Doomstacked Doomstack Doom-Thread: ReDoox

[Drowe]

What if having multiple stations with snares pulled random ships to them?

For example, your system has 5 stations, all stations have a snare. The enemy fleet warping in will be split in 5. Each station pulls 1/5th of the fleet to it.

That way heavily fortified systems have a bigger chance to thin the enemy fleet before falling (and buy your fleets time to get there).

Just picked that idea up from the new dev diary thread. This seems like it might be a concept to make defenses more relevant.

@Guilliman88
Good idea in my opinion, mentioned it here so it gets more attention.

 

[Drowe]

@Legendsmith
Something that might belong in the summary, an old post from @Wiz we should take into account when discussing ideas:

One really important thing to bear in mind when it comes to game design and communities is that a community is often very good at identifying a problem, but, unless the solution is simple and straightforward, not at providing solutions. You can liken it to being a driver vs a mechanic: The driver is the one who is always driving the car, and knows if the engine tends to stall when it's cold, or if the left door is making strange noises. Sure, if a tire's fallen off, it's pretty easy to figure out that you just need to put it back on, and if the fuel gauge isn't visible because it's blocked by the steering wheel they can tell the car's designer "that was a really bad interface decision", but any complex problem is going to require knowledge and experience to solve. People tend to think of game design as just having ideas, but it's actually a very complex set of skills that nobody gets to have without putting in the effort to learn.

As with any expert discipline though, it's easy to become arrogant and think that someone who doesn't have your level of expertise cannot possibly identify any problems with the game that you yourself would not have thought of. After all, you designed that engine to be cold-proof, so how DARE a mere driver complain that they got stuck on the highway in the freezing snow?

As such, my philosophy when it comes to community criticism is always to listen, but the more complex a suggested solution is, the less likely I am to adopt it. That doesn't mean it NEVER happens - a couple features in EU4 were lifted almost straight off the suggestions forum - and it also doesn't mean it was useless: I've often been inspired by a suggestion to come up with a new solution for a problem, even if that solution ended up radically different than what was suggested.

Sometimes, however, a problem simply isn't worth fixing. If your left car door makes strange noises, and the solution is to replace the entire chassis... it's probably better to just learn to live with it. Sometimes, fixing a problem will create more, and bigger problems in other areas of the game. Sometimes, what the player thinks they want will actually end up making the game worse for them, because humans are not perfectly rational creatures able to accurately weigh all their conflicting desires.

It's important not to stop listening to the player, though.

 

[Phil76]

So when an admiral dies you have to recall your whole fleet. They do die of old age after all. Oh wait, you can't do that because you can't move your ships together anymore.

If an admiral dies, then you are allowed to replace him/her.

But mixing fleets would be discouraged, so you can't use them to protect larger ships without sacrificing fleet power, ergo you get exclusively fleets with battleships only, every other ship type becomes obsolete once a larger one is unlocked.

I don't see your point! Without limitation you may also build only large ships, but you can't because of your economy. Having fleet cap, doesn't modify this.

You can mix fleets already, and I regularly do that, often using battleships as the main force but with a screen of cruisers armed with flak cannons, destroyers with point defense and corvettes as cannon fodder. It doesn't work too well, since I can't tell my cruisers to stay back and guard the battleships, so they suffer heavier casualties than I'd like. But my battleships don't get destroyed. If you could assign roles to a ship class when you design it, that would probably help in doing that. But forcing the player into a specific tactic is not good game design.

I didn't say you can't mix fleet, I only said that there should be some rules about fleet composition. Paradox already did that in other games : you must have a ratio of small ships per large ships, otherwise you suffer a penalty.

The fewer rules a game has, that force the player to behave in a certain way, the better. Ideally the game just defines what each piece can do and lets the players do the rest. If a game designer has to enforce a behaviour through a rule, there needs to be a good reason to do that. And using a rule to fix a different rule is just causes more problems. Doomstacks are a consequence of rules that already exist, better fix those rules than adding new ones.

Having fleet number limited by command rating (command rating coming from ship size, admirals, and/or ships specialisation or a mis of the three) is a common rule in fleet battle simulations. Apparently this rule doesn't please you, it doesn't mean that it is a bad rule.

 

[Drowe]

If an admiral dies, then you are allowed to replace him/her.

But that new admiral would be unable to command the fleet because of having a lower level. You would need to get at least two, if not more. And that presupposes you actually have the influence to get one, let alone multiple.

I don't see your point! Without limitation you may also build only large ships, but you can't because of your economy. Having fleet cap, doesn't modify this.

If you have no limit, then your choice is made by your economy or preference, you can choose to build only battleships or build a mixed fleet or only corvettes, one isn't inherently better. If you only have a limited number of ships, then you only bring your most powerful ships, because is you replace one battleship with a cruiser your fleet is weaker. If you want to win, your choice is made for you.

I didn't say you can't mix fleet, I only said that there should be some rules about fleet composition. Paradox already did that in other games : you must have a ratio of small ships

So you want to take away the choice of how to build their fleet away from the player to achieve... What exactly? Just because other Paradox games do that, doesn't mean it is right for Stellaris. Given the difference between how Stellaris simulates combat and how every other Paradox game does it, I would say that such an approach is entirely unsuitable. If it was a rule, players would build those ships because the game penalizes them for not doing so, rather than because those ships are worth building.

