Now would I rather want to do this or steal a technology? These are the interesting decisions I play stellaris for... (Just joking around appearantly there is more to it)
Sabotage Starbase
- Thread starter Liggi
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I would be. In fact, I would welcome it.
You should not always be able to stop things like this by burning a resource or picking a decision, like some kind of mana, but you should always be able to mitigate away most of the effects by planning ahead. Knowing that your stuff can be crippled will force you to build in redundancies and plan for actual worst case scenarios. Thats the mark of a good strategy game.
I would not call current situation of "I see choke point, I put 1 station there, I safe" Good Strategy. Having to think about what happens if this or that happens, is good. It might force you to always keep a small reserve fleet near a critical starbase, for example, which also helps to neuter things like doomstacking.
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This is so right. I would add to the discussion that it seems arbitrary to elect just the one thing that is "not fun" as a valid target for destruction. Might as well listen to someone who would abandon the game and never return over bombardment losses (it is a hassle to regrow pops!) or over crisis (now that I was winning those jerks appear out ot nothing!) or over anythibg, really.
Besides to me it seems dreadlyndwirm is exagerating how much of a hassle it is to rebuild a starbase (it is certainly not the case), and how little effort it takes for ops to succed (it is being described as a mere "pay 2000 energy, profit" move. It isn't).
As in any game worth of the name there must be challenge. This game's wars are already too easy as it is. I would welcome being put on my toes all the time. And it is not like there are not defense mechanisms to espio. All I am saying is, this is being painted as something it is not: a mere "push button, destroy starbase" for the AI to use all the time for no cost at all and you cant do nithing about it, ansld rebuilding sours the entire game. It is not that.
If that was the dev's thinking, they are way off.
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I would prefer annoying and useless to annoying impactful. Primarily since in most games i've played with espionage mechanic's the ai have a hardon for spaming the player with espionage. If for example the espionage could disable a starbase theoretically an ai federation could simultaneously disable all your starbases instantly crippling your economy by sending you way over fleet cap, or completly preventing you from building new ships during a war.
Obviously the best option would be non-annoying impactful effects but i'm not sure what they would be an people likely wouldn't aggree on what they would be either.
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I'd say targeted disabling of FTL blockers in a system would be decent alternative to randomly disabling entire starbase or random component of it. It would not disrupt entire empire but would make them vulnerable to quick attack though at the same time the enemy risks getting stuck behind the enemy lines if they get overwhelmed and can't retreat because the FTL blocker is working again. Obviously cost should be higher than "destroy anything, I don't care what but destroy something" mission.
Alternative option would be to economic sabotage, eg. in RP terms docking facilities etc. That could be modifier reducing trade value coming through the starbase but not blocking it entirely.
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Rather than destroying a starbase simply having a starbase powered down for X time would be good. Providing the AI could use it effectively, shutting down a starbase in order to fly a fleet by.
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Yes I agree. Should be agreeable to most players. More even if espio was a feature people could toggle off, as @King Harkinian said above.
I particularly am 100% for espio ops being N-A-S-T-Y but I can sympathise with @DreadLindwyrm as one guy who doesn't like it. Maybe more things could be teakeable with game options.
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Buildings don't just get randomly destroyed out of nowhere (although buildings getting randomly ruined by stuff like land appropriation IS very annoying, so I'm glad it won't be happening in 3.0) and destroyed fleets can be reinforced with one click with very little scrolling (for all the s*** the fleet manager gets, it does work most of the time), and getting them destroyed is actually significant (ie, has a real impact on my game). Furthermore, planet and fleet management are already core parts of the gameplay loop anyways, so I'm already checking in on them regularly. Loosing one random module does absolutely nothing to me (Losing 6 navy cap or 6 energy income for 6 months it takes to rebuild a base and 50 alloys is effectively meaningless), but requires scrolling through 70+ starbases (for a lategame empire), which is absolutely no fun, even with Tiny Outliner. I have no desire to add starbase management to planet and fleet management. It's a waste of my time and attention.
