Yeah but i have no intention of playing in those versions of the game x)
Not only did it failed at stopping people from building monolithic fleets but it made it even worse imo...
Stellaris Dev Diary #79: Ship Component & Balance Changes
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Yeah but i have no intention of playing in those versions of the game x)
Not only did it failed at stopping people from building monolithic fleets but it made it even worse imo...
Just face it: it never happens! It takes a lot of resources and almost a year to recruit even ONE advance army, and plus, the number of armies you can own is limited by your population, so you'll never have enough to guard your planets and attack at the same time.
But armies aren't for guarding planets anyway.
Since you can assault with infinite armies and only defend with a set number, armies are useless for defending planets and you should only build the cheapest ones to suppress unrest with.
Since you can assault with infinite armies and only defend with a set number, armies are useless for defending planets and you should only build the cheapest ones to suppress unrest with.
They do and both have zero tracking, however torpedos are for smaller ships to engage bigger ships while XL-Weapons are for bigger ships to engage big ship.
the reason why ppl want a long range weapon for missles is because they feel they dont have a longrange-weapon to compete with the XL-Weapons of other types, wich in practise is true but not in theory because the usual L-Missles have the same range then the XL-Weapon of other weapontypes. however this advantage is completly negated by fighters or flak/PD and the slow travel time of the missles, meaning even without pds and fighters you would loose attackpower of your first volley simply through to exploding ships.
in my opinion it wouldve been best if the swarm-missles woudlve been an XL-Slot-Weapon with the same range then normal L-Missles. after the rebalance of course this might no longer nessesary but we will see.
That only works on water, once the seaborne vessels suffer from drag. But spaceborne vessels like for example, a stardestroyer would be faster than a frigate or than the Millenium Falcon.
Short answer: no
Longer answer: Your larger ship would have to deal with the Square Cube Law with regard to multiple systems, including the superstructure and the thruster exhaust. As the volume and expected mass of the ship increases by the cube of the multiplier, the surface area of the cross sections of the superstructure (if increased proportionally) only increases by the square. This means that a larger ship, assuming it has the same proportional superstructure, cannot handle as much acceleration without failing (either in the direction of main thrust or in turning) as a smaller ship. If the thrusters scale in the same way, they also do not provide as much proportional exhaust pressure as a smaller thruster. If the larger ship wants to commit a significantly larger percentage of its internal volume to superstructure, it can handle as large or larger compression and lateral stresses; it could then also apply a much larger percentage of its rearward-facing surface area to thruster exhaust in order to actually catch up to and pass a smaller ship.
Normally the only time the superstructure issues wouldn't apply is if the materials used are so strong as to take up such a negligible percentage of the ship's overall cross-section that massive increases in their absolute amount have virtually no impact on the usable volume. Unless you have reactionless drives, in which case neither would apply, but that's not how they're defined thus far within the game.
Unless of course someone wants to claim that since we have space dragons and psionics, we don't have to worry at all about anything approaching science, engineering, physics, math, logic, etc. Ever.
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battleships would be slower and tougher in space because of the square cube law, as above, you could protect more volume with the same amount of armour (less surface area to volume), but you could not have as many thrusters for the volume (again, less surface area to put thrusters on)
How much testing is done before you release a game mechanic? The past two games, HoI4 and Stellaris, have been plagued by poorly-thought-out mechanics that should never have made it past basic paper testing, much less into live release.
For example, Stellaris for the past year has used module upgrades with diminishing returns. Each module is less cost-effective than its predecessor. A starter small red laser costs 2.5 and deals 5 min damage. The 'best' small laser, small gamma laser, costs 12.5 and deals 11 min damage. The gamma laser costs 400% more, but does only 125% additional damage. The player pays 127% extra per unit of damage when using a small gamma laser over a small red laser. No sane player would ever want to use anything but the starter small red laser, unless she has no alternative means of increasing her fleet's damage output.
