Does no one else just mass recruit in preparation for an invasion, I mean you know that you may come across a fort world why not just prepare three years ahead?
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Create a limit of one fortress per planet and remove Cadia fortress world spam
- Thread starter Shorr Kan
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Realistically? Yes.
“Now that we have attained space superiority, you will surrender. If you do not, we will obliterate one of your Earth cities every hour on the hour.”
In a “realistic” setting, space superiority it would be like real world aerial and naval superiority on steroids.
Ideally, planets would have orbital defenses that fleets would have to break through and planets would surrender once the “You have no way to stop us from glassing every city on this planet” stage has been reached.
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I mean, I usually have a few multi-k armies invasion forces hanging around using whatever top-tier army tech I have.
Sometimes I have clone armies as well, leftover form building my own emergency fortress worlds (drop down a shield and start spamming strongholds/fortresses in order to stop some flanking attack from an unexpected direction). Clones are fast to build and good at surviving bombardment under the protection of 95% planetary defence.
After such a trust is defeated, I'll take my clones off into orbit. Their job is to clear the lesser defended planets, while my xenomorph armies (or whatever) are used against real fortress worlds.
The only annoying part is the right arrow, build N armies, right arrow, build N armies spam to mass recruit quickly from every planet at once. Then the shift-click every army, g-click to rally point, then shift-click merge armies to marshal it into a single force.
Having a few-k army auto-follow fleets is worthwhile. Even if they take some shots, those are shots that your real fleet doesn't take. So you can have an army right there ready for the land war if needed.
Considering bombardment still works even when a planetary shield generator exists, we know that they don’t completely stop attacking fleets.
That’s what the second part of my post was about and shields fall under the umbrella of orbital defenses.
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Incorrect. Playing Reanimators and watching your initially small invasion force snowball is super fun, especially if you’re getting stronger over the course of an invasion.
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If you want to actually be seriously realistic, every race in Stellaris should start in 2300 with the ability to crack planets by slingshotting an asteroid. Realistically planets should have no defense against an opposing fleet except for an overwhelming offense consisting of, I dunno, a million missile launchers. Anything from space that can hit a planet can easily devastate it.
inb4 someone points out that being really, really realistic would entail removing FTL. That'd really slow down conquest and annoy the OP
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Would be pretty cool if at least calamitous birth would allow this.
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Single-used planet-killer ships that destroy the planet by ramming unto it would be, uh, something.
you can always become crysis and destroy whole system, idk what is the point to play stellaris without dlc
If the AI is struggling as much as it is to accumulate naval cap, then perhaps a new empire policy should be added:
- Military recruitment policy
- Army First
- More armies spawn per soldier pop, but each soldier produces fewer base naval cap.
- Army recruitment/training/replenishment(healing) speed is increased.
- Balanced
- Vanilla
- Navy First
- Fewer armies spawn per soldier pop, but each soldier produces more base naval cap.
- Army recruitment/training/replenishment(healing) speed is decreased.
- Army First
If it needs more soldiers (e.g. because it's fleets got wiped, its not got the resources to replenish - or its shipyards are in ruins) to run ground defence, and wait for AIs (or push the player to force-peace) then it can flip the other policy.
- Could add a few civic flavour bonuses to some of the options for this too, idk, like Corvee system making soldiers give increased basic / worker output to other pops on the planet (ie. idle soldiers are put to work).
I think this is probably the "lightest" way to implement this, and likely most in-line with the way the vanilla game is balanced.
That said, I'd personally rather turn fortresses in to a new district type, buffed by certain planet unique buildings.
- A "military district", providing soldiers and planetary devastation defence + devastation recovery speed (implying devastation takes much longer to recover from passively than it currently does - or requires the player to expend unity to speed it up via planet decision if no mil districts around), and perhaps other bonuses to orbital ships/defences (construction speed, caps, discounts etc).
- Have fortresses be a planet unique building increasing defence armies per soldier, and maybe adding to the orbital defence station cap.
- Have military academies [and swapped equivalents] be a planet unique building providing increased naval cap per soldier and providing passive general XP if one is assigned to the planet.
I think this is a big element of what makes the current ground warfare implementation feel so off.
Warframe, for example, has several space sequences that also include orbital defence grids - around Venus, in this case.
Fighting a planet wouldnt just be about fighting on the ground. Though without a heavy rework this is largely semantics (renaming "ground" to "orbital network" or whatever). I still feel like this idea fleshing out the 1.0 ground combat UI's atmo/orbital layer, felt like a missed opportunity.
