Should fleet power and army power be hidden?

[Tree of Life]

Just a thought experiment, since it is a bit boring to know whether you will win or lose before the fight has even begun. Rough total empire fleet power should be available from the diplomatic tabs, but it seems odd to me that your empire knows exactly how powerful every fleet is and updates it on a real time basis.

Do you think it will be more interesting if we need to judge a fleet's strength based on overall technology level, civics, ethics and ship number or is it just extra micro?

edit: maybe have the accuracy tied to intel as suggested in the comments?

 

[prismaticmarcus]

it's just extra micro

 

[Archael90]

Just a thought experiment, since it is a bit boring to know whether you will win or lose before the fight has even begun. Rough total empire fleet power should be available from the diplomatic tabs, but it seems odd to me that your empire knows exactly how powerful every fleet is and updates it on a real time basis.

Do you think it will be more interesting if we need to judge a fleet's strength based on overall technology level, civics, ethics and ship number or is it just extra micro?

On one hand i agree, it should not be so obvious.
But on the other hand. Those informations are there from the beggining, and lot of players wold calculate it all the time, and everyone will calculate it at least once. So for now its qol funcion.
What would be fun - if components would not have statistics. We know that hyper shields are better than regular shields, or that kinetic artillery is better than gauss cannon, but we dont know if one of them have 3 or 30, or 1000 shield and second one have 6, 50, 10000 shield points.

 

[prismaticmarcus]

On one hand i agree, it should not be so obvious.
But on the other hand. Those informations are there from the beggining, and lot of players wold calculate it all the time, and everyone will calculate it at least once. So for now its qol funcion.
What would be fun - if components would not have statistics. We know that hyper shields are better than regular shields, or that kinetic artillery is better than gauss cannon, but we dont know if one of them have 3 or 30, or 1000 shield and second one have 6, 50, 10000 shield points.

that's what i was thinking. a margin of error in the fleetpower figure of, like, 10-15% would do the job, i think. dunno what it is at the moment.

 

[fusei]

Not having the fleet power of individual fleets would turn Stellaris into a horror game for me, but I could imagine to limit the info based on military intel something like:

no intel	number of digits	x000
low intel	highest digit	5000
medium intel	second highest digit	5700
high intel	third highest digit	5730
full intel	all digits	5732

 

[Derp]

no

 

[Ryika]

Player information can be a difficult topic, but my opinion largely boils down to: Make sure players have all the information they may want, unless there's a good gameplay-enhancing reason not to give that information to them. I don't really see such a reason here.

Also, Fleet Power is already an estimation in itself. It's not the case that a fleet with more fleet power always wins against a fleet with less power, so in an indirect way, you already don't know the "real" strength. It's just that instead of forcing the player to look and estimate, the game also offers you a base estimation that players can go by.

If numbers are close and if you're an experienced player, then looking at the fleet, especially when you have the intel required to see their loadout, will always give you a more exact estimation of what will happen in a fight than just fleet power itself.

 

[Nerisande]

You can still estimate fleet power from the number of ships, so hiding fleet power numbers will just make the game less comfortable by requiring extra calculations. The idea of making fleet power numbers less or more accurate dependant on intel is more interesting.
But I don't think that is so necessary, there are a lot of more important things to improve.

 

[StellarXe]

Not having the fleet power of individual fleets would turn Stellaris into a horror game for me, but I could imagine to limit the info based on military intel something like:

no intel	number of digits	x000
low intel	highest digit	5000
medium intel	second highest digit	5700
high intel	third highest digit	5730
full intel	all digits	5732

It's a cool idea, but once I get low intel to know there's 5000 fleet power,
I believe I won't need to know the further intel of fleet power anymore as I can roll my another 5000 power of fleets face-to-face enemy.

Unless low intel could only display like 5000, but actual fleet power be like 4000 - 6000 range depending on how much intel we got?
if we decided to declare war on enemy we would have to think carefully with low intel information that we currently know,
to differentiate the advantage of having low/high intel?
But I think this will be a mess to how Ai do decision later, nah..

Just a thought.

 

[Archael90]

It's a cool idea, but once I get low intel to know there's 5000 fleet power,
I believe I won't need to know the further intel of fleet power anymore as I can roll my another 5000 power of fleets face-to-face enemy.

Unless low intel could only display like 5000, but actual fleet power be like 4000 - 6000 range depending on how much intel we got?
if we decided to declare war on enemy we would have to think carefully with low intel information that we currently know,
to differentiate the advantage of having low/high intel?
But I think this will be a mess to how Ai do decision later, nah..

Just a thought.

More like low intel rounds power to thousand, so seeing 5000 it can be something between 4500 to 5499 and i think that would be quite good (tho low intel should round to ten thousand, and medium intel should round to thousand. But exact numbers are up to discussion). This would explain why varous fleets (like leviathans) have skull icon instead of power - because we dont know that thing enough to be able to estimate its power.

 

[Want0n]

Really good suggestion. Having intel level affect individual fleet power knowledge and even ship makeup, let alone ship component details, would significantly increase the value of espionage generally and would make warfare more realistic. At the moment there is too much 'perfect information' when it comes to both fleet and ground based warfare.