Diminishing returns to upgrades make sense under two conditions:
(1) There is a hard cap on number of units. If the number of units a player can field is capped, then the player cannot bring an unlimited number of units to battle and instead must ensure that each individual unit is as effective as possible. Otherwise the player's weaker units will be defeated in detail in a series of battles. Swamping in such a game becomes impossible. The cap can be either local or global. Examples of strategy games that use unit caps effectively include: Sword of the Stars, Europa Universalis 4, and Sins of a Solar Empire. In Sword of the Stars, the player can only field a small number of ships in each battle. In EU4, the player can only bring a limited number of divisions to bear per battle turn, number of divisions per province is limited by supply, and the total number of divisions has a soft cap whose penalties scale exponentially. In SoaSE, there is a hard cap on the number of ships a player can field.
In contrast, players can easily build well above their fleet cap, and the cap itself is so high as to be meaningless in typical circumstances. The only limit is the player's mineral stockpile. There is no limit on number of ships per battle, so the best strategy is to be as efficient as possible to make the best use of the player's mineral reserve.
Or, (2) Replacement is either difficult or impossible in the span of a typical conflict, so each loss cannot be made up easily. In Stellaris, units can be built quickly, and smaller units build faster than larger units. The only limit is the mineral stockpile.
Any competent designer would have recognized that diminishing returns on upgrades is incompatible with Stellaris's other mechanics. But it took almost a year for you to recognize that this design was flawed, and to try and patch it.
Other bad mechanics that should never have made it to release:
Early-game hulls that retain effectiveness into the late game. This encourages unit spam, diminishes the benefits of tech advantage, and makes combat losses meaningless from the mid-game onward. Currently, corvettes are as viable end-game as battleships. Arguably more-so because numerical superiority confers both resilience and flexibility. Ten corvettes can be sent to multiple systems, and the loss of one does not catastrophically diminish fleet effectiveness. Compare with one battleship that can only be in one place at a time and whose loss massively degrades fleet effectiveness. Hull balance should be changed so that each larger hull is superior to its predecessors, except for possibly some specialist forms like torpedo boats. Even then, torpedo boats should be at least destroyer-size. That will reduce unit spam and thereby increase performance. It will also make tech research more rewarding and, if paired with other changes will make ship losses actually matter.
Pops in planetary management. This mechanic was lifted almost wholesale from Ascendancy. It worked in Ascendancy for small empires, because Ascendancy involved a relatively small number of planets. A similar tile management minigame works well in the Civilization series, because Civ games feature a small number of cities, each city has a small number of mechanically-distinct tiles, and (at least in Civ4) the AI is good at managing tiles and can also be given orders as to what tiles to prioritize. In comparison, Stellaris involves dozens of planets, the planets have a lot of tiles which are 80% identical, and the AI is incompetent at managing them. The problem is made worse by habitats built in 'core' systems, which cannot be simply offloaded onto the AI and which the player must tediously micromanage for no good reason, and making exactly zero meaningful choices in the process. There is absolutely nothing redeeming about the pop system as implemented currently. It's like Farmville without Farmville's redeeming qualities.
Mechanically-indistinguishable planets. Once a planet is offloaded onto the sector AI, it becomes wholly indistinguishable from any other planet. Most planetary interaction, aside from events, involves building ships. Each planet builds ships at almost an identical rate. Any planetary spaceport can be upgraded into a major production center within a game year. Each planet is identical, and losing any single planet is largely irrelevant. Compare with (again) better games where planets, systems, and/or cities can be specialized in a meaningful way, specialization requires major investment, and losing a major production center is actually catastrophic, while losing a minor backwater is a mild inconvenience.
Non-interactive sectors. The only purpose of sectors seems to be as cover for the pop management minigame. They seem to serve no other purpose. In theory, a player can specialize sectors, but the variety of planetary resources and planets means sectors can be left as generalists and produce effectively identical benefits. In theory, a player can set special orders for sectors, but there is no reason to do so that I can think of, and I can't even recall what those special orders are called after over two hundred hours of gameplay. There was literally no reason to ever change them. For that matter, internal management in general might well not exist.
Doom stacks. If there is no downside to cramming as many ships as possible into a battle, then players will cram as many ships as possible into a battle. We've known this for a very long time. EVE Online has been dealing with the n+1 problem for over a decade, and it's hardly the first game to face it. I have no idea why any competent game designer would release a strategy game in 2017 without at least considering whether the n+1 problem is something they need to deal with.
