Small idea about doomstack discouragement

[OnyxAbussos]

What about a fix similar to Civ 5.
Only 1 or X Fleets per empire per system, while retaining fleet command limits.
(Civ did it with one unit per hex, period).

This would inherently widen every theater of war, and make strategic movement even more important.

 

[Cordane]

Scale, in time and distance, is probably one of the major contributors to excessive doomstacking within the game Stellaris.

The speed of single battles mostly comes down to being a conceit of a pause-able real-time game that's ticking by days, not hours or minutes, at a time. If a battle took only the amount of time that you would expect it to in a realistic scenario, the game would have it resolved almost before you could hit the space bar to pause. Instead, a single battle takes weeks and often months to resolve, allowing the human player to make some kinds of decisions.

Weapon and engagement ranges are the next issue: ships are spread out the way they are on the screen so that the human player can see them, because it's impressively pretty, not because there would be any realistic, tactical reason for them doing so. Once they're laid out that way for pure game visibility, the assumption is that the fleet should fight as though that's how they're physically laid out. Because of that, weapon ranges are measured in effectively many light-minutes not a few light-seconds. Engagement ranges, within which the fleets pretty much have to fight each other, then become light-hours not (at most) light-minutes. Currently, a fleet can show up in-system and immediately force engagement with 20% of the orbital plane at once. In a more realistic scenario, that absolutely should not happen, but how do you make that work within the context of the game?

Realistically, any large fleet should break down into smaller subsets, like squadrons or flotillas, that separate out some from the center of the formation and get at least some guns and drives into position to respond within hours to any engagement along the edge of the formation. Once that fight starts, the rest of the fleet would coalesce and follow. Because the fleet is legitimately spread out, the individual engagement ranges of each subset allow the entire fleet to have the larger functional engagement range that players are more used to.

That could be done in Stellaris, with this as a possible organization, for example:
Fleet of 10 Battleships, 10 Cruisers, 20 Destroyers, 40 Corvettes (200 Command Points)
The game defaults to 5 squadrons, Center, Forward, Rear, and Right and Left Flanks, splitting the ships or CP as evenly as it can
Player could go on to choose a different split (e.g., larger double-squadron Core and 3 regular squadrons) or click on squadrons to change their default numbers (CP, sizes, classes) to defined values, including merging or splitting them
Player could add more squadrons and define which ships are included - if a squadron defines sizes/classes in quantity, they get those and the remaining squadrons divvy up the quantities in sizes or classes that aren't defined
Player chooses Core and 3 squadrons (Forward, Right Flank, Left Flank) and leaves them undefined, starting at 4/4/8/16 for the Core and 2/2/4/8 for the squadrons
Squadrons have default behaviors, but can have those adjusted individually - Player adds two new squadrons, sets them to Chase 1 & 2 (they don't wait to group and reinforce, they immediately head for the target in their own formations) and defines them as 5 DD and 10 Corv each, which drop the Core to 4/4/4/8 and the other squadrons to 2/2/2/4
With the squadrons grouped up, screening ships don't separate from their charges, meaning PD DDs don't rush to the front and get chewed up in order to get their remaining S-slots in play, rather than shooting down GW aimed at their BBs

A proper doomstack, in a realistic scenario, would be hell on anything that got close to it, but staying totally grouped up would keep it from having any real sphere of influence in a system. Only by legitimately spreading out in smaller bunches would it have a hope of bringing other fleets to battle. This system allows the doomstack to move within systems and through FTL as a single organism, so less day-to-day micro than actually separating them into distinct units, but also makes them less capable of instant obliteration.

 

[kalauer]

Unpractical. The player can split fleets so that each fleet have exactly ONE ship for a doomstack of FULL SPEED.

Thank you for taking the time to reply. To be honest, I noticed the instance I wrote this that it would lead to misunderstandings. But still felt this sentence conveyed the general idea best. In the following sentences of the original post, I rephrase to include this exact problem: Instead of basing it on fleet size, the modifier could be based on the amount of ships in a x-system radius, eliminating this incentive for unnecessary micro.

the worse part is that now i'm dicking around with things to try to circumvent a pointless penalty instead of just playing the game

There is of course always the challenge of implementation which does avoid exactly this behaviour. I guess it would be helpful to describe how you would dick around to see whether this can be stopped by the feature's design. If this is not the case, then I would argue there is a valuable and valid point against the idea. But regarding the pointlessness of the idea: the point is to incentivize fleet splitting where it would, in strategical terms, be useful but is now stopped by the justified fear of losing catastrophically against the larger fleet. While this risk will never disappear (and it should not), when there is something to be gained in taking this risk, I would argue this seems like a choice worth offering. One which might enhance wars by a nuance.

