Stellaris Dev Diary #96: Doomstacks and Ship Design

[BlackUmbrellas]

Love all the changes!

But there's one thing in this Dev Diary that puzzles me. I totally understand why you want to deal with Doom Stacks, but I just can't see the difference between bringning my full fleet cap into the system using one fleet (currently) or ten fleets (Cherryh). I mean, that would still be 100% of my overall fleet cap moving together.

I do like the new "Force Disparity Combat Bonus", I just don't see how forced fleet splitting helps with the doom stack problem if I'd still be able to move my whole fleet around the galaxy basically the same way I'm doing it now.

As has been explained by Wiz, the goal isn't to stop you from ever forming a doomstack- it's to make that not the only reliable option.

If you bring your full forces to bear on one spot while the enemy uses multiple fleets to successfully perform feints, delaying actions, and opportunistic raids...

 

[MKS]

Yet, I think I'd rather have a fleet capable of doing some damage to an enemy fleet rather than pinning down the fleet. Damaging the enemy fleet to where they can't continue the fight or can't break through a starbase is more important than a delaying action. But I concede that's personal preference perhaps.

I'd point out that Napoleon probably lost at Waterloo simply because he was unable to keep the two enemy forces from linking up to hit him at the same time. If the British and the Prussians had been fought separately, he might have won the separate engagements where he couldn't beat them together.

In this sense, the small fleet prevents the link up by pinning and tanking a second fleet long enough for your main fleet to engage and destroy one of the component fleets.

In the scenario with more damage, but less delay, you might even take out some of the fleet that is trying to link up, but it is probably unreasonable to expect you'll take out half of a larger force with a smaller one. So they will link up and still have most of their firepower available to overwhelm your main fleet.

But if you pin one of the two forces away from the main confrontation long enough, then you have removed half of the ships from the main battle without having to destroy a single enemy ship, and you can achieve temporary superiority with your main fleet, which means that you could defeat a much larger enemy force in detail as long as you can keep them apart so they can't support each other.

How this plays out in Stellaris I can't be sure. But that is one way that you decisively beat opposing armies/fleets who have superior numbers in real life. Suppression, area denial and control are more important than raw firepower because they allow you to control the flow of battle and thus reduce brute force advantages.

This is also why you have tank and crowd control in MMO raids. You are given a task against odds that will flatten you unless you control the battle in a structured way.

 

[Hawklaser]

In new patch damaged ships will be less effective. This may force stronger enemy (usually attacker) to retreat after "won" battle in purpose of repairing his fleets before going further inside your territory. Even if not - it still favours weaker side (defender). Because of new starport mechanics defender will have more time to repair his fleets and strike again. Also I think proper doctrine will play huge role in this strategy. "Hit and run" may drastically increase chance of ship withdrawing and also mitigate negative consequences of emergency FTL. It will be still hard to win if you're outnumbered, but it will be possible now to actively try doing something to slow enemy's advance. 2.0 Stellaris will definitely see more Fabiuses Cunctators

See, from my point of view, if the defender is able to inflict the kind of damage that would warrent the attacker to stop and repair after a single battle, the attacker screwed up and didn't attack with a sufficient force. If its after several, its a different story. The changes would have to allow the defender to be able to inflict damage fast enough that their repairs+reinforcements are outpacing the attackers rate of reinforcements. And I don't see that reliably happening outside of already close battles, especially with the withdrawal mechanic.

 

[King Ari]

One thing I'm not seeing addressed is the arbitrary 'fleet power' calculation. For example, in the early game I have a fleet of 30 corvettes, upgraded with basic shields, t2 weapons, armor, etc. (Lets say my fleet power is 3k) And I go to war with an enemy that is also 3k fleet power. BUT I lose almost every ship before being able to retreat because their fleet is 50 basic starting tech corvettes. Does this fire power bonus take this into account? Is it based on number of ships or this nonsense 'fleet power'?

 

[Borgratz]

I think I lost any feeling for how the final version will play.
Im somewhat worried you played the game so much, that it will make it hard for you to notice wether or not that smaller fleet buff will make wars feel super unintuitive. And this has the potential to create some gamey new strategies. But I guess I just have to trust you/ wait till its out
Everything else just sounds plain awesome.

