Future of ship combat

[Muramas]

The problem:
Right now in Stellaris ship combat is a rock paper scissors game (missiles, lasers/guns, PD) where you doom stack all your ships together and the bigger number generally wins. This has a bit of issue.

1. Ship design can be confusing, auto design is less desirable which leads to costly retrofits
2. Combat calculation can be off
3. Ship tech is often b-lined with certain tech being untouched
4. Players are forced to doom stack and AI makes foolish choices with fleet.

A solution pt:1 Combat width
Paradox has corrected this issue before in their other games and here it could use the same solution with combat width. The difference between combat width with Stellaris would be that we could use three different range bands: short, medium and long.

Long would be artillery battleships/carriers. These ships are vulnerable to med and short-range ships, these could also launch fighters (for this example, each long has 4 fighter) which fight in short range.
Medium would be tanky cruiser type ships and acts as shields to the long ships
Short range ships would be like your destroyers and your fighter ships that are provided by the long hangers. Fighters also ignore combat width and all fighters attack at the same time.
Capital ships acts like a long but only one can be in combat.


Here is an example combat with a width of 4

Short, med and fighters attack short which acts as a wall for the larger ships.

Long/capital fire on med ships.

Once a ship range has been killed out, it increases the attack range by one. Long fires on short last.


A solution pt:2 Components

With the classification change of ship types this means the old research path of [corvettes -> destroyers -> cruisers -> Battleship] would need to be changed. One of these changes would being able to build the three classification of ships right from year 2200.

With a change on how ships interact with one another the components on ships would also need to change to fit that. It would be a smart move to have more slots for tech, possible removal of Utility gear, and basic improvements like all ships having point defense lasers, unified armor / shields slots, and all classification of ships have default armaments. For example, that all long has hangers. This will shift the focus of designing ships to designing fleet compositions.

A change to improve streamlining this could be once you research a new component tech it is automatically installed in all ships. As for retrofitting, this could be used when you research a new era / improved version of the classification which brings more stats or more component slots. This means less retrofits but when you do a retrofit, they could take a long time and put your ships out of commission.


Conclusion:

With these changes, combat has much more in depth, more easily visible on what is happening, less need of maintenance, makes doom stacking less useful, makes all component tech more universally good, while removing the complexity of ship design.

 

[DukeLeto42]

Here's your problem: unlike other Paradox games, combat isn't abstracted. Navies don't enter into a "battle mode" while in a system with enemies, but instead engage, with each vessel having a specific, moving position in space. Ships fire when they are actually in range, not from a rank in combat. This is why you can do things like ambush fleets with a higher range at the hyperspace point, a way to maximize low-range penetration weapons or reduce the strength of FE/AFE ships' long-range weaponry. Rules like "only 1 Titan can engage at once" make perfect sense when you can't really see the battle and can only imagine a fleet, but seeing a Titan uselessly bopping about because of an arbitrary rule would be deeply frustrating.

While I agree that the game does not do a great job of signaling how fleets should be built or what makes the most of a given ship build, I don't see how this post is consistent with how Stellaris handles combat.

 

[Muramas]

Here's your problem: unlike other Paradox games, combat isn't abstracted. Navies don't enter into a "battle mode"

Actually they do, don't you notice when ships engage an enemy they drastically go slower? This is the game going into a cinematic battle mode.

 

[grommile]

I would totally be happy to step away from Stellaris's current model of ship movement and combat to something influenced by HOI4 naval combat, but it would be a massive change to so many things about how space combat works.

 

[DukeLeto42]

Actually they do, don't you notice when ships engage an enemy they drastically go slower? This is the game going into a cinematic battle mode.

Yes, ships change behavior when they enter battle, but they don't cease to be a physically present object in the system in the process.

 

[Muramas]

Yes, ships change behavior when they enter battle, but they don't cease to be a physically present object in the system in the process.

Not sure why you think they would need to do that. In this design short ships do the same things they do in the current stellaris and run at the enemies fleet, med stay a bit away firing and long stays a bit away from med fireing. so they should look more like a wedge and stay in formation.

 

[DukeLeto42]

Not sure why you think they would need to do that. In this design short ships do the same things they do in the current stellaris and run at the enemies fleet, med stay a bit away firing and long stays a bit away from med fireing. so they should look more like a wedge and stay in formation.

This assumes that every single battle in Stellaris is one fleet flying against another. That's rarely the case, with at the very least the local starbase and often secondary fleets getting involved. Having reinforcement fleets enter combat and immediately blip into battle lines, or not fire at the enemy while they sail through battle lines to their position, also makes little sense.

I'm not saying that the physically represented vessels needs to be how Stellaris does combat, but it is the current design. With that said... the beauty of naval battles, of being able to watch your vessels engage each other and destroy each other, is one of the selling points of the game.

 

[Ryika]

Actually they do, don't you notice when ships engage an enemy they drastically go slower? This is the game going into a cinematic battle mode.

It's pretty obvious that this isn't the same thing as "battle mode" in other paradox titles though. You can see the ships visually represented in the system as individual units, and things would look very weird if ships just stayed in place during a combat, doing nothing until one ship is destroyed to then enter the battlefield. And I don't really see a justification for combat width. In historical games it's the terrain, but what's holding back ships in space? It just doesn't seem like a fitting mechanic for the game.

Plus, I don't really think it's required, either.

If the devs wanted to get rid of the mono fleet meta, all they'd need to do is to make the ships less... smart. That's because right now, a battleship will always ignore ships with large dodge values if it has the ability to, and instead go for the biggest and least agile thing it can find, which is usually other battleship. If they changed it, so smaller ships attracted fire from the heavy hitters, they'd actually protect the larger ships to an extend and mixed fleets would be more of a thing. (But to be clear, I'm not saying that this should happen, I'm just presenting this is a much easier solution to the proposed problem)

And imho Doomstacking is more of a result with how the galaxy is laid out. Why would you split your fleets if there's usually only one angle of attack anyway?

 

[grommile]

If they changed it, so smaller ships attracted fire from the heavy hitters,

Then I would scream "you gibbering morons, why are you firing your low-tracking megacalibre handwavium cannons at afterburner corvettes when there's a battleship in range?!" at my gunners, and uninstall if that nonsense couldn't be disabled.

 

[makaramus]

this will make things even more complicated , I think you are not realizing
if this was a thing you will be making a fleet that specificly deals damage to shield
then a fleet dealing damage to armor
then fleet dealing damage to hull
reason:They can't engage at same time so you want to benefit from this as much as possible.When shield destroyer fleet deals with all the shield they will retreat and give space to armor crushers and so on.
in a world where every ship can engage at same time this doesn't make sense but in your world this will be meta

 

[Ryika]

Then I would scream "you gibbering morons, why are you firing your low-tracking megacalibre handwavium cannons at afterburner corvettes when there's a battleship in range?!" at my gunners, and uninstall if that nonsense couldn't be disabled.

I think if such a change were to be considered, then some randomness in targeting could easily be explained as things not always being done perfectly in the heat of battle, or line of sight not being available to the larger ships due to other ships being in the way, or whatever silly explanation we'd be able to come up with. Not that it should be implemented in the first place, since it would essentially just make gameplay worse to enforce a new meta that now only consists of mixed fleets.

That being said, I just realized that I misread a part of OPs post, and that mono-ship fleets weren't even something he wanted to tackle... so that whole paragraph was meaningless to begin with.

 

[currylambchop]

I would totally be happy to step away from Stellaris's current model of ship movement and combat to something influenced by HOI4 naval combat, but it would be a massive change to so many things about how space combat works.

HOI4 naval combat is the worse part of HOI4 they don't even have range lul