Realistically, any large fleet should break down into smaller subsets

I hope I understood this correctly. In principle, you are arguing that there should be a dedicated frontline-mechanic with engagement width and sections between which ships can move and fulfill certain roles. I feel this is somewhat of a deeper change though . It may end up being similar to other PDS games and, without knowing it for sure, I think Stellaris was designed differently on purpose. But on a theoretical level, I agree that a more complex differentiation/representation of space and time could solve some issues. I just don't think it can be done in Stellaris.

What about a fix similar to Civ 5.
Only 1 or X Fleets per empire per system, while retaining fleet command limits.
(Civ did it with one unit per hex, period).

This would inherently widen every theater of war, and make strategic movement even more important.

I guess this would also help to spread out fleets. But then you'd have the race to the highes fleet limit. Potentially, you'd have stacks forming waves waiting at the system entry points. I am honestly unsure whether this would be an improvement. But it would feel quite artificial and with the core problem of the disproportional superiority of larger fleets, I can imagine circumstances where this would even worsen the situation. Like one high fleet limit fleet defending a single system against multiple times its strength of smaller fleets.

 

[OnyxAbussos]

What about a fix similar to Civ 5.
Only 1 or X Fleets per empire per system, while retaining fleet command limits.
(Civ did it with one unit per hex, period).

This would inherently widen every theater of war, and make strategic movement even more important.

Forgot to say: Would start to add a slightly chess-like element to war fronts, kinda sorta almost.

 

[Diettinger]

Fellow Stellarians,

I just had an idea bout the in my opinion ever looming issue of doomstacks in space combat. But as I am in this forum merely intermittendly, I am unsure whether this idea has already been discussed and dismissed. Anyhow, here I go.

Problem: Due to the well discussed validity of Lanchester's square law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanchester's_laws) in Stellaris, concentrating your fleet is always better and you are going to win disproportional when you face a smaller fleet. In fact, you often end up with total destruction against losing maybe only some corvettes. Thus, doomstacks are in many cases the best way to go. Or the only one.

Idea: Mobility is an underrated property in this scenario. So what about reducing fleet sublight speed based on its size? There would be an incentive to split fleets in order to be faster and you would think twice before deploying your entire fleet to the other side of the galaxy for a small enemy. Maybe you just send a medium fleet because it is faster.
However, you would still concentrate your fleets for decisive battles, which is fine. But you would split them again afterwards, or at least there would be incentive to do so. This of course also depends on the topography. Also fine. When there is a single point to defend or attack to, sure I put my forces there.
For this modifier to speed fleet, there could be even some 'reality'-arguments (although I don't think they are necessary if it helps gameplay). For example fleet coordination. That's always a good one.

Implementation: This is the tricky part I believe. Just basing the speed penalty on nominal fleet size (maybe better: weighted ship size and count) would just add micro because you'd split the fleets and still let them fly together. So maybe this should be about number and size of shipd in a given system-radius? So when you have 50 corvettes inside 3 systems range, you get no penalties, but with 100, all of them move slower.

So again, what do you think of the idea? Would the intended effects be worth the effort? Would implementation be possible? Looking forward to your opinion.

Other alternatives are
1. making the detectability of large stacks higher
2. Increasing the effective weight of larger shops by increasing the number of guns they possess
3. increasing the number of weapons of area mass destruction... ie they hit tight formations more effectively.

For number 2 create a battery version of regular weapons which represents multiple mounts of that weapon and the increase the rare if fire to represent these multiple installations...

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

Aside of the tactical problem Stellaris have a huge problem with strategical depth which make doomstacking the one and only way to conduct a war.

Stellaris have no logistical system which would make large fleet movements and deployment very expensive and difficult. This would also include a system of standing and reserve forces... it make no sense that you would have more or less huge fleets on continuous stand by or even large part of the economy devoted to the fleet all the time.

