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Stellaris Dev Diary #18 - Fleet Combat

Good news everyone!

Today’s Dev Diary will be about Fleet Combat and the different things affecting it. Like always it is important for you to remember that things are subject to change.

In Stellaris we have a number of different types of weapons that the player may choose to equip his/her ships with. All weapons can be grouped into either energy, projectiles (kinetic), missiles, point-defenses and strike craft. Their individual effects and stats vary somewhat, so let’s bring up a few examples. One type of energy-weapon is the laser, using focused beams to penetrate the armor of a target dealing a medium amount of damage. Mass Drivers and Autocannons are both projectile-weapons with high damage output and fast attack-speed, but quite low armor-penetration. This makes them ideal for chewing through shields and unarmored ships quickly, but are far worse against heavily armored targets. Missiles weapons are space-to-space missiles armed with nuclear warheads. Missiles have excellent range, but they are vulnerable to interception by point-defense systems. There’s of course far more weapons in the game than these mentioned, but it should give you a notion of what to expect.

Strike crafts are different from the other weapon types since they are actually smaller ships that leave their mothership. Cruisers and Battleships can in some cases have a Hangar weapon slot available, in which you may place a type of strike craft. Currently, we have two types of craft; fighters and bombers. Fighters will fire upon ships, missiles and other strike craft. Bombers however may not fire on other strike craft or missiles, but they will do more damage than fighters against capital ships. Point-defense weapons can detect incoming missiles and strike-crafts and shoot them down. These weapons may also damage hostile ships, if they are close enough, but will do significantly less damage against those.

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When it comes to defenses, you may increase the durability of your fleet in combat by placing armor and shield components in the utility slots on your ships. Armor components will reduce the incoming damage and can’t be depleted during combat. Shields work much more like an extra health bar to your ships and will be depleted if they take too much damage. Shields will automatically regenerate after combat, unless you have certain components that allow your shields to regenerate during combat. Both shields and armor can have their efficiency reduced if the enemy uses armor and/or shield penetrating weapons.

The different components you place on your ships will also affect certain other key combat values:… Hull points is a value corresponding to the “hit points” or health of your ship. Evasion affects the chance for your ship to evade a weapon firing at it. You may also affect the overall stats (values) of your fleet by assigning an Admiral to it. The stats of your fleet will both be affected by the skill and the traits of your leader. But be aware that traits will not always have a positive effect. I would recommend everyone to always have good admirals assigned to their military fleets since they can really improve your stats, like +20% fire rate and +10% evasion.

Once the combat has begun, you very few options to control what happens, much like it works in our other grand strategy games. For this reason it is really important not to engage in a battle that you are not ready for. As a fallback, it is possible to order a full retreat through the “Emergency FTL Jump” option, this will basically cause your fleet to attempt to jump to the closest system. However, during the windup for the EFTL jump your ships will not be able fire back at the hostile ships, so you put yourself in an exposed situation. Depending on what type of fleet you have, you might want them to always engage in combat or always try to avoid it; for this purpose we have different fleet stances. The evasive stance will try to avoid combat and the fleet will leave a system if a hostile arrives. Civilian fleets have this stance on per default. Aggressive stance will actively make your fleet attempt to attack any hostile that enters the same system as them. Passive stance will, like the name suggest, make your fleet only engage in combat when enemies are within weapon range.

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The combat might be off-hand, but you can still indirectly affect how each individual ship will behave. When you design your ship you may specify what combat computer to use on the ship. These computers range from making your ship super aggressive, and basically charge the enemy, or be really defensive and keep formation. At the start of the game only the default combat computer is available, but more are unlocked through normal research or reverse engineering.

It is very possible that your fleet might end up in combat with multiple fleets. This means that you can have a combat with three different empires that are all hostile to each other. To help you keep track of everything that happens we have a combat view, which will appear as soon as a combat is initiated. This view will list you (and any other friendlies or neutrals) on the left side and every hostile on the right side. The combat view is currently being reworked, so you will get to see that interface at a later date, but the idea is to provide you with crucial feedback on how effective your weapons and defenses are.

