Create a limit of one fortress per planet and remove Cadia fortress world spam

[Mastikator]

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...

Both. Stack em. You got a +7, I got a +7, the plane has a width of 10. The width becomes 24. These mega fortress 4k+ worlds are just annoying to deal with, let me annihilate them with xenomorphs a bit quicker please.

 

[DreadLindwyrm]

Both. Stack em. You got a +7, I got a +7, the plane has a width of 10. The width becomes 24. These mega fortress 4k+ worlds are just annoying to deal with, let me annihilate them with xenomorphs a bit quicker please.

And... ruin the point of defensive worlds?

No thanks.

 

[Mastikator]

And... ruin the point of defensive worlds?

No thanks.

The point is to be obtuse. Yes, ruin that.

 

[Shorr Kan]

To summarise the Design Philosophy of all the changes to ground combat and bombardment:
Ground Combat and orbital bombardment will now be a bigger part of the game since big planets will automatically have some defences. Building armies and using them to invade planets will be much easier by using the Army Builder and Rally Troops functionality. Small planets with 1-25 pops will be prime candidates to be taken by orbital bombardment alone, removing the need to have to manually invade each small insignificant planet or habitat.
Further there are some tweaks to ground combat and orbital bombardments to create a trade off between bombing and invading:

• Bombarding planets is much more devastating than it used to be, more pops will die and buildings and districts will be ruined in the process. This also adds a trade off between the different bombardment stances, doing selective bombardment will be slower but fewer pops will die in the process compared to indiscriminate bombardment.
• Orbital Bombardment will now scale with the amount of ships bombarding, the first 100 fleet size ships will do full damage, after that each additional 100 fleet size will add 70% of that efficiency. For example, 300 fleet capacity worth of ships will deal 100% + 70% + (0,7^2 = 49%) = 219% total worth of bombardment damage.
• This effect is scaled based on the number of pops/buildings and planet’s size, where highly populated small planets will suffer greater losses compared to large sparsely populated planets.
• Ground Combat is also more devastating to planets than it used to be, but much less so than bombarding.
• The effect of collateral damage from different army types have also been adjusted, previously the collateral damage on army types was a linear value and not a multiplier, which meant that in practice high damage high collateral units like Xenomorphs could effectively do less collateral damage on the planet compared to normal troops because they would kill the enemy troops very quickly. This is no longer the case as the collateral damage modifier now acts as a multiplier on any damage dealt.
• Planetary Capital buildings now spawns 0/4/8/16 defensive armies for free based on the tier of the building.

It's great to be proven right by the devs no less about ground combat. And I got more than 50 forumites disagreeing with me.

 

[Ryika]

It's great to be proven right by the devs no less about ground combat. And I got more than 50 forumites disagreeing with me.

I honestly don't understand how you came to the conclusion that what the devs are implementing and what you proposed are similar in any way.
What the devs are proposing sounds good, your proposal to limit planets to one fortress each does not.

 

[Shorr Kan]

I wrote that ground combat is frustrating and sucks. Now the devs are improving it and ground armies. I wrote that orbital bombardment is ineffective, now they're improving it. I wrote that AI makes Cadia fortress worlds out of small backwater planets and habitats, now they're making it way easier to conquer backwater colonies without using ground armies.
Stellaris ground combat is an unmitigated disaster and killjoy trash since the release.

 

[Losttruppen]

I don't see how you having to now fight 16 Defense Armies at the least for every 50 pop world proves that we needed less Fortress upgrades. 25 pop planets will have 4x as many armies by default as they did previously.

 

[Ryika]

I wrote that ground combat is frustrating and sucks. Now the devs are improving it and ground armies. I wrote that orbital bombardment is ineffective, now they're improving it. I wrote that AI makes Kadia fortress worlds out of small backwater planets and habitats, now they're making it way easier to conquer backwater colonies.

Pretty sure those are not the reasons you were downvoted. You were downvoted because the suggestion was overly invasive and created problems that you offered no solutions for.

 

[Shorr Kan]

Pretty sure those are not the reasons you were downvoted. You were downvoted because the suggestion was overly invasive and created problems that you offered no solutions for.

If you think forumites here downvote for any logical reason, you're wrong.

 

[Shorr Kan]

dude, learn how to use colossus

This is one of the brightest and smartest answers in the thread.

