Fixing Big Ball of Death Suggestion: Admiral Combat Width

[Drow7]

If problem with combat width is that its space and its huge 3D without terrain features then why not simply say its admirals capacity to command certain number of ships?

Better admirals can get bigger "combat width" with their traits and technology can get better computers and holographic battle overview or whatever to assist them to increase it.

 

[clockworkBabbag]

Just imagine if the Blorg were facing another hostile empire out in the spiral arm.

There's your incentive to split a fleet up right there.

Other tactics may also strongly discourage doomstacks, like fast moving groups of raiders swatting all the mining stations.

In other circumstances, a doom stack may be exactly the best thing to do and in those cases you should go ahead and do a doomstack, it's not inherently "less tactical" it's actually pretty optimal tactically. Kinda daft to think of it as a 'problem' top be fixed with gamey machanics.

Do any of those do anything for winning a war?

Sure someone could run around your territory damaging your infrastructure, but if in the meantime you've completely annihilated all resistance from one front in the war and have a bunch of warscore because of it, who comes out ahead?

Again, the idea is not to make large fleets ineffective - there just don't seem to be enough incentives to not have giant stacks at all times. If you're strong enough to field a giant death stack, it doesn't seem like you'd ever really want to split up your fleet or commit forces to multiple fronts unless you're already sure that your split up fleets are still strong enough to handle everything they need to. If you're not - if you're fighting, say two individually weaker empires (as an example, let's go with 60% of your fleet strength for each) but a collectively stronger alliance on two fronts, the correct decision is to demolish one enemy and turn around and deal with the other front later. Not to split your fleet.

If there were some actual incentive to limit fleet size, this would be a much more difficult war to win. But again, Stellaris - unlike other Paradox games like EU4 - doesn't have any such incentive.

The incentive against giant stacks doesn't have to be explicit limits if you're really against that - it could be, as others have suggested, possible force multipliers that would be more effective against a larger fleet than a smaller one (defensive platforms, some kind of powerful AoE weaponry that wouldn't be as cost-effective against a smaller fleet, etc). But the lack of any such incentive is concerning.

Of course, this thread as a whole should probably wait until we see how the first multi-front war the glorious Blog will fight goes.

 

[The_Red_Star]

If problem with combat width is that its space and its huge 3D without terrain features then why not simply say its admirals capacity to command certain number of ships?

Better admirals can get bigger "combat width" with their traits and technology can get better computers and holographic battle overview or whatever to assist them to increase it.

Why on earth would better computers be allocated to admirals based on how many battles they've won?

 

[Summin Cool]

Why not? especially if its a unique case ie rare tech piece from a exploration survey

 

[The_Red_Star]

Why not? especially if its a unique case ie rare tech piece from a exploration survey

War isn't an RPG, generals don't get phat lewt based on how gud at commanding they are. And if your species needs ancient lost technology to get computers good enough to coordinate a battle in space...how did they get in space to begin with?

 

[Summin Cool]

Might have been like, a super duper cool computer. The ones with all the bling

 

[Drow7]

Why on earth would better computers be allocated to admirals based on how many battles they've won?

Who said they get better computers with performance? All admirals get better capacity as you research new technology to aid them, but still each has his innate skill to begin with.

 

[The_Red_Star]

Might have been like, a super duper cool computer. The ones with all the bling

If you don't have the computational capacity to coordinate a relativistic battle the idea that your species could handle the high level physics that presumably goes into FTL travel becomes very questionable.

 

[Tim_Ward]

Do any of those do anything for winning a war?

Destroying the resources they're using to maintain their fleet and the space ports they're using to construct new ones.

Sure someone could run around your territory damaging your infrastructure, but if in the meantime you've completely annihilated all resistance from one front in the war and have a bunch of warscore because of it, who comes out ahead?

If you've completely annihilated all resistance, you've won anyway.