Once the battle is over, you may want to investigate any debris left from destroyed vessels. If you weren’t the one being wiped out, perhaps you can salvage something?

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Sadly, neither the “Picard Maneuver” nor the “Crazy Ivan” are currently possible in the game, but who knows what the future might hold…

Stellaris Dev Diary #19 - Diplomacy & Trade
 
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Not very much actually unless you decided to use super heated plasma and allowed it to escape magnetic confinement. You can create and maintain plasma with less than your average electrical plug. Granted the plasma in a fluorescent bulb is not nearly as dense as what you'd use on a plasma shield, but that's merely a matter of scale.

And it would actually be effective against some forms of space weaponry unlike a spinning electromagnetic field. For a magnetic shield to be effective, it has to A, be projected very far away from the ship (Hundreds if not thousands of kilometers) to deflect a projectile. and or (mostly and) B be insanely powerful so as to offset kinetic energy of any projectile it can affect in the first place.
 
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That's true, but it's also true that for any given type of radiation there's something that reflects it. A mirrored gold finish will protect you from visible, infrared, UV and microwave radiation. What it can't protect you from is a chunk of something heavy travelling at 0.1%c.

EDIT: This is why I really like the paper/scissors/stone aspect of the game's weapon design. It means that you have to tailor your ships to the enemy they're fighting, which in turn means that a very strong fleet can be defeated by a weaker enemy who tailors their weapons to that particular opponent.
 
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Lets ask the astrophysicist, seeing as X rays are the most commonly used type in scifi for laser weapons, What reflects an xray laser?

Nowadays? Basically nothing that we can build, to my knowledge.

In plausible extrapolated science fiction? I can think of something.

Laboratory mirrors aren't made of a substance polished to a high degree of perfection; they're made of alternating sheets of semi-transparent material, and work via the differences in the materials. If you had a really big materials-science lab and a magnificent budget, then I think you could work out something like this which worked to reflect x-rays. It's plausible that a spacefaring civilisation would be able to take something like this out of the lab and mass-produce it. However, this would probably be extremely fragile and so make them easily defeatable by mass drivers.

It's not really my field though.
 
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Well I'm a professional tell other people what to do ;) and delegate responsibilities.

So its more your field than mine. ^_^ I just have an interest in scifi, I'm mostly self taught on the physics aspects of it.
 
Not very much actually unless you decided to use super heated plasma and allowed it to escape magnetic confinement. You can create and maintain plasma with less than your average electrical plug. Granted the plasma in a fluorescent bulb is not nearly as dense as what you'd use on a plasma shield, but that's merely a matter of scale.

And it would actually be effective against some forms of space weaponry unlike a spinning electromagnetic field. For a magnetic shield to be effective, it has to A, be projected very far away from the ship (Hundreds if not thousands of kilometers) to deflect a projectile. and or (mostly and) B be insanely powerful so as to offset kinetic energy of any projectile it can affect in the first place.
You don't try to deflect the bullets entirly you try to get them to ht the armour at an angle so they glance of.

And no your magnatic shield would still allow heat radiation to pour through it like water through a strainer and with nothing to pick it up you'd be churning out loads of energy.

Plasma is great if you want to make light for someone as the means to scramble EM it's not that useful. Also it's barely more useful than diluting the laser in the same gas cloud when it's cold. Which is again way less efficient then just letting the armout act as a heatsink (and preferably give it reflective propterties). As soon as a laser hits anything it's basically just adding heat to that something, so long as you cna keep it from melting the hull you're golden. A freaking air conditioning system would be more energy efficient than a plasma shield.

Not that it really matters because lasers dont make very good weapons in the first place (except as point defence systems). you either waste a lot of energy makign the light monochromatic and coherent (real lasers) or you use focused light (which realy isn't lasers but since that's the popular name for light based weapons) where you have to know the distance to your target to set the focus right or you end up turning the entire ship into a sauna rather than melting the hull.

