added past the first applies a multiplicative penalty to the fire rate for all fleets, with one fleet being one command limit worth of ships in a particular battle.

...
Having disengaged ships still count as being in battle for the inefficient command calculations could also make no retreat and unyielding actually useful and flavorful instead of just stupid since having a higher percentage of ships actually firing would give a substantial bonus to damage output compared to having some disengaged ships lowering the output of the whole fleet. Probably have them count as a fraction of their original value though, otherwise having a single ship refuse to run away for too long would suck.

....

I quite like the idea of paradox wanting to prevent doomstack battles. They tried to fix it by buffing smaller groups. This does work to some extend but not nearly eneough. So I believe the above to be a viable option to add (and I mean add not replace the current system) to the game.
Might be worth suggesting it to the developers / posting it in the suggestions forum

 

[shandou]

Personally I do not see what the big fuss about doomstacks is. Doomstacks make perfect sense. It is space, space is HUGE, you can have a humongous grand armada, mutiply it 10 times and you still occupy a very minimal amount of space.
Doomstacks are (and should be) highlly effective. The best, easiest and most reliable way to defeat an opponent is to show up with a colossal fleet and vaporize everything into space dust. The only downside of doomstacks is inefficiency. Splitting fleets allow to cover more ground... I mean space. Multiple systems can be attached at once. Actually it is a highly effective strategy against massive empires. Attack them from all sides, then start conquering planets everywhere, while the doomstack is playing catch with one of your smaller fleets.

The problem is that the AI is dumb as a rock and cannot make strategic decisions. If you show up with your grand armada, that the AI cannot defeat with another doomstack, it should start attacking your systems with small fleets, conquering stations and landing troops on your planets. Then you will be sure as hell forced to split up the big ball o' doom. If the AI would decide that it has a shot to defeat your grand fleet, it should consolidate its ships into another doomstack to let the epic battle play out. A really smart AI would evaluate the status of its economy and if it is strong, it should be willing to go into epic pyrrhic battles just to screw up your economy.

The only penalty that doomstacks would supposed to get is speed. I think large fleets, regardless of fleet capacity should receive a small penalty to sublight speed and FTL engage speed. But I would even argue against this as well, because players can learn how to exploit this mechanic (keep big numbers of small fleets). Now you can fix this exploit by saying that all ships in a system slow down regardless of fleet size, depending on the number of ships in the system. But then players are also able to abuse that as well, by organizing fleets so all of them would consolidate right before the attack, making a change just another disadvantage the AI should (and fail to) overcome

 

[Zergor]

I'll give my experience (in the beta, done this weekend):

I fought a few time a federation way stronger than me.

There was each time the same huge problem: The first fleet to enter my territory was the federation fleet and it DESTROYED my defenses (talking 20k fleet when I had maybe 18k between all my fleets).
Nothing wrong here...
Except it went straight for a planet to bombard and wasn't followed by transports.
Way after that the normal fleets (followed by transports) come and atttack other system. Those fleets on the other hand are 5k to 9k fleets and I just have to crush them with the combined power of mine while the fed fleet happily bombard my planet.
Each time I just have to destroy all their incoming small fleets time and time again until I have enough ships to take on the fed fleet.

Just having a transport follow the main fleet would have them be threatening. Ok I could deal with the small fleets but if the big federation fleet actually invaded planet after planet that would be scary and put me on a timer to react.