 

[Wolfgang I]

Is this some sort of organic problem I'm too much of a machine to understand?

*Mega Warforms go brrr*

 

[Abdulijubjub]

I wrote that ground combat is frustrating and sucks. Now the devs are improving it and ground armies. I wrote that orbital bombardment is ineffective, now they're improving it. I wrote that AI makes Cadia fortress worlds out of small backwater planets and habitats, now they're making it way easier to conquer backwater colonies without using ground armies.
Stellaris ground combat is an unmitigated disaster and killjoy trash since the release.

The fact that ground combat was frustrating was not in dispute. Nor was the fact that bombardment was mostly useless for actually killing armies. These are common complaints that pop up on the forums all the time.

What was in dispute was whether your "cure" is worse than the disease, or the existing workarounds (like using a colossus).

The devs went with an entirely different solution from the one you proposed. They made producing armies less tedious, added more defense armies (not less, like you're proposing), and made bombardment much more powerful. None of which were anything like what you proposed.

 

[stargazersatnight]

I mean I might like to see an adjustment where the ai didn't spam fortress worlds, so you know they might actually have a functional economy. But they should still be able to make them, especially in choke points as its a good strategy

 

[NotAYakk]

"Ground combat needs a rework" is obvious to everyone. There are dozens of threads about it.

It was your rework that people didn't like.

Did you know that incompetent people are poor at understanding how bad they are at the thing they are incompetent at? The very lack of skill they have in a subject also makes them bad at evaluating their own skill. This results in incompetent people over-estimating their skill levels significantly.

I have no idea why I would mention that here, but for some reason it seems relevant.

 

[currylambchop]

World War 1 combatants: ‘Trenches are annoying, we should make a law where you can only have 1 trench per country!’

 

[Incompetent]

Is this some sort of organic problem I'm too much of a machine to understand?

*Mega Warforms go brrr*

On a more serious note, if mid-game planets are going to have a large garrison by default, there is probably a case for doing a review of army balance and maybe adding some new army types for the mid-game. Non-Gestalt synth ascension does absolutely nothing for armies, for instance, and cyber ascension isn't great either. In theory, most non-machine empires can get Xenomorphs, but for some reason, the tech is gated behind finding a presapient species (which I've found are relatively rare, certainly rarer than pre-FTL civs).

I would also note that Mega-Warforms (and Xenomorphs) are getting a bit of a nerf in the next patch: with the increased garrisons and recalculation of collateral damage, they will end up doing much more damage to the population and infrastructure of the planet you conquer.

 

[Wolfgang I]

On a more serious note, if mid-game planets are going to have a large garrison by default, there is probably a case for doing a review of army balance and maybe adding some new army types for the mid-game. Non-Gestalt synth ascension does absolutely nothing for armies, for instance, and cyber ascension isn't great either. In theory, most non-machine empires can get Xenomorphs, but for some reason, the tech is gated behind finding a presapient species (which I've found are relatively rare, certainly rarer than pre-FTL civs).

I would also note that Mega-Warforms (and Xenomorphs) are getting a bit of a nerf in the next patch: with the increased garrisons and recalculation of collateral damage, they will end up doing much more damage to the population and infrastructure of the planet you conquer.

*The bio-trophies hurt themselves in their confusion*
It is not very effective

Invading planets in the late game is not very satisfying even with RAs and DEs I admit. Changing the system is more than welcome.

 

[Cosmic Fishering Fleet]

World War 1 combatants: ‘Trenches are annoying, we should make a law where you can only have 1 trench per country!’

Counterpoint came with the Second War. Through Belgium.

 

[HFY]

Yes, the game would be far better if every space or land battle would play out as a 30 minute RTS skirmish.

Now that Co-op Mode is a thing, maybe we can get that to happen.

Player 1: "Bombardment complete, time for invasion ..."

Players 2-5: "COMMENCING DOOR BREACH MANEUVER!"

( )

 

[Thiend]

Now that Co-op Mode is a thing, maybe we can get that to happen.

Player 1: "Bombardment complete, time for invasion ..."

Players 2-5: "COMMENCING DOOR BREACH MANEUVER!"

( )

I'd... Actually play that, yeah. Asymmetrical coop games are a genre I wish was way more common.

Like one player is playing an RTS, and one player is playing an RPG. But they're playing in the same world, just one player controls the faction overall and one player controls the most significant individual agent.