Admiral levels will now increase command limit (from stream)

[Imp0815]

This is just another attempt to change something about the disconnected military system we have.

With the changes to the Fleet designer to quickly copy templates we are closing in to a system more akin to HoI IV's divisions which i like:
We have templates that can be easily replicated multiple times to have a consistent and standardized military force.

The changes to admirals just counteract this addition which seems the design decisions around the whole Fleet and Military systems are not consistent with the rest of the game which, funny enough, is my core point of criticism about it.

I asked Eldarin in the recent stream about changes to the Space Combat and removal of Doomstacks and it seems they a aware that it is not in the best place but "all other solutions are worse". (On my personal note: i highly doubt this)

 

[Zentay]

It sounds like it would cause more annoying micromanagement. Stellaris already has too many mechanics that require frequent micromanagement.

I really want fleet sizes that are the same for every admiral. I also really want control over my fleet speed. My fleets should all move at the same speed so that they begin fighting an enemy on the same day. With speed differences it's easy for a portion of the fleet to begin fighting days later, when the battle has already been decided. This also makes the AI lose wars because it does not know how to make sure that fleets move together.

Admiral traits that change ship speed are very good, but also dangerous for this reason.

 

[ruzen]

I am fine by it. Players can recuit and level up admirals for reserve purposes.

But i believe this change will criple AI further
Many fleets will split probly... will see about tgis change

 

[Imp0815]

I am fine by it. Players can recuit and level up admirals for reserve purposes.

But i believe this change will criple AI further
Many fleets will split probly... will see about tgis change

According to Eldarin from yesterdays Stream, the intended design goal of this rework is to have not enough admirals to staff all your fleets.

 

[currylambchop]

id rather them remove command limit tbh, embrace the doomstack

 

[stargazersatnight]

I'm not a fan, I don't want my fleet sizes changing everything an admiral dies, add an annoying bit of micro

 

[Panzerslothen]

I really like this change - something they've snuck right in under the radar. I've wanted something like this for a long time. It makes sense that Command Limit should be based on the Limits of the Commander, afterall.

Should mitigate the Doomstack effect somewhat!

 

[The5lacker]

Given Fleet Supply only exists to mitigate micromanagement, I really don't understand this change. Like, mechanically, there's very little difference between a fleet of 20 Corvettes and two fleets of 10 Corvettes, beyond the minor benefits Admirals grant you.

 

[The5lacker]

I really like this change - something they've snuck right in under the radar. I've wanted something like this for a long time. It makes sense that Command Limit should be based on the Limits of the Commander, afterall.

Should mitigate the Doomstack effect somewhat!

How will it, in any way, shape, or form, mitigate Doomstacking?

 

[Calvax]

I really like this change - something they've snuck right in under the radar. I've wanted something like this for a long time. It makes sense that Command Limit should be based on the Limits of the Commander, afterall.

Should mitigate the Doomstack effect somewhat!

It might make sense but that doesn’t make it fun or strategically interesting. I can’t quite see how it will change doom stacking either. All it will mean is that when our admirals die and the fleets auto split we’ll have to do some tedious micro of hiring a new admiral and setting the smaller fleet to follow the bigger one until they can be merged again.

 

[Zetesofos]

There was a passing comment from the game director on the stream - idk the timestamp right now - that they might consider shrinking the overall galactic shipcount in the future (I interpreted that to mean less sources of naval cap, or ships consume more of it?).

It might be that - for example - if ships cost more naval cap as the game goes on (e.g. in line with higher on-board tech components) then you're going to be needing a better admiral to accommodate a decent sized fleet of them. Though thats very much a guess.​

It also seems like Tier 2-3 admirals are not too hard to get, with little investment, from looking at bonuses on the stream. So I'm not sure if this will be as big of an issue as it seems.

I'm more curious about the Tactics specialisation for admirals - which specifically mentions the admiral will focus on survivability and "certain ship types" - it might be the fleet copy-paste function becomes a useful way to quickly tailor variants of your normal fleets for certain "builds" of admirals - ones stacking up traits to focus on "missile cruisers" "armor stacking/penetration" or "stealth torp frigates" and so on.
View attachment 976141

I really hope they reduce the overall ship count - I feel that the pathing for each ship is one of the main contributors to late game lag - so reducing the ships would help.

But also - as long as proportional power is there, I'd love to have fewer ships to manager - then they feel more special

 

[Pancakelord]

I really like this change - something they've snuck right in under the radar. I've wanted something like this for a long time. It makes sense that Command Limit should be based on the Limits of the Commander, afterall.

