Gene Warriors should not be the top tier

[Pern]

I'm against the rock-paper-scissors approach, but having more types of defensive armies would be nice.

meh, go with: rock scissors paper lizard spock

 

[DragonWasTaken]

Ultimately I think the trouble with improving ground combat is that there isn't really much of a ground combat to improve in the first place. You'd need to build a real system to actually play with before any of the decisions actually matter enough to adjust.

 

[Secret Master]

On a sidenote you'd lose two society research by building clone bays on your cap from the biolabs 4 and 5 so please don't do that. It does seem then clone armies are more efficient but, perhaps for a player trying to maximise research, labs are more efficient. Is the difference between clones and genes large enough to make 4 physics and 4 engineering worth it? Early to mid-game at least?

I suppose it depends on what you mean by "worth it."

I don't generally put clone bays on dedicated research planets. I place them on planets that either contain mining Gulags (and thus probably have POPs with desirable army traits since those traits help with mineral extraction) or on non-capital generic worlds. I certainly wouldn't put them on a habitat or a 25 tile Gaia world with 23 science widgets on various tiles.

Again, though, perspective is important. Smaller empires that focus on research and have few planets, maybe only need one lousy clone bay. I mentioned 4 clone bays just as an example of how fast you can build clones in general. No one probably needs more than 48 clone armies a year, and that's achievable with just 4 clone bays.

I figure any empire that contains more than just the capital world can afford at least one clone facility without facing too much of a research sacrifice.

 

[Lukepop]

That's true. Still, would you say gene warriors are a viable alternative to robots if not clones?

 

[Cannes]

Secret Master said what I wanted to say. Except with actual analysis instead of a wild ass guess. Slave armies or clone armies are the way to go on attack.

Although, seriously what the hell is up with only allowing 12 defensive armies? You can fit infinite armies of the attack somehow, build spaceships that can support them indefinitely, but you only got room for 12 when you're defending?

Honestly, though I think the invasion system is screwed up on multiple levels.

The 12 cap has been changed to the (size of the planet) cap.
Imo, the whole system needs a complete redesign. I would still like to have ground combat in, it just needs to have some interesting and meaningful mechanics.

 

[Secret Master]

The 12 cap has been changed to the (size of the planet) cap.
Imo, the whole system needs a complete redesign. I would still like to have ground combat in, it just needs to have some interesting and meaningful mechanics.

You know he was responding to a post made months ago, and his post was made at that time, right?

That's true. Still, would you say gene warriors are a viable alternative to robots if not clones?

Compared to robots and android armies? If you made the gene warriors from the right kind of POPs, and you have the time to build them, it might be viable. I'd have to run the numbers on android armies to see how they shake out versus gene warriors with very strong and resilient. (And if you have gene warriors, you are also going for evolutionary mastery, so you can easily get POPs with those traits; not doing so would be stupid.)

Versus clones: If you have a low population, which would severely limit the number of offensive armies, then they would be a better buy since you can't necessarily field 100-200 clone or slave armies.

On defense, gene warriors are still technically better due to the limited number of armies available to defenders.

But...

On defense, even gene warriors are just a delaying force. Once the enemy bombards the planet's defenses to zero, flooding the planet with the same 50-100 clones or slaves you've been using the whole time will work no matter what kind of troops are defending. (It's even worse when the attacker has a general with butcher or invader.) So, I'd only waste time putting gene warriors on specific planets that I don't want to fall quickly with the understanding that those planets are a priority for the navy to defend anyway.

There's no point in building 18 gene warriors over a decade and a half to defend planet X if you are just going to let the enemy bombard it to death and invade. You might as well have not bothered.

EDIT: I'm also operating under the assumption that robot, android, and xenomorph army numbers are not limited by the POPs in your empire like troop types built from POPs. Even if you only have 25 POPs in your empire, you should be able to build infinite numbers of these army types without being limited by a cap. If that's not actually true, please show me so I can adjust my thoughts accordingly.

 

[bmt17]

It doesn't need to be a rock-paper-scissors type hard counter, just slight bonuses agaisnt the different army types. Anything to add more to the ground combat in this game.

 

[The_Red_Star]

I have a few ideas on how to improve ground combat.

Firstly, implement a basic division builder system. Nothing as deep as Hearts of Iron which is literally a game all about simulating world war two era combat but a system that lets you have some real thought and choice into constructing your armies. Secondly give some more stats, right now there is only health, damage, and morale health and damage. Some extra stats could go quite a ways into further increasing the meaningfulness of your design choices, much as how space warfare currently has somewhat meaningful choices in fleet composition and ship design.

You could have say, regiments that you can put into a division and "modifier cards" you can put on regiments within the division to modify them a bit further. Such as a power armor card you could put on infantry or animalistic (i.e xenomorph) regiments as well as other cards like genetic enhancements (though gene-warriors would remain a separate thing), cybernetic enhancements, psychic powers (the difference between an assault army with a psychic power card and a psi-warrior regiment would be like the difference between an initiate and a yuri clone in Red alert 2.)