Having fleet number limited by command rating (command rating coming from ship size, admirals, and/or ships specialisation or a mis of the three) is a common rule in fleet battle simulations. Apparently this rule doesn't please you, it doesn't mean that it is a bad rule.

Stellaris is not a fleet battle simulator, it's a hybrid of 4X and grand strategy with some rudimentary RTS elements mixed in. And because combat is not abstracted but gets simulated in a way that resembles automated RTS, something like that is a really bad idea.

To sum it all up, what you are arguing for are all measures to impose a certain behaviour on the player, they are prohibitive, and that's something that should be used as sparingly as possible and only for a good reason. By making doomstacks or single class fleets impossible, the reason why they exist isn't fixed. You'll still want to kill the enemy fleet as your primary objective. The ship classes you don't want to use are still worthless. The only difference is that it becomes harder to do what you know would be better but the game prevents you from doing through artificial means. If you instead gave those worthless ship classes a purpose, something they can do better than other ship classes and that is actually relevant, then players would use them of their own volition. If players had a good reason to split up their fleets, for example because fleets aren't worth more than planets in wars, then they would split up their fleet of their own volition. If the game had been designed the way you suggest from the start, then going that way might have been sensible. But not nearly a year after release.

 

[vonriel]

One thing I didn't see listed in the summary was a look at the way Emergency FTL works. At least, not in the way I'm thinking.

Slower FTL was mentioned for larger fleets, as well as faster retreat times, but I mean a more concerned look at the mechanic itself. Right now, it's one-size-fits-all, there's no way to interact with it, and the only hard choice to make involving it is how many ships you want to risk losing when you press the button.

I know faster retreat times have been knocked down, but something in me still feels like the Battlestar Galactica method of FTL navigation under pressure should be considered. That is, you can retreat whenever in combat, but only the "most important" ships in your fleet are guaranteed to make it. Everyone else has a chance of being MIA for a longer period of time, lost forever, or simply fail to jump out with the rest of the fleet, putting their FTL on a new timer. The actual "failure" clause can easily be changed, and what is defined as "most important" needs some clarity. The idea here, though, is that a bigger fleet should require more coordination to safely retreat than a smaller one.

Thematically, bigger fleets have more moving parts. They would require more information spread to more pieces in order to safely plan the retreat route. Ships lost in this action could be thought to have warped into a planet, into hostile space, or to have met other similar fates.

Mechanically, this is to force every jump a doomstack makes matter. I would also combine this with military station changes, which I'll get into in a minute, in order to put more emphasis on scouting or other smaller actions before moving in the main fleet. This does unfortunately lead back to the apparently decided-upon idea of faster retreats for smaller fleets, although I maintain that 'safer' doesn't equate to 'faster'. There would also need to be some kind of scaling, maybe with FTL drives, time elapsed, or else through a new technology chain, in order to ensure that early-game corvette fleets face the same sort of FTL difficulties late-game doomstacks do.

Finally, I would also make this mechanic scale with the number of ships involved in a fleet battle, and not just the size of the fleet itself. Perhaps a new admiral trait would remove this restriction, allowing you to place an admiral with this new 'autonomous' trait in charge of a hit-and-run fleet that can move in and out of a fight with fewer restrictions while the main fleet engages. I'd also say that the longer past the minimum 100% safe point you wait, the shorter the time your fleet should have to spend MIA.

In any case, I do feel like the current implementation of the Emergency FTL system is one of the many reasons doomstacks are so safe, and it will need to be revamped in some fashion in order to prevent them from being the only best option.

Now, onto the military station thoughts I had. I personally don't want to see military stations get much more in offensive power than they already do, or else if they do, split it off into a second category of station. Instead, I want them to be royal pains in the ass to any enemy invader.

To do so, one change I'd like to see is to make the FTL snare galaxy-map based instead of system based. That is, any enemy fleet pathing over an area around a system that has a fortress, or one of the other defense station types outfitted with a snare, will be dragged into the system and will have to face the defenses set up there. Coupled with this would be a change to the way snares work. No longer would you warp in on top of the station, but instead you'll be warped into the system as if your fleet had willingly warped there. Any enemy ships in such a system won't be allowed to FTL out normally until the station with the snare is destroyed, but will be allowed to emergency FTL out as normal.

You may notice that I suggest that fortresses automatically come with snares. Well, I'm not suggesting it, I'm saying it. Fortresses, in my mind, should be near mega-structure levels of huge. They should be expensive, ridiculous to kill, and only placeable in inhabited systems. They should be a giant middle finger to enemy fleets, capable of winning battles of attrition against any fleet that doesn't have cruisers or battleships in it, unless that fleet has a truly ridiculous number of destroyers and corvettes. Other stations should be able to be built in a system with a fortress, removing this silly minimum distance rule, but additional stations might add exponentially increased costs to all station maintenance. Or there could be a "station capacity" stat, similar to fleet capacity, that changes on a system-by-system basis, and is based on the number of pops inhabiting that system. Systems with no pops would only allow one station or two platforms to be built within them.

