Bigger Fleets should be harder to manage (in terms of battle effectivity)

[VoodooDog]

this would be an incentive for the player to create more fleets (and counter the deathball stacks).

another mechanic to counter the deathball stacks of doom would be something like a flank bonus:
if 2 fleets fight and a third fleet aproaches the battle from "behind" it should get some 'suprise' bonus to the battle?
maybe a higher hit chance of their weapons or something like that.

if such a mechanic would be balanced and in the game, i think battles can become much more dynamic and
challenging.

what do you guys think?

 

[Cagliostro]

This is sort-of-similar to how attrition works in CK and EU. I don't think it would *solve* the problem, but it could definitely help.

 

[Rath12]

A soft cap of how many ships a admiral can manage would be great. It should also scale with level, so you need to train up your new two-stars on the troop escort before they can go and lead one of the 100K stacks.

 

[Shatterfury]

A soft cap of how many ships a admiral can manage would be great. It should also scale with level, so you need to train up your new two-stars on the troop escort before they can go and lead one of the 100K stacks.

Exactly my thought, we should have a cap on how many ships there can be in a system.

 

[Rath12]

I don't think it should be ships in a system, but high numbers of ships in one battle should have fire rate and accuracy maluses.

 

[Zwollenaer]

This would probably make wars a lot more interesting. Just call it a "supply cap". If your fleet is larger than your supply lines can support they will become ineffective. Seems realistic to me. Supply should be a huge consideration, but right now it's a non-factor.

 

[Rath12]

Resupply should also be important. There should be a addon slot (Where the shield capacitors and afterburners go) where you can add a part that gives ships with it +100% or +75% time out of supply before maluses and +50% supply max distance without military stations.

 

[Shatterfury]

I don't think it should be ships in a system, but high numbers of ships in one battle should have fire rate and accuracy maluses.

It`s still a cap, I was speaking very generally, you just get into details on how to implement the cap.

This would probably make wars a lot more interesting. Just call it a "supply cap". If your fleet is larger than your supply lines can support they will become ineffective. Seems realistic to me. Supply should be a huge consideration, but right now it's a non-factor.

Under the supply cap system you still can use your entire fleet as a doom stack.

We need something to break doom stacks.
It can be implemented as growing malus to accuracy as Rath said, or as a command limit for admirals etc.
The exact details are up to the devs but the doom stacks have to be broken.

My opinion anyway.

 

[Rath12]

Sort of. Besides a system cap, the cap should also matter for distance, so exploring the entire galaxy with one mass driver corvette shouldn't work.

 

[Shatterfury]

Sort of. Besides a system cap, the cap should also matter for distance, so exploring the entire galaxy with one mass driver corvette shouldn't work.

That is a good point...now here is were the supply system comes into play.

At least let`s see the doom stacks broken and that we can hope for more.

 

[Alblaka]

I think there are FAR better and more detailed solutions to this issue already presented in the Suggestions forum.

 

[VoodooDog]

This would probably make wars a lot more interesting. Just call it a "supply cap". If your fleet is larger than your supply lines can support they will become ineffective. Seems realistic to me. Supply should be a huge consideration, but right now it's a non-factor.

i think ships dont need a supply line like in HoI for example. because ships are something like autonomous units.
there can be 500k value of ships in one system, why not? but if all these ships are part of just one fleet, the individual effectiveness of each ship should go down.

 

[Exarian]

ATM combat in Stellaris is less tactical oriented then common bar brawl of drunken people. Two big stacks mix together and TADAAADAAAM better composition wins. I prefer TACTICAL reason to split the fleets instead of any hard/soft caps. Maybe soft-cap based on tech level and admiral level will not be bad, but it should not be excuse for lack of any reasonable tactical depth. If I cannot split fleets mid battle, change formations, use tactical flanking etc. etc. - it mean space admiral have infinitely less tools to use then common WW2 admiral.

Space Tactic in Stellaris is limited to F10 keyboard button

 

[The Founder]

this would be an incentive for the player to create more fleets (and counter the deathball stacks).

This is just another "Doomstack" thread. For wich there is a quanratine thread.

Anything you might be thinking about has been thought about, ignored, forgotten, refound, hyped as the holy grail, only to be found useless or infeasible in that thread. Often 5-20 times over.

 

[Elimdur]

Instead of making big fleets undesirable because of arbitrary rules I would much more like it to have much less ships flying around in the first place and those that are around having much more durability instead. The Star Trek: New Horizons Mod shows how this can work. It is less of a hassle to reproduce 10 ships than reproduce 100 where you have to click for every single ship... Also the battle look much better than what we have in vanilla. I once had a fleet with 400 ships spanning half the system...No fun at all when they stand in the way of each other...

 

[Coffee Fox]

This is just another "Doomstack" thread. For wich there is a quanratine thread.

Anything you might be thinking about has been thought about, ignored, forgotten, refound, hyped as the holy grail, only to be found useless or infeasible in that thread. Often 5-20 times over.

Where? I don't see a quarantine thread for doomstacks, just sectors.

 

[Ixal]

We need both a supply system and a (soft) cap on fleet size.
The first to make wars more interesting and giving the defender a chance to recover from a defeat as the opponent first has to conquer some planets or risk being caught out of supply with massive penalties abd the latter to prevent doomstacks.

At first a simple cap would be okayish, but that doesnt prevent you from simply moving all your fleets together as a deathball.

Maybe after a big expansion you could create a HoI like command structure with one fleet admiral at the top and several sector admirals below him each commanding a fleet (and having a fleet cap) and penalties for two or more sector admirals fighting in the same system because of coordination issues etc. based on doctrine and ethos.
In the beginning of the game you only have one admiral for all your fleet but as your tech and naval cap progresses you unlock more layers of the command structure.

 

[Kamakaze Panda]

this would be an incentive for the player to create more fleets (and counter the deathball stacks).

another mechanic to counter the deathball stacks of doom would be something like a flank bonus:
if 2 fleets fight and a third fleet aproaches the battle from "behind" it should get some 'suprise' bonus to the battle?
maybe a higher hit chance of their weapons or something like that.

if such a mechanic would be balanced and in the game, i think battles can become much more dynamic and
challenging.

what do you guys think?

It's a nice idea once again, but the problem is it will simply create a new Meta size of fleet that will become the new doomstack and at which point you will just bring 2 of the optimal sized fleets to a battle.

The problem is that there is no tactical battles and therefore no real way to outmaneuvre or overcome a superior force. Now I'm not saying this is something that can really be fixed within the scope of the game, as it's Grand Strategy not Tactical Combat.

Really doomstacks make perfect sense within the scope of the game, as annoying as they can be.

If I were to make suggestions it would be for more ships to be required as dedicated defensive fleets or as ships in orbits to appease those populations. In real life I imagine puting all your eggs in one basket and leaving almost 100% of your territory unmanned would make people pretty unhappy. Perhaps it could be worked into a faction system somehow.

Problem is even this solution doesn't solve much when you think about it. The AI will simply have to dedicate more resources and ships to defence, depleting it's ability to have a large stack to fight your no so doom, but still very large stack that you can use on the offensive.

This post was a bit of a ramble, but really this topic has been discussed to death and it's difficult to find an adequate solution.

 

[extrapancake]

I agree, and throw in system supply which would address the same problems better. Would also be really fun to send out raiding parties to harass supply lines.

 

[The Founder]

Where? I don't see a quarantine thread for doomstacks, just sectors.

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...mstacked-doomstack-doom-thread-redoox.991261/
Yes, a lot of doom in the name