Stellaris lack political motivation for deploying fleets, most conflicts in our real world have many levels of engagement. Wars are rarely all or nothing affairs where both sides commit all their forces to this one single conflict.

Stellaris have no real reason to protect systems, planets and locations as they have no political or real cultural values and thus there are no reason to be cautious or protective against potential threats.

Diplomatic stances and relationships are too binary and the AI will not seize the opportunity to attack when they see that someone is weak.

There are no internal factors that decide to rise up while you are occupied in a war, the perfect time for a dissatisfied planet or sector to break out and form its own government.

The War score and exhaustion mechanic is too simple.

There are too many direct benefit to conquer an enemy planet.

It is too easy to invade enemy planets while also having the planet habitable and decently in high condition afterwards. Bombarding planets should be way more devastating to the planets infrastructure and population.

Fleets and military have no morale... forces defending would tend to have better moral than offensive troops, especially if they fight against extinction or other really "evil" types.

All of the above things would together be factors to make war more strategic and less of a point and click system.

 

[GC13]

But that's just forcing bad strategy, though, because in order to make that happen, you're having to artifically enforce a game rule to make one of the most fundemental concepts of warfare not apply.

You can't NOT have doomstacks happen, because concentration of force is literally a corner-stone of military strategy.

I completely disagree. Concentration is the fundamental goal in military strategy, but there's a reason it takes a master to practice: it's not quite so easy as "roll up on them with your entire army". Sometimes logistics requires you to split your forces; perhaps the roads are too poor to move enough supplies on, perhaps the spaceports you've forward-staged supplies at can only dock so many supply ships a day.

Of course other times there are all sorts of other things your fleet could be doing. The huge problem of war in Stellaris has, since day one, been that the only strategic target is the enemy fleet. Once you neutralize that you can conquer their entire empire at your leisure. War exhaustion from "attrition" doesn't accrue nearly fast enough to compel me to split my fleet before the enemy fleet is crushed.

There's no sense of initiative in Stellaris—nothing where I need to take this now to improve my position. There's only one time that matters, and that's two years after you hit 100% war exhaustion. In a real war the only thing that doesn't matter when you take it is a fort, and its entire purpose is to delay you from taking something important; in a real war if I take a port with a task force before the enemy can reinforce it, I can dig in and require the force of the enemy's full fleet to dislodge me. If the enemy fleet amasses to take it back, I can either strike them with my fleet – even if I lose I might damage them so much that they lack the strength to retake the port – or strike another target. The entire time that port is allowing me to unload enough supplies to sustain armies in the field somewhere they'd probably rather I not have any.

Things do stuff in real wars, they aren't passive tokens you collect to get enough victory points at the end of the war.

 

[methegrate]

I think you are right that in strong empire strenght disparity, these measures won't help. But I would argue they are not supposed to. When one empire is clearly way stronger, of course they must crush the opponent. Anything else would be very frustrating. This point is more about somewhat equal strategic positions, in which you currently have to concentrate your forces, ending up with doomstacks. Adding reasons why splitting the forces can be beneficial is something that has been pursued for a long time, from what I can tell. And the thought is that influencing mobility could be a way. Especially since moving around does take quite some time now.
Maybe one could think it the other way around and give small fleets a movement bonus, if that sounds better .

I guess, but didn't you read the entire rest of my post that started with, "So this really only applies to enemy empires that are somewhat in parity"?

 

[kalauer]

I guess, but didn't you read the entire rest of my post that started with, "So this really only applies to enemy empires that are somewhat in parity"?

I didn't intend to let that pass. But actually, my point here was not to remove the option to doomstack. Because as you rightfully say, is is an important strategy. And as others pointed out, there are a lot of other reasons why it is the only viable strategy right now. The idea would try to create additional, or any, incentive to split your fleet when it seems possible. E.g. when there is no large enemy fleet in sight (of course you'd still have to be cautious about that). Or when deploying a fleet to a distant theater.
With the changes you mentioned, travel speed was reduced for all fleets in order to incentivize multiple strategic bases in large empires instead of a single central point. I do think this was a step in the right direction and I feel my proposal could be seen as taking another step down this road.
But you are right that there are shortcomings to the intention of the idea behind the overall movement speed reduction. And that is I think the key point in what @GC13 said: The highest value target is the enemy's fleet. That's why you protect it with all you have.