But as we know, doomstacks make mincemeat out of any defense station at present. That needs to change for these changes to be meaningful. I'm talking an increase in hull and shields of at least an order of magnitude, if not two. These things should be a massive pain to disable. And I do mean disable, not destroy, because it would take a frankly absurd amount of firepower to meaningfully destroy the kinds of installations I'm envisioning. Once disabled, it would take a mineral cost to repair them, or maybe a mineral and energy cost, but repairs would take a fraction of the time of rebuilding it from scratch. Or maybe multiple construction ships could be used to increase the speed of repairs. I'm not sure on this one, but I do believe that they need to be renewable without being destructible. I'd like a new wargoal to allow for the forced decommission of certain defense stations, in order to allow some method for people to remove these as obstacles for future conquests.

However, they should be absolutely pathetic when it comes to firing back. Anything smaller than a fortress should never be able to kill a Battleship, and Platforms shouldn't even be able to touch Cruisers. They should just be able to tie them up, to hold them in place until a fleet can arrive to back them up. Fortresses might be able to take out smaller-scale doomstacks, if the owner leaves it there for a year or more, but by that point the owner should have been able to spool up a more-than-safe emergency FTL. The primary contribution of a Fortress or other defense station in an ongoing fleet battle should be to support the allied ships. Whether this is through auras, or a special AI that targets things like PD-targets and capacitor-laden ships first in order to keep them killable for the defense fleet, or through other means is up for grabs.

The defense station ideas in particular seem to encourage doomstacking on offense, but then, I've never been against doomstacks as a concept. I just don't like that they're, at present, the only option. I like the idea that a Fortress and a smaller defensive fleet can tie up a doomstack, or maybe even beat it if given enough time and the proper mix of weaponry/utilities. I like the idea that a main doomstack needs a smaller scouting fleet to look for enemy FTL snares that might sit between them and a target, in order to prevent getting bogged down. I like the idea that a pacifist empire may never need a fleet even half the size of an opposing fleet in order to remain safe from it.

Also, damn was this was long. Sorry for the wall.

 

[Dissonance]

This is an interesting thread because I've been working on a similar personal mod myself for quite some time. IMHO Stellaris is by far the best of any games to attempt this. However it still has some ways to go. I decided to limit fleet sizes so that the differences in weapon outfits would have a more pronounced effect on the battles. It also had the unintended side effect of significantly speeding up mid-late game @ 1000+ stars. I've got it now at the sweet spot in the budget where the AI isn't bankrupting itself with fleets nor is it entirely undefended. I've since stopped developing it temporarily as there are too many bugs with Banks.


-Completed
My solution was to severely limit fleet supply sizes such that nothing but star-ports give naval supply. A star-port only grants supply enough to cover a single of the most advanced ship it can build. So a level 5 star-port can supply you with one battleship or four corvettes. Your choice. (I had to redo events like pirates and tone them down because at start you have 1 supply. A single ship to you empire's name. Don't worry, near the end game you can still have fairly large fleets but by the time you do, you'll have the planets and production.)

-In progress
Another move I made was to limit star-port upgrades to planet sizes. You'll only ever be capable of building level 5 star-ports on 20+ tile planets, level 4 on 15+ tile planets, and level 3 on 10+ planets. So planets now have some new sort of strategic value. You could demand the singular concession of a single planet that is their only planet capable of building battleships, and thus cripple their fleet. Though the larger the planet the larger the warscore necessary to capture it.

-Plans
I would like some way to cap fleet size but currently there is no way. I imagine a standard fleet could have 21 supply in it. After that the fleet takes penalties as the size becomes unmanageable. Admirals, research, and civics could increase the standard fleet size. Fleets under their fleet supply may even have bonuses to FTL travel and E-FTL. There might even be room for a new ship type, the logistics ship which lets you expand your fleet size.

Jamming Beacon - Military Station Module - AOE - ( To dissuade those who would simply break their death-balls into smaller sizes and punish those who don't.)
-5% tracking/enemy fleet in system
-5% evasion/enemy fleet in system
+50% FTL damage (To have some leverage against death-balls)
(currently this isn't possible so it's more a dream than anything. The idea being that multiple fleets within range of a hostile jammer would receive massive penalties. So you'd have to send in a strike force to take out the jammer before jumping in with all your fleets.)

Wishlist
- *Decommissioning.* Ships have a natural lifespan at the end of which they must be decommissioned and replaced. Improved with techs.
- Easy fleet replacement. Once you've designated a fleet it saves the number of ships and automatically replaces them as they decommission or are destroyed.

Edit: Grammar

 

[Phil76]

But that new admiral would be unable to command the fleet because of having a lower level. You would need to get at least two, if not more. And that presupposes you actually have the influence to get one, let alone multiple.

First you must understand that losing an admiral in the middle of a battle and having no one to replace him/her puts you in serious trouble.

Then the rule would not be only "You must have an admiral". There should be some work on it, for example something in case you have only one admiral, who dies.

My main point is that you can't put this idea aside just because you don't like it and because it doesn't suit with the style of game you have decided Stellaris should be.

Your opinion is biased, and with the summary from legendsmith which is also biased, you try to lead Paradox's solution in your way. Who are you to decide that an idea is good or bad for the game?

