Just make the first fleet 10 or 20. Every game i have to go in and up it to allow me to reinforce it easy. Yes it is simple, but come on. Who keeps it at 3???
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Quality of life - starting fleet size
- Thread starter Zogist
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Used to be pretty common to delete the starting fleet I believe. Pretty sure there are plenty of people not planning on attacking the first neighbor they run into that don't bother to expand fleet until they've teched up some.
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Back in 1.x you could explore with a single military ship, so I would break up my 3 starting ships and send them to neighboring stars while my science vessel surveyed the home system (which you had to do in 1.x, no free scans, no free mining stations).
Much cheaper to lose a single corvette to some space monster than to lose a science ship, especially since replacing Leaders cost Influence back then.
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Yeah if anything they should just remove starting fleet from the game, all it does is make people have to always downgrade them for alloys and then disband or willfully waste resources
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The main thing people use the starting ships these days is to "upgrade" them to a new design without armor, shields, or weapons which costs negative alloys, which means you get alloys for making the upgrade and then you can use those alloys to make more science ships.
It would be better if we just started with a couple extra science ships instead of the corvettes.
It would be better if we just started with a couple extra science ships instead of the corvettes.
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Moreover, I'd say that there's a little inconsistency in pretending that the adjacent systems are still not surveyed (yet explored) because no science ship ever flew there (and no FTL probe were sent here ever), and yet you get a fleet of several large FTL-capable space ships. If this isn't putting the cart before the horse... (except perhaps for fanatical militarist empires).
Note that some events require an early fleet, though, and ought to be changed if starting fleet's size is changed.
Note that some events require an early fleet, though, and ought to be changed if starting fleet's size is changed.
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Hate to bring in a realism argument but really wouldn't be likely for anyone other than a pacifist to build FTL exploration ships without at least one military ship and of course military would want at least two or three so there's redundancy if one is offline for maintenance or something. Possibly starting ships should have some very minimal armor and shields that can't be removed so they are just good enough to be able to out-fight some converted civilian ships used by pirates or something. I'd still want to keep them as 'corvette' hulls rather than some new dedicated cheaper hull so you could get ship experience with them and upgrade them later.
Not too unreasonable that you wouldn't have built an actual warfighting fleet when you have not yet discovered any other civilizations.
Not too unreasonable that you wouldn't have built an actual warfighting fleet when you have not yet discovered any other civilizations.
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They could have 'corvette' hulls and no FTL drive, for instance. A science ship (eventually manned by the military) would still be needed to calibrate the drive through experiencing a real jump. A few months after, a new tech would be issued to all the other ship classes (constructors, transports, colony ships, corvettes), and only corvettes would actually need a refit.
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Another reasonable possibility for a starting ship would be the military-scientific hybrid. To make it balanced it would probably need to be weaker than a corvette and also somewhat less capable than a pure science ship, maybe slower sublight, slower survey, slower anomaly investigation, etc. With very limited space infrastructure it would make sense to build multifunction ships at the start but once you start to grow dedicated ships would become more cost-effective.
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It's logical, but sounds like sthing that will confuse newbs a lot.
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I doubt that would be an issue for new players; more likely to confuse people familiar with the current start situation.
I'd be more worried about internal stuff. The game has categories for ships being military or civilian and this one would be sort of both. Probably should be allowed to group in fleets like normal military ships rather than solo like civilian ships (or some event ships) but that might confuse the ships' scientific functions.
Yup definitely, 3 starting corvettes are totally useless for the available actions you can use them for.
Actually on 2nd thought this is exactly what Endless Space already does, their 'Science ship' is scout-type ship that can have militaristic weapons (although only lightly) and with effort can be used for battles (albeit poorly)
The issue with that, like you said, is confusing ppl and prob won't work well in Stellaris where lots of events requrie 1 science ship.
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You mean like the standard StarTrek Federation science vessel with enough fire power to destroy a planet?
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It certainly is common among certain content creators and in turn points to an issue that should be examined. In my view we might want to start everyone with a pair of scout ships and extra alloys to allow for a choice of making warships or more scouts. This will remove one advantage players have over the AI where they sell back the ships to gain an early alloy advantage. Granted with this change some table updates will be required to keep the AI from panic building the three ships immediately
Considering the fact that the best course of action at the moment is to downgrade and then potentially delete the starting fleets getting even more ships would be dumb.
I like the idea of having some weapons on science ships and getting more of those. Would make more sense then having a fleet of FTL capable warships ready if you haven't left your home system.
If that's to much of a change maybe just downgrade the current starting corvette design to that it gives less alloys (just one starting weapon, no FTL or shields should be fine).
I like the idea of having some weapons on science ships and getting more of those. Would make more sense then having a fleet of FTL capable warships ready if you haven't left your home system.
If that's to much of a change maybe just downgrade the current starting corvette design to that it gives less alloys (just one starting weapon, no FTL or shields should be fine).
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It would be interesting if different Ethics started differently. I remember in Civilization Beyond Earth, you could customize your start like start with more explorers or more soldiers. Here are some ideas for basic/fanatic versions:
- Materialists: +2/4 science vessel.
- Militarist: +3/3 corvettes +1 destroyer
- Pacifist: fully developed system/neighboring system is explored and ready to be developed
- Gestalt: +1 Colony Ship
- Xenophobe: Starts with Starhold instead/Not sure
- Not sure what I would do for the others.
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IIRC they will die to your starbase even if your fleet is elsewhere when they spawn.
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In my experience they won't because their AI is set to passive and they spawn outside of starbase range. They will politely sit there and wait for your fleet to engage them while doing nothing other than shouting "Ooga booga!!!" to scare any civilian ships you might have in the home system and make them run to neighboring systems.