1. So you shove your supply cap up massively. So does your opponent, (exactly as is intended, this is what your supposed to do).
If everyone is shoving up their supply limit, it's the same as if no one did it. So where's the point?
2. So you start blitzing his spaceports. In the time its taken you to move out of your system and cooldown after the jump, kills the space station that snared you, (now buffed so not trivial unless you doomstack, which limits how many systems you can kill at once), then moved through the system to each the spaceport, then moved back to system edge and then charged up and jumped he's had anywhere from a month and a half to 2 months plus to build up. Even at 20% build rates, (which i said would probably be woefully insufficient), he could have built a pretty ridiculous amount of fleet power and supply cap worth of ships. He'll need a bit of time to concentrate them, but your only in his border systems. You can't hit more than his 2nd tier systems before he gets his equally big, (or since your going deep he can build bigger on the same cap), fleet into you).
This only has an effect if the defender has enough systems to absorb the losses and still come out on top. Sure, if both sides have 20 systems up, then this tactic wouldn't work. But instead you get an equilibrium at some point, where neither side can make any gains. If the attacker recalls some ships the defender will reclaim lost territory and if he presses on he overtaxes his economy and gets outproduced and also looses gains. If the defender tries to press his counter attack he will weaken himself and risks losing even more. It also weakens playing tall even further, since they usually don't have large territories, instead opting for things like habitats and terraforming.
3. You've sat around with all that maintenance for all those years on the fleet you could have built on spec. Well done you. Your opponent has probably outgrown you with his better economy and contrary to what i said above in point 1 they can actually afford a bigger supply cap than you meaning not only can they build a fleet that cna stop your blitzkrieg, but they have the cap to afford to send that fleet to take your border systems. Which forces you to downsize, which means he can attack you 2nd tier systems with a smaller force and still have the advantage, repeat ad infinitum till you lose.
How much time do you think it will take you to pull even with my pre built fleet, that's say twice as big as yours? Can you build that fast enough to stop me from destroying your fleet, and taking out a good many of your spaceports and some planets? Assuming you're big enough that I can't kill all your spaceports within the first few months, I will take as many planets as I can get and then turtle down and let you come to me. If I need to, I'll lower my maintenance while I'm not actually in a fight. Or I send my ships out on suicide missions to kill as much of your economy as I can, and maybe take out some of your ships in the process, or just send them back to my territory and build defensive stations in the occupied systems.
In any case, why would you even go the indirect way that basically does the same as saying the further into enemy territory you go the more maintenance your ships in that territory cost? Because that's essentially what your proposal boils down to. In your own territory your ships take up their normal fleet cap, ergo being at your fleet cap has no penalty. If you attack the attacking fleet takes up more fleet cap, so you have to pay more for maintenance, if you have to manually increase how much you pay to maintain them or if it happens automatically makes no difference for the result. The difference is in the details, if you forget to increase the fleet cap, you're screwed. If you forget to lower the cost, when you don't need it, you're screwed. If you constantly adjust it because you want to be optimal, you have to do a lot of small adjustments, that nevertheless pay off in the long run, but to do it perfectly, you essentially have to pause the game every time your fleet moves somewhere with a different fleet cap usage, and every time you build or lose a ship. Ideally you would even reduce it any time you're not fighting or preparing for a fight.
The whole point of the system is that our supposed to keep supply and leet sizes small before the war, but as a side effect of making ships quick to replace, (so fleet deaths aren't particularly decisive unless they lead to planet deaths, and you've got enough of those they shouldn't decide wars on any one planet loss, yes tall will need some helping factors IMO), you can surge to full war fighting capability quickly enough that movement speeds of fleets especially with in system combat mean they can't do more than level the space infrastructure before you get built up and can start launching counterattacks. And the Buffed space defences and attrit losses from jump outs to heal up means unless your opponent has a firm starting econ advantage you've got a good chance of being able to force him to retreat from at least some of your systems.
The system is designed with massive empires in mind, there are game setups that don't allow such empires to arise in the first place, or at least makes them very difficult achieve. The more AI empires there are and the fewer habitable planets are around the less such a limit impacts the ability doomstack. Even on default settings it only really makes a difference once you are big and then you snowball anyway.
