Generally agreed, particularly with:
- My earlier post on how 1-dimensional wars are (we would need more ways to fight, more things to fight over for different ship roles to really matter).
For my two cents, I think it boils down to this: There are no alternative uses for your ships, so there is no need for alternative types of ships.
Ultimately every fleet battle in Stellaris (whether fleet v. fleet, fleet v. defenses, or a mix) boils down to the same formula. You throw all of your ships/defenses at each other and try to do the most amount of damage. There's only ever one mission, blow up everything, so there will only ever be one build, whichever ships are best at blowing everything up.
Even if we fix the battleship problem, that issue will still remain. Players will just settle on the next correct build, because there will always be a ship or ship set that is best at doing the most damage to other ships all at once.
- Basically, we're asking the wrong question. The issue isn't "what ships are players building?" It's "what do players need to do with those ships?"
Players only need to do one thing, so they're only building one ship.
The way to fix this is to give fleets different roles and missions. If fleets needed to do things other than just blow each other up, then players would need to build the ships that are best at those different missions and assignments. While I haven't read much of this thread, people have referenced how Stellaris ships compare to real life navies. That's a good analogy. Actual navies have different ship classes not just for mixed fleets, but because their ships need to conduct a variety of missions. An aircraft carrier would make a poor choice to intercept pirates, for example, while a submarine is best for picking off lone enemy ships. Different ships exist to carry out the different missions that navies need to conduct.
Say we had four basic things that a Stellaris fleet could do:
- Artillery
- Ship Combat
- Raiding
- Support/Defense
Now we could build fleets based on the ships that are best for that. Battleships, for example, could keep their long range guns but might have a minimum effective range, making them excellent for blasting away at fixed defenses but a poor choice for engaging fast-moving enemy fleets. (We would probably need to lop a decimal point off of all weapon ranges, as
@Pancakelord referenced above, but it would be worth it.)
This would almost automatically give cruisers an effective role in the game, as your heavy hitters that can still engage the enemy up close and personal. They would have real guns, without the weakness of a battleship in close combat.
Corvettes would be well suited to raiding, since their speed could make them effective pirates and tools of harassment on enemy mining stations and trade routes. (Of course, like artillery, this would require some retooling to how the map works. Right now choke points and FTL snares make raiding a non-option.)
And destroyers could provide the support necessary to keep a starbase in the fight far longer than it should, especially if we focus our long-range weapons on strike craft and missiles. (I can see an excellent destroyer module along the lines of "Gravitic Field: Bend spacetime enough to deflect many kinetic and beam attacks, reducing the accuracy of weapons the further away they're fired.)
Obviously you wouldn't use single-ship fleets. Every ship would still have its role in different missions, you wouldn't send your battleships on an artillery strike unescorted for example. But you could build your fleets around the mission they're trying to accomplish.
Right now we
are doing that. We're building fleets around the mission. It's just that there is only ever one mission, and so there's only ever one fleet. Making battleships less desirable won't change that. It will just change the composition of that one fleet.