 

[Tree of Life]

Not having the fleet power of individual fleets would turn Stellaris into a horror game for me, but I could imagine to limit the info based on military intel something like:

no intel	number of digits	x000
low intel	highest digit	5000
medium intel	second highest digit	5700
high intel	third highest digit	5730
full intel	all digits	5732

One unintended side effect might be that wars would avoid/be waged around the gap of information present when fleet strengths grow a digit. The inaccuracy present when fleets are 6-9K is dwarfed when fleets start to be on the low teens.

 

[Harkinian's Dinner]

Just a thought experiment, since it is a bit boring to know whether you will win or lose before the fight has even begun. Rough total empire fleet power should be available from the diplomatic tabs, but it seems odd to me that your empire knows exactly how powerful every fleet is and updates it on a real time basis.

Do you think it will be more interesting if we need to judge a fleet's strength based on overall technology level, civics, ethics and ship number or is it just extra micro?

edit: maybe have the accuracy tied to intel as suggested in the comments?

1: Hidden fleet power numbers is a terrible idea that would only cause frustration and busywork.

2: You do not in any way know whether you will win or lose based on fleet power alone. You can easily beat a fleet that is 150% of your fleet power by countering the opponent's ship designs. In other words, having to judge a fleet's strength is already in the game, and becomes more and more important as you get better in the game.

 

[MathyM]

Fleet Power is just a rough estimate anyway. It doesn’t take into account how well your designs will fare against the enemy’s, or things like initial range of engagement.

By the way, a fun way to surprise your enemy is to toggle all Rare Resource Edicts just before your ships engage.

 

[Chuunibyou Imouto]

I love the idea of fleet power being tied to intel level. Lol at the people in this thread acting like that would ruin their lives because it would require them to interact with the espionage system, despite half the threads on this forum and on Reddit being "ESPIONAGE TOO WEAK, PLS BUFF"

IMO this would be exactly like in line with them changing it so you can't see enemy fleets orders anymore to know what system they were heading to, and how now you need intel on an enemy to see their fleet composition and see if they are preparing for war. This definitely seems like something that would be on the devs radar to make war more tactical and make the player think before just declaring war on every enemy they meet immediately.

Gathering info is literally the first step of preparing for war, sorry people who are saying it would "increase micro" but improving the combat is one of the main things people complain about, and this would be one step on path to accomplishing that

 

[grommile]

half the threads on this forum and on Reddit being "ESPIONAGE TOO WEAK, PLS BUFF"

Literally all of the people saying that are demanding powerful covert sabotage mechanics, not just intelligence gathering.

(Occasionally to the ludicrous extent of basically "my espionage service should be as powerful a weapon as a FanPu's entire navy".)

 

[Derp]

I love the idea of fleet power being tied to intel level. Lol at the people in this thread acting like that would ruin their lives because it would require them to interact with the espionage system, despite half the threads on this forum and on Reddit being "ESPIONAGE TOO WEAK, PLS BUFF"

IMO this would be exactly like in line with them changing it so you can't see enemy fleets orders anymore to know what system they were heading to, and how now you need intel on an enemy to see their fleet composition and see if they are preparing for war. This definitely seems like something that would be on the devs radar to make war more tactical and make the player think before just declaring war on every enemy they meet immediately.

Gathering info is literally the first step of preparing for war, sorry people who are saying it would "increase micro" but improving the combat is one of the main things people complain about, and this would be one step on path to accomplishing that

warfare in stellaris is a simple affair, and this wouldn't change that at all; it would just make it more annoying.

 

[Snadasky]

Just a thought experiment, since it is a bit boring to know whether you will win or lose before the fight has even begun. Rough total empire fleet power should be available from the diplomatic tabs, but it seems odd to me that your empire knows exactly how powerful every fleet is and updates it on a real time basis.

Do you think it will be more interesting if we need to judge a fleet's strength based on overall technology level, civics, ethics and ship number or is it just extra micro?

edit: maybe have the accuracy tied to intel as suggested in the comments?

ehh there is obviously ftl communication in the game universe so it would make sense that sensor readings would be sent back to analysts some where who then update the admirals with an estimated threat profile pretty quickly or even the fleets own CIC doing the analysis and reporting back to HQ (the player)

and real time to us is actually ~24 hours per tick in the game world

 

[Snadasky]

I love the idea of fleet power being tied to intel level. Lol at the people in this thread acting like that would ruin their lives because it would require them to interact with the espionage system, despite half the threads on this forum and on Reddit being "ESPIONAGE TOO WEAK, PLS BUFF"

IMO this would be exactly like in line with them changing it so you can't see enemy fleets orders anymore to know what system they were heading to, and how now you need intel on an enemy to see their fleet composition and see if they are preparing for war. This definitely seems like something that would be on the devs radar to make war more tactical and make the player think before just declaring war on every enemy they meet immediately.

Gathering info is literally the first step of preparing for war, sorry people who are saying it would "increase micro" but improving the combat is one of the main things people complain about, and this would be one step on path to accomplishing that

i do regularly interact with the espionage system to gather intel the other options are infact too weak except maybe the one to get agents but thats only to help get intel faster
intel gathering is all well and good but we only usually see this info when we have direct sensor readings on the ships in question

we already need quite high intel to see their fleet details and orders outside of sensor range

radar stations dont need an espionage service to know that there is a squad of aircraft or ships there and what their heading is.

 

[grommile]

radar stations dont need an espionage service to know that there is a squad of aircraft or ships there and what their heading is.

The heading of a Stellaris starship tells you, at most, what the next step on that fleet's journey is. (If there is a gateway or hyper relay in the system, it doesn't even tell you that much.)