One would need a reason to sacrifice the fleet in order to e.g. stop bombardment of a planet. At the moment, there is little to none. I experienced an edge case but it was only there due to combat AI issues. But I feel this is another point going much further than this idea of mine.

Other alternatives are
1. making the detectability of large stacks higher
2. Increasing the effective weight of larger shops by increasing the number of guns they possess
3. increasing the number of weapons of area mass destruction... ie they hit tight formations more effectively.

For number 2 create a battery version of regular weapons which represents multiple mounts of that weapon and the increase the rare if fire to represent these multiple installations...

I also thought about some AoE weapons but this would not necessarily target strong fleets but fleets of small ships. What I ment was incentives to deploy half-fleet limit fleets on purpose, not necessarily how they are comprised. Also, as actual location is of limited impact in the combat system right now, I have no idea how this could be implemented in a meaningful way.

 

[methegrate]

I didn't intend to let that pass. But actually, my point here was not to remove the option to doomstack. Because as you rightfully say, is is an important strategy. And as others pointed out, there are a lot of other reasons why it is the only viable strategy right now. The idea would try to create additional, or any, incentive to split your fleet when it seems possible. E.g. when there is no large enemy fleet in sight (of course you'd still have to be cautious about that). Or when deploying a fleet to a distant theater.
With the changes you mentioned, travel speed was reduced for all fleets in order to incentivize multiple strategic bases in large empires instead of a single central point. I do think this was a step in the right direction and I feel my proposal could be seen as taking another step down this road.
But you are right that there are shortcomings to the intention of the idea behind the overall movement speed reduction. And that is I think the key point in what @GC13 said: The highest value target is the enemy's fleet. That's why you protect it with all you have.

One would need a reason to sacrifice the fleet in order to e.g. stop bombardment of a planet. At the moment, there is little to none. I experienced an edge case but it was only there due to combat AI issues. But I feel this is another point going much further than this idea of mine.


I also thought about some AoE weapons but this would not necessarily target strong fleets but fleets of small ships. What I ment was incentives to deploy half-fleet limit fleets on purpose, not necessarily how they are comprised. Also, as actual location is of limited impact in the combat system right now, I have no idea how this could be implemented in a meaningful way.

Personally, I'm not sure it will ever be possible to fix doomstacking post-2.0

As you and @GC13 say, the heart of this problem is and has always been that the only relevant target in warfare is the fleet. There's nothing else worth protecting and nothing else worth attacking, and the best way to do both of those things is to concentrate your reinforcements.

The only way to fix that is by adding in strategic targets that can cripple the enemy's ability to wage war even if their fleet is completely intact. You can do this through war score/war exhaustion (having targets that dramatically escalate those counters, so that losing them makes the war unsustainable for the enemy empire). You can also do this through logistics (having targets that cripple the enemy fleet's ability to keep fighting).

I do think @GC13 put it very well in his description. "Things do stuff in real wars." It would be relatively easy to make a conceptual version of the game based on naval strategies, control of ports and bases, crucial supply lines, operational ranges, and the island hopping strategies of WWII. In that model defenses and fortresses would be a strategic judgment call based on the systems you need to protect and the forward bases you fear are vulnerable.

The problem is that in order for this system to work, either the "things do stuff" logistics model or a politics/culture war exhaustion model, fleets would need the mobility to actually hit those valuable targets without engaging the enemy doomstack. I mean, we already have a whisper of that right now with anchorages. If you could clean out the enemy's anchorages, you'd get a huge advantage. But in 2.0 they rebuilt the entire game around starlanes and chokepoints. This wiped mobility off the board at a single go, because now to reach any of those anchorages you still have to go through one or two pre-defined chokepoints.

The best (if not only) way to do that is with a doomstack.

In this system there's no version of crippling an enemy empire by targeting infrastructure or critical systems. The only way to reach those systems is by going through the chokepoint system, and they will have fortified that tiny border with their entire fleet. So regardless of whatever other targets exist, they're irrelevant because the enemy can protect all of them at the same time by placing their whole fleet in range of one or two chokepoint systems. As long as the chokepoint and starlanes mechanic is in place, I'm not sure this is a fixable problem.