 

[spriggan02]

In one of the other threads there was the suggestion that hasn't made its' way into the summary yet: To integrate a way to create a "military rebellion" that is tied to fleet size. In short: if the (new) "military elite" faction gets the opportunity (in form of having a fleet that is significantly larger than the rest of the military forces within an empire) to stage a coup-d'etat it will do so (or there will be a chance for the event) with the aim of taking over. Could be tied into the factions system as well.

This does at least disincentivise building one giant fleet. I get that apparently most people agree on the argument that a split up doomstack is still a doomstack so the idea still needs some working on and doesN#t solve the problem on its own, but i find it interesting from a narrative point of view.

Edit:

Diminishing firepower returns for large vs small fleets (Slow down the rate of death for losing fleets)

• This can be called combat width, coordination penalty, or whatever. Basically it means that larger fleets will still defeat, but not immediately 'delete' smaller fleets. They will kill them more slowly, up to a point (unless the smaller fleet is very significantly smaller in which case it'll still be deleted). This slows down battles a bit and makes splitting fleets up a less risky move. The slowing of battle also means that it's not a great idea to send your whole fleet to kill something a quarter of its size because it'll be tied up for too long in a battle that yes it will win, but it's just so much overkill.

Sins of a Solar Empire has a mechanic called "mitigation" that reduces damage for ships that are being focus fired on (IIRC the explain it with some sort of shield-related tech-babble). Basically: the more attacks hit a single vessel during a timeframe the less efficient each one is. Maybe this could somehow be translated to Stellaris space battles.

 

[Airowird]

My main point is that you can't put this idea aside just because you don't like it and because it doesn't suit with the style of game you have decided Stellaris should be.

Your opinion is biased, and with the summary from legendsmith which is also biased, you try to lead Paradox's solution in your way. Who are you to decide that an idea is good or bad for the game?

He's putting the idea aside because it does the following things:

* Adds a rigid cap into the game which is only based logically on communication/overview. Does not work when a player can see & order any troops around instantly anywhere.
* Takes away player options through complex rules for fleets, without actually preventing multi-fleet doomstacks (e.g. 10 fleets at cap all moving in unison)
* Creates equal or more potential issues than it attempts to solve (Admiral deaths for one, having to balance # Admirals in your Leader pool vs fleets in your empire,...)

Most of this he actually explained at the bottom of the post you are reacting to.

Reasons why I put your idea aside:

* Ad Hominem attack to anyone disagreeing with you, on a forum, in a discussion thread.


And to answer your question; He's a customer, just like you and me. (well maybe a bit less like you) He has a right to voice his opinion and basicly tell Paradox "Hey, I think this idea will make the game worse and if you do implement it, I might reconsider playing your game". Are you telling him and others that they don't have the right to do so? And if so, why are YOU defending your suggestion? After all, it might steer Paradox towards YOUR idea and that's not allowed, right? Or maybe, just maybe, people here are trying to convey their issues and opinions. I think it was Ghostcrawler (formerly of Blizzard, now at Riot iirc) that explained how suggestion threads rarely actually lead directly to a solution, but more often than not, indicate an issue which most players try to solve by attacking the symptoms (after all, those are the ones you notice first). What I see here is Drowe, Legendsmith and many others, such as myself, understand that finding the cause here is very difficult and are actually looking to analyze the problem more directly.
For me personally, that's half the fun. I love theorycrafting, have done it a lot in WoW pre-sim era, which incidently helped me understand my math & programming courses better and got me to research some serious Excel stuff untill I managed to effectively cause Excel to crash due to the heavy calculations. And from a systemic PoV, your solution does not add a clear way towards the intended goal (multiple fleets with multiple goals), adds hardlined limitations that can be circumvented, causing more needless micro-management and increases overall complexity without that complexity being the purpose or a key tool of the game play cycle. Thus, my opinion is that this is a bad suggestion.

 

[Drowe]

My main point is that you can't put this idea aside just because you don't like it and because it doesn't suit with the style of game you have decided Stellaris should be.

Your opinion is biased, and with the summary from legendsmith which is also biased, you try to lead Paradox's solution in your way. Who are you to decide that an idea is good or bad for the game?

Let's first address that, I don't put the idea aside because I don't like it. I put it aside because a.) it doesn't work without changing everything about warfare and b.) because the Devs made a deliberate decision not to limit the size of individual fleets and only put a very generous soft cap on the total number of ships you can have. You or I have no influence what so ever to lead Paradox towards anything, all we can do is make suggestions and try to make those suggestions as good as possible and as easy to implement as possible so maybe, just maybe, it gets picked up or inspires the developers to do something similar. In that light, suggestions that require a total rework of the combat system are unlikely to make it into the game and are therefore not good solutions to the problem. If a major overhaul of warfare happens, then the ideas in this thread may have a slight impact on the details, but only if they coincide with the vision the developers have of how combat should work.

If I criticize an idea and give reasons for why it wouldn't work in the current scope of the game, then you have to prove me wrong with counter arguments, not by ad hominem arguments. That only gives the impression that you have no substantial arguments you can bring.

First you must understand that losing an admiral in the middle of a battle and having no one to replace him/her puts you in serious trouble.