Planet Invasion System GIF/Mockup
This is how I have always wished ground invasions worked. For so long the UI was teasing me with possibility. Now that its gone I felt the need to play around in photoshop for far too long. Image Text: 1. Invading Armies are carried directly by...
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So how would these defenses work? Would these defenses be spammable anti-ship artillery or strike craft that you can send after space crafts? But all that would be done is replacing one problem with just another more intricate problem.
And how much realism do you want? We could sit here for days like we are already doing arguing about how realistic a game could or should be, a good portion of this game is not realistic. If the issue is just ground armies being clunky and a hassle then we agree, I also think ground armies need some serious help. Fort worlds are hard to conquer and an eyesore in an offensive campaign, I believe that is purpose. But if you just want the ground army feature to be removed in general than I disagree, I personally enjoy the feature even if it is just a bunch of dumb circles killing each other.If you want to actually be seriously realistic, every race in Stellaris should start in 2300 with the ability to crack planets by slingshotting an asteroid. Realistically planets should have no defense against an opposing fleet except for an overwhelming offense consisting of, I dunno, a million missile launchers. Anything from space that can hit a planet can easily devastate it.
inb4 someone points out that being really, really realistic would entail removing FTL. That'd really slow down conquest and annoy the OP
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I also agree, watching your armies entering the atmos while under a constant barrage of orbital defenses before landing and fighting on the ground would be fun. Also maybe add events that could happen during a planetary invasion but make them lively and interesting. And siege events, maybe the locals could be putting up a fierce defense.Fighting a planet wouldnt just be about fighting on the ground. Though without a heavy rework this is largely semantics (renaming "ground" to "orbital network" or whatever). I still feel like this idea fleshing out the 1.0 ground combat UI's atmo/orbital layer, felt like a missed opportunity.
Planet Invasion System GIF/Mockup
This is how I have always wished ground invasions worked. For so long the UI was teasing me with possibility. Now that its gone I felt the need to play around in photoshop for far too long. Image Text: 1. Invading Armies are carried directly by...forum.paradoxplaza.com
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It's worth noting that there are real opportunity costs involved with making a fortress world. Naval capacity is certainly a valuable resource, but any pops working those fortresses are still pops that eat into the normal upkeep, while not being able tow work jobs that provide resource such as minerals, alloys, research or anything else that is needed or really handy to have more of. Those fortress also occupy building slots that could have been used to house something like a research lab or other other infrastructure that could grow your economy. Those buildings also have an upkeep that eats resources that could be used for other things.
That said, the devs probably do need to revisit armies (get rid of them IMO and make them a ship component) and how the setup heavily skews in favor of wide empires. When you have a ton of worlds, it does become much more feasible to dedicate worlds to the production if naval capacity because there are enough other worlds to handle production of other required resources. It's not unreasonable for wider empires to have an easier time at getting a larger naval cap because in theory they have access to the resources and population. Just that the skew should be fixed so that the disparity isn't quite as large when the difference between two empires comes down to who just has access to more worlds and systems; especially, if both empires have similar population sizes because in theory both should be able to field similar sized navies. It also gets really silly when a tall empire with twice the population, but half the worlds of a wide empire, can't field a similar sized fleet because they have less places to setup for the generation of naval capacity.
Possible solutions might be to add a new building that is better at adding naval capacity, but isn't a structure that can be spammed. Likely a unique building that your empire can only have one of, but not restrict it solely to being build on capital worlds. Call it military HQ and when it's active, it generates naval capacity best on total population. Leave fortresses, anchorages and other fleet capacity generating stuff in, maybe don't even nerf them directly. Instead sprawl really should have an impact on ship upkeep because larger size means more administrative crap where supplies gets misplace, sent tot he wrong location and more opportunities for it to get stolen. Also increased administrative paperwork also means more chances of personnel not being correctly deployed or given orders on time. Could even experiment with the idea of giving a separate kind of sprawl for fleet upkeep to track that is limited to only being increased by the number of systems and colonies an empire has.
That said, the devs probably do need to revisit armies (get rid of them IMO and make them a ship component) and how the setup heavily skews in favor of wide empires. When you have a ton of worlds, it does become much more feasible to dedicate worlds to the production if naval capacity because there are enough other worlds to handle production of other required resources. It's not unreasonable for wider empires to have an easier time at getting a larger naval cap because in theory they have access to the resources and population. Just that the skew should be fixed so that the disparity isn't quite as large when the difference between two empires comes down to who just has access to more worlds and systems; especially, if both empires have similar population sizes because in theory both should be able to field similar sized navies. It also gets really silly when a tall empire with twice the population, but half the worlds of a wide empire, can't field a similar sized fleet because they have less places to setup for the generation of naval capacity.