Don't mistake simple logic for trivial on the processor. Lots of simple logic is generally a lot more taxing than smaller amounts of more complex logic. Or at least thats been my observation and what's come through from years of modding other games and dev comments on them. I'm not up on detailed processor instruction sets to confirm that from personal knowledge of the details.
I'm not, that's why I said that the targeting logic needs a lot of processing power. What I said was, that the more tasks an AI has to do the more processing power it needs, that is true regardless of how complex or simple the calculations are. What your proposal does do however is increase the total number of ships, especially during war. Fights with big fleets will be more common and thus the expensive targeting operations will see more use, slowing down the game. Another really expensive thing is moving fleets, which you would do more, since you have more ships.
Also the AI can totally be given the ability make those kinds of judgments, i didn't make the excel comment idly, whilst in my current sleep addled state i'd have some issues doing it on short notice i'm pretty confident i could write a set of IF functions to work out those factors and let the AI do the comparisons. And you can't shift the focus onto the economy, (which you've said is a good idea), without having to code the AI to work with that as a metric. But it's really simple to do from a math pov. It's coding that into actual computer code thats the pain
You keep insisting the AI can't do what it absolutely can. I just don;t get it, it's like stellaris is the only game you've ever played and are stuck with the idea that game AI's can't do simple basic arithmetic, which is all thats required). They can, other games have them do that all the time. Stellaris AI isn't as bad as it is because Game class AI's are inherently incapable of making the kind of decisions involved intelligently, it's bad because like many AI's it simply hasn't been coded to be very intelligent, it's a cost/benefit thing. You code the minimum level of AI needed to use a given facet of the game system at a minimum level of effectiveness then compensate the AI's poorer than human abilities with artificial buffs. It's less coding so cheaper and most players won't care enough to make it an issue from an end sales PoV.
I have been delving too deep into AI lately, so my working idea of AI is very different. I've been tinkering around with machine learning and how to model human like learning processes. Takes a bit to get out of that mindset.
Those giant decision trees require the developer to actually take into account all the actions the AI can take and anticipate what a player might do within reason, you can't take everything into account of course. The more options the player has, the less predictable he is going to be. And if the player can modify his force limit with resources, then that needs to be taken into account. How are you going to put that in numbers? How do you calculate how strong a player actually is? Currently it uses fleet cap, technology and fleet power as a metric. Technology and fleet cap don't change very quickly in most cases, so they work well as a base line to compare strength. But if I can switch from peace time economy to war time economy quickly, then fleet cap is variable as well. You seem to be confident, that you can figure it out anyway, and I disagree with that. Either the developers have to dictate the relationship between economy and fleet size the AI uses, which isn't very flexible and will be easy to exploit. Or they need to develop an utility function to determine that. The second option is way to complex for a game AI, as in too difficult to create, not too difficult to compute, so option one will be used.
My example for overbuilding your force limit comes into play here. From a minmax point of view it may be suboptimal to do so, but it will make it difficult for the AI to judge your strength. Because while you may have a massively overpowered fleet during the opening months of the war, you need to invest much less into building your fleet and have more or less free reign to destroy his economy, while he has to build up his forces to match yours, and that's assuming he can avoid a direct engagement and losing a sizable portion of his fleet. The thing is, that exponential rise in maintenance cost once you're over the force limit makes overbuilding it costly during peace, which is why you avoid doing so. But if I only have linear growth going above doesn't hurt the economy much during peace, since you don't need to raise your cap if you're not fighting. Cheaper build costs also means building more ships than your force limit allows isn't as taxing on your economy as it would be otherwise. So you can build up a massive force that would be impossible right now and still have a decent economy, which lets you save up a reserve to draw on during war, when you need it.
Remember where we started on this. You were arguing the AI couldn;t make such micromanagement changes and that it was bad at implementing decisions. AI's are freaking amazing at both of those. They're just really bad at making the decisions.
Like I said I was on a different track in regards to AI. You're right, it can micromanage, but is bad at it if it involves making a decision, which is easy to see looking at how bad the sector AI is in developing planets. Actively raising the fleet cap could be done automatically, so it doesn't have to make decisions, but then you could do it for the player too, because either it is annoying to have to adjust the same value over and over in reaction to changing circumstances to avoid wasting resources or you can use it in game breaking exploits.