Again, the idea is not to make large fleets ineffective - there just don't seem to be enough incentives to not have giant stacks at all times. If you're strong enough to field a giant death stack, it doesn't seem like you'd ever really want to split up your fleet or commit forces to multiple fronts unless you're already sure that your split up fleets are still strong enough to handle everything they need to. If you're not - if you're fighting, say two individually weaker empires (as an example, let's go with 60% of your fleet strength for each) but a collectively stronger alliance on two fronts, the correct decision is to demolish one enemy and turn around and deal with the other front later. Not to split your fleet.

Not correct. You need enough forces on one front to ensure you defeat the forces you're likely to face on that front (while minimising losses to a degree). What's the point in wild overkill? If you attack one empire with 5 times the amount of force you need to destroy them while the other empires are running around wrecking your shit on undefended planets, you're doing it wrong.

Given what little we've seen of Stellaris warfare in the wild, I'm going want to have some separate fleets if for nothing else than picket duty. Wiz could have safely split his fleet and saved himself some damage in that war he fought, but he didn't know how ineffectual the AI fleet was.

If there were some actual incentive to limit fleet size, this would be a much more difficult war to win. But again, Stellaris - unlike other Paradox games like EU4 - doesn't have any such incentive.

If there's an incentive to limit fleet size, all people are going to do is roll around with two or three fleets together instead of one big fleet.

Of course, this thread as a whole should probably wait until we see how the first multi-front war the glorious Blog will fight goes.

Agreed. All we've seen so far is a two one sided conflicts against broken AI.

 

[ringhloth]

I don't see why a fleet supply wouldn't be bad. If you have over the supply that a system had, you suffer a percentage penalty to combat.

 

[Tim_Ward]

That mechanic made sense for EU4 because of the tendency of armies of that period to 'live off the land', doesn't make sense in space.

 

[Timelordwho]

Those AoEs would have to be friggin' enormous to deal with ships that have any concept of spacing. Like; quite possibly bigger than whole planets AoEs.

The AOE doesn't hit multiple ships. You've just dispersed several hundred thousand cloaked nuclear tipped mines around a region of space

 

[clockworkBabbag]

Destroying the resources they're using to maintain their fleet and the space ports they're using to construct new ones.

If you've completely annihilated all resistance, you've won anyway

I don't know how you reconcile these two statements - that was exactly the point I'm making. These tactics are not threats. They are not an incentive against making giant stacks if the existence of that giant stack wins the war for you no matter how cleverly your opponent plays.

Not correct. You need enough forces on one front to ensure you defeat the forces you're likely to face on that front (while minimising losses to a degree). What's the point in wild overkill? If you attack one empire with 5 times the amount of force you need to destroy them while the other empires are running around wrecking your shit on undefended planets, you're doing it wrong

Did you not read the paragraph you quoted, where I gave hypothetical numbers that are not wild overkill? 100% vs two 60% fleets on multiple fronts is not an order of magnitude stronger. Splitting your fleet would be a terrible thing to do in that situation - unless there was some kind of incentive that would allow a slightly weaker fleet to put up a fight against a stronger force in some fashion, no matter how it's implemented.

Again, the issue I see here is that Stellaris has absolutely no incentive against not concentrating as much force as you need to minimize losses. Compared with EU4, where you can't quite as easily just smash one front in a war while ignoring the other, or where defensive advantages and terrain can allow a small, well-positioned force to defeat a numerically and possibly tech-wise stronger force.

The fact that such mechanics require additional thought/redesign to justify them in a space setting is not an argument against them being there - if the mechanics would result in a better game, they should be in there, arbitrary opinions on "realism" be damned.

If there's an incentive to limit fleet size, all people are going to do is roll around with two or three fleets together instead of one big fleet

Did you not read anything else I've consistently said in this thread, where I give a suggestion that is based on a per-combat basis instead of fleets, much like how combat in EU4 has combat width that is not calculated on a per-army basis?

Please do not respond to that last paragraph by talking about how combat width as a hard limit makes no sense in space. You should absolutely be capable of reading this thread and my replies and seeing my position on that.

