DOOMSTACK AND FLEET DOOMSTACKED SUPER-THREAD OF DOOM

[redeemer216]

In this game, where leaders are pretty temporary and the leader cap is low, tying it to admiral skill would be a poor choice. It would mean you have to micromanage and reorganise your fleets every time one died of old age.

You might be right about that, but I still think admirals need to gain experience much faster. Could end up being an annoyance, but some may like having that immersion.

Maybe be able to set them to train in times of war at the cost of some influence per tick?

Also making it proportional to your fleet cap doesn't really fix the problem at all, it just means you have N doomstacks where N is the proportion of fleet cap in each one.

I kind of agree, on second thought I don't really like scaling it with navy cap, since then larger empires would somehow inherently get an advantage to command and control, which doesn't really make sense.

Making it a fixed number of fleet cap would be better, eg. a late game max tech fleet can contain no more than say 125 fleet cap, then fleet compositions actually become important because you have to think what you're going to put in that cap and how it's going to beat another equivalent size fleet.

I agree, though the balancing game with max fleet cap (plus admiral trait modifiers) will have to be played by the devs.

 

[Smorensky]

If any sort of supply mechanics is introduced, it could fix a lot of things. As long as we are not in Cultureverse, where a single ship can build a planet if it so desires.

All war machines require maintenance and fuel. Kinetic weapons require ammo, missiles require missiles, lasers require focusing lenses (or anything else rly). In order to jump/warp/hyperspace ships require energy/fuel. If the ships have crew, the crew needs rest and some "shore leave" or they go crazy/desert.

Having some kind of supply/attrition/fatigue mechanics would mean that you need to keep at least a part of your forces in reserve so that once one of your fleets needs to go back for maintenance and resupply you have something to replace it with.

As long as your fleets need to fall back after a certain time or risk fighting with severe penalties you cannot just rampage through enemy systems. If you have to fall back, the enemy has a chance to rebuild.

 

[Foraven]

1. Longer fleet battles - increase ship HP, or lower weapon damage, or both.

From having modded lots of games over the years, increasing hp or decreasing damage don't help. Instead of making fights last longer, it makes fights snowball faster. Whoever has the edge has an easy time keeping it because the losing side has lots of troubles killing anything due to weak firepower. That makes doomstacking even more of an issue as you don't want to have the numeric inferiority -ever-.

 

[Kandoruus]

Reasons small fleets don't work now:

1. Smaller fleets take too long to kill anything compared to how fast fleets can move.
Say two warring empires have 20k fleets. Player A splits into four 5k fleets to raid enemy systems and Player B doomstacks. A's fleets are sent to B's most valuable mining systems which have lots of mining stations and are completely undefended. The A's stacks engage a station, maybe they get one per system, and are starting on the next, but wait B jumps into one of those systems with his doomfleet. A's is lost because.......

2. You can't use sub-FTL effectively to avoid or prolong combat.

Mostly because once combat is engaged you get "locked-in" until you can use emergency FTL. A's fleet cannot disengage from the station they are attacking, and his other fleets can't disengage from their targets to come help. Fleet strength is now 15k for A to say 19k for B. Which is a HUGE advantage that will last the rest of the war because.......

3. Fleets are really really expensive (in terms of both time and resources) compared to infrastructure.

The 8-12 mining stations A destroyed just are not enough compensation for the net 4k loss in fleet power. Player A is now locked out of the doomstack option because he now has the weaker fleet, and even though his economy is stronger in the short term he simply will not be able to rebuild his fleets faster than B can rebuild his infrastructure while also increasing his fleet strength.




So some simple solutions to try might be:

- Decrease the defenses of stations

- Allow fleets to disengage combat at sub-FTL speeds. They should decrease fire rate and evasion during this time so it is easy to "walk away" from a station, not so much from another fleet.

- Make fleets cost less compared to infrastructure (either increase infrastructure cost or decrease fleet cost)


Thoughts?

EDIT:
PATCH IS LIVE BABY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[GloatingSwine]

Reasons small fleets don't work now:

1. Smaller fleets take too long to kill anything compared to how fast fleets can move.
Say two warring empires have 20k fleets. Player A splits into four 5k fleets to raid enemy systems and Player B doomstacks. A's fleets are sent to B's most valuable mining systems which have lots of mining stations and are completely undefended. The A's stacks engage a station, maybe they get one per system, and are starting on the next, but wait B jumps into one of those systems with his doomfleet. A's is lost because.......