I do think that a starbase getting disabled would be much better, since that might actually have an impact (if say a trade hub gets disabled, I might need to spend a few months carefully juggling resources to avoid collapse, and a well-timed bastion debuff could theoretically turn the tide of a close war), and I wouldn't need to scroll through 70+ starbases to fix the problem. I still don't think I'd ever use it, since bastions are worthless by the time I can afford to casually drop 2K energy anyways, and the AI doesn't set up proper trade hubs, but at least it would be both less annoying and more impactful.
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Oof... couldn't agree more.
As the defender I have to constantly rebuild the destroyed module/building. As the attacker, the best I can do is modestly weaken a starbase. Seems like the worst of all worlds.
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Sorry for the double post, but agreed. This is exactly what I was hoping for too. Sabotage could either give you a first strike option to bypass their chokepoint defenses, so that players would have to plan their defenses around the risks of putting all their eggs in one basket. Or it could give a raiding empire the ability to slip their ships past chokepoints/inhibitors to hit mining stations and steal pops. That would have been an interesting change to warfare.
Edit - I also really agree with @Pancakelord:
It's a good thing when you can't perfectly predict what's going to happen in a strategy game. Chokepoints dumb down the strategy by reducing your options to just the one, obvious choice.
Espionage could really shake that up. If you have to plan around the fact that someone can disable that base, the answer is not "and then they just run amok in my empire until they hit the next chokepoint." You prepare for the unknown and the answer becomes "I have to plan around the important targets." You end up having to actually make judgment calls about where to invest your defenses. Those judgment calls might be wrong, because the game hasn't literally scripted in the answer for you, but that's the essence of a good strategy game.
Instability and unpredictability make the game better, while the perfect-information model of "I know where and how the enemy will attack because they have no other option" is like forcing someone to play poker with their cards face up. Sure, you know exactly how to bet on each hand, but that's because you also know who's going to win before you've even done so. In poker, imperfect information is what makes the game fun. The same is true of a strategy game like Stellaris.
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For me this would be a bad deal. One of my main goals for sabotage starbase would be to influence the war between two empires that are not me. If i would get that codes that wouldn't help.
But i wouldn't be against a additional operation for this.
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That's fair. Maybe you could have something like a "Blind System" operation. It doesn't disable the starbase, but it does let your fleets pass uninterrupted. Or maybe you could focus it even more, so that only corvettes and destroyers could pass through uninterrupted. (That way your raiders could get through, but not the main battle fleet.)
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I mean you could literally have a blinding espionage attact which reduces sensor ranges of stations to -1 (they don't even reveal them selves on the map). This would allow you to either ambush a station or sneak into an empire without them knowing where (although they would liekly have a pretty good idea due to choke points)
An espionage attack to hack into a gateway and allow access would be neat for a true suprise attack, although it may be abit to annoying if people then decide they need to build stations on all their gateways.
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Thinking about this more and reading all the other non-military concerns with knocking out a starbase (permanently or temporarily), I’m thinking a ‘sabotage system defense’ operation that applies a debuff like -% damage for all an empire’s military in a system may make more sense. It doesn’t invalidate starbases for defense since the base still contributes and fleets suffer the same penalty, but it still serves the purpose of helping break defensive strongpoints.
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Late to this party but had similar feelings. I would personally like it if you could destroy a base much like a crisis can in 2.8.
That way, if a player has a homeworld in the system, it would come back, albeit with no modules or buildings, otherwise it could allow for sneakily taking territory without war decking (but with the previous empire retaining claims so would eventually wardec you if you continually do this)
That way, if a player has a homeworld in the system, it would come back, albeit with no modules or buildings, otherwise it could allow for sneakily taking territory without war decking (but with the previous empire retaining claims so would eventually wardec you if you continually do this)
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Disabling an entire starbase doesn't have to be quick, easy, or repeatable to have a big impact on defense strategy. Knowing that the operation exists, one has to assume that one's starbases are going to have zero effectiveness in combat when an enemy decides to invade your territory, because the rare moment when they have a sabotage op prepared will coincide with their invasion. I can't imagine deciding to invest alloys in static defenses when such a risk exists, so to me, it seems like this actually reduces the number of meaningful choices available to a player.