Don't try making some mini-board game out of ground combat, that'd be silly and tedious and literally no Paradox Development Studios Game in the history of ever gave you that kind of control once a battle was joined. Not even Hearts of Iron and that's the dedicated wargame out of the lot. Instead just give some meaningful choice to be had with unit composition and design. This would require some extra stats to make it really meaningful; you could put in things like speed, frontage (basically how numerous a force is), range, defense etc. While these would ultimately just be assorted multipliers and additives like all stats in Paradox game combat ultimately are it does give at least the impression that more is happening.

What I think is crucial however, is giving some extra visual feedback. Ground combat basically has none as it stands. Not even the bare minimum of watching two gigantic dudes poking each other, My proposal is quite simple, just replace the current really visually uninteresting battle screen with something more akin to HOI IV's battle screen. Ultimately it amounts to the exact same things under the hood, it's just two piles of numbers crunching away until one pile of numbers is left standing, but it would give the illusion that something cool is happening.

I'd also recommend being able to build some special tile improvements and orbital stations to help make it more possible/plausible for a defender to hold out long enough for reinforcements to arrive. The planetary shield improvement could do with a pretty major buff, like making orbital bombardment flat out not work and thus forcing the attacker to have to make a ground assault against fully prepared fortifications a la the battle of Hoth. Secondly surface to orbit defense stations and orbitally mounted satellite guns that can further harass and annoy any attacking fleet like the Ion Cannon at Hoth or the Magnetically Accelerated Cannon Satellites around Earth in Halo. Even basic things like hangars for aerospace strike craft because you all know me and how much I fucking love space fighters even if they're the least realistic thing ever. You could also further raise the importance of sieges by giving the defender some added bonuses like new kinds of military stations including interstellar ranged artillery and interstellar ranged subspace snares that force hostile fleets to have to go through a particular system; thus allowing for "Fortress worlds" like Cadia and making for some actual game geography outside of Hyperlane games.

The other big thing I'd recommend is as I've repeatedly advocated, dealing with the Doomstack by decreasing the importance of decisive battle by making it much easier to come back from losing a fleet. This would favour more spread out forces that can take out an enemy's industrial centers and gradually strangle an enemy to death by eliminating their production powers rather than a big slow moving blob that tries to hunt around for that one battle to win the war. This would make sieges more important and more even.

This all adds up to a pretty thorough reworking of how warfare works but I think it would make combat much more involved, fun, and more "epic" to use a word that I'm sure the early 2010s and late 2000s made us all sick of hearing. This, along with my hopes for buildable titans and leviathans via megastructure shipyards and megastructure death star esque planet killers (also a buff to strike craft like much more range, much greater numbers of strike craft, replenishability, and faster strike craft that can be upgraded with FTL systems to let them instantly pop over to a target in the system as well as dedicated carrier ships; please paradox I need my carriers ) would in my eyes help elevate Stellaris to having one of the best combat systems in the Space strategy game genre.

Also unrelated but; I need my Mecha Paradox. Give me my big stompy walkers and mecha. I don't care if they're gundam esque mecha that can outfight spaceships in space, warhammer esque walking fortresses, or Battletech and Star Wars esque tanks with legs but I need my mecha. Hell you could go for all three and I'd be fine, I just want my big stompy death robots to go along with the trainable pet Kaiju already in the game. On a more related note, Stellaris also needs an army and a fleet template order system. You create a template of the kind of fleet and army you want; how much of that fleet or army you want, then select the planets/spaceports that will produce that force and they'll produce it automatically. This way I can just order A number of battleships 1, B number of battleships 2, C number of cruisers, D number of destroyers, and F number of corvettes rather than having to piss around with manually assembling a fleet. As well as a button to replenish the fleet or army according to that template if any are lost and for armies; a button to return each army to its planet of origin for garrison duty.

 

[razaron]

Wiz has already said a few times that he's unhappy with ground combat and wants to rework it. So gene warriors (or clones) being OP is fine, since nothing beats spam anyway.

Since this thread repeats, I'll just use one of my old posts.

I like the way Distant Worlds does it. It's fully automated but still requires some pre-planning. It's also similar to Stellaris since your troops land in waves and spread their fire across the opponent.

In DW there's 4 troop types: Infantry, Armour, Defense and SpecOps.
Infantry: Standard cheap troop type. Good for offense and defense.
Armour: Expensive and strong. Good for offense, but a bit expensive for a garrison.
Defense: Basically AA. They shoot down landing troops.
SpecOps: They can't be targeted while landing and focus on taking out Defense units. Expensive glass cannons.

There's also a bunch of troop modifiers, like oceon species being stronger on ocean planets and weaker on desert planets.

Something like this would be amazing in Stellaris. With the already in place morale mechanic and the 3 different paradigms (synthetic, biotic and psionic) ground combat could be quite colourful.



Of course this would need changes to fortifications. Something like 0 fortification making defenders take 50% more damage and deal 33% less damage (to abstract orbital superiority), and shield generaters removing/reducing the malus.
Also, battles need to take longer. At least a few years. So troop reinforcements for the defender can come from offworld.

Other than that, troop transports being replaced with troop sections for ships would be nice.
Plus it would be cool to see if ground combat was somehow fought over the tile map.

From what the devs have intimated it's most likely that, out of diplomacy and warfare, the next expansion will focus on warfare. So hopefully ground combat will get some love.