I think you're drastically overestimating the survivability of mining stations there.

They die basically instantly to anything like a 5k fleet.

Even spaceports die pretty fast, likely faster than a 20k fleet's warp cooldown/wormhole windup.

 

[Kiwibaum]

I think you're drastically overestimating the survivability of mining stations there.

They die basically instantly to anything like a 5k fleet.

Even spaceports die pretty fast, likely faster than a 20k fleet's warp cooldown/wormhole windup.

If the 5k fleet would attack dierectly instead of doing some crazy evasive maneuvers outside of the enemies range and taking years to get to the mining station in combat that would be true.

 

[Mltdwn]

In this game, where leaders are pretty temporary and the leader cap is low, tying it to admiral skill would be a poor choice. It would mean you have to micromanage and reorganise your fleets every time one died of old age.

Also making it proportional to your fleet cap doesn't really fix the problem at all, it just means you have N doomstacks where N is the proportion of fleet cap in each one.

Making it a fixed number of fleet cap would be better, eg. a late game max tech fleet can contain no more than say 125 fleet cap, then fleet compositions actually become important because you have to think what you're going to put in that cap and how it's going to beat another equivalent size fleet.

Actually that may be an intriguing idea... have 2 fleet caps, one which is overall how many ships you can have (i.e. as we have now) and a second one that is how many each can contain. Course it also might help if the AI didn't always doomstack... If instead of running around in a 10k fleet they took 2 5k fleets, had one acting as a delay to you (and used retreats instead of fighting to the death every time) and had the other going around the back side of your empire and taking out resource generators and colonies it may make a lot of difference. As it is now, it never seems like the AI has any kinds of 'negatives' to huge fleets. Well that and I keep getting stuck right next to 'advanced' races right next to me if I leave it on so while I am running around at cap with 200 fleet points of ships in an 12k fleet they are running around with a 20k fleet while holding less area and fewer resources and no negatives. Really wish there was some way to be certain that the AI has to go by the same rules we do or not.

 

[Admiral Adama]

I think there should be a fleet cap as well as a total naval cap for both the ai and player. This would prevent anyone from building 1 massive fleet using the entire naval cap, which is annoying for many reason but if you go to war then essentially all you need to do is defeat the 'Super Fleet' and you've won. Also if you have a system full of defense fortresses, this Super Fleet just wipes them out. So instead there should be say a 100 naval cap per fleet. That way you would have 10 fleets instead of 1, then we need to figure out how to stop the player/ai from sending all 10 fleets into the same system at the same time. Maybe attrition from having so many fleets in one place should play a role here....thoughts?

Ps, I agree with what mltdwn has written above.

 

[Everstill]

I think there should be a fleet cap as well as a total naval cap for both the ai and player. This would prevent anyone from building 1 massive fleet using the entire naval cap, which is annoying for many reason but if you go to war then essentially all you need to do is defeat the 'Super Fleet' and you've won. Also if you have a system full of defense fortresses, this Super Fleet just wipes them out. So instead there should be say a 100 naval cap per fleet. That way you would have 10 fleets instead of 1, then we need to figure out how to stop the player/ai from sending all 10 fleets into the same system at the same time. Maybe attrition from having so many fleets in one place should play a role here....thoughts?

Even if you cap number of fleets in a system, the player will simple send X fleet at a time one after the other until they wipe out all the opponent fleets. It will simple turn the War in a boring fleet micro.

You have to disencourage the use of Doomstacks, you can't try to force not making Doomstacks.

 

[Admiral Adama]

Even if you cap number of fleets in a system, the player will simple send X fleet at a time one after the other until they wipe out all the opponent fleets. It will simple turn the War in a boring fleet micro.

You have to disencourage the use of Doomstacks, you can't try to force not making Doomstacks.

Yeah I can see how that would suck the fun out of it....... I'm not sure what else can be done.

 

[Admiral Adama]

What about a kind of 'defense sector' kind of mechanic. Similar to how you create sectors but instead of planets you assign fleets which patrol and immediately attack intrusion. Then next step would be to assault enemy empires systems....

Kind of similar to HO4 where you create a Frontline then an attack plan so to speak......this just popped into my head so I haven't really thought about it.

 

[Everstill]

What about a kind of 'defense sector' kind of mechanic. Similar to how you create sectors but instead of planets you assign fleets which patrol and immediately attack intrusion. Then next step would be to assault enemy empires systems....