Real-time combat. Space combat in Stellaris has all the meaningful decisions of combat in CK2 or EU4 - none whatsoever. Two fleets always ram into each other based on whatever pre-set AI settings you game them, and fight to the death or until someone hits the 'retreat' button. Combat might well have been resolved via dice rolls. This would probably have been a better choice, because it's easier to tweak a statistical system than a system that also features fancy graphics and such.
For example, Stellaris for the past year has used module upgrades with diminishing returns. Each module is less cost-effective than its predecessor. A starter small red laser costs 2.5 and deals 5 min damage. The 'best' small laser, small gamma laser, costs 12.5 and deals 11 min damage. The gamma laser costs 400% more, but does only 125% additional damage. The player pays 127% extra per unit of damage when using a small gamma laser over a small red laser. No sane player would ever want to use anything but the starter small red laser, unless she has no alternative means of increasing her fleet's damage output.
Diminishing returns to upgrades make sense under two conditions:
(1) There is a hard cap on number of units. If the number of units a player can field is capped, then the player cannot bring an unlimited number of units to battle and instead must ensure that each individual unit is as effective as possible. Otherwise the player's weaker units will be defeated in detail in a series of battles. Swamping in such a game becomes impossible. The cap can be either local or global. Examples of strategy games that use unit caps effectively include: Sword of the Stars, Europa Universalis 4, and Sins of a Solar Empire. In Sword of the Stars, the player can only field a small number of ships in each battle. In EU4, the player can only bring a limited number of divisions to bear per battle turn, number of divisions per province is limited by supply, and the total number of divisions has a soft cap whose penalties scale exponentially. In SoaSE, there is a hard cap on the number of ships a player can field.
In contrast, players can easily build well above their fleet cap, and the cap itself is so high as to be meaningless in typical circumstances. The only limit is the player's mineral stockpile. There is no limit on number of ships per battle, so the best strategy is to be as efficient as possible to make the best use of the player's mineral reserve.
Or, (2) Replacement is either difficult or impossible in the span of a typical conflict, so each loss cannot be made up easily. In Stellaris, units can be built quickly, and smaller units build faster than larger units. The only limit is the mineral stockpile.
Any competent designer would have recognized that diminishing returns on upgrades is incompatible with Stellaris's other mechanics. But it took almost a year for you to recognize that this design was flawed, and to try and patch it.
Other bad mechanics that should never have made it to release:
Early-game hulls that retain effectiveness into the late game. This encourages unit spam, diminishes the benefits of tech advantage, and makes combat losses meaningless from the mid-game onward. Currently, corvettes are as viable end-game as battleships. Arguably more-so because numerical superiority confers both resilience and flexibility. Ten corvettes can be sent to multiple systems, and the loss of one does not catastrophically diminish fleet effectiveness. Compare with one battleship that can only be in one place at a time and whose loss massively degrades fleet effectiveness. Hull balance should be changed so that each larger hull is superior to its predecessors, except for possibly some specialist forms like torpedo boats. Even then, torpedo boats should be at least destroyer-size. That will reduce unit spam and thereby increase performance. It will also make tech research more rewarding and, if paired with other changes will make ship losses actually matter.
Pops in planetary management. This mechanic was lifted almost wholesale from Ascendancy. It worked in Ascendancy for small empires, because Ascendancy involved a relatively small number of planets. A similar tile management minigame works well in the Civilization series, because Civ games feature a small number of cities, each city has a small number of mechanically-distinct tiles, and (at least in Civ4) the AI is good at managing tiles and can also be given orders as to what tiles to prioritize. In comparison, Stellaris involves dozens of planets, the planets have a lot of tiles which are 80% identical, and the AI is incompetent at managing them. The problem is made worse by habitats built in 'core' systems, which cannot be simply offloaded onto the AI and which the player must tediously micromanage for no good reason, and making exactly zero meaningful choices in the process. There is absolutely nothing redeeming about the pop system as implemented currently. It's like Farmville without Farmville's redeeming qualities.
Mechanically-indistinguishable planets. Once a planet is offloaded onto the sector AI, it becomes wholly indistinguishable from any other planet. Most planetary interaction, aside from events, involves building ships. Each planet builds ships at almost an identical rate. Any planetary spaceport can be upgraded into a major production center within a game year. Each planet is identical, and losing any single planet is largely irrelevant. Compare with (again) better games where planets, systems, and/or cities can be specialized in a meaningful way, specialization requires major investment, and losing a major production center is actually catastrophic, while losing a minor backwater is a mild inconvenience.
