Ground Combat

[Medicine Man]

I mostly agree with Wiz about ground combat. I certainly think the current implementation of ground combat is way too micro-intensive for what it adds. My only regret at the thought of ground combat going away entirely would be how some of the cool, classic science fiction tropes would be ejected from the game in the process. It is very cool to bio engineer an army of horribly drooling xenomorphs to break the defenses on a large planet (and presumably eat a lot of the populace as a consequence). Does your race use lots of anti-gravity vehicles in ground warfare? Or are you a species of weakling scientists that uplifted a strong client species to do their fighting for them (who could turn on you at some point)? Do you have a conventional army that is accompanied by robotic titans (aka. Mechwarrior)?

Maybe in the future garrisons, armies, and marines could be designed and customized in something like the ship designer and allocated to ships as a component, as one of the other posters here suggested.

 

[Philthy]

I mostly agree with Wiz about ground combat. I certainly think the current implementation of ground combat is way too micro-intensive for what it adds. My only regret at the thought of ground combat going away entirely would be how some of the cool, classic science fiction tropes would be ejected from the game in the process. It is very cool to bio engineer an army of horribly drooling xenomorphs to break the defenses on a large planet (and presumably eat a lot of the populace as a consequence). Does your race use lots of anti-gravity vehicles in ground warfare? Or are you a species of weakling scientists that uplifted a strong client species to do their fighting for them (who could turn on you at some point)? Do you have a conventional army that is accompanied by robotic titans (aka. Mechwarrior)?

Maybe in the future garrisons, armies, and marines could be designed and customized in something like the ship designer and allocated to ships as a component, as one of the other posters here suggested.

I agree that it would be cool and would add a lot of flavor. I just don't know how it fits into the scale of Stellaris. :-/

 

[CastelloNova]

And have games go "very slow" during multiplayer? No, that's alright thanks.

TBH the tile game would have to be good enough that playing on very slow or slow would be compelling enough to focus on that and nothing else in your empire - which during a war is not such a guaranteed proposition. A land battle lasting a month could mean that your fleet is attacked from the side, or ships get around to get your starbases while you were in the tactical screen.

Don't take away what is there now, but no one is talking about doing that. It would be actively harmful to the game for us to manage troops once they land on a planet. If there were a tile system, we should have zero control. If we have zero control, it might as well be abstracted as it is now. Space combat being more interesting and engaging is where the focus should be. it's already compelling to watch, though a few strategies dominate.

Make it automated much like it is now but have it take place over the tileset. With buildings giving different modifiers and expanding the viarity and quality of different armies you can use each better suited for different planets types or building tiles. Then have it so can choose a set of say 3 landing stratagies and watch the flow of battle over the planet. Similar enough to what we have but more engaging and interesting to keep track of while allowing upsets to sometimes happen.

Defensive tactics could be set as standard by a policy and changed manually if the player is so inclined. By no means am i saying it should need to be microed.

 

[Philthy]

Make it automated much like it is now but have it take place over the tileset. With buildings giving different modifiers and expanding the viarity and quality of different armies you can use each better suited for different planets types or building tiles. Then have it so can choose a set of say 3 landing stratagies and watch the flow of battle over the planet. Similar enough to what we have but more engaging and interesting to keep track of while allowing upsets to sometimes happen.

Defensive tactics could be set as standard by a policy and changed manually if the player is so inclined. By no means am i saying it should need to be microed.

But lets say you have a 16 tile planet with 16 defensive armies. Why do some get chosen as beach-heads? etc. etc.

 

[CastelloNova]

But lets say you have a 16 tile planet with 16 defensive armies. Why do some get chosen as beach-heads? etc. etc.

You are landing from orbit, Having a fully defended tileset would make the drop more costly as AA downs dropships causing your armies to take damage on the way down but then once on the ground fighting would start as normal, where they land would be dictated by you're prechoosen landing strategy, lets say spread out lands them all over the planet or focused on one tile. Each would have a benefit and detractor, IE starting strong but encircled or starting spread with more areas of possible break through.

 

[GuildenSpur]

I like the discover and build phase more then ground combat so for me losing troops would mean less micro management and more "top down" management which is a good thing in my book. I rather not develop RSI from the hours and hours of endless gaming and clicking.
Having separate armies for defense and offense doesn't make sense to me.

What if the combat system was abstracted further? Give the planets more defenses capabilities the fleets have to fight through.
With intelligent targeting from these systems, the extra losses your fleet takes would cover for some of the cost building the troops took.
You could also make it so there is a small energy and mineral cost when taking a planet. With the same reasoning as above.

 

[CastelloNova]

I like the discover and build phase more then ground combat so for me losing troops would mean less micro management and more "top down" management which is a good thing in my book. I rather not develop RSI from the hours and hours of endless gaming and clicking.
Having separate armies for defense and offense doesn't make sense to me.

What if the combat system was abstracted further? Give the planets more defenses capabilities the fleets have to fight through.
With intelligent targeting from these systems, the extra losses your fleet takes would cover for some of the cost building the troops took.
You could also make it so there is a small energy and mineral cost when taking a planet. With the same reasoning as above.

There's potential here but it would have to be done right. Having your battleship survive a massive fleet battle only to be shot down by invisible ground to orbital cannons would be INCREDIBLY frustrating. Personally i like the imagery of your soldiers fighting over an alien world and subduing the populous, but it's obvious Wiz is leaning heavily towards something more space based like your idea then he ever will towards reworking what we have like what I and a few others have proposed.