Should mitigate the Doomstack effect somewhat!

Micro concerns aside* It should also make another scifi trope viable: "command ships".
As this modifier will just be put into the fleet scope (rather than only existing in the country scope) it should make it possible to create a fleet-bound "command aura" that increases fleet capacity. Such as a Titan, or some dedicated CNC ship. That could give you one more high value thing to hunt down in wars, too.

* IMO most of the issue can be mitigated by just adding a cooling off period - 3-6 months to assign a fresh admiral, then the fleet splits, rather than immediately. Or a soft-cap for fleet sizes with stacking debuffs whilst exceeding the fleet cap - as others have suggested.

 

[Aranaya]

I think the biggest objection to this (inconvenient fleet micro-ing and unworkable templates) can be addressed by simply making the FCL a tiny bit less strict in a few ways.

1. Allow templates to be created and edited to any size (up to the hardcoded maximum, which AFAIK is 500 or something). Maybe a UI warning if the template is oversized.
2. Instead, prevent oversized fleet templates from being reinforced above the size limit.
3. Allow existing oversized fleets to stay at oversize, but with penalties (eg reduced speed, increased upkeep) and a pop-up warning.

 

[Panzerslothen]

Micro concerns aside* It should also make another scifi trope viable: "command ships".
As this modifier will just be put into the fleet scope (rather than only existing in the country scope) it should make it possible to create a fleet-bound "command aura" that increases fleet capacity. Such as a Titan, or some dedicated CNC ship. That could give you one more high value thing to hunt down in wars, too.

* IMO most of the issue can be mitigated by just adding a cooling off period - 3-6 months to assign a fresh admiral, then the fleet splits, rather than immediately. Or a soft-cap for fleet sizes with stacking debuffs whilst exceeding the fleet cap - as others have suggested.

Command Ships, yes, absolutely.

And please, please for the love of The Shroud, *give me a means of declining aggro/engagement and pulling back my fleets!* I really can't stand that the second they get engaged, that's it unless I click to do an emergency hyperspace evacuation.

(I also really want Logistics Ships which I can use to deliver Humanitarian Space-Aid to Space-Disasters; Hospital Ships to respond to Space-Pandemics; that sort of thing. But that's almost a pipe-dream).

 

[Panzerslothen]

I really hope they reduce the overall ship count - I feel that the pathing for each ship is one of the main contributors to late game lag - so reducing the ships would help.

But also - as long as proportional power is there, I'd love to have fewer ships to manager - then they feel more special

I concurr with this because I like that idea of smaller-size engagements in which a single or a few large ships face off against maybe 1.5, or 2, or 2.5, or 3, times their number of smaller but more variant ships. This makes each ship more valuable and more of an interesting 'character' in the battle and the war.

In real life, building and maintaining warships is an INCREDIBLY expensive business, but even a single Frigate can do a lot of different things - to say nothing of the IRL equivalent of Stellaris Battleships and Titans - the Aircraft Carrier - which is a city-on-the-water and an arsenal in its own right to boot.

Some people like Stellaris's approach of huge numbers of ships which are individually irrelevant and easily replaced, and that's fine I guess. But it isn't written in stone as the ONLY way the game could be. There would be advantages to smaller fleet sizes and naval caps across the board.

(Also, if the AI could only be tought to spread its forces around its Empire and its warzones, this might go a long way too...)

 

[Tannhäuser Cake]

For those who missed the stream today it was revealed that command limits for fleets will go up by 10 for every admiral level:

View attachment 975993

If an admiral retires or dies the fleet will automatically split if it is above the new, lower command level. I'm trying to reserve judgement until the DLC is released but I can't help but feel a bit concerned about this. Fleet management in stellaris can be quite a pain. We're getting some new features to more easily copy and paste fleet templates which is fantastic but having a late game war where multiple fleets are getting auto-split sounds like a real micro hassle. Plus the copy and paste function is going to be marred by the fact our fleets will likely all have different command limits so we won't be able to neatly apply templates across them.

And while it might be a pet peeve I'm going to keep saying it til a dev acknowledges it: the random sorting of the fleet outliner is bad. It's not game breaking sure, and I see why fixing it isn't a priority. But it's very aggravating to not have our fleets be able to be neatly ordered to distinguish them from event ships, fed fleets, GDF, mercs, juggernauts etc. I fear that in the late game it's going to be a regular pain of random small fleets appearing that can't be remerged.

