Ship Design & Power Creep

[Dzuari]

We are all familiar with the issues of the AI and the crazy corvette evasion ratings. Most suggestions are to nerf the corvettes but the problem isn't that they are overpowered, it's that they don't have any kind of counter. So i'm going to propose an alternative fix that either the Dev's could use or a modder could make. I have zero skills at modding or i'd take a stab at it.

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The Problem

The ship design and progression from corvette < Destroyer < Cruiser < Battleship suffers from what is called Power Creep.

World of Warcraft suffers from this heavily. New expansion, new levels, new gear? All the old stuff is now obsolete and useless. Same thing is happening here. A destroyer is just a bigger corvette with less maneuverability. A cruiser is just a bigger destroyer with less maneuverability. Same thing with battleships except they get a fancy support module.

This results in overpowered units, like the super evasive corvette and relatively useless ships like the destroyer and cruiser. Once it's nerfed there will be a new OP ship which just creates a new ship to be nerfed.

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The Solution

In contrast lets look at another game, League of Legends. Been around for 7 year now, yet all classes released upon launch are still some of the most viable champions to play. Why? Because the game is designed around counters, not power creep and progression.

So, how do we use this design in Stellaris? Easy. All we need to do now is edit the ships a bit to turn them into counters instead of linear progression.

• First up is revamp weapon prioritization. Right now whatever ship is at the front line gets targeted. This needs to change so small guns target small ships(Corvettes/fighters/bombers). Medium guns target medium ships(Destroyer, Cruiser) and Large guns target large ships(Cruisers, Battleships). This alone will add a great amount of depth and customization to fleets.

• Second up is revamping the distance that ships loiter or turn to broadside. Battleships need to be in the back line, with cruisers shielding them, destroyers and corvettes making up the fur ball in the middle. This would allow secondary ships to flank the engagement and hit back lines. Thus more adding more tactical options.

• Remove the Battleship support modules and give them to cruisers. Turning the Cruiser into the strongest EW ship in a fleet. A good and well rounded fleet would have multiple cruisers all with their own Unique EW capabilities. Mods and expansions could add even more debuffs or perks.

• Give battleships support modules revolving around armor, shields, power or fighter/bomber perks. Thus turning them into dreadnoughts or specialized carriers. Throw L guns on them and you have an anti-battleship obliterate. Lighten them up along with the distance revamp and now you can flank and kill enemy carriers since their large guns will prioritize large targets of the backline.

• Give Destroyers single target webs that debuff the corvettes evasion rating thus turning them into true hunterkillers. You could even give them perks against other destroyers or cruisers.

Now you have an extremely well rounded combat roles and ever ship class can counter the other. You have less nerfing and headache with OP ships and it gives you a tremendous amount of customization and replay-ability. You can compound this even more by designing some AI to favor large ships, some might favor corvette swarms, so might favor the middle ground or even well rounded fleets or multiple specialized fleets. Then you can design your fleets to counter them specifically.


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Examples

Fighting corvette swarms? Build web destroyers, outfit battleship with AOE or small weapons and tons of armor. Throw in a cruiser or two to stack the web debuff.

Fighting a fleet that heavily reliant on fighters/bombers? Build destroyers, cruisers and corvettes. Build a secondary fleet with glass cannon battleships to flank and engage the backline.

Fighting a well rounded fleet? Use the flank and backline to win an even keel matchup.

Fighting L swarm missiles or L torpedo? retrofit cruisers and destroyers for Point Defense to protect your backline battleships that the L weapons will prioritize on.

Fighting lots of medium ships/medium W? Build bulldog battleships to tackle them head on. Use cruisers to debuff and destroyers to focus.



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Combat Roles of Real Ships


Destroyers
In real life destroyers, cruisers and battleships all have specific roles. Destroyers are light and fast, excelling at hunter/killer tactics, hunting subs, destroying fast light ships. They are the guys that chase down and tackle fleeing ships. Newer models are also designed with EW(Electronic Warfare) In mind.

Cruisers
Cruisers are the DPS bruisers, Paladins that protect aircraft carriers. They excel at Anti-ship and Anti-Air combat. Masters of long range bombardment like the Ticonderoga Class used in the Gulf War or the bombing of Baghdad in the Iraq invasion where they launched 50 tomohawk missiles in the opening hours of the war, each costing $1.4 million for a total of $70 million spent in just a few hours. They also have extremely strong EW capabilities.