I never said anything about the admiral dying in a fight, there is ample time between fights an admiral could die. It also isn't relevant to the criticism. If an admiral dies, that commands a fleet of maximal size, any admiral you newly hire will be unable to command that fleet, because it exceeds the command limit. So what happens to the excess ships? They can't be part of that fleet anymore, so you would need to hire a second admiral, provided you have free slots and the influence to pay for a second one. I'm assuming the best case, and all the fleets the dead admiral controlled get an exception to the no admiral assignment outside your home system you introduced to prevent switching admirals around to circumvent the movement rule.

Then the rule would not be only "You must have an admiral". There should be some work on it, for example something in case you have only one admiral, who dies.

A rule that needs an exception to cover for a flaw is by definition not a good rule. Sometimes it's inevitable in a complex game to make such exceptions, but it should really only be done when absolutely necessary.

Now I'm going to demonstrate in detail why in the current state of Stellaris limited fleet sizes are not the answer.

[EDIT]There is a TL;DR at the end, so if you just want to know the point I'm making, you can skip my little play-by-play demonstrating it in detail.[/EDIT]

1. Fleet sized tied to admiral level and largest hull without mixed fleet requirements:

a.) Since the limit on how many ships can be in a fleet without an admiral can't be 0, there needs to exist a minimum fleet size, let's take 10 for corvettes, 15 for destroyer, 20 for cruiser and 25 for battle ships. An admiral adds 5 per level, so one admiral can command up to 35 corvettes or 50 battleships. This creates a problem, because why would you ever build corvettes if you have bigger ships available, that you could then also command more of. The only thing it creates are battleship doomstacks of 50 battleships, making the number smaller only shifts it around depending on which numbers you adjust. If you want more ships in a fleet, you'll add another admiral, limits doomstacks a bit because of the limit on leaders, but the difference between having 8 scientists, a governor and an admiral or having 7 scientists and 3 admirals doesn't really limit you much, making them smaller does change it a bit, but you would have to drop the limit way down, say only give 4 ships for battleships and 5 for max lvl admiral, so you get 9 battleships and a maximum of 6 corvettes. So that doesn't really work out too well.

b.) Instead have each ship cost their weight in fleet capacity. Those 50 slots from earlier now can only fit in 6 battleships plus one destroyer or two corvettes. So stacking battleships sounds like it's not a good idea anymore, still want that extra fleet size though. So new best solution, one battleship and 42 corvettes. Basically you now have the token battleship and a swarm of corvettes. And everyone else will use that exact same composition, because numbers trump quality. No matter how you slice it, you will always create an objectively best fleet composition. You can fiddle the numbers around however you like, it will always be slanted towards one extreme.

2. Fleet sized tied to admiral level and largest hull with mixed fleet requirements:

The previous example obviously doesn't work, so to make it more balanced a ratio between capital ships and escorts gets introduced. To make it easy, I'll just take the numbers from the recommended ratio in Hearts of Iron 4, that's 3 escorts for each capital ship.

a.) So the size limit of 50 if you have a battleship again, but now you can't just put 50 battleships in a fleet. We want to maximize our fleet power, so obviously we bring as many battleships as we can without exceeding that limit, that's 12 and 38 escorts. Now we don't want to use corvettes, because in this case destroyers give our fleet more power. So optimal solution 12 battleships 38destroyers, no cruisers or corvettes.

b.) I don't think that's what you had in mind, so let's require to have a ratio between all classes, if you have battleships, you need also cruisers, destroyers and corvettes and have them in a specific ratio. Let's say 1 Battleship, 2 cruisers, 3 destroyers and 4 corvettes. Now the 50 ship fleet has 5 battleships, 10 cruisers, 15 destroyers and 20 corvettes. That looks like a nice fleet. So I bring it to a fight and oh wonder, my opponent has the exact same fleet composition as I do. If we have the exact same technology, then it's pure luck who wins. So how to shift the odds to my favour? Bring another fleet of course, but my opponent does the same. So I bring another, and another. And now we have a doomstack battle. Well maybe not, I may not have enough admirals to do that. But I can still send in smaller fleets. So if I run out, I'll just bring fleets with just 2 battleships and a few extra escorts, they'll come in handy anyway since I'm going to lose most of them anyway. That may be even better than hiring more admirals.

3. Number of fleets with fixed size tied to admiral level and only one fleet without an admiral can use FTL:

Ok, the first two versions were flawed, so let's try a different approach. An admiral can command a certain number of fleets simultaneously but those are of a fixed size. I'm deliberately leaving out the possibility of having system wide boni to their size because that creates unnecessary complications for a very minor benefit. This suffers from the same problems as 2a. and 2b. since basically all that's changed is the scope. Instead of scaling it with larger fleet sizes, you scale it with more fleets.

a.) So to preempt the problem of bringing in multiple fleets without admirals, they can now only move one at a time. Makes sense, players can understand the reason behind that rule, so it's a good rule right? Ok so I still have basically the same fleet as my enemy, how do I bring more ships than he does to make sure I win? I can still use multiple admirals, so I'll just assign all my fleets to admirals and move them together. Don't have enough admirals? Well, I can just reassign them. Problem solved, Doomstack.