Kind of similar to HO4 where you create a Frontline then an attack plan so to speak......this just popped into my head so I haven't really thought about it.

I don't understand your suggestion. How this will prevent my Doomstack to raping your planets one by one?

In fact, they should make better incentives to strike the enemy infrastructure. Like A bombardment type focused on destroying the planets buildings, so, spreading multiple fleets to destroy multiple infrastructures will pay off. Hardcore purges Empires can start purging a planet by bombardment, killing pop by pop and building by building until a threshold that turns the planet into a Tomb World. (Today the mechanic of blockage is easily counterable with the Doomstack chasing your fleets or simple not caring because they will get all the Warscore anyway)

There must be a reason to Split your fleet. For example, if an enemy comes with a giant Doomstack, what you do? Spread your fleets and attack multiple planets until he can't pay the maintenence cost. We need more incentives to not simple Doomstack and steamroll everything and I really don't know a good one.

 

[melaw]

You have to disencourage the use of Doomstacks, you can't try to force not making Doomstacks.

There must be a clear disadvantage when creating massive fleets. Something like movement penalty, maneuverability penalty, reduced rate of fire... just thinking about authentic issues a huge fleet would face, rather than thinking about artificial caps or limitations.

 

[Airowird]

There must be a clear disadvantage when creating massive fleets. Something like movement penalty, maneuverability penalty, reduced rate of fire... just thinking about authentic issues a huge fleet would face, rather than thinking about artificial caps or limitations.

But at which point do you start to activate this penalty?
It's clear for fleet cap & core system cap, but you can't just put on an arbitrary cap to fleet size and start penalizing it just because.
I've always advocated having a system cap for sectors as well, in which case, each sector could have their own fleet cap as a resource to be taxed into a national fleet.
Local fleets (from remaining cap) could be AI-controlled or by the player, possibly with a bonus for fighting within their own sector, and as each upkeep is paid for by the sector itself, a large issue of the "can't 100% tax sectors" issue is resolved as well as having local penalties for going above the cap. Pacifist & Egalitarian governments could be limited in the amount of fleet they tax, while authoritarian & fan. militarist could be allowed to tax up to 90 or even 100%, but having to tax the sector heavily as well.

In this case, the discouragement for doomstacks is the unhappiness of heavily taxed sectors in both fleet and energy credits, while losing the defensive bonus of local fleets.
Doomstacks would then only be possible for Blitzkrieg-style invasions, because as soon as the defender can gather their own fleets together, a defense strategy can be mustered.

 

[mangalore]

The reason for doomstacks are lack of purpose for fleets other than fighting the enemy.

If you needed fleet presence to control and occupy territory (your own and enemy one, up to even needing fleet presence to maintain your border pressure in a region) and add other underlying mechanics like allowing fleets to do running battles and disengage instead of getting stuck in as well as attrition/supply you could create a plethora of reasons to have fleet units split to do different tasks creating reasons for counter attack etc.

I'm not much a fan of fleet caps, I rather want added mechanics that create a more complex dynamic because of strategic necessity than arbitrary game rules.

 

[melaw]

But at which point do you start to activate this penalty?
It's clear for fleet cap & core system cap, but you can't just put on an arbitrary cap to fleet size and start penalizing it just because.
I've always advocated having a system cap for sectors as well, in which case, each sector could have their own fleet cap as a resource to be taxed into a national fleet.
Local fleets (from remaining cap) could be AI-controlled or by the player, possibly with a bonus for fighting within their own sector, and as each upkeep is paid for by the sector itself, a large issue of the "can't 100% tax sectors" issue is resolved as well as having local penalties for going above the cap. Pacifist & Egalitarian governments could be limited in the amount of fleet they tax, while authoritarian & fan. militarist could be allowed to tax up to 90 or even 100%, but having to tax the sector heavily as well.

In this case, the discouragement for doomstacks is the unhappiness of heavily taxed sectors in both fleet and energy credits, while losing the defensive bonus of local fleets.
Doomstacks would then only be possible for Blitzkrieg-style invasions, because as soon as the defender can gather their own fleets together, a defense strategy can be mustered.

I think you misunderstood me. I'd prefer a kind of disadvantage that grows with fleet size (I.e. amount of ships close together).

 

[dskod1]

Closed for necro.

This is the old doomstack thread, you should be using the newer one here: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...d-doomstack-doom-thread-redoox.991261/page-14

Thanks,
Dylan