Battleships
Battleships in stellaris take a duel role as they can either be fitted with tons of large guns or hangers, thus turning them into a carrier. In real life battleships where the bulldogs. The dreadnoughts. The obliterate of cities and leveler of islands. Eventually they where decommissioned as smaller vessels and advanced tech could pack the same punch for a lot less money. That and armor advancements turns them obsolete.

But fuck that, this is a video game, we can do whatever we want.

 

[Stripes]

You never tested an actual combat using console, do you?

 

[AdricTheGreat]

I dunno. I think ship design matters. I've had little issues with corvette spamming. My battleship eat through them.

 

[aitaituo]

I don't think the metaphor is appropriate. GSG combat is fundamentally different than PvP or PvE combat in LoL or WoW or any of the games in those genres. Additionally, power creep generally refers to expansions making old items obsolete (your awesome gear is now comparatively meh, buy the DLC/microtransact!) not to tiering of equipment in general.

I do like the idea of moving the ship aura generators to cruisers.

 

[Dzuari]

power creep generally refers to expansions making old items obsolete (your awesome gear is now comparatively meh, buy the DLC/microtransact!) not to tiering of equipment in general.

Right now the destroyers and cruisers are just glorified corvettes. They serve no real purpose other than a filler between corvettes and battleships. They lack any real purpose and don't add any depth to the game. With a few tweaks they could become extremely valuable and add a ton of customization to fleet designs.

 

[solidprice]

I do like the idea of more rock paper scissors like combat.
Also ships having different roles other than a straight upgrade dose intrigue me.
Ships are pretty power creep.

 

[aitaituo]

I do like the idea of more rock paper scissors like combat.
Also ships having different roles other than a straight upgrade dose intrigue me.
Ships are pretty power creep.

Rock paper scissors combat in strategy games sounds good. Personally, I've always found they become tedious quickly, much like Rock Paper Scissors. It also fundamentally forces a reduction in combat complexity and I like complex combat more than IF "rock" THEN "paper".

 

[Dzuari]

Rock paper scissors combat in strategy games sounds good. Personally, I've always found they become tedious quickly, much like Rock Paper Scissors. It also fundamentally forces a reduction in combat complexity and I like complex combat more than IF "rock" THEN "paper".

The best way is to actually be able to micro the individual battles. There are other methods though. Stellaris doesn't have to turn into CoH2 or Command and Conquer but you could take a semi-micro level of play. Any of the Total War franchises are great at this. Mass units attacking other mass units while other mass units flank and hit other mass units. Basically just have multiple fleets and allow us to micro the fleets movement in the battle. Adds enough tactical options to avoid the IF THEN dice role but not as complex or time consuming as designing an entire RTS style of play.

• allow fleet manuvering in combat
• allow targeting specific types of ships in combat based on the fleet itself

This would pretty much allow us to build specific fleets for specific roles/functions and add another layer of replay ability and user freedom.

 

[aitaituo]

The best way is to actually be able to micro the individual battles. There are other methods though. Stellaris doesn't have to turn into CoH2 or Command and Conquer but you could take a semi-micro level of play. Any of the Total War franchises are great at this. Mass units attacking other mass units while other mass units flank and hit other mass units. Basically just have multiple fleets and allow us to micro the fleets movement in the battle. Adds enough tactical options to avoid the IF THEN dice role but not as complex or time consuming as designing an entire RTS style of play.

• allow fleet manuvering in combat
• allow targeting specific types of ships in combat based on the fleet itself

This would pretty much allow us to build specific fleets for specific roles/functions and add another layer of replay ability and user freedom.

While I also love the Total War franchise, it's like comparing rice paddies to cotton farms. Flooding the field doesn't also make the crops grow.

 

[208]

First up is revamp weapon prioritization. Right now whatever ship is at the front line gets targeted.