 

[Ur-Quan Lord 13]

See, from my point of view, if the defender is able to inflict the kind of damage that would warrent the attacker to stop and repair after a single battle, the attacker screwed up and didn't attack with a sufficient force. If its after several, its a different story. The changes would have to allow the defender to be able to inflict damage fast enough that their repairs+reinforcements are outpacing the attackers rate of reinforcements. And I don't see that reliably happening outside of already close battles, especially with the withdrawal mechanic.

Right. Except even bringing "sufficient force" you will now suffer at least some damage. I'd assume (neither of us have a clue) that at least at 50% fleet size, you will be able to do relevant amounts of damage. And, hopefully repair and reinforcements will be difficult enough in enemy territory that a weaker defender will actually be able to grind you to a halt if they play well. But, even if not, with the new war exhaustion system, even if they lose every battle they can still force you to end the war quicker before taking everything you wanted, and actually cost you some minerals to rebuild things. It's no longer just an inevitable mindless slog to 100% war score after the first battle decides the outcome. It's a test to see how much you can take before they force you to end it.

 

[DiscoRay]

What space battles really need for me is to have the option for them take place in a "tactical" game mode, outside of everything else. It's a little absurd that ships within close proximity of one another trade fire for weeks and months of game time on end without quick resolution. In large battles I constantly have to pause as more time transpires to manage the rest of my empire. Having a tactical game mode to isolate the battle would remove that headache, and let the player focus on not just the fight, but actually fighting it with some strategy.

 

[King Ari]

I will admit i've only read up to page 6, but most recurring complaint was about fleet disparity bonus, primarly said bonus being arbitrary and 'game-y'. I can't help but agree with it, somewhat - having more space to manouver should have no effect on your fire rate. But what it SHOULD have effect on, is your evasiveness!

....

Thoughts?

The reason its fire rate is a game-y reason. They most likely considered the other options already. But within the rules of the game as it stands now... Evasion or tracking or whatever else other than fire rate affects different ship hulls and weapon types differently. Missiles would still ignore evasion bonuses, If it was tracking bonuses, suddenly medium weapons get way better than smalls against corvettes because they can hit easier. These examples are just the surface of the pain in the ass to balance.

So from a purely game mechanics environment it works, and if it actually solves the issue then thats fine. I guess we have to wait and see for ourselves

 

[Drowe]

Problem 1: Disproportionate Casualties
Disproportionate Casualties is the problem we talked about above: Engaging a larger force with a smaller one is virtually always a losing proposition because of the disproportionally greater casualties taken by the smaller force. Naturally, a larger force should more powerful, but the fact that a force twice the size will annihilate the enemy while barely suffering any losses makes combat and warfare far too pain-free when you have the advantage in numbers. For this reason we have decided to introduce something called the Force Disparity Combat Bonus. The Force Disparity Combat Bonus is applied when a smaller force is engaged with a larger one in battle ('force' being every ship engaged on one side of a battle, regardless of how many fleets and empires are involved on each side), and gives a bonus to the firing speed of all ships belonging to the smaller force. As an example (example numbers only, likely not final numbers) a force that is half the size of the enemy might gain a 50% bonus to its firing speed, representing the fact that the smaller force has an easier time manuevering and targeting the larger enemy force. The larger force is still more powerful and will likely win the battle (unless the smaller force has a significant technological advantage), but will almost certainly suffer losses in the process, making it possible to force an enemy to bear a cost for their victories even when they have overwhelming numbers.

Wouldn't a mechanic like that increase micromanagement? It seems to me like it would create situations where you deliberately split off ships from a fleet to reduce the losses you take. I'm familiar with Lanchester's Laws, so I understand how this is meant to work, but removing a ship from your fleet should never increase fleet performance, and this mechanic has the potential to do just that.

