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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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So in the end, we have more or less a rock-paper-scissor system:

  • Energy beats armor but does less damage so less effective against shields
  • Projectiles beat shields but not armor
  • Missiles and strike crafts beat armor and shield but are beaten by point defense
I got the impression that those are just the basics. Note:

There’s of course far more weapons in the game than these mentioned, but it should give you a notion of what to expect.
 
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So in the end, we have more or less a rock-paper-scissor system:

  • Energy beats armor but does less damage so less effective against shields
  • Projectiles beat shields but not armor
  • Missiles and strike crafts beat armor and shield but are beaten by point defense

I am sure there will be a Lizard type or to the very least Spock graded weapon too.
 
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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.

Instead of a binary left/right view for friendlies and hostiles, would it be feasible to make a "web" type display (think of the screen for nomadic clan relations in CK2), to show how much each side has damaged the others? If I'm at war with empire B, and both of us are hostile to empire C, and all three of us are involved in a three way battle, it would be really useful to know if most of the damage to my fleet was coming from B's ships or from C's.



On another note, while those tactics you mentioned aren't available, would it be possible to build an equivalent to fire ships? Basically build simple, cheap ships for use as missiles?
 
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Well to be honest kinda underwhelming because we already knew most of the information in this DD.Apparently the whole "Fleet combat" is still not finished yet and Paradox are testing what can work and how to look properly.At least the fights will look cool as in the screenshots when you zoom in the camera.

Paradoxian fans will probably hate me but why the player should have so little "power" during the combat phase ? Why not Stellaris be the first Paradox game that will offer a Total War style of combat or something simillar or anything more involving than just watch and chose to flee or not ?
 
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Can we say set our reactors to an unstable setting and go in for a suicide run as a last ditch effort, or can we have part a fleet say the actual combat ships stay behind to defend in a last stand and then have all non-combatants go to FTL ASAP?
 
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very cool, i like the battle computer add in. this will give some standard AI for that ship to follow.


question though, how (if at all) will stellaris try to balance ship sizes in fleets to make sure that fleets dont end up as zerg corvette fleets or only massive battleships?
 
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No torpedoes? I mean... ;_;
 
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So in the end, we have more or less a rock-paper-scissor system:

  • Energy beats armor but does less damage so less effective against shields
  • Projectiles beat shields but not armor
  • Missiles and strike crafts beat armor and shield but are beaten by point defense

I thought the same thing, but remembered this is a paradox strategy game. Perhaps it will be more shock vs fire vs maneuver, or infantry-cavalry-artillery balancing instead of lasers vs missiles vs kinetic.

You can beforehand choose a strength to focus on for your species (more manpower means more infantry, more discipline for better infantry, more tech/money means more artillery, lots of large swabs of hard to travel land means cavalry armies). Similar reasoning can be introduced in Stellaris, where formations/speed are important for large fleets with small vessels but targeting/shields/armor/point defense are important for large lumbering vessel fleets.

I doubt it will like the total war battles a rock paper scissors style game would create. Train your species and tech up for certain tasks/conditions and they will perform better.
 
Does combat include excessive dice rolling like in EU4? I really hope it does not.
"Hey look, just lost the whole war, because my general rolled 5 zeroes in a row!"
 
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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…

"'Ere we go, 'ere we go, 'ere we go,
'Ere we go, 'ere we go, throo the cosmos
'Ere we go, 'ere we go, 'ere we go,
'Ere we go, 'ere we go, throo infinity

'Ere we go, 'ere we go, 'ere we go,
'Ere we go, Don't know where 'til we get there"


(from Battlefleet Gothic rulebook)

Da Orkz don need sum stinkin humie "manuva"! We got da WAAAAGHHH!
 
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Are the "Formations" that are held by the combat computer proper formations? Can I build a Carrier with a lot of strike craft and few defensive measures thats gets blown up when alone, but is incredibly powerful when protected by a proper screen? Same may apply to Missile Cruisers e.g. A first, second, third row mechanic or something like that would be really nice and add a lot to fleet composition.
 
You mentioned civilian fleets. I though there was something saying there were no civilian ships. are these basically just colony ships or will there by trade ships and stuff too?
 
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