This is not strictly true. Ships already are supposed to prefer targets of their own size, according to the ship behaviour templates:

    targeting = {
        keep_previous_target_bonus        = 100        #flat bonus for keeping previous target
        damage_value                    = 5            #score += estimated damage dealt ( including damage to shields ) * <damage_value>
        low_health_bonus                = 50        #flat bonus if estimated damage will kill the target in a few shots
        shield_focus_value                = 5            #score += estimated shield damage dealt * shield damage bonus * <shield_focus_value>
        armor_focus_value                = 5            #score += enemy armor * shield penetration value * <armor_focus_value>
        already_incoming_damage_penalty = 200        #score -= ( fleet total estimated damage to enemy / enemy max HP ) * <already_incoming_damage_penalty>.
        distance_to_fleet_penalty        = 20        #score -= distance between enemy and fleet * <distance_to_fleet_penalty>
        size_difference_penalty            = 1000        #score -= Abs( ship size - enemy ship size ) * <size_difference_penalty>. "Pick a fight with someone your own size!"
        civilian_target_penalty            = 100000    #if( target is civilian ) score -= <civilian_target_penalty>
    }

A hitch in this plan is that for two fleets flying directly towards each other, the first ship at the tip of that triangle formation is always going to be the first one in range, which means it's going to pick up a lot of "already damaged" and "previous target" bonus points even once other ships are in range as well. Once those initial ships are down and the fight evolves into more of a melee/battle line, though you should see more size-appropriate targeting.

 

[Laotze]

Rock paper scissors combat in strategy games sounds good. Personally, I've always found they become tedious quickly, much like Rock Paper Scissors. It also fundamentally forces a reduction in combat complexity and I like complex combat more than IF "rock" THEN "paper".

Couldn't agree more. I could never play Gal Civ2 for that very reason. The other thing is I do not feel there is any personality to my fleets. Most weapons have the same range and all the ships close to point blank range in a big free for all. I can live with no direct control but let me care about my battleships, name them, zoom in and watch them tear apart the enemy or scream nooooo when they get destroyed. Instead, we have the corvette zerg.

 

[Baron Jukaga]

I dunno. I think ship design matters. I've had little issues with corvette spamming. My battleship eat through them.

I had a similar experience last night. Fought a 5k enemy corvette fleet with my 6k balanced fleet with near-parity of tech (they actually had better torpedos than me) and I decimated them. I was about 40% corvettes, 10% Destroyers, 40% Cruisers and 10% Battleships. Was pleased.

 

[Jorlaan]

So far I've been running more "realistic" fleets with larger numbers of smaller ships and smaller numbers of large ships and it has been working out pretty well. At worst I love a few corvettes even in large battles typically. I've only got so many hours of play time so far though so we'll see if this changes.

 

[moridin84]

The way I thought things would work once you got battleships is that corvettes/destroyers are cannon fodder. I gave corvettes and destroyers attack computers, cruisers and battleships defensive computers. The small ships would charge in, tank most of the damage while the bigger ships hung back. Ideally in a big battle, I'd lose a lot of my smaller ships but the bigger ships would be fine. And smaller ships are quicker and easier to replace. But no.

Your idea of small guns targeting small ships and etc probably does make a lot more sense, though. Especially when you can pick and choose the number of small, medium and large weapons on every ship.

I really like your idea of putting auras onto the cruisers. Paradox already said they were planning to remove point defense weapons from battleships and add huge weapons too.

Personally, I think that one big difference between corvettes and destroyers should be that destroyers can carry large weapons. So you could create specialized anti-battleship destroyer swarms. Which would result in anti-destroyer corvette swarms to counter that.

I also hate how ships will charge forward at each other regardless of the range of their weapons. I think ships, especially with defensive computers, should take at the maximum distance of their shortest range guns. Corvettes with missiles would hang back while those with railguns would charge forward. You'd normally only use medium/long range weapons on battleships to make them hang back. However, you could also create a battleship with only short range guns, stacking as much armor, shields or whatever defensives you can.

Couldn't agree more. I could never play Gal Civ2 for that very reason. The other thing is I do not feel there is any personality to my fleets. Most weapons have the same range and all the ships close to point blank range in a big free for all. I can live with no direct control but let me care about my battleships, name them, zoom in and watch them tear apart the enemy or scream nooooo when they get destroyed. Instead, we have the corvette zerg.

I think the scale of Stellaris is too big for you to get attached to your ships, even battleships.

 

[Dnote]

You know, they could copy the last two centuries of naval warfare, which give us fleets of different ship classifications and roles.

Stellaris suffers from a combat system that seems to be born from CK2/EU4 (rock, paper, scissor with a linear power progression), which is too simplified to handle the additional complexities they've introduced from the 4X genre.

It's too early to say whether it needs a complete rework, we'll see how the balancing in 1.1 and 1.2 do.