Problem 3: Lack of need for Admirals
Though not directly related to Doomstacks, one of the issues we identified and wanted to address was the fact that empires generally only need a single Admiral, regardless of whether it is a small empire with a handful of corvettes or a sprawling empire with hundreds of ships. To solve this problem, we have introduced the concept of Command Limit. Command Limit is a limit on how large any one individual fleet in your empire can be (right now it's a hard-cap, though we might change it into a soft-cap), and thus how many ships an admiral can give their combat bonuses to. Command Limit is primarily given from Technology and Traditions, Admiral Skill does not impact it. The reason for this is that we do not want a fleet's command limit to suddenly drop due to the death of an Admiral or other temporary factors that would force frequent and annoying reorganizations of your fleets. Note that Command Limit is not meant to solve the problem of Doomstacks itself, but combined with the other changes (and the FTL changes that makes it so it's harder to cover your entire empire with a single fleet) it should naturally encourage keeping several fleets, as it is now possible to skirmish and fight delaying actions without risking the entire war in a single battle. As a part of this (and the FTL changes) we have also made it so that fleets that are following other fleets will now jump into FTL together, making it possible to have fleets following each other without becoming 'decoupled' as they travel across multiple systems.

Is this really necessary? The other changes will make multiple fleets more likely in any case, which makes more admirals attractive anyway. From my point of view, an arbitrary cap is not very helpful there. Why not make it a requirement to have an admiral assigned to a fleet with more than one ship (or some other small number) and give fleets without an admiral a combat penalty based on its size? In addition to that switching an admiral from one fleet to another should take some time.

The rest of the changes seem excellent, keep up the good work

 

[CocoCincinnati]

I'd like to see how these idea work in practice. Sounds good on paper but I'm worried that the end result will be the same. Making all your fleets follow the one you are controlling and then sending them all to attack the enemy will still result in the bigger force winning. True that the bigger force will suffer some damage and the loser will have some ships survive, but they will still end the battle with more of an advantage than before the battle started. Then once they go get repaired and the enemy goes and gets repaired and they meet a second time, the disparity in power of fleets is larger than it was in the first battle. Don't get me wrong, it's definitely an improvement, because the end result is spread out over several battles instead of just one so I approve, but at the end of the day, you're still going to want to maximize your forces and concentrate on a specific point.

I wonder if making disengagement chance be effected by total fleet size could be an idea, it's harder to retreat when you can't maneuver, so that would be another way to hurt the doomstack side. Another Idea is to make admiral skills and traits have a bigger impact so that occasionally, a smaller force with a level 5 admiral might even win (or draw) against a bigger force with a level 1 admiral.

This might already be answered in the 28 pages of this discussion but is command limit number of ships or hull size. It seems too small if it's hull size, but it might encourage all battleship fleets if it's number of ships. Maybe make the command limit two tiered, one limit for screens and one for capital ships for each fleet, it could be represented as 30/10 or something like that. Also related to command limit, hopefully the number of leaders you can have will be increased, I hate having fleets without admirals.

I like the changes for power and armor, seems like an improvement but balance will be key. Hopefully I don't have to put level 4 weapons on a ship even after I've got level 5 reactors. I've always been one to mix and match my fleet, a little bit of everything. Hopefully that will still work with this new system (maybe even work well). We'll have to wait and see I guess.

I also like the war doctrines, it's nice to see it will be effected by ethos as it should be......but hopefully there is a little more depth added to it, perhaps even different technologies/edicts becoming available depending on your war doctrine.

 

[ElectricEel]

Lancaster's Square Law is a big issue in doomstacking, but it isn't the only issue. The other big problem is that there's no reason to attack anything but the other team's fleet. The only strategic target relevant to winning the war is the enemy fleet, and the only strategic asset is your fleet; nothing else matters to the outcome of the war, so you put everything you've got into protecting your asset and taking theirs out. Hence, doomstacks.

Maybe I'm missing it, and others please do correct me if so, but I don't see how that will change here. I still want to blow up all your ships, just now I have to throw three fleets at a system instead of just one. And now I have to chase your fleet once it's disengaged. I'm still going to point all my guns in one direction though, because that's still the most efficient way to protect my ships while blowing up yours, and doing that is still the only real way to win the war. Or am I missing something?

These fixes do seem to make doomstacks less absolute in any given engagement, but I'm not seeing anything here that will make them less valuable. The game needs alternative strategic considerations. It needs a way for your one big fleet to keep winning battle after battle, while I still win the war.

Personally, I would do this with a supply base mechanic and more differentiation among systems. There should be reasons why:

- My victory in System A makes it harder for you to keep fighting, even if you had no ships there, and

- My victory in System B deprives you of some unique asset you can't afford to lose (economically, industrially, tactically, socially, politically, etc.)