What are people's thoughts on this change?

A soft fleet cap with an "un-coordinated vessels" debuff like increased ship upkeep, reduced tracking/accuracy and speed (slower windup, interstellar and jumpdrive-cooldown speeds) would be a good idea imo.
Maybe combined with some common Admiral traits that multiply the Force Disparity modifier when fighting vs larger enemy forces to further disincentivise stacking over the cap.

While I do not expect admirals to die very often, and don't expect this feature to result in tedious micromanagement, it will still be a minor annoyance that does not need to be there. I have previously suggested that admiral skill could influence FCL, but that was a secondary part of a suggestion of making FCL a soft cap with teeth. I think the "soft cap" and "teeth" parts should be in place before adding variable sources of FCL.

Though an optimist interpretation could be that FCL changes are set to come in a patch soon.

If the FCL cap is going to get teeth soon, and the plan is for the cap to then be soft, perhaps a temporary solution would be to just not have fleets break up. They could just keep the ships they have, but be unable to add new ships until they are back below the cap.
(Though this depends a bit on the hypothetical implementation; if they are going the route of penalizing combat with multiple fleets, rather than basing the penalty on the number of ships relative to the highest FCL, splitting up fleets makes sense as the way to emulate the ensuing confusion and chaos after a grand armada loses the grand admiral and their highly skilled staff who held it all together.)

 

[Zetesofos]

I concurr with this because I like that idea of smaller-size engagements in which a single or a few large ships face off against maybe 1.5, or 2, or 2.5, or 3, times their number of smaller but more variant ships. This makes each ship more valuable and more of an interesting 'character' in the battle and the war.

In real life, building and maintaining warships is an INCREDIBLY expensive business, but even a single Frigate can do a lot of different things - to say nothing of the IRL equivalent of Stellaris Battleships and Titans - the Aircraft Carrier - which is a city-on-the-water and an arsenal in its own right to boot.

Some people like Stellaris's approach of huge numbers of ships which are individually irrelevant and easily replaced, and that's fine I guess. But it isn't written in stone as the ONLY way the game could be. There would be advantages to smaller fleet sizes and naval caps across the board.

(Also, if the AI could only be tought to spread its forces around its Empire and its warzones, this might go a long way too...)

It feels like that is something they could change with a game slider:

Naval Capacity Factor: 1 - 25x (as you increase the factor, ships use relatively more naval capacity per ship - thus lowering the number of ships in the game. Would apply to all empires/crises, etc.

 

[Zetesofos]

While I do not expect admirals to die very often, and don't expect this feature to result in tedious micromanagement, it will still be a minor annoyance that does not need to be there. I have previously suggested that admiral skill could influence FCL, but that was a secondary part of a suggestion of making FCL a soft cap with teeth. I think the "soft cap" and "teeth" parts should be in place before adding variable sources of FCL.

Though an optimist interpretation could be that FCL changes are set to come in a patch soon.

If the FCL cap is going to get teeth soon, and the plan is for the cap to then be soft, perhaps a temporary solution would be to just not have fleets break up. They could just keep the ships they have, but be unable to add new ships until they are back below the cap.
(Though this depends a bit on the hypothetical implementation; if they are going the route of penalizing combat with multiple fleets, rather than basing the penalty on the number of ships relative to the highest FCL, splitting up fleets makes sense as the way to emulate the ensuing confusion and chaos after a grand armada loses the grand admiral and their highly skilled staff who held it all together.)

This seems like the short term solution - I mean, what happens if the admiral dies DURING a battle - does the fleet suddenly split into two? are the even?

Keep them together, but just lock adding more ships.

But overall, not a big fan - feels like there are other options they can work with.

 

[Panzerslothen]

It feels like that is something they could change with a game slider:

Naval Capacity Factor: 1 - 25x (as you increase the factor, ships use relatively more naval capacity per ship - thus lowering the number of ships in the game. Would apply to all empires/crises, etc.

Yeah, I love every bit about that. More Sliders = more direct, scalable CHOICE in the hands of the player = more of a custom game experience = BETTER. In my book, anyway.

Some mods do it without sliders but they often don't scale everything else in the game, such as Crises etc.

(Of course I'd also be happy with Battlefleet Gothic 2: Stellaris Edition...)

 

[ZomgK3tchup]

Cool idea, not so cool execution.

Instead of the extra ships splitting off, I'd rather some debuff to either the entire fleet or the affected "overflow" ships.