Stellaris Dev Diary #96: Doomstacks and Ship Design

[Pyramid_Head]

Planetary edicts like Capacity overload are now empire edicts?

 

[Hound Archon]

Will these changes help us inflict casualties on Awakened Empires? I'd love to be able to put a dent on their 1.1 million fleets with my "modest" 400k one, have it retreat and then go at them again after some repairs.

 

[Darkath]

The ambition is not that you should have lots and lots of fleets, just more than one. We aim for Command Limit to be about 50-33% of your Naval Capacity, and really, everyone should be able to have a couple Admirals.

Make it 20% and increase leader limit across the board. I think it's more interesting to have more characters in game.

And please make leaders more different from one another, (see recent HOI4 generals overhaul)

 

[klingonadmiral]

Why?

The "Force Disparity Modifier" makes whatever else this DD says absolutely irrelevant. Its only purpose is to make mistakes matter less. There's only 2 reason I can think of if you would have a significantly smaller fleet than your opponent:

1. You are small (One-Planet Empire or simply got a bad start). In this case you must get friends. If you don't get friends, you have failed and thus deserve to lose.
2. You are big but one of your smaller fleets you built up was caught. In this case, why did you let your small fleet to be caught by the enemy? In this case, you deserve to lose your fleet.

Belgium surely didn't get some magical firepower bonus when the Wehrmacht came a-knocking. They got Xeelee-stomped. And the "explanation" for the FDM ... is absolutely laughable. Space doesn't work this way.

The ambition is not that you should have lots and lots of fleets, just more than one. We aim for Command Limit to be about 50-33% of your Naval Capacity, and really, everyone should be able to have a couple Admirals.

But ... this was already the case as to prevent Fallen Empires from Awakening?

 

[Silvanus]

YES. I love the changes in point of combat computers and Rockets.... At the moment I have the feeling, that I HAVE TO specialize on a Single weapon type, even if I woul like to play with two. Now I can mix up torpedo slots with Rockets and use the other slots for a second weapon type. I like it.

 

[Alblaka]

2.0 'Cherryh'

So you finally went through and officially labelled it 2.0?

Many people have proposed solutions to Doomstacks. Some have been simple, others complex, but what most of them have missed (and the reason we have taken so long to address this) is that there is no one solution. It is a complex problem with multiple causes and problems, and the only way to begin to address it is to tackle those problems individually.

I think you guys had the one-up over us there. I don't think any member of the community would have dared to suggest a multi-step solution concept on that scale But it's nice to see a few community suggestions mixed into your solution.

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.

This is a very interesting move. It's obviously going to draw complains from people aka 'mah realism' (I mean 'they have more freedom in maneuvering' is a half-hearted reasoning.), but it definitely sounds like something that could work out.

Rather than always fight to the death, ships can now flee battle and survive to fight another day. In combat, any ship that takes hull damage while already below 50% health will have a chance to disengage from battle

That's not quite Fleet Morale, but it's close enough.

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)

Please do change it into a soft-cap. If I get stuck with 27 Fleet limit, I will go mad over not being able to have a clean number like 30 ships.

We believe that these changes, together with many of the other changes we are making (Starbases, FTL rework, etc al) will naturally change the way wars are fought away from Doomstack primacy. Certainly, there will still be wars decided by large-scale engagements of both sides' navies, and certainly it will sometimes be advantageous to keep all of your fleets in one place. But this should no longer be the only way to play, and there should be many new tactical and strategic opportunities available to players in how they use their navies.

As much as this sounds intriguing, I'm slightly worried about the AI's capability of recognizing, deciding on, and deploying these kind of warfare tactics...
I mean, we still, at times, see the AI struggling to do anything because two fleets keep 'following' each other...

requiring a fiddly excercise of swapping reactors for shields/armor and vice versa

Thanks for removing that bit.

to balance between weapons, shields and Aux utilities.

On that point, did you ever consider allowing ship modules that actually differ? Right now, all you can do is chose the size of your guns, or replace 2 guns with a torpedo tube or a hangar (simplified).
I would really love to be able to chose modules that have less guns, but more defenses, or vice versa. I want heavily armored cruisers with a couple weak weapons glued to armor plates on the front, and fragile gunslinging sniper battleships in the back.
I know that would require even more balance testing (and probably ship modelling, since you would probably object to having multiple ship modules with the same model (abeit I personally don't really care for the ship's looks, over gameplay)) and won't come in 2.0 either way, but might be put (or already present) on your TODO list.

so we created a formula for mapping armor to damage reduction that pretty much nobody understands

Including the devs?

the rather ill-suited Energy Torpedoes that aren't Torpedoes at all but just a regular energy weapon, resulting in even more confusion and diffusion

Standards and consistency are for the weak.