Tryign to cut through steel (or ever harder materials) with a beam of light at thousand of kilometeres of range is a bad idea to begin with.
 
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Point 1... things don't "glance" off at these speeds. Starships in stellaris are shown to be moving at least .1% the speed of light (Probably faster but lets say that's our minimum) that means a direct hit from a 20 kg slug impacts with about half the force of a nuke even more if the hit object happened to be moving towards the projectile. A "glancing" blow is still going to turn whatever it brushes up against into a nice debris cloud.


Point 2 I never suggested a magnetic field would stop heat transfer, simply that it doesn't take much energy to create plasma which is your assumption. Hence my providing you with an example (One of a myriad) of plasma you likely see on a regular basis that takes almost no power to create.


Point 3 a dense cloud of plasma is more effective at absorbing a laser as opposed to a solid object, because plasma is not harmed by absorbing the energy, the energy bleeds off fairly quickly due to heat transfer, the plasma is in constant motion so no particular molecules of plasma absorb an undue amount of energy, and its relatively easy to replace any plasma that escapes containment due to absorbing too much energy because its fairly low in mass. None of which is true with a solid object that isn't reflective to whatever particular wavelength of laser is used.
 
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Eh no a denser mater is actually better at diluting energy also better at passing that energy on to the rest of the material hence why we make heatsinks out of steel. As for glancing you're the once suggesting that armour could stand up to a direct hit of projectiles at this speed and quite frankly the proportion of energy lost at glancing is the same regardless what speed the projectile is glancing at (that'd be the cosine of the angle if you're intrested). Which means that without soem kind of defelction you're even more humped the faster the projectile is moving.
No offence kid but I am an engineering phycisists I know a bit about these things. Now if you want to keep making stuff up sure go ahead but I know how reality works.
 
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Eh no a denser mater is actually better at diluting energy also better at passing that energy on to the rest of the material hence why we make heatsinks out of steel. As for glancing you're the once suggesting that armour could stand up to a direct hit of projectiles at this speed and quite frankly the proportion of energy lost at glancing is the same regardless what speed the projectile is glancing at (that'd be the cosine of the angle if you're intrested). Which means that without soem kind of defelction you're even more humped the faster the projectile is moving.
No offence kid but I am an engineering phycisists I know a bit about these things. Now if you want to keep making stuff up sure go ahead but I know how reality works.
Obviously there no other reason we don't use plasma as a heat sink in a desktop computer. Isn't water cooling a thing that people do?

There seems to be a lot of assumptions being made about the completely unexplained thus far nature of the weapons and defense system. Personally, I think that the physical defense vs physical weapons and energy defense vs energy weapons makes intuitive sense to me.

Also: saying "no offense" and then disparaging someone is fairly disingenuous.
 
Yeah making stuff up... and yet I never said armor would be effective against, kinetic projectiles, or anything else you've claimed I said in everyone of your posts. Instead I explained why a specific type of shield would be effective against laser type weapons and not kinetic ones.

Do continue making an ass of yourself though.
 
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Mass drivers would be incredibly destructive weapons in RL. The problem with them is that they fire unguided projectiles at incredible speeds towards a tiny dot in the distance that's also travelling at incredible speeds. Even if the other person isn't jamming your sensors, you're not going to score many hits.

Were I Paradox, I would have flavoured mass drivers as the short-range high-powered weapon, and taken lasers as the long-range low-powered option. I think the paper-scissors-stone approach is exactly the correct one (from a gameplay as well as scientific perspective) but would work better if they were switched around.

In my opinion, in RL the defence against mass drivers would be sensor jamming and the defence against lasers would be a reflective surface. However, shields and armour are venerable sci-fi tropes and I think they're cool enough that they deserve to be here.
 
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Obviously there no other reason we don't use plasma as a heat sink in a desktop computer. Isn't water cooling a thing that people do?