Agreed. All we've seen so far is a two one sided conflicts against broken AI.

...have we seen two conflicts? I don't have time to watch streams live, and for some reason I've thought the Stellaris streams came out on Thursday. Last weeks stream ended before the war with the Just League started.

 

[Balkri]

Not another one of this post...

Check the Blorg vs Fallen Empire battle.

Weapon Firepower, weapon range, combat behavior and defense systems are the superior factor over fleet size.

Doomstack are not a problem in this game... and i'm kind of getting tired of writing the same thing every 4 or 5 days in a "fear the doomstack" thread

 

[Bob_Herzog]

I think the way the warscore works will be incentive enough to have more than one fleet once the empire grows bigger and bigger (might of course depend on the FTL type too). And it is not that unrealistic either. All the ships you build are essentially what "Ships of the Line" were from 17th to mid 19th century or later Dreadnoughts or Battleships (yes even the Carriers because they can't use their fighters and bombers to carry out battles far apart like i.e. 1 or 2 systems away. So I agree with the description in the Blorg stream that they are more like a special kind of missile).

If one looks how those fought it was always about concentration. The only reason seperate fleets were formed at all was to be able to be able to work at more than one theater at the same time. The spread out fleet was the smaller stuff that either protected the own trade or disturbed the enemies trade or both (and delivered reconisance and similar support stuff).

So the incentive to split the fleet, build defences and/or leave a guard are in place (ignore this to much and a small - medium force might strike while your stack of doom is far away playing cat and mice with their supposed stack of doom). But they fit the incentives we find in naval operations and not that we saw in land combat.

 

[Timelordwho]

If it works anything like EU4, only the top dog matters.

If not, the combined fleet would be as good as those three admirals on average, while the other fleet would be outfitted with the best admiral.

You can't just hire 20 +5% admirals and fly 20 fleets into an enemy stack and have +100% modifier. Where did you get that idea?

They probably don't stack. But battleship commander can lead the capital ships and Macross missile master can lead the missile cruisers and cousin jimmy, who for political reasons was made an admiral, can lead the screening force of frigates and/or cannon fodder

 

[Tim_Ward]

I don't know how you reconcile these two statements - that was exactly the point I'm making. These tactics are not threats. They are not an incentive against making giant stacks if the existence of that giant stack wins the war for you no matter how cleverly your opponent plays.

You haven't made the connection between conducting raids on enemy territory and them automatically winning the battle on the main front. I'm not talking about using my entire fleet to do this, just two or three fleets of ships powerful enough to overwhelm unsupported space ports and fast enough to evade their main battle fleet.

Did you not read the paragraph you quoted, where I gave hypothetical numbers that are not wild overkill? 100% vs two 60% fleets on multiple fronts is not an order of magnitude stronger. Splitting your fleet would be a terrible thing to do in that situation - unless there was some kind of incentive that would allow a slightly weaker fleet to put up a fight against a stronger force in some fashion, no matter how it's implemented.

Sometimes concentration is legitimately the best strategy, and that's what you should do in those cases and you should not be arbitrarily penalized for doing so.

Again, the issue I see here is that Stellaris has absolutely no incentive against not concentrating as much force as you need to minimize losses. Compared with EU4, where you can't quite as easily just smash one front in a war while ignoring the other, or where defensive advantages and terrain can allow a small, well-positioned force to defeat a numerically and possibly tech-wise stronger force.

I don't know where you've got this idea that you can simply ignore one front. Having a load of planets occupied and losing all your resource stations is not going to do wonders for your warscore, nor your ability to replace losses.

The fact that such mechanics require additional thought/redesign to justify them in a space setting is not an argument against them being there - if the mechanics would result in a better game, they should be in there, arbitrary opinions on "realism" be damned.

I haven't seen anything in this thread that would make the game better.

Did you not read anything else I've consistently said in this thread, where I give a suggestion that is based on a per-combat basis instead of fleets, much like how combat in EU4 has combat width that is not calculated on a per-army basis?