b.) Ok what if we limited reassigning admirals somehow, say a fleet must be docked to get an admiral assigned. That sounds reasonable, so I'm on my way half way to my target my admiral dies. Now what? Can't move the fleet together anymore can't reassign an admiral either. So fleet by fleet I bring back my fleets to dock them at a station and assign a new admiral. Well, that's kind of annoying.

c.) If an admiral dies, you can assign a new one. Problem solved! Oh, that admiral is lvl 1, my old one was lvl 5, he can't command the fleet. Ok, if an admiral dies, all fleets he commanded can get an admiral. Problem solved! But what if I can't afford another admiral? I have to abort my campaign because the stupid RNG killed my admiral. No, that can't be, we'll fix that somehow, with <insert solution here>.

d.) Finally, a solution, now we can get back to war. You can now only bring enough fleets if you have enough admirals. Hmm, the number of admirals I have is exactly the same as my enemy, RNG decides who wins, and there is no way to bring more fleets in. Wait, I can still send individual fleets into the battle, takes a bit longer, but I can bring more ships and win. Both sides do that. And doomstack again.

e.) Ok how about preventing fleets without admirals from taking part in fights, that should fix it right? Every empire has roughly the same leader cap after all, so there is no way to equivalent forces could tip the balance by just bringing in additional fleets. That should work. Oh wait, my enemy is a federation slightly weaker than myself. They could have more admirals, and thus can bring more ships than I can, even though I have more ships in total. Well, that can't be right.

f.) Ok only one admiral on either side can take part in a fight, that should fix it, right? No more doomstacks, yeah! Wait, why am I losing? I have more ships, I should win! Damn with all those extra admirals, they take out all my ships that don't have an admiral.


Ok, I'll stop now. This has gone on long enough. It is a clear demonstration of why you can't fix something by placing rule upon rule to fight the symptom. And that's what the suggestion of capped fleet sizes or number attempt to do. If you make it harder or impossible for the player to reach some sweetspot that let's him win, then the player will either use all the loop holes you create by adding rule after rule and add exceptions to those rules to cover their flaws, to get as close to the sweetspot as he can, or it will create an imbalance. And you'll try to fix those by adding even more rules and exceptions to the rules, to try to balance them. With each rule you add, you make the game more confusing, less fun to play and create opportunities for more bugs. It makes the code increasingly harder to manage and maintain. It makes it more difficult to find a bug if one shows up and it ultimately kills the game because it becomes unplayable.

Making a game is hard work, just as any major software product is the result of hard work. The concept of limited fleet sizes based on admiral levels or what ever else you can come up with is not an inherently bad concept, plenty of games including Paradox games use it in some form or another. But it is not the be-all-end-all-ultimate solution to doomstacks. If a game like Stellaris doesn't have doomstacks, then it is because the developers of that game have found a combination of mechanics, which may or may not include maximum fleet sizes, that makes it so the player doesn't need or want to build them in the first place. Placing restrictions on fleet size does have inherent weaknesses too, just as not having a restriction does, because there is simply no best solution in game design.

TL;DR:
A lot of words to make a simple point. If you want to fix something, then look for the underlying cause first, because trying to fix the symptom will only make it worse. If you have a brain tumor, that gives you headaches, then just eating more and more painkillers will no more help you than chopping off your head will.

@Airowird
Thanks for the support.

 

[Malefic215]

I had posted this idea as a separate thread not realizing there was a huge thread already devoted to Doomstacks. I'll just paste it below to add to the conversation.

I've been playing Stellaris since launch and never liked that wars were won or lost in 1 large battle. If one doomstack beats another, the game is over for the loser, as the winner's fleet rampages until they win. There is no way to build enough ships in time to push the enemy fleet back.

I think a way to increase the length of wars and prevent a doomstack rampage is an Emergency FTL retreat. Let's use this example: Empire A and Empire B both have 100 Corvette doomstacks. The fleets engage and Empire A wins the battle with 30 ships remaining. Normally, this is game over for Empire B, since they cannot build enough fast enough to slow down, let alone stop Empire A's fleet.

The idea is that when a ship reaches 0HP, it has a 50/50 chance of either being destroyed outright, or Emergency FTLing back to the closest Station to start repairing.

So take the example above with this in mind. While Empire A's fleet won the battle, Empire B should have around 50 surviving ships repairing at a station. This means that Empire B still has ships left to keep fighting, with a numerical advantage over Empire A. When the ships are repaired, along with any reinforcements, they can counterattack fairly quickly.

This would force Empire A out of Empire B's space to regroup with the survivors of its fleet, ensuring that there would be future large battles, as the two Empires go back and forth like a real war would.

This would also be fun from a Role Play view. As ships come in for repairs and join reinforcements, maybe the Admiral's ship survived and he wants to go back for revenge. Additionally, it makes sense that not all ship captains would be suicidal and not try to save their ships from destruction, to keep fighting in the future.

Some already pointed out that the attacking fleet also recoups half of their fleet as well, but they need to move much further back to their empire to repair and all the way back to the front. This should give a defending empire enough time to push them out for a time and make further large battles or fortifying an area possible.

Any comments or criticisms are welcome!