Together these would give me a reason why I'd split my fleet to go after strategically relevant and asymmetric assets, and why I'd worry about keeping those same safe. As-is, I don't see a difference between this and the current state of play. Ships are the only strategic asset on the board, because they're the only ones relevant to winning the war. So I protect mine and destroy yours, and even with these tweaks the best way to do that will still be force concentration.

I think that in combination with the new combat mechanics, the upcoming starbase and FTL changes will definitely introduce points of strategic interest worth contesting. I will refer to @EntropyAvatar's post below:

It seems like the starbases will tend to concentrate various aspects of an empire's war-making capacity in a few systems. You might have a star base that represents 30-40% of your shipbuilding capacity, or 30-40% of your command limit. Note that for a given development level, a starbase's defensive capacity trades off against it's construction, supply and economic capacity, so the best-defended star bases aren't necessarily the most important.

So I think if you can capture one of the aforementioned "keystone" starbases from an empire, that will be worth losing a battle against your opponent's doomstack, especially if the lost battle does not represent a complete wipe, and you inflicted loses on your opponent as well.

So to sum up, starbases will be much, much more important to war fighting capacity than individual spaceports are now, so that provides something that is important to protect or capture. At the same time, the less decisive battles and the reduction of the outnumbering effect mean that you aren't paying as high a price for not keeping all of your fleet in one place.

In addition, since fleet battles aren't one-sided stackwipes anymore, lines of reinforcement will matter a lot more - after a clash of two fleets of similar strength, regardless of which side won, both will have to send damaged ships to a starbase for repairs and if one side's starbases are much closer than the other's, they may be able to come back with repaired and freshly constructed ships before the enemy can and gain a local strength advantage that way. The Gateways described in the FTL dev diary should also be important bones of contention as control over them can have drastic effects on lines of reinforcement (depending on the geography, right down to cutting the enemy empire into two isolated pieces).

Since combat-focused starbases are supposed to be able put up a fight even against major fleets, they should be able to shelter docked fleets, preventing them from being wiped out unless there's a very large disparity in fleet strength or the enemy is willing to expose themselves to a major risk. This could potentially allow fleets to function as a fleet-in-being, operating from a safe harbor and contesting enemy control of nearby systems even if they're not strong enough to take on the enemy main fleet in direct combat, forcing the enemy to choose between a costly direct assault or committing a portion of their fleet strength to containing those forces if they want to hold that territory. This would be one circumstance under which splitting up fleets seems sensible. On the other hand, since a captured starbase's defensive weapons can be turned on its original owner, having a heavily fortified starbase in your territory captured is a liability and successfully capturing one could be a major coup.

 

[Hawklaser]

Right. Except even bringing "sufficient force" you will now suffer at least some damage. I'd assume (neither of us have a clue) that at least at 50% fleet size, you will be able to do relevant amounts of damage. And, hopefully repair and reinforcements will be difficult enough in enemy territory that a weaker defender will actually be able to grind you to a halt if they play well. But, even if not, with the new war exhaustion system, even if they lose every battle they can still force you to end the war quicker before taking everything you wanted, and actually cost you some minerals to rebuild things. It's no longer just an inevitable mindless slog to 100% war score after the first battle decides the outcome. It's a test to see how much you can take before they force you to end it.

That's just it, a sufficient force isn't going to be a 2:1 fleet ratio. It is more likely going to be a 3:1 or 4:1 thanks to the new starforts. As have to have enough force to deal with defenders fleet + fort. So as a defender, are you ever going to risk your fleets when outnumbered at those odds anywhere but your forts? Keep in mind, that unless some amazing other points of interest are added, the developed forts or built up planets are the most likely goals for an attacker.

 

[Adventurer32]

I just hope that this is part of the base free patch and doesn't require another 20$ DLC. We already have some of these changes in mods, and as much as I feel like they should be implemented into the base game, I would hope we won't run into the situation with EU4 where there are "neccessary DLCs" to play. I just hope this doesn't turn into one of those.

 

[kpipersburg]

Respectfully, I'm not sure I understand how any of this would work.