If there are players who actually just want starbases not to be obstacles in war, or to be less significant, that's a valid stance to take. I'll still disagree, but it will at least make sense to me.
I think starbases' defensive power adds nuance, rather than removing it. A starbase with 6 weapon modules has 0 anchorages. It's a pile of irretrievable alloys that can't contribute to battles outside its system. It's not going to capture your enemy's territory or bombard their worlds. It can't support your beleaguered ally, nor hunt down the enemy Star Eater. Its power applies to a very narrow scope. Making it formidable within that scope creates a meaningful choice; if, for all those constraints, starbases were still only as powerful as the same alloys' weight in ships, you'd just build the ships instead. And, if a covert operation were allowed to nullify its power at just the moment its narrow scope would actually apply, investing in it would be absurd.
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I think my problem is that this assumes that they can spam this operation, or that you’re restricted only to building defenses at the one, pre-scripted choke point that the map gives you.
Certainly this should be limited. I’m happy with restricting it to one starbase (ie one operation at a time). But in that case it wouldn’t mean that your starbases in general are useless. It just would mean that you have to build redundancy into your defenses. You can’t count on one single base to make up your defensive wall, because any individual base is vulnerable. Instead you have to plan for defenses on an empire-wide basis. That, in turn, would mean prioritizing which systems to invest in over others.
If anything, I would argue that this debate underscores what a terrible design choice chokepoints were. When taking out a single base can reliably cripple an empire’s entire defenses, it shows how much we as players have come to rely on the model of “find the pre-scripted choke point, stack all defenses there, #strategy.” When they announced a move to chokepoints, this was exactly what critics of the system warned would happen.
Personally, I feel like it would be a best case outcome if espionage made it very risky to stack all your defenses at a chokepoints.
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You know, if disabling starbases was a thing, the next-best thing would be to just spam fortress habitats in chokepoint systems to massively delay any and all invading forces there. So it's not like the option is even meaningfully removed, then, it just gets even more of a cost than investing a full starbase (that could be something more productive instead). In fact, one might argue that creating such fortress habitats and relying entirely on a fleet to defend yourself with could be more effective/flexible than making defensive starbases in the first place - but it's certainly not as cost-efficient.
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I keep getting told that I'm assuming the proposed "disable starbase" op is spammable, and I keep saying I'm not. It doesn't have to be spammable to fundamentally undermine the value of static defenses.
If you have 6 outer choke points, and you fortify 6 starbases, it's not because you expect your enemies will politely split their forces into 6 fleets and attack you at all of them. It's because the path of least resistance is the path your enemy will choose, so if you neglect one of those choke points, your enemy will ignore your better-fortified fronts and take advantage of your oversight. If an enemy has prepared to invade you, and they have the opportunity to disable one starbase, once, in that whole war, then they will do that, and that makes your 6 starbases become as valuable as 0 starbases.
Some of you point out the need for defense in depth. (The concept, not the Stellaris war doctrine.) Yes, incentivizing players to have fallbacks is a good thing that makes the game more interesting. You can limit the value the enemy gets out of their sabotage by having more layers of defense. But if static defenses only have any value when layered, and you need to spread them throughout all your territory, I think it very quickly becomes a bad investment. Who's going to fare better when invaded: a player who built multiple layers of fortified citadels, or a player who has zero citadels, filled a bunch of star fortresses with anchorages instead, and built a particularly big fleet? If the enemy can completely disable one starbase in the whole war, for long enough to bypass it or destroy it, I expect the player who didn't bother with static defenses at all to be better off. This is why I say that a "disable starbase" operation would dissuade players from fortifying starbases in the first place.
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I would argue that you do need to build quite a decent spy network to achieve this however. It's the highest level operation outside of privateers, so it would take some time and planning to pull this off - giving your opponent much time to war dec you first from a solid defencable position.
If anything, the fact that you may risk an opening by not acting quick enough would in my mind give you an actual reason to go to war ahead of being prepared, rather than the current tactic of turtling until ready.
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