Non-interactive sectors. The only purpose of sectors seems to be as cover for the pop management minigame. They seem to serve no other purpose. In theory, a player can specialize sectors, but the variety of planetary resources and planets means sectors can be left as generalists and produce effectively identical benefits. In theory, a player can set special orders for sectors, but there is no reason to do so that I can think of, and I can't even recall what those special orders are called after over two hundred hours of gameplay. There was literally no reason to ever change them. For that matter, internal management in general might well not exist.
Doom stacks. If there is no downside to cramming as many ships as possible into a battle, then players will cram as many ships as possible into a battle. We've known this for a very long time. EVE Online has been dealing with the n+1 problem for over a decade, and it's hardly the first game to face it. I have no idea why any competent game designer would release a strategy game in 2017 without at least considering whether the n+1 problem is something they need to deal with.
Real-time combat. Space combat in Stellaris has all the meaningful decisions of combat in CK2 or EU4 - none whatsoever. Two fleets always ram into each other based on whatever pre-set AI settings you game them, and fight to the death or until someone hits the 'retreat' button. Combat might well have been resolved via dice rolls. This would probably have been a better choice, because it's easier to tweak a statistical system than a system that also features fancy graphics and such.
Man, that's a great post and all, but every single one of your points has been discussed to death. Most of them in this thread.
The only one that I think is at all contentious right now is saying that early game hull sizes should become obsolete. I disagree and I think many others will too. You want each hull type to have its own place in the late game so that you're not forced to demolish half your fleet once it becomes time to upgrade. On top of that, straight upgrade from corvette through to battleship means a very linear and boring progression, with the added problem that as soon as someone researches destroyers they are ready and set to conquer everyone around them. It'd make Stellaris into just another Civ game where tech is king and you just want to rush for the next largest ship as soon as your current fleet becomes par for the course.
The only one that I think is at all contentious right now is saying that early game hull sizes should become obsolete. I disagree and I think many others will too. You want each hull type to have its own place in the late game so that you're not forced to demolish half your fleet once it becomes time to upgrade. On top of that, straight upgrade from corvette through to battleship means a very linear and boring progression, with the added problem that as soon as someone researches destroyers they are ready and set to conquer everyone around them. It'd make Stellaris into just another Civ game where tech is king and you just want to rush for the next largest ship as soon as your current fleet becomes par for the course.
You might be able to have a way to build the same size ship using newer modules that allow for (slightly) more hull damage, speed, or evasion, but not allow for upgrades (or really expensive/lengthy) from earlier/lesser modules. If you don't allow upgrading, you would want to allow for salvaging mineral value. You could probably allow for the earlier/simpler frames to be built cheaper than before, as you've more perfected the previous construction techniques, but you would have to balance the discount for building old in favor of the gains for actually building new.
Good ideas don't self-propagate; they must be repeated in order to take hold.
Regarding your post, the reality is that under the current system, the hulls exist for the sake of having hulls. This is true of most of Stellaris' game mechanics near as I can tell -- someone went down a check list and added stuff they thought a space strategy game should have. None of the hulls have a unique place as things stand, and there will always be a strictly-superior hull choice. W
Regarding the current ship hull system, it has three problems as implemented:
(1) It encourages unit spam. Unit spam both severely degrades late-game performance and makes ship losses meaningless.
(2) It offers no meaningful choices. Hulls are HP pools for mounting weapons. There will always be some optimum hull which is most cost-effective for mounting weapons. Right now, corvettes are ideal because the cost of upgraded hulls doesn't justify the additional cost, missiles can't effectively After the next patch, I suspect we'll see a battleship meta or something similar.
(3) Unlocking new hulls feels pointless. When you unlock a new unit or hull in EU4, or Sword of the Stars, or other well-designed games, it feels like an actual upgrade. In Stellaris, it feels like one more pointless variable in a game filled with pointless variables. Tech research in a game should never feel pointless, like it's being done for the sake of itself. This doesn't mean newly-researched hulls should be overpowered, but there should be some benefit to being ahead in tech beyond merely the fact of being ahead in tech.
