some mechanism needed to discourage doom stack play

[Dalwin]

This is easily the weakest aspect of the Stellaris design, in my opinion.

Strategy consisting of piling all your ships into one stack is no strategy at all and is not much fun. This has been a problem with other Paradox games in the past and most of the solutions used by those games would not be a good fit here.

Supply/attrition does not fit the setting well.

I favor the approach of applying a large penalty to both evasion and firepower past a certain size. Unfortunately I realize that this sounds much easier than it is since it is only the first part of the problem.

Once there is a mechanism to discourage doom stacks you then need to teach the AI to formulate a plan using multiple forces to go for multiple objectives at once, instead of the much simpler (simplistic) one at a time approach.

 

[Monkey Fritz]

Unfortunately, 'zerging' is almost always a superior tactic. Not just in games, it's exactly how Alexander the Great conquered the known world. He put all of his forces together, marched them across the land. Conquering and increasing the size of his zerg as he went. Many nations gave up at the site of them and went for vassalization.

It's very, very hard to limit what is a truly viable tactic in a game. (Like camping in an FPS).

That said, one small change could be made without actively nerfing large fleets (which i think is a bad idea):
Currently there is a maintenance bonus associated with the number of fleets you have. One single large fleet uses less energy than splitting that same fleet into smaller ones. This seems very backwards to me. It should cost more to have a larger fleet, as it takes much more to properly coordinate, manage, and even fuel and stock a large fleet vs a small one.

If you really wanted to get technical, it should be a bigger drain the more ships you have in a single system. So you couldn't just stack five 5k fleets together to get past the limitation, but would have to actually split your fleets across different systems to lower their maintenance costs.

That way an empire that can currently field a single fleet of 30k, could make a number of smaller fleets, spread across their empire, totalling 40k, for the same maintenance cost. In an offensive or defensive situation where you really needed that fleet stacked, you could bite the negative upkeep long enough for a quick maneuver, but would not be able to sustain a zerg for long protracted campaign.

This would fit in line with the actual costs and difficulties with maintaining a large army overseas.

I would even be okay with increasing the maintenance cost of fleets relative to their distance from an allied space station. Simulating the escalating cost of supplying that fleet far from home.

 

[KiwiNoob]

The problem is that any penalty to the fleet itself can easily be avoided by splitting the fleet up and having one follow the other.

I agree that doom stack play gets lame quite quickly and removes a lot strategy from the game. Wars are simply who has the biggest stack and fights are typically one-sided and conclusive. If a fleet is winning it's easy for it to chase down the retreating fleet and re-engage. There is no benefit to a well planned multi-prong offensive, in fact it is suicide.

 

[Hicpotboy]

This is easily the weakest aspect of the Stellaris design, in my opinion.

Strategy consisting of piling all your ships into one stack is no strategy at all and is not much fun. This has been a problem with other Paradox games in the past and most of the solutions used by those games would not be a good fit here.

Supply/attrition does not fit the setting well.

I favor the approach of applying a large penalty to both evasion and firepower past a certain size. Unfortunately I realize that this sounds much easier than it is since it is only the first part of the problem.

Once there is a mechanism to discourage doom stacks you then need to teach the AI to formulate a plan using multiple forces to go for multiple objectives at once, instead of the much simpler (simplistic) one at a time approach.

Supply still makes a ton of sense. Energy has to come from somewhere. We don't just pull it out of nowhere. Missiles don't form from the nether, ready to fire. I propose a supply/ordnance system, with supplies consumed at a set rate, based on ship size and engines (energy costs; going faster = more energy), and ordnance as a, "catch all" missile/mass driver consumable.

This would mean you'd need to create supply ships to resupply your warships; those same ships are consuming the supplies as well, leading to less and less effectiveness the more you need, and a greater reliance on them for your warfleet. You have a doomstack? Great! Kill the supply ships. Watch 'em starve.