Fleet chain of command

[GC13]

But in small vs large the bigger fleet would still beat the smaller one due to having more guns to bring to bare, but the bigger fleet will be take a disproportionately larger amount of damage.

It doesn't really work like that. If I have 4x as large a fleet as my enemy and it works out so that it will only do the square root of its superiority as damage, it will do twice as much damage as the enemy, and take half of the damage divided over four times the ships; by the time the enemy has taken 100% damage per ship, I will have taken 12.5% damage per ship or ~50% of the enemy's health. If my fleet was only twice as large and I was doing forty percent more damage than the enemy, I'll take 70% of the enemy's health in damage divided into 35% per ship. That is to say: while I'll take more damage with a bigger fleet than I would have without the penalty, I still have no incentive to split my fleet unless it's to try to flank for that pincer bonus you mentioned later, in which case all you've added is more micromanagement.

It's the same principle as back when people were suggesting area of effect weapons to counter doomstacks: if the weapon does enough damage to be worth using to kill doomstacks with, a doomstack will be able to use it more effectively.

 

[WhiteWeasel]

I'll admit it's not a perfect solution, but neither is anything that involves tampering with combat balance. The only way to truly stop a deathball a is to deter the player from wanting one in the first place.

Why don't we amass giant, singular fleets in the real world?

 

[Karl244]

Personally I do not agree with the OP. I think the way to remove doomstacks is by adding morale per ship (to reduce the loss of a single battle) and adding a supply limit to a system somehow.

 

[Sheriff Godwin Law]

Morale is more of a way to remove swarms of small weak ships. In EU4 it essentially killed galley spam. Doomstacks though are generally comprised of the best ships you have in your empire.

What's worse, the morale system would also discourage people from building anything more than battleships and possibly cruisers. Gone would be my screen of destroyer pickets because the morale loss of losing a large number of smaller ships could cost me a fight I would have won otherwise.

 

[GC13]

Why don't we amass giant, singular fleets in the real world?

Because there are lots of things to do, and lots of things to defend.

If the enemy concentrates to take a key target though, you need to concentrate and try to stop them. In real warfare, even if you can't hope to face them in a pitched battle you can still attack their supply lines to try to force them to pull back. There is also the matter of time (which is why the enemy will only concentrate for a key target rather than a small one): in Stellaris it doesn't matter if you win the war in twenty years after having half of your planets occupied by the enemy or if you win in two years in a complete steamroll, just so long as you win (and so long as you have that fleet and keep adding to it, your chances of winning the decisive battle go up). In the real world though, putting off an offensive for even just one month while you wait for additional units can have disastrous consequences.

 

[WhiteWeasel]

Because there are lots of things to do, and lots of things to defend.

If the enemy concentrates to take a key target though, you need to concentrate and try to stop them. In real warfare, even if you can't hope to face them in a pitched battle you can still attack their supply lines to try to force them to pull back. There is also the matter of time (which is why the enemy will only concentrate for a key target rather than a small one): in Stellaris it doesn't matter if you win the war in twenty years after having half of your planets occupied by the enemy or if you win in two years in a complete steamroll, just so long as you win (and so long as you have that fleet and keep adding to it, your chances of winning the decisive battle go up). In the real world though, putting off an offensive for even just one month while you wait for additional units can have disastrous consequences.

So in essence, you are not punished enough in Stellaris for leaving gaps in your defenses, and thus people gravitate towards deathballs because they can get away with them.

I saw a mod that is trying to resolve this by massively buffing limited and full bombardment, so there are disastrous consequences for letting the enemy slip by.

Limited:
75% to ruin a building
10% chance to create a tile blocker
15% chance to kill a pop

Full:
70% to ruin a building
65% to ruin a second building
15% chance to create a tile blocker
50% chance to kill a pop

Furthermore there is a 30% chance that it the probabilities are executed a second time and a 20% chance that it is executed a third time.
That means that per month up to 3 buildings can be destroyed with Limited bombardment while up to 6 buildings can be ruined with Full bombardment. Now you will think about defending your planets.

 

[GC13]

Bombardments that can actually hurt things would help (Fanatical Purifiers will get Armageddon, but I doubt it will be any stronger than what Full should be, and at any rate it's restricted to a very specific Civic), though it's still just an increased mineral cost. Really you'd need unrest generated for this kind of damage lasting long, and unrest generated on untouched planets that don't feel they are properly defended and might be next. Damaging bombardments would also make the shield generator building worthwhile, if they provided a layer that had to be blasted through first before damage could start happening.

Of course, for purposes of laying waste to a planet a fleet of a hundred battleships would have to have a better chance to cause damage than a single corvette.

 

[Drowe]

Morale is more of a way to remove swarms of small weak ships. In EU4 it essentially killed galley spam. Doomstacks though are generally comprised of the best ships you have in your empire.

What's worse, the morale system would also discourage people from building anything more than battleships and possibly cruisers. Gone would be my screen of destroyer pickets because the morale loss of losing a large number of smaller ships could cost me a fight I would have won otherwise.

A moral system could counter the "one battle decides the war" problem, if done properly. It doesn't have to be the way you describe it. If moral loss is determined by how much fleetpower you lose when a ship is destroyed, you can lose about 10 corvettes for the same amount of moral you would lose for one destroyed battleship. If you start losing battleships, your moral drops quickly, while losing corvettes is par for course and does little to impact your moral. It won't solve doomstacks though.

Personally, I think doomstacks are a valid way to fight in space and shouldn't be actively prohibited. There should be alternatives to counter doomstacks, other than engaging them in an open battle. One way may be to make hit and run attacks a viable tactic, it's micro intensive but using a group of fast raiding ships that attack and kill a few ships before fleeing seems like it could slowly bleed a doomstack dry.

If supply lines were introduced harassing the supply would also work as a way to decrease the effectiveness of doomstacks.

And my favorite way is to make doomstacks have a cost, specifically an influence cost. This could be achieved by splitting the amount of fleetcap you gain from sectors between you and the sector. A sector would build his own ships (and maintain them) and use it as sector defense. You can request those ships during war, but it is a drain on your influence and can make the sector unhappy if you keep them too long.

 

[SWVRoma]

...I couldn't get past using ground pounder enlisted ranks and two ground pounder officer ranks for Fleet command.

 

[enpi]

As long as an empire dont have an ingame and natural incentive to split its fleet up (by protecting trade lanes etc.) doomstacks are totally ok. They also reduce the fleet clickfest to a minimum.