There seems to be a lot of assumptions being made about the completely unexplained thus far nature of the weapons and defense system. Personally, I think that the physical defense vs physical weapons and energy defense vs energy weapons makes intuitive sense to me.

Also: saying "no offense" and then disparaging someone is fairly disingenuous.
Liquid coooling systems work because you utalised that liquid is not a static medium so you cna actually move heat from one location to another and dissapate it there. It's not nearly the same concept as either a gas cloud or a bulkhead. Though you could actually use liquid cooling to cool the hull of a ship, making again hulls even better at resisting lasers.
Also computer processors aren't the only thing we use heatsinks to cool.


Mass drivers would be incredibly destructive weapons in RL. The problem with them is that they fire unguided projectiles at incredible speeds towards a tiny dot in the distance that's also travelling at incredible speeds. Even if the other person isn't jamming your sensors, you're not going to score many hits.

Were I Paradox, I would have flavoured mass drivers as the short-range high-powered weapon, and taken lasers as the long-range low-powered option. I think the paper-scissors-stone approach is exactly the correct one (from a gameplay as well as scientific perspective) but would work better if they were switched around.

In my opinion, in RL the defence against mass drivers would be sensor jamming and the defence against lasers would be a reflective surface. However, shields and armour are venerable sci-fi tropes and I think they're cool enough that they deserve to be here.
Well reflecting materials are great to reduce the heat absorbed by a hull from light based weapons but there's only so much it'll reflect in the end, even if you use the superreflective materials that we're developing (though those are really cool they are based on several layers where the transmission from each layer cancels out the transmission from other layers through wave intereference and thus boosts the reflectiveness ,because of how light phase shifts when it's reflected, something we learned from butterfly wings), you'll end up needing a hull to dissapate the rest of the heat.
 
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Good news everyone!

Today’s Dev Diary will be about Fleet Combat and the different things affecting it. Like always it is important for you to remember that things are subject to change.

In Stellaris we have a number of different types of weapons that the player may choose to equip his/her ships with. All weapons can be grouped into either energy, projectiles (kinetic), missiles, point-defenses and strike craft. Their individual effects and stats vary somewhat, so let’s bring up a few examples. One type of energy-weapon is the laser, using focused beams to penetrate the armor of a target dealing a medium amount of damage. Mass Drivers and Autocannons are both projectile-weapons with high damage output and fast attack-speed, but quite low armor-penetration. This makes them ideal for chewing through shields and unarmored ships quickly, but are far worse against heavily armored targets. Missiles weapons are space-to-space missiles armed with nuclear warheads. Missiles have excellent range, but they are vulnerable to interception by point-defense systems. There’s of course far more weapons in the game than these mentioned, but it should give you a notion of what to expect.

I very much disagree with this. Think of ship armor more like a tank. It going be very thick. Also thing about how the ship entering a planet atmosphere. That armor will get super hot from the friction of air molecules rubbing against it. So the armor will mostly be tempered to resist heat. While shields will be protecting the ship from flying space debris and meter showers. With other chunks of matter that fly though space. The shields would be more protective against hundreds of kinetic material. While armor would be to dense for laser to effectively cut through it.

I see laser being millions and billion of charged particals which can over load a shield generator. While think what happens if a ship flies into an asteroid. I know that will ether destroy the ship or badly damage it. Depending on the size of the ship and asteroid. Same thing with firing large chunks of metal at the speed of light.

Shot think how long it takes to take a to cut thick high melting point metals. Then thing about how powerful kinetic energy can be. After all they say a single asteroid did cause the ice age.


Shouldnt mass drivers actually have the best armor penetration properties?
I agree with this. Let's hope they have an option to set this into play. That or someone quickly makes a mod for it. The energy beats armor sound stupid. Having a laser cut though reinforced super thick armor sounds so dumb.
 