If the defensive position really is that strong, doesn't that mean I need to attack with more forces, not less? If your starbase is 40% of my fleet strength alone, I need to throw everything I've got at it just in case you reinforce it with some ships. If I split my fleet, then all I'm doing is inviting you to send those reinforcements so you can trash that smaller fleet. Whoever sends in the most ships will win the battle. Realistically, all we've done is confirm that I can't attack at all unless my fleet is 40% bigger than yours, because otherwise you can doomstack and guarantee a win.

So, I have to doomstack. Now, you decide whether to split your fleet.

But why would you do that? If you doomstack in return, you get to fight my 25k with your 35k in system and beat my entire fleet. Let's say under the new system I do some damage and you don't delete my fleet. I limp away at 20% power and you're reduced to 80% strength. Why wouldn't you want that?

The only reason would be if an alternative target would weaken me to an equivalent or greater degree. What would that be? What do I have that would be worse than losing a major battle with all my ships involved? (Or I could commit less than all my ships, but again, that would invite almost certain defeat.)

And even if we ignore that, what's your advantage to splitting the fleet? Nothing about the new mechanics suggest that you can "pin down" my fleet more easily than you can right now, nor that Fort C will be particularly worth taking or losing. Fleets will have some differences in how they're built, but not how they're deployed. You order them to go and fight, not "come in at an angle and [pound the] back line."

Everything you describe feels like it could happen just the same right now, but players don't do that because taking Forts C or D doesn't matter. I want to destroy your fleet, after which I can take your forts at ease. Yes, instead of destroying your fleet I'll now cripple it, but isn't that six of one/half dozen of the other?

My point is that tossing equal fleets at each other and hoping for the win is no longer viable. One of the big problems right now is that forts are absolutely useless. The scenario I described CANT happen right now. You'd run over the defenses and we'd HAVE to have an all out fleet battle. To the victor goes the spoils.

Now I have the choice to split my fleet as the defender to respond to a stacked fleet. As the aggressor, you can easily move a fleet into position to attack a fort or move it around unprotected systems harassing mining stations or blockading worlds. The defender could shrug but she'd have to keep a fleet present to watch over your threatening fleet. Because if she doesn't, you can plop down on a fort and take it away. If she stacks all the way down at F to defend a threatening fleet in the area (keep in mind that larger fleets take longer to warp), the aggressor can now have the fleet at A move onto fort D and take it while the stacked defense fleet is led on a merry chase possibly back into the aggressor fort at C. If the defender splits fleets, we now have to consider scanning range. The aggressor can poke his head into the defenders vision with a fleet near D and F. Fleet at D disappears. It could be moving in fog down to F to group up and attack F while the defender struggles to decide whether to abandon D in case the group and smash is happening or move closer to the aggressors territory to get a better view. (This scenario is even better if Wiz and Co add a jamming building to the forts or planets in the same vein he hinted at inhibitor fields on planets.)

Regardless, let's say that the defender decides to keep the fleet at D and the aggressor had snuck the fleet down to F. Combined fleets and with first strike, the aggressor has the advantage. Assuming the defender attempts to flank, the aggressor can keep a portion of the fleet back to cover. Eventually, with the smaller fleet and emphasis fleets put on destroying other ships over fortifications, the enemy fleet will be forced to withdraw leaving the fort to be taken. Meanwhile, the defenders other fleet could be attacking fort A, but doing so causes little problem for the aggressor since he already has taken fort F.

To answer your questions. 1) pinning your fleet in my first scenario is no different than it is now really. Once a fleet is in combat, it's there for a month at least. If I can force you to emergency ftl, you have a bit of downtime before your entire fleet comes back. But having achieved that now in 2.0 is going to really hurt you because of longer travel time and the reprieve in which a defender can repair and reinforce. 2) I think you should try this in a current match. Send a main fleet with a decent amount of tanky cruisers at an enemy fleet. As the enemy engages, it locks in and can no longer position on the map. While those fleets are preparing to clash, move a smaller fleet (I like to use a lot of torpedo corvettes since they're fast in one fleet followed by another fleet of dps cruisers and a few high dps battleships and destroyers that have to hang way back at first due to range) outside of the gun range of your enemy. This is why you hug the end of the system. Now you yell Tora Tora Tora and send the smaller fleet in behind their battleships either at an angle or from directly behind once your tanking fleet has engaged. This is easier in 1.8 to pull off simply by drawing the enemy fleet to you deep inside a system with a worthless fortress or some bait wiggling since this is only really necessary vs fleets that are bigger than yours, or you want to wipe out the battleships before they have time to run and cripple their fleet against an evenly powered fleet. So yeah... Flanking is possible... 3) taking forts is potentially important now since you limit the enemies production, you get a hold of a place to repair in their turf, you can build its defenses to drain more of their resources, and Wiz did imply that you can siphon resources from controlled systems. Any way you look at it, all of the forts are important and fighting a risky fleet to the death battle is foolhardy.