None of these issues are likely to be fixed any time soon. Paradox is already trying for over a year to balance six different types of weapons (missiles, fighters, lasers, railguns, artillery, disruptors) and three different types of defenses (shields, armor, evasion), without much apparent success. They're not going to balance five hull sizes on top of everything else.
My proposal is as follows:
1. Each larger hull is strictly superior to its smaller predecessor when in a 'generic' configuration.
2. Each hull, aside from corvettes, has a unique configuration that lets it do something special. Torpedoes for destroyers, XL weapons for cruisers, and other such.
This system will probably offer players more meaningful choices, because it will allow Paradox to balance around weapon systems and defenses, without also having to factor in hull sizes, and because hulls will, by the end game offer players clearly-defined choices rather than the current mess of assorted hulls that don't seem to have any clear role at all.
As far as hull upgrade cost, most strategy games don't have trouble requiring players to either pay for upgrading to new hulls (EU4, Civ), or requiring the player to demolish the old hulls and buy new ones (old EU4, Civ). The advantage of such a system is that it allows players who have fallen behind in fleet size to catch up, and reduces snowballing. Worst case, provide the player with a 'reprocess' button that returns 50% of the credits consumed. Admittedly, we currently must click through three screens to build ships, but this is shoddy UI design that should be solved by better UI.
The armour and evasion formulas are so damn lazy it makes the whole combat system unbalanceable. But apparently we need to know exactly who domestic slaves are servicing at all times. There are only 3 weapon mechanics that differ by more than numerics and that is already apparently too hard for PDX. I would suggest that we need some energy storage and ship abilities to actually make it interesting but I don't think PDX would be able to balance that in time for the game to start in 2200. Despite having a system that tracks the location of every ship and every non-instant projectile as well as fighters, the actual complexity of the combat is below most freemium web games. It achieves a complete tedium and lack of interest in every aspect of naval warfare from technology to ship design to fleet building to logistics to fleet composition to battle deployment to battle control. On top of this sterile system is a toothless AI that spends all game sniffing glue so that RPers can jizz themselves about their great empire and buy more DLC.
Yes the hulls should have T shaped competencies. All should be able to be fitted acceptably for general combat but do one or two things better than other hulls can.
I'm still for the concept of making high level game shields and armor immune or nearly immune to early game weapons. FE/AE fleets and Leviathans should not take a single point of damage from tier one weapons and insane should be insane not just delay the point when you outsnowball the AI a bit. And no I don't care about multiplyayer balance. 
Not much point speculating about how drives in Stellaris universe work when they allow actual FTL inside stellar systems (just start as UN and look at travel times of any ship, then compare to actual system radius).
Saaaaame... apparently it's 20 minutes until the livestream starts and then the DD gets released either when it starts, when it ends, or shortly afterwards
From Wiz twitter:
"Big day today! Dev diary will be a bit later than usual, will hit around the time the stream starts."
So hold your breath, should be soon.
You should start with all hulls unlocked, each hull plays a tactical role in a combined arms context. Tech upgrades should all be things that help either improve carrying out these roles or provide flexibility to the role of the hull, e.g. cruisers acting as screens against destroyers, cruisers acting as screens against strike craft/missiles, or directly countering other cruisers. Its not the hull size that makes your tech breakthrough feel worthwhile, its the weapons and systems you put on the hull that provide this feedback.
I respectfully disagree. The vast majority of modules affect nothing but a bunch of calculations somewhere in the background. Tier advancement is literally the Stellaris equivalent of D&D's bland "+1" weapons. It's the hull sections that allow for exciting combinations and, via their hardcoded tactical behavior, reforms in naval strategy.
True, all of that is ultimately just a bunch of numbers, too. But at least it does not feel that way since it has a much more pronounced impact on the interface and the appearance of your fleet, or how you see it fight its battles.
And just like dreadnoughts and aircraft carriers, and the effect they had on naval warfare, weren't available from day 1 in real life, I'd consider it a huge loss of immersive realism and storytelling potential if an empire that has barely discovered FTL and is about to launch its first colony ship somehow is capable of launching a thoroughly organized combined arms space navy, rather than going through progressive advancements in technology and operational application.
Personally, I at least always consider it a joyful occasion when I have unlocked a new class of ship, or even just a new type of hull section. (and, on a sidenote, I'd like to see more of the latter for increased variety and to fill up the tech tree)