Hmmm nice photo, but the combat view is faaar away and even with max zoom is like mosquitos or bees moving with no order, why all the ships move like fighters when they are heavy ships? Yes is only animations because the real battle is only window battle.
 
I hope there's a way to at least initially organize where what ships are located in a formation. Most of the gameplay i've seen is people just lump the ships togethere and it flys in a pattern but I dont see anyone organizing those patterns.

ex: Big shield/armor vessels in front to soak initial salvo, carriers or gunboats in the middle and longest ranged weapon platforms in the rear.
 
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Agreed. There is probably some neat potential in choosing mixes of ship behaviors. Direct control of combat, even choosing combat cards, would be a bit of a mess in a real-time game. IMO tactical control works best in games with turn-based strategic layers.

Tactical battles seem to work well-enough in Polaris Sector which is a real-time 4x game. The strategic game basically pauses until the combat is resolved. Not immersion breaking either, you can think of combat playing out in seconds or hours, while the strategic game advances at a rate of weeks/months.

If you are going to have "arena based combat" I prefer it not to be just sit back and watch, but to have tactical control of individual ships (SOTS, StarDrive, Polaris Sector) or at least the ability to issue fleet wide commands (Endless Space).

Otherwise combat should be played out on the strategic map (almost like SOASE), where newly arriving ships or fleets have a chance to join the battle, i.e., you can send in reinforcing fleets.
 
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Tactical battles seem to work well-enough in Polaris Sector which is a real-time 4x game. The strategic game basically pauses until the combat is resolved. Not immersion breaking either, you can think of combat playing out in seconds or hours, while the strategic game advances at a rate of weeks/months.

If you are going to have "arena based combat" I prefer it not to be just sit back and watch, but to have tactical control of individual ships (SOTS, StarDrive, Polaris Sector) or at least the ability to issue fleet wide commands (Endless Space).

Otherwise combat should be played out on the strategic map (almost like SOASE), where newly arriving ships or fleets have a chance to join the battle, i.e., you can send in reinforcing fleets.
I agree that fleet combats that last weeks are a bit silly, but MP (and even SP if the AI battles pause the game as well) is going to be incredibly unwieldy if the game pauses to resolve every battle.
 
It's always possible to come up with an explanation for how things work in-game. However, all else being equal, I'd prefer they go with the rules that make the most physical sense. I guess the argument for armour being better against most kinetics is that it's what people expect, even if the physics doesn't work that way.

I think the physics does (or could) work that way ;). One can always make up explanations as you say.

If you look at the progression of stones vs leather, arrows vs plate, muskets vs tanks, bullets vs kevlar, sabots vs reactive armor, ablative armor, and even newer technologies like active defense systems, or presumable technologies like super-alloys, field enhancements, nuclear bonding, etc, would we ever say that the bounds of technology in this race has been reached?

Even magnetic rail guns ... presumably if a round can be magnetically accelerated, it can be magnetically decelerated.
 
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Some level of control during battles would be nice. It would be a pitty to develop detailed pew pew visuals and animations if the player can't get some sort of agency during these engagements. I really like the administrative part of the game, I would like the same type of high-level control over fleet combat, can't speak for others. I imagine that it be difficult to have one system that makes everybody happy, so my hope is to see an expansion with the actual fleet combat, which I hope will give us limited control over larger battles, rather than more control but small scale skirmishes, 10v10 types of battles. Better said, I do hope that fleet sizes scale with the size of the empire and that a single planet with billions of people can support a fleet of its own, tens of vessles, plus contribute to the maintenance of an empire's fleet as well. High level control would be awesome in a game where you play the role of the captain of one ship (eventually in charge of a fleet), but in a game about empires, fleet sizes should be larger than one single player can effectively control and direct.

It's not a dealbreaker to me if the grand strategy part is covered well. It would be worse to have a system that forces the player to do these battles that are really bad and unenjoyable. But we already had games with small level skirmishes implemented, it's about time for one where the player gets to prepare for epic space battles (please!?!).