For a long time, ground battle seems extremely out of place to me.
It rarely interacts with the rest of the game, the combat is uninteresting.
As such, I think it's proper to stop trying to "fix" army and ground battle altogether, but use space force to capture instead.
The idea comes from Command and Conquer: Generals. In that game, the primary way you capture enemy building is via the basic infantry unit.
For Stellaris, we can do the same: let our combat vessels capable of capturing planets.
Attacking Force
"Selective" bombardment stance now includes a capturing effect.
A new core component "landing pod" becomes available. You can leave it empty to save resource or fit the pod with army types you have unlocked for taking over planets.
Landing pod components have energy, mineral or food upkeep when installed, based on the army type.
Every landing pod in the fleet provides a per-day capturing progress toward the colony it's targeting, and has a cap proportional to planet size.
Defending Force
The base amount of progress required to capture a planet will be directly associated with how well developed the planet is. (One of the main factor is pop count)
Aside from that, the defense army should go away. Instead, defender use defensive buildings.
Defensive buildings are separate buildings from the existing 12 building slots, but share the same building queue.
Similar to how building slots work after 3.0, you get defensive building slots from capital building and gain additional from each fortress.
Planetary shield is now a defensive building.
Fortress no longer gains FTL inhibitor automatically, but needs to be built as a unique defensive building.
There are other ones that either slow down the capturing or deal damage to fleets in orbit.
These different buildings can allow for defenders to organize more interesting defending strategies other than making just huge "swamp" planets that attackers need to chew through.
For the upcoming unity rework, the capturing difficulty may also be adjusted based on sprawl, representing local population resistance to invaders.
Miscellaneous
This would not only greatly simplify the system but also add more meaningful strategic decisions to the game.
Thoughts?
It rarely interacts with the rest of the game, the combat is uninteresting.
As such, I think it's proper to stop trying to "fix" army and ground battle altogether, but use space force to capture instead.
The idea comes from Command and Conquer: Generals. In that game, the primary way you capture enemy building is via the basic infantry unit.
For Stellaris, we can do the same: let our combat vessels capable of capturing planets.
Attacking Force
"Selective" bombardment stance now includes a capturing effect.
A new core component "landing pod" becomes available. You can leave it empty to save resource or fit the pod with army types you have unlocked for taking over planets.
Landing pod components have energy, mineral or food upkeep when installed, based on the army type.
Every landing pod in the fleet provides a per-day capturing progress toward the colony it's targeting, and has a cap proportional to planet size.
Defending Force
The base amount of progress required to capture a planet will be directly associated with how well developed the planet is. (One of the main factor is pop count)
Aside from that, the defense army should go away. Instead, defender use defensive buildings.
Defensive buildings are separate buildings from the existing 12 building slots, but share the same building queue.
Similar to how building slots work after 3.0, you get defensive building slots from capital building and gain additional from each fortress.
Planetary shield is now a defensive building.
Fortress no longer gains FTL inhibitor automatically, but needs to be built as a unique defensive building.
There are other ones that either slow down the capturing or deal damage to fleets in orbit.
These different buildings can allow for defenders to organize more interesting defending strategies other than making just huge "swamp" planets that attackers need to chew through.
For the upcoming unity rework, the capturing difficulty may also be adjusted based on sprawl, representing local population resistance to invaders.
Miscellaneous
- There are some traits that tailor toward army damage, such as strong. These no longer apply to attacker, but do apply to defender capturing difficulty via increasing / decreasing the progress required to capture.
- General is no longer a thing. There can be a few new admiral traits that tailor toward planet capturing speed or planetary defensive weaponry damage reduction.
- New espionage: destroy defensive buildings
- Repeatable techs now become increase capturing speed and increase capturing difficulty. In addition, there can be a new repeatable that explicitly increases planetary defensive weapon strength, as such weapon probably should not benefit from existing weapon repeatable techs.
This would not only greatly simplify the system but also add more meaningful strategic decisions to the game.
Thoughts?
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