Combat doesn't work like that in Stellaris, ships can attack anything in range (which can be half way across the system with high end tech), they don't seem to be locked in either a combat or a non-combat state.

...have we seen two conflicts? I don't have time to watch streams live, and for some reason I've thought the Stellaris streams came out on Thursday. Last weeks stream ended before the war with the Just League started.

They've fought a very brief war with a one system empire that had just achieved FTL and another war with the blue lizard warrior people.

 

[Tim_Ward]

I thought about this some more. It depends a lot on what type of FTL you're using, and what type of FTL your opponent has.

Wormholes almost necessitate splitting your fleet. You have to defend those stations, or else you're quickly going to find yourself unable to even move. Simultaneously, instantaneous FTL allows separate fleets to mutually support one another: you can keep your forces split up, but they can instantaneously converge if attacked en mass, provided your advance doesn't outpace the construction of your wormhole stations.

If you're using hyperlanes, you decision to consolidate or spread out is dictated by the numbers of the enemy and the geography of the hyperlanes. If you have one choke point, you have to concentrate. If you have more than one choke point but are outnumbered, you have to sacrifice ground and still bunch up. If you're not outnumbered, you can decide how you want to deploy depending on the layout.

If you're using warp, you have to play it by ear a bit. You have flexibility, but not speed so you need to figure out how to negate the enemies mobility advantage and exploit their restricted ability to move.

Permutations of these basic principles occur depending on whether you're attacking or defending, the layout of the map, the tech levels involved, and how much knowledge you have of the enemy.

 

[naisel]

I just want to add. In neither EU, CK or Vicky has it ever paid off to separate your army just because you're fighting a two-front war. In principle, it is always better to just focus all your armies in one front, win decisively there, then move to the other front, win decisively there, and only when there is no meaningful resistance do you split up to carpet siege. When you're attacked from multiple directions, you just let them siege and capture one front and hope you can win on one front quick enough to still have something left on the onther one, Germany's WW1 strategy basically. It's just too dangerous to risk losing battles, which can snowball into losing the war really quickly, to make splitting your army worth it unless you already have overwhelming numbers on both fronts.

The primary motivations to have more than one army is because of attrition. And even then you're always taking a Napoleonesque strategy where you move your armies around to avoid attrition then quickly join them together to fight the decisive battle. It's pretty deathbally, but attrition forces you to use some strategy. From what I've seen so far, I don't see any mechanic in Stellaris that would make me ever separate my fleet until I'm de facto carpet-sieging the opponent.

I dont't know about Vic, but in EU4 and in CK2 that's a good strategy because there is little loss in having your territory sieged down. In CK2 you lose the ability to raise some levy, which was probably already raised, plus a small loss on income for a couple of years; the true devastation on the land, that such a tactic would in risk in real life, is not modeled.

In Stellaris instead, you risk losing space ports, defensive stations, even worse wormhole stations, plus your planet being bombarded. That I think should be a big incentive to split the fleet and defend your territory.

 

[Ramiel]

I don't think people realize just how important all those mining stations are that are now being raided and destroyed cause you kept your fleet in one big doomstack currently invading the enemy. It looks to me like unless you're super wealthy empires are going to be pretty balanced on their energy/mineral income vs expenditures. Lose just a few stations, and you're already going into negatives. They'll drop even faster if planets under bombardment stop sending resources to your empire's pool (which makes sense, I'd be sad if they didn't), especially if half your planets are now blockaded by small raider fleets. Now look at how much maintenance the Blorg are already paying to support their massive fleet. You let little raider fleets take out your economy, and suddenly you can't support that massive doomstack. What happens when you can't pay ship maintenance? I'm guessing either your ships start getting negative modifiers or ships start disbanding. May even affect pop happiness, I dunno. Either way, loss of economy is going to very quickly chew your doomstack up - and now you have no resources to rebuild it. Throw in the fact that Defense Stations work multiplicatively - not additively - on the fleets they support and that doomstack's gonna have a terribly rough time.