When 2.0 comes out, you can try to continue mindless fleet charging with doomstacks, or being lame and waiting til you have a fleet twice the size of your neighbors before you will do anything, but me, I'm gonna explore what tactics I can to get a quick edge in a war and end it by swiftly raising war exhaustion and peacing out.

 

[kpipersburg]

Believe Wiz has stated that stations can more than equal a fleet in terms of power now if built right. Looking forward to that change.

Based on the communications/sensors/galactic terrain diaries you might very well be able to.(ambushes that is)

I remember he mentioned something like planetary inhibitors. Hopefully he also includes planetary/fort sensor jammers. It would be cool to have a jammer that denies vision for a lane or two out. And I kinda dislike the sentry arrays ability to give an opponent clear vision of my entire territory.

 

[methegrate]

I also like the war doctrines, it's nice to see it will be effected by ethos as it should be......but hopefully there is a little more depth added to it, perhaps even different technologies/edicts becoming available depending on your war doctrine.

This is the part I love about this DD. War doctrines is just a great idea, and I agree with you. Hopefully we'll see this taken in some really interesting and creative directions. Four options, with many of those forestalled by your ethics and empire choices... it looks like most players will really only two choices in practice. But it's just a terrific start. I'm hoping we see future development where technologies and edicts add to your war doctrine choices.

 

[anamiac]

I don't think that we've even defined the problem correctly. Wiz defined 3 problems, doomstacks supposedly gives us, but I have one I want to add.

1. Doomstacks, due to Lanchester's Laws (math), cause the superior force to take disproportionate casualties? The solution given is 'screw math, we're gonna make the superior force take more proportionate casualties.' The justification given is paper thin, as expected when you're coming up with a solution to a problem that defies mathematics.
2. Decisive battles mean that the smaller fleet looses every ship in one or a couple engagements. The solution of ship Disengagement is certainly historically accurate. However, I just don't know if it'll give the smaller fleet an advantage to have half of their ships leaving the battle early (leaving the rest to go it alone!). If the larger fleet simply follows them to the home port, then there will be a second battle, where the odds are stacked even higher for the larger fleet. Similarly, damaged ships having their combat ability reduced seems to penalize the smaller fleet more, at least in the initial battle. If the smaller fleet can repair before the larger fleet arrives for round 2, then these changes might work, but in current Stellaris, they generally don't have enough time for that.
3. Players aren't recruiting as many Admirals as the devs would like them to. This seems like a problem with the devs, not the players. Forcing us to have our fleets separate-but-together is stupid. Has little or no effect on doomstacks, and really shouldn't be lumped into the same category.
4. There's nothing in your space that, undefended, will loose you the war quickly. This is, imo, actually the number one reason why we have doomstacks - we can. We can afford to leave vast swathes of our space undefended. Historically the reason to disperse forces is because having the enemy rampaging through your country side is VERY BAD. They'll burn your crops, rape your women, murder your citizens, plunder your art, demoralize your nation, and these are what cause a nation to surrender. Even if you win, it will take you years to rebuild. But in Stellaris, a planet retaken is almost indistinguishable from a planet never lost in the first place. If I'm Space Germany in a two front war, I'll gladly doomstack to take out Space Russia's fleet and then send my doomstack over to take out Space France's. Who cares if Space France caps 3 of my outer colonies while I'm off fighting Russia? I'll just take mine back on my way to capping 20 in France... or maybe I'll just cap 23 French planets if it's faster. I don't loose the planets simply because they landed troops on them, I rarely loose population and the production I loose out on is small, short-lived, and not enough to force me to disband my ships. I am of course out the spaceports, but my outer colonies do not have expensive spaceports. Wiz hinted that travel times are going to be increased, but if there's no permanent or large penalty to letting an enemy fleet wander around in my space for a year or two, then there's no reason for me to split my fleets for defense. If on the other hand there were a few key places in my empire (ie, space stations) that I had to protect or I couldn't supply my fleet, and hence would loose the war, large fleet or no... Or if it were actually possible to conquer a large empire within a month (ie, by taking their capital) then I would have motivation to have separate fleets. Now, Wiz has talked about war weariness in previous updates, but I've read what he's written and it seems to make defeating an enemy fleet a higher priority instead of a lower one. There's been talk about fortifications and status-quo peace, but if France is knocking out my space fortifications while I'm defeating Russia, then how's France going to fortify the captured systems against me to prevent me from retaking them before the peace deal? I like the way that territory changes hands in HOI IV more than the way it changes hands in EUIV or Stellaris. In HOI, when you take a province from your neighbor, it immediately increases your production of tanks and airplanes and boosts your natural resources, albeit with a small penalty. You don't have to wait until the war is over. In Stellaris, taking planets from the enemy hurts them some, but doesn't help your war effort in any way until you sign a peace deal.