 

[Drowe]

@Malefic215
Not a bad idea as a measure to make doomstack battles less deadly. It would certainly make sense that a ship's captain would try to save his ship. And since the deadlines of battles is one of the things encouraging doomstacks, any mechanic that mitigates that is a good idea in my book. I also can't see a flaw with this idea that could cause problems. Bonus that it works without player action being necessary and on any fleet size, assuming a single corvette has roughly the same chance of retreating as a ship fighting a doomstack.

It doesn't solve doomstacks by itself of course, but I think that no one mechanic can do that anyway.

 

[Malefic215]

@Drowe
I've given it a lot of thought. I don't think Doomstacks are a problem that can be solved without really changing the game. I figure a better solution is to make Doomstacks more interesting and resilient since they have to exist and are a core gameplay element. Most RTS games in general use Doomstacks anyway, I wasn't really bothered to much by it but i really don't like that if you lose 1 battle by enough of a margin, you pretty much lose the game. Or vice versa if you beat an opponent by enough of a margin, you just casually direct your ships destroying everything they have with no worries of a counterattack.

 

[Drowe]

@Malefic215
Doomstack battles will always be in the game, on that I agree, but there are ways to make them less common. Not every battle has to be a doomstack battle.

Right now, a doomstack is the best way to protect your most valuable asset and it also has the best chance at destroying your enemy's fleet, which is his most valuable asset. Making other potential targets equally or more important than preserving your fleet, would give players an incentive to protect those, and that can be done better by splitting the fleet up, since a doomstack can only be in one place. Of course spreading yourself too thin isn't a good idea either, since ships are still important. This creates a situation with no clear best strategy, which would make warfare more interesting. That's the idea at least.

 

[sterrius]

@Malefic215

in the end the problem is not the doomstack itself. Its the 1 battle decides all the main problem.

Small systems/empires will always doomstack as they have little strategic targets no matter how much importance you place in other systems.

As empires grown we need mechanics to force you to keep fleets in point A or B. (Something like the rebels in EU4 that force you to keep troops everywhere in the world as any event can trigger rebellions or problems that you can´t fix by sending troops from another continent).

Also at war we need both places to hurt a empire outside of taking planets. (So you need to split your fleet more to defend those points).

And planets need a considerable more amount of time and ships to be conquered. Forcing you to either take the enemy very very slow (giving him time to rebuild/prepare) or leave ships that will reduce your doomstack.


Fixing problem 2 you automatically kind of fix the doomstack problem.

I already talked a lot about this in the last pages. So kind no point going for more wall of pages. I stopped talking to drowe because we started to make 360º turns in our ideas.


We really have very little new things to say about the topic. PDX need to choose how to aprach the 1 battle wins all problem and after choosing that direction we will know what kind of ideas will make sense and what kind of ideas will not.

 

[Drowe]

@sterrius
Yeah, we approach the problem from different angles and with different philosophies. I think both ways have the potential to solve doomstacks, but would lead the game in different directions in terms of warfare.

At this point, I don't think there will be many genuinely new ideas. And we won't be getting anywhere arguing about which way is better. We could try to map out how each idea might interact with the rest of the game, and what changes to the game they would entail. That might lead to new insights and could be productive.

A mechanic that increases the number of ships surviving battle, could have an impact on the value of minerals for example. Less ships to build, which leads to lower expenses for rebuilding ships, which frees up minerals for other things or a bigger fleet I suppose. What would that do to the balance?

 

[Malefic215]

@sterrius

Oh yeah, I never saw Doomstacks as a problem, they should just be more interesting. I posted my idea of Emergency FTL to counter the "1 battle decides all" problem. If, after losing a doomstack fight, you still have around half your ships (Albeit damaged and repairing) you can still fight back. You will still be losing in the long run because the enemy will recoup half their losses as well, but the war is not done and you still have ships left to fight.

This opens many possibilities for warfare. Does your enemy, after winning a doomstack battle, risk staying to deal more damage knowing a large repaired fleet will soon come to them? Or retreat to meet up with reinforcements and buy the defender more time to build ships/defenses, potentially dragging the war on to force peace. I think this simulates the back and forth nature of warfare well. And it doesn't add any more systems or input from players.

As apposed to just losing after 1 battle, this is more interesting and realistic.

 

[sterrius]

On the economy side we do need a lot of new things to sink our energy and minerals. Not really early game but by mid/late game when we start to pull out the specialized planets things get really out of hand.

I don´t think it was PDX idea to allowing empires to spam battleships on multiple stardocks with a income of minerals going above 500-1k/month. At least at the start.

While i like projects like the dyson sphere, they actually made things worse in that regard. There is no planet/static building that helps to consume even a fraction of that production. Only ships.

Another thing @Drowe we can try to do is to make PDX to read the topic. I think and hope they read this as the topic is fixed but would be nice to know all the ideas we put here are not going to be a waste of our time. (As some people here lost quite a good amoutn of hours thinking really hard about the problem and put quite a good amount of ideas).

@Malefic215


I do like the idea of a % of the fleet staying to cover the escape of most of the fleet. It sound realistic, gives a Battlestar galactica feeling (A very good feeling) and the retreat FTL don´t have to stay locked in 30+ days anymore.

no one is going to hit that button unless he needs to if he is going to lose 15-20% of his Firepower.

 

[Equalsun]

So, has anybody suggested trying to base the combat off of EUIV's system directly yet? A lot of the summary looks to me like people just want that. Allow me to explain.