 

[fetusthebard]

Two things surfaced on this thread that made me very excited about future iterations of armies. First, that capturing buildings on-planet would give bonuses. This is an excellent idea, and would make purchasing buildings like shields or military headquarters actually useful (both offensively and defensively). It would also be a smart idea to provide however many army-slots (in both defense and offense!) as there are squares on a planet, with combat between two armies taking place on the same square and adjacent squares providing support to the main square but without losses. This is a very intuitive system. It allows battles to be semi-random (a smaller force could eke out a capital for enough morale to survive the invasion, or an enemy capture of a frontier clinic could boost the soldier's health enough to get another round of combat in), and it also puts a hard limit on invasion forces, meaning that technologically advanced armies will be better than 40 assault troops (because even on the biggest planets, they can't all land).
Second, that the army system in its current iteration be scrapped by the devs. There is no reason to keep transport ships and the like in game as they are currently, they are annoying and unnecessary. In multi-player, you can just spam assault troops and send 1 or 2 to every planet you lose, immediately taking them back and forcing the enemy to return and bombard/invade the planet again. In single-player the AI does much the same, to the point where splitting your fleet to the amount of planets you are planning to invade is the best idea. Having ships dedicated to invasion mechanics (and BOARDING!!!!!) -with the above-mentioned change to invasions themselves- would feel rewarding and fix many of the existent problems.

@Wiz, thank you for your contribution to this discussion, and thank you for sharing them even though you thought they might be unpopular. Your actions as a developer for Paradox have attracted my interests as a consumer almost more than the games you work so hard on.

 

[Eldorian]

There's potential here but it would have to be done right. Having your battleship survive a massive fleet battle only to be shot down by invisible ground to orbital cannons would be INCREDIBLY frustrating.

Why would they be invisible? Why can't a planet have a military rating?

 

[CastelloNova]

Why would they be invisible? Why can't a planet have a military rating?

I'm not a coder so idk how accurate this is. But you can't upgrade defense stations (so neither can you up the military rating) so i would assume that a single entity can't be upgraded without first replacing it entirely ala fleet refit and that could open up alot of bugs for pops, buildings and edicts.

 

[GuildenSpur]

You can actually upgrade defensive stations.

 

[CastelloNova]

You can actually upgrade defensive stations.

Once built? How?! it'd actually help my current game.

 

[stumason]

Once built? How?! it'd actually help my current game.

There is a little upgrade button in the corner when you select a space station - it's very micro heavy (ironic - considering Wiz's stand against micro) as you have to select each and every space station to upgrade them.

 

[Scon]

Planets need an ftl jammer which prevents you jumping from one enemy system with a jammer to another.

That way ground combat has relevance to a space game.

 

[Medicine Man]

I agree that it would be cool and would add a lot of flavor. I just don't know how it fits into the scale of Stellaris. :-/

Maybe only as a set of modifiers that impact a fairly abstract invasion/planetary siege mechanic. Something analogous to fortress sieges in EU4.

Empire ethics and technology determine what kinds of garrisons can be built on a planet. The strength of local militias plus the garrisons present determine how long the planet will resist planetary invasion. The marine/invasion modules on an orbiting fleet determine how fast the planetary resistance is reduced, modified by special modules etc. Biological or engineered weapons could be activated as a toggle. If Paradox really wanted to rewrite the early stages of the game in MP, they could also make it so a corvette fleet doesn't have enough manpower to siege a developed planet (so no capturing homeworlds until destroyers are available).

Something like that. My ideal ground warfare system for Stellaris is something that allows preparation and creativity at the strategic/empire-building level but has very little logistical footprint or micromanagement.

I bet Wiz has something along these lines in mind anyhow, as most of what I've quoted above is quite similar to Pdox's approach to representing defensive warfare in other titles.

 

[DavetheGreat]

Yeah, I'm playing around with a design along these lines. Also includes using troops for boarding actions.

YES!

 

[A-150]

It's perfectly fine the way it is. Adding more to it is unnecessary, and removing it would make it too easy to take planets.

 

[enpi]

Thats a very disappointing attitude from Wiz.

In reality planets are the true reasons empires fights against each other and not boring space. Trooper against trooper. Alien in exosheletons against men. The main SF universes today have their focus on ground combat, but in stellaris ground combat should be not important? How ridicolous is that?

Imagine a SF universe without ground combat. Warhammer40k? Star Wars? Starship Troopers? Or any other of a bazillion SF novellas which featuring ground combat. A game without featuring ground combat in one of these popular universes would kill their franchise instantly.

Removing the ground combat feature or not improving it would be major drawback to the immersion of beeing in a living SF universe.

Wiz should realize that even if he personally dont like ground combat (due to some not very comprehensive reasons), most players like it because it contributes to immersion into the universe and is also strategically interesting because it represent an additional layer which is different to space combat.

But I agree is that generals are mostly worthless with the current ground system. Only an expanded ground system would make them necessary. If you dont plan to introduce such a system, please just remove them in the next patch.

 

[satyrlord]

I absolutely hate ground combat and I usually avoid it in wars unless it's absolutely necessary for war score. I can barely wait the rework. Thank Wiz for this info, it's amazing that you think the same way!

 

[grommile]

Imagine a SF universe without ground combat.

It's perfectly easy to imagine an engaging SF universe where the content creators don't pay much attention to large-scale ground combat, but focus on ship-to-ship combat with a side order of commando raids and boarding actions.