 

[Ur-Quan Lord 13]

Wouldn't a mechanic like that increase micromanagement? It seems to me like it would create situations where you deliberately split off ships from a fleet to reduce the losses you take. I'm familiar with Lanchester's Laws, so I understand how this is meant to work, but removing a ship from your fleet should never increase fleet performance, and this mechanic has the potential to do just that.

If they don't balance it properly. But, seeing as the stated goal isn't to make a smaller fleet defeat a larger, but just to make it not useless, there is lots of room between "useless" and "optimal" for proper balance, and I don't think the devs are idiots.

Here's how easy it is, for everyone that's worried:
Make sure that, even with this bonus, holding back x% of your fleet from the battle, always reduces the damage you do to the enemy by more than x%. But, less than 100%.

There. That's it. As long as that's true, there is no gaming the system. The only time it's worthwhile to engage with a smaller fleet (as long as that's true) is if it's all you can muster, or if there's an actual strategic benefit (like, sending a raiding fleet to their systems to drive up their war exhaustion).

Is this really necessary? The other changes will make multiple fleets more likely in any case, which makes more admirals attractive anyway. From my point of view, an arbitrary cap is not very helpful there. Why not make it a requirement to have an admiral assigned to a fleet with more than one ship (or some other small number) and give fleets without an admiral a combat penalty based on its size? In addition to that switching an admiral from one fleet to another should take some time.

The fleet cap also acts as an additional penalty on larger fleets. You need additional high-level admirals to get the same bonuses on your entire fleet. If you have 2 fleets with a level 8 and level 4 admiral, and your opponent has half the fleet size but just one level 8 admiral, that's a little extra advantage.

For realism, I guess it depends on your POV. Do ungoverned sectors have no government, or just nobody special enough to give bonuses? Do armies without leaders just charge aimlessly? Do fleets without admirals not coordinate at all? Only science ships stop functioning without a leader, but these are scientists smart enough to head up an interstellar empire's research department or help a whole planet research more effectively, so it seems like surveying is just really complex work. But, anyway, from that POV, yes a fleet should get penalties without an admiral, but why make things complicated when just changing your interpretation makes that unnecessary? Meanwhile, it makes sense that an admiral would have a limit to how big a fleet benefits from his bonuses. Yah, with advanced tech he could command them all, but the fleet already has commanders, obviously. He's providing commands in-depth enough to allow the ships to tactically perform far better than average. He's not omniscient; there should be a limit to how much he can do.

 

[The Nexerus]

Cherryh sounds like it's going to be a hell of a drastic change. Mostly for the better, but incredibly drastic nonetheless. It feels like all of the important-but-slightly-controversial changes that people have been calling for since the beginning are all being implemented in this one update.

 

[Harle]

The changes look good. I was hoping for a new system/set of mechanics to solve the doomstack problem, more than caps and bonuses/penalties etc, but given the way that systems will be defended and taken, hopefully all the changes in combination will do the trick. I'm looking forward to seeing how this all plays.