 

[GC13]

Stellaris doesn't need to go with a blue-water navy metaphor for its strategy—it can blaze its own path, so long as the systems make logical sense.

I feel like Stellaris is actually close to having some kind of strategy. Upgraded starbases are the only places you can repair your fleet, you can only have so many of them, you can capture them from the enemy, and an inferior fleet can engage a superior enemy without being wiped out. If they could solve the power scaling issue, so that an anchorage could be fortified enough to dissuade even a superior fleet from attempting to take it if it's been weakened enough, and made even regular outposts keep up so they do some worthwhile damage before being captured then starbases could be made hard targets to crack that open up more of the empire for attack.

If defense platforms were more durable but ate naval capacity that might be a starting point for a meaningful fortification. Ship retreat chance would probably need to be increased too.

 

[methegrate]

Stellaris doesn't need to go with a blue-water navy metaphor for its strategy—it can blaze its own path, so long as the systems make logical sense.

I feel like Stellaris is actually close to having some kind of strategy. Upgraded starbases are the only places you can repair your fleet, you can only have so many of them, you can capture them from the enemy, and an inferior fleet can engage a superior enemy without being wiped out. If they could solve the power scaling issue, so that an anchorage could be fortified enough to dissuade even a superior fleet from attempting to take it if it's been weakened enough, and made even regular outposts keep up so they do some worthwhile damage before being captured then starbases could be made hard targets to crack that open up more of the empire for attack.

If defense platforms were more durable but ate naval capacity that might be a starting point for a meaningful fortification. Ship retreat chance would probably need to be increased too.

Very fair. I like the blue-water metaphor just for ease of use, and because I think it would be awesome, but you're certainly right. It isn't necessary.

I think I would add to your list: If they opened up mobility so that the map wasn't defined by predictable chokepoints that force an all-or-nothing confrontation. If they added some sort of fleet range, so that empires needed to defend territory they'd taken. And if they spread out the number of strategic targets (like anchorages) so that it wasn't possible to defend all of them at once.

I like your point about making outposts and anchorages somewhat harder targets. I think we have to balance that against not wanting to make them too hard to take. I mean, you should be able to fortify the ever loving crap out of a system that's particularly important. But if every important system is too strong, then we're right back at basically needing doomstacks to accomplish anything.

Defense should force as many choices as offense. It should be about trying to judge where you have to invest limited resources, so you pick the systems you think are most critical or most vulnerable and you stack defenses there. Meanwhile as the attacker, you try to find key systems that are undefended, and figure out how you can hit them. (Which is why I think fleet range needs so badly to be a thing. Since right now "figure out how you can hit them" is "well, you right click, and then you wait.")

 

[Diettinger]

I didn't intend to let that pass. But actually, my point here was not to remove the option to doomstack. Because as you rightfully say, is is an important strategy. And as others pointed out, there are a lot of other reasons why it is the only viable strategy right now. The idea would try to create additional, or any, incentive to split your fleet when it seems possible. E.g. when there is no large enemy fleet in sight (of course you'd still have to be cautious about that). Or when deploying a fleet to a distant theater.
With the changes you mentioned, travel speed was reduced for all fleets in order to incentivize multiple strategic bases in large empires instead of a single central point. I do think this was a step in the right direction and I feel my proposal could be seen as taking another step down this road.
But you are right that there are shortcomings to the intention of the idea behind the overall movement speed reduction. And that is I think the key point in what @GC13 said: The highest value target is the enemy's fleet. That's why you protect it with all you have.

One would need a reason to sacrifice the fleet in order to e.g. stop bombardment of a planet. At the moment, there is little to none. I experienced an edge case but it was only there due to combat AI issues. But I feel this is another point going much further than this idea of mine.


I also thought about some AoE weapons but this would not necessarily target strong fleets but fleets of small ships. What I ment was incentives to deploy half-fleet limit fleets on purpose, not necessarily how they are comprised. Also, as actual location is of limited impact in the combat system right now, I have no idea how this could be implemented in a meaningful way.

I frequently use half capacity stacks with most half stacks following a lead stack. The primary reason is to maintain and develop a reasonable stable of admirals.

 

[ArmChairAttila]

Simple fix, play max hyperlanes. If you doomstacks you will probably lose a lot of territory. The AI is quite good with fleet maneuvers on max hyperlanes.