1. Point #1 in the overview is the same in EUIV- watching the Dev Clash, the armies clash with reinforcements pouring in from every direction, and decisive combat emerges. However, the difference in EUIV is that the damaged army retreats and *passively* regenerates combat power from a pool of resources and manpower, as stated in #4. In Stellaris, the only way to replenish a damaged navy is the purchasing of new units, and fleets are decimated irreparably at the end of combat, so much so that building another effective fighting force over the course of the war is a herculean effort, if possible at all. So, my suggestion is this- individual ships receive damage, but instead of ships being focused down by the enemy targeting AI the combat is more spread out, with ships engaging each other on a more individual basis. Targeting should be revamped so that ships in a navy are all generally taking the same percentages of damage, with the fleet warping out when either a new Morale mechanic tells them to or too many ships start dropping below the point of dying upon emergency FTL. This still allows for stackwiping of smaller fleets, as if emergency FTL doesn't recharge quick enough the fleet will be wiped out as usual. This would allow for a defeated fleet to passively rebuild its strength with either a newly-introduced sailors/manpower mechanic and minerals, or just minerals. Which brings me to suggestion 2-

2. Make planets/special static defenses (see 3.) blockers. Similar to forts in EUIV, fleets shouldn't be able to move past unoccupied planets or undestroyed fortresses without first sieging them down. This would be a simplified "supply lines", reasoning that supplies couldn't get to a fleet if the planets and fortresses behind them are intercepting equipment and ammunition shipments. This would establish lines of battle and points of conflict, allowing for players to plan engagement points and allowing damaged fleets to repair safely. Which brings me to another point-

3. Make some static defenses indestructable. These would be things like a Death Star, a massive space station bristling with weapons and defenses. However, those weapons aren't anti-fleet combat weapons- they're light weapons that poke out of the station's shields occasionally to swat at the bombarding fleet. The idea is this- the station has a ton of shields/armour/whatever, and once those are bombarded down the station is captured and becomes controlled by the attacking fleet. This is similar to forts in EUIV- stationary structures at strategic locations that deal attrition and serve as blockages for advancing fleets. Hopefully that's intelligible.

So, to sum it up, the reason this would help solve the doomstacking is- you can put all your ships in one place, and often will, but there will always be consequences. You'll only take down one defense at a time, slowly grinding into enemy space. You'll take attrition, and the enemy fleet can reengage you over and over (well, if they have the resources/manpower). Wars will drag on for longer and be far more of a drain on an empire's resources, turning the single-decisive-battle mechanics of Stellaris into the more accurate constant struggle of warfare.

Constructive criticism/comments are welcome

 

[HugsAndSnuggles]

Just a few thoughts, since I have time:

A losing fleet loses hard, and is quickly wiped out

This is a problem with damage calculation, not sure if it can be adressed without re-making entire system. The only solution I see right now is to force more even fleet battles, while it will result in wars baing decided in N battles instead of one, larger side will still lose more than it does now, since it'll have less of an advantage. Making damaged ships perform worse might also help, to a degree... at least damaged doomstack will have less strenght than an intact one.

I'd rather they scrap the whole system, but adding artificial restrictions (I'm not fond of) and targets that are not the enemy fleet might work too.
===================

Slower FTL For Military Ships

In my opinion it's 'nerfing for the sake of nerfing'. Might be a way of balancing, if there are tough targets that still make doomstaks viable (like planets with spaceports/defense platforms that are not dying to single salvo of ark emitters), as well as viable targets other that enemy fleet (for smaller fleets to be just another tactic and not a 'new meta' dictated by FTL speeds).
===================

Supply limits/chains

This is totally not needed, and will require fundamental rework of entire game (food/mineral supply lines, for example - to be consistent). We already have maintenance - can simply work with that as an abstraction of the costs to procure, deliver and keep those supplies safe: like larger maintenace costs outside your border.

Speaking of which I don't really understand why you so opposed to the idea of

Admirals as a size limit for fleets

Doesn't have to be hard cap, just increae those maintenance costs for oversized fleets. Have two fleets in the system? - double it. Have three - double it again. It's not like it's easy to organize a huge supply line through hostile territory. Will make doomstakcs actually expensive to use and having several admirals somewhat useful.

Docked fleets - might depend mostly on governor skill, so you'll be forced to keep feets on core worlds.
===================

Planets as high value targets aka Consequences of invasion & bombardment

I'd also add empire-wide happiness penalties for every planet bombed/taken - this way it will ensure you'll lose your productivity if you can't protect your space. Obviously, should be applied for every time planed has its shield drained, pop/building killed, etc.
(For those thinking it's too harsh of a penalty - any anti-planetary action, in my opinion, should result in diplomatic relations debuff, but that's another topic entirely)

Would also like to see warscore for destroyed stations return (will require warscore rework, obviously, so it's not "kill 10 stations - get new planet" all over again). If not - just link them to nearby planets somehow (so that empire gets resourses from planets, and planets - from tiles and nearby stations) and add planetary happiness debuff for each station killed (this way planet does not have to be taken to inflict damage). All this makes planets responsible for entire areas of the map, so losing productivity on one planet long-term or temporarily losing the planet itself will hurt more.