Possible solutions might be to add a new building that is better at adding naval capacity, but isn't a structure that can be spammed. Likely a unique building that your empire can only have one of, but not restrict it solely to being build on capital worlds. Call it military HQ and when it's active, it generates naval capacity best on total population. Leave fortresses, anchorages and other fleet capacity generating stuff in, maybe don't even nerf them directly. Instead sprawl really should have an impact on ship upkeep because larger size means more administrative crap where supplies gets misplace, sent tot he wrong location and more opportunities for it to get stolen. Also increased administrative paperwork also means more chances of personnel not being correctly deployed or given orders on time. Could even experiment with the idea of giving a separate kind of sprawl for fleet upkeep to track that is limited to only being increased by the number of systems and colonies an empire has.
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Oh no.
Fortress worlds do what they say on the tin.
They produce massive defensive armies that make the world difficult to conquer, or require *vast* expenditure of effort to do so.
Park a big bombardment fleet over any fortress worlds, and go conquer the rest of the enemy empire whilst it chews away at the planet, if necessary using other routes into their empire.
If they've only got one route into their empire, then the fortress world is doing *precisely* what they're intended to do, by stopping your invasion dead.
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Sorta. The invader probably wants the pops alive and infrastructure intact, or else what's the point of taking the planet? What you're describing is Armageddon Bombardment, which will already very quickly destroy the planet by killing all their pops. Once all the pops that generate armies are dead, you can instantly capture it. Or once all the pops are dead, you can just colonize it. Armageddon should be much faster than it is (as with all bombardment), but it's there.
The planet would likely capitulate, but only if the military was loyal to the planet rather than the empire. Because it doesn't matter if the populace surrenders: what matters is whether the army will attack the invader's occupying forces when they land.
If anything, this shows a different issue with bombardment: lack of shelters for civilians, and lack of ability to destroy districts. On a Fortress world, each fortress ought to be able to shelter a number of pops from death via bombardment (for a while), though they would stop working their jobs if they're not soldiers, but all the infrastructure should be vulnerable. Not even nukes or the equivalent in orbital bombardment can reach things that are far enough underground.
It's easy to make a shelter that would require utterly destroying the economic potential of the planet (make it a tomb world) to crack with artillery. Just build it inside a mountain. But right now that's not an option, though subterranean approximates it with near immunity to bombardment.
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I just throw a big stack of Cybrex Warforms at them, and the meat grinder processes the defense armies quite quickly. Even when that's not available, a proper focus on quality of your armies, not just quantity, still dramatically increases the speed of ground combat.
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Two things that could help mitigate such a thing.
1) If we had an army manager that just built armies on many planets and sent them to the army doomstack when built.
2) I also think it should be possible to increase the combat width. Combat Training could add +1 aggressive conditioning could also add +1, command matrix could add +1. Strategic Coordination Center mega construct could add +1 per upgrade.
1) If we had an army manager that just built armies on many planets and sent them to the army doomstack when built.
2) I also think it should be possible to increase the combat width. Combat Training could add +1 aggressive conditioning could also add +1, command matrix could add +1. Strategic Coordination Center mega construct could add +1 per upgrade.
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But whose combat width rating do we use? The attacker's or the defender's?
And higher combat width isn't always good - yes, you can fight with more troops, but so can your opponent. If you've got 10 *really powerful* and hard to damage units, you might want a low combat width to limit how many units your opponent can bring to bear.
I do like 1 - it could be an add on to the F10 menu to order units of a particular size and species to army (X). Being able to go "build me 100 (ultra strong psychic death beasts)" with just a few clicks would be handy. On that note (and as a naval thing) having a "automatically reinforce" button would be good ***if*** the ship reinforcements could be persuaded to not build unnecessary ships when there are ships of that category already in fleets, but in need of upgrades...
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Wait until you play with Gigastructural Engineering. Maginot worlds (non-gas giant/ringworld ones) start with 10K plus an orbiting bastion at ~500K plus other things like a self destruct... The issue isnt fort worlds, the issue is ground combat in general. The devs have even stated they would rather remove it than overhaul it. And personally I wish they would. Before I start a war I get at least 5K in armies ready. Usually two or three of these armies is enough to get through everyone except fallen empires.
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