It also means that empires that want to invest heavily in the power of missiles will need to use designs and ship classes that can pack torpedo slots, instead of simply putting missiles on everything that would normally mount a different weapon

Which loops back to my above mention about ship modules. I would hope you will amend modules some for this change, to actually allow making dedicated missile-only ships. Because currently, you would have to put a mix of missiles and other weaponry.

As well, how does this affect starting weapons and the general early-game?

 

[Creamu]

I wonder if the AI will always be set to prioritize having each of their fleets at max command limit. Or if it will do more interesting things like having one heavy fleet at max command limit, and 2 smaller fleets at half command limit.

 

[Sapa Inca]

Damaged ships will have their speed and combat ability reduced, all the way down to a ~50% reduction when they are nearly dead.

Maybe leviathans, the reckoning (end of cycle) and another big beef foes need a balance check pass due this change that probably nerf small quantity of big hulls vs huge quantities of small hulls?

 

[elandread]

I like the changes, but I hope that they will be balanced well. In EU4 at some point it was very annoying to wage wars as enemy armies very often escaped from battles barely damaged, and then travelled very far in "invincible" mode, so wars turned into an annoying whack-a-mole game.

Hopefully the new changes to battles in Stellaris are well-balanced, so that, for instance, if one Empire does indeed have an overwhelming military advantage, then the war still can be finished rather quickly.

 

[Birnenpappe]

Another potential Loophole: The Interstellar Fleet Traditions society technology seems to be extremely strong, giving you an immediate boost to your fleet strength, this technology could tip wars if one side was unlucky enough to not get it in time...

 

[Coyote027]

There is only truly one way of "solving" the doomstack problem. Superexpensive WMD's that are powerful enough to destroy an entire fleet in one strike

I feel like this would be harmful to fleet combat at any scale, and make the game into something fundamentally different than the classically-inspired space opera 4x that it currently is. Super Mega Doom Destructor Weapons are acceptable for leviathans and crises, but I would hate to see every single empire with more than one planet to its name running around with them.

 

[Xenith_Shadow]

The more I think about it the less happy I am about Command Limits being a hard cap. Would much prefer stacking or exponential penalties like with Naval Cap. Preumably it would be stuff like Evasion, Tracking and Fire Rate

I mean losing a percentage of evasion tracking fire rate ftl speed equal to the percentage you over would effectivly prevent you going over the limit. Also the hard limit is hardly a problem as you can just get the other ships in the second fleet to follow the first and they will all ftl to each location together anyway

 

[Pyramid_Head]

All empires start with all basic weapons in Cherryh. More on this next DD.

How autodesigner will deal with all basic weapons? Now it tends to use beam weapons above all. Can we set priorities?

 

[mrclint]

With this I hope you change the AI so that it follows the new (doomstack) rules.

 

[Wizzington]

Also worth noting, something I forgot: There is a cap to the Force Disparity Combat Bonus (caps out at roughly 'outnumbered by 100%'), so a force that is utterly and completely outnumbered will still be appropriately crushed. Your solo corvette won't be putting a dent in Fallen Empire Fleets.

 

[Jean-Luc]

Ok, this could work. Force Disparity's kinda "gamey" but there's no good way around it I suppose. A larger force does provide a target rich environment. Ship disengagement is probably the best part of this.

I do like the idea of missiles becoming more of a support/artillery weapon. It sounds like using different types of weapons will be more important in general.

Will ships be tougher in general as well? Some people noticed them having more hp in the "teaser screenshots".

 

[fabius]

The Combat has been the only thing holding me back on picking Stellaris up (though would like more involved immersive planet invasion/defence too)

Love the thought of the disengage mechanic combined with Hit and Run strategy providing a viable asymmetrical war with some prospects.

I know they won't say if still unannounced- but is there an ETA for 2.0 been put out yet? (Can plan buying of Stellaris accordingly)

 

[Creamu]

Another potential Loophole: The Interstellar Fleet Traditions society technology seems to be extremely strong, giving you an immediate boost to your fleet strength, this technology could tip wars if one side was unlucky enough to not get it in time...

Thats perfectly fine though. The same will be for super weapons when they get added into the game.

 

[Tim_Ward]

Belgium surely didn't get some magical firepower bonus when the Wehrmacht came a-knocking.

 

[benjaseth]

I feel like this would be harmful to fleet combat at any scale, and make the game into something fundamentally different than the classically-inspired space opera 4x that it currently is. Super Mega Doom Destructor Weapons are acceptable for leviathans and crises, but I would hate to see every single empire with more than one planet to its name running around with them.

Why? Even human nations on earth today have nuclear weapons, which by the way, totally have changed the nature of international politics and warfare.
It is weird to imagine that spacefaring nations suddenly would stop creating these kind of weapons.