As for the MP. I still say the inherent econ advantages would drown it out in most cases, nor am i balancing heavily for the competitive MP environment, Stellaris just isn't built for that so it's a strictly tertiary concern because it's never going to be a good game for that. This is somthing the MP types don't seem to get, Stellaris isn't designed for cutthroat play and Paradox are incredibly unlikely to rejig massive bits of the game to support it.
Fair point, but it doesn't only have an adverse effects on MP, the same applies to SP if someone is a compulsive minmaxer, or plays on a high difficult level where a getting even a slightly better efficiency will make a difference.
Your missing the key point here. You can have doomstack focus with no micromanagement or you can have econ focus some micromanagment. You cannot have econ focus without any micromanagement.
Why not? In essence you can get the same result by tying maintenance cost of fleets to their distance from your border.
You can make space based resources rarer, but with much higher yields, so they can rival a small planet or habitat in output. So smashing infrastructure actually is an effective strategy to weaken your opponent's economy. You could create an actual supply mechanic, instead of repurposing the force limit to serve as one, that allows for disruption of supply lines, weakening unsupplied ships. You could make fleets much more durable, so losing a fight doesn't have the same level of impact. Give captured planets a benefit for the conqueror, besides war score and weakening your opponent. None of these options require that level of micromanaging you proposed and all of them encourage defending your territory and you need to split your fleet to do it if you want to attack at the same time as defending your territory and secure your supply lines, regardless how big you are.
The key point about shoving the war onto the economy is that against someone of similar size (within a modest range), it can and will force you to kill all non-war centric economic activity. our economy will simply stop growing significantly even as your ship production ramps up dramatically.
You can already do that by overbuilding your fleet cap during war. It has diminishing returns but can give you an edge at the cost of economic growth.
Do you want a situation where you have to do that when fighting some small 10 system opponent spread along one spiral arm?
That is exactly what your system leads to. Distance to your border is big if the empire didn't grow evenly in all directions, so even if I have twice the size I will have a harder time fighting him that way since I have to go much deeper than on an elliptical galaxy with more even expansion.
And do you want to be stuck with a fixed wartime supply limit that stops you deepstriking a 10 system enemy spread out along a spiral arm just as much as a 50 system equal, meaning it takes you years to kill someone you should be able to kill in months?
Same thing as above. Using your system, if I border a 10 system empire spread out on a spiral arm and only share a small border, then it is just as expensive to go deep as with a 50 system empire which grew evenly.
The biggest long running complaint with late game wars is how long they take, and your suggesting making that worse by having a fixed non-manageable supply system. Players can and will scream bloody murder if you try that and demand that you let them decide how much econ to dedicate to the war so they can punch out that little guy in a few months then get back to growing their economy.
Unless you have something like call for peace, which doesn't depend on using your system, it's not going to change. Without it, your system would draw it out longer than now. So I don't see an improvement.
It's the equivelent of expecting the US to go onto rationing everytime it gets involved in somthing in the middle east just because the countries technically at war.
No it isn't, if ships have a higher maintenance cost while in enemy territory, and you only send how much you need, you can avoid the cost explosion without needing to go an indirect way. But if you produce ships much faster, then you want to end the war as quickly as possible to avoid having to invest resources in building more ships and you do that by going all in instead of using only as much force as necessary.
To sum it up:
A fleet cap that can be boosted with resources is going to be abused in hard to predict ways. And increases micromanagement to play optimal.
Increasing fleet cap usage according to distance from borders, is equivalent to increasing maintenance cost of ships outside your borders according to distance, at least if you can allocate resources to boost your fleet cap. This gains nothing over doing it by scaling cost directly and only for those units actually deployed instead of a global system.
Cheaper ships and shorter build times mean more clicks and more work for players. It also makes wars longer because you can rebuild faster after a loss.
Linear scaling costs when overbuilding your force limit will make extreme military buildup before a war easier and leads to blitzkrieg tactics unless the target has enough territory to trade for time.
