Stellaris needs to focus more on planets and less on space. Fight me.

[Asa_TJ]

(Okay, don't really fight me.)

So this discussion came up in a reddit thread where I was proposing some new mechanics for contested planets and ground combat. Her'es that, if you care to read it:

Spoiler: Improved Planetary Mechanics

• Each row of tiles is a “Continent”.
  
  
• Continents can be controlled independently, allowing two empires to coexist on the same planet.
  
  
• There can only be one capital structure per planet. The continent with this structure is the Capital Continent.
  
  
• The owner of the Capital Continet has exclusive spaceport rights. There can still be only one spaceport per planet.
  
  
• Pops from different empires on the same planet are much more likely to migrate if better conditions are available on another continent and their species is allowed in the destination empire.
  
  
• A faster-breeding species of one empire who has migration rights to another empire that controls continents on the same planet can and will "reproduce into" the foreign continent.
  
  
• Rebellious factions, subterraneans, etc. can potentially take control of continents and start new, planet-bound factions.
  
  
• Planets with primitives are likely to have multiple, distinct civilizations of the same species living on the same planet. Only one can eventually establish a planetary capital and become spacefaring, but the others will still exist unless conquered.
  
  
• When colonizing a planet with primitives, it is possible to land on an uninhabited continent and choose not to disrupt their society.
  
  
• Multiple empires can attempt to colonize the same planet on different continents. The first to establish a planetary capital “claims” it and blocks other empires from doing the same.
  
  
• Rebel factions can start Ground Wars, in addition to their current insurgencies, attempting to take control of continents. Government policies will determine to what degree bombardment can be used in these wars, since the chances of collateral damage against one’s own people (and potentially causing them to join the rebels) is high.
  
  
• Likewise, two empires that control territory on the same planet can declare a Ground War to sieze territory only on that planet. This can be escalated to a full war, but again, bombardment of a planet that contains your own pops and infrastructure is likely to result in collateral damage and unrest. For diplomatic purposes, the faction that escalates a Ground War to a Stellar War is seen as the aggressor, even if they didn’t start the Ground War.
  
  
• An empire who has filled every tile on their controlled continents with pops is likely to spawn events modeling the agitation between them and any primitives or other empires who control territory on that planet (especially if Xenophobe/Militarist) and may enact partisan violence without the government's approval that can spiral into war.
  
  
• Ground combat is now fought continent by continent. Troops are divided between defensive armies for each continent, and a single assault army per side. One side must defeat the other’s assault army before they can start conquering. While both sides have an active assault army, the war for the planet is in a “Skirmish” phase where no territory changes hands. Once one assault army is destroyed, the faction with the existing assault army becomes the “attacking force” and the battle enters the “Conquest” phase.
  
  
• In the Conquest phase, the attacking force will assault enemy garrisons on each continent, with a victory giving them control of that continent. Defeat will force them to wait for their assault army’s morale to recover, during which time the enemy may also recover or build more assault armies for a new skirmish phase.
  
  
• When one side controls the whole planet or a structured peace is negociated, the conflict ends (unless one side escalates it to a Stellar War.

The idea came around that this would be Bad, because Stellaris is a game about space and should focus on space. I strongly disagree, and here's why:

One factor Stellaris is still missing for me is a sense of groundedness. Too much of it takes place in space, when that's not actually where pops are and things are happening. Since this is a grand strategy game, I want the lives of my pops down rockside to matter more. I want to feel more immersed in that part of the universe. Imagine if 80% of Victoria 2 took place at sea. It makes space feel big, empty, and lifeless. Planets are where stories happen. I mean, not all of them. But in typical sci-fi, that tends to be the case.

The sector system would keep it from getting too complex. You'd receive sector events for sectors, and the governor would presumably handle anything smaller than that. Your core worlds would be your story generators. Obviously, if a ground war happens in one of your sectors, you'd have the option of intervening. Especially if you lose a planet. Maybe it's time to send in the feds and replace that governor.

This is grand strategy. How do you disincentive "glass it and move on" warfare? Political and diplomatic ramifications. Cost of resources relative to what is gained. Collateral damage. If your ground armies can handle it, why would you send a battleship to blow up some rebels in the jungle? It's total overkill. You're paying upkeep to have that thing out of dock. And you're probably going to light some forests on fire and leave thousands of your own citizens displaced... who now want to join the rebels. And your egalitarian neighbor empire is asking questions about why exactly you're restricting the free expression of these noble guerillas with immediate obliteration from orbit.

Why didn't we nuke Vietnam? Because of the international ramifications. Why are you sending boots and not cruisers to deal with this brushfire rebellion on Cylat 3? Because of the interstellar ramifications. When you escalate a ground war to a stellar war, that's like firing off ICBMs - and at a target where some of your own people live, to boot. There will be domestic and international consequences.

Even if you ignore the strategic angle, look at it from a story generation angle. The sea, for the most part, is negative space. People don't really live there, unless they live on a ship. Most people live on land. Like in Stellaris, the vast majority live on planets (or orbital habitations in Banks, but you get my point). This is a grand strategy game. It's not a space war simulator. It's about lots of sentient aliens trying to live their lives while all these galactic upheavals and grand machinations are going on. I'd like to see it go in a more Victoria 2 direction, where those ground-level stories about the 99.9% who aren't in the navy or the science corps are more involved in story generation. It adds a roundedness and believably that's lacking in Stellaris compared to other PDS games. I want to feel immersed more in those pops' lives, not just the negative space around them.

Stellaris shines when it looks not at what space 4x has been or is, but what it can be. Otherwise, we might as well all go play GalCiv or NewMoO.

 

[Azi0]

I like the background of this thinking and believe it would deliver a lot of depth for smaller focused empires as well, since it wouldn't be a massive rat-race to become the biggest while being occupied with expanding all the time. It would also be a bit more fair in regards to ground combat with making the fighting a bit more dynamic, rather than just dropping loads of units down to the surface with a couple of diverging stats. In my opinion still lacking desperately in depth.

I do have some minor doubts regarding the story generation and primarily the implementation which could become tedious for trivial events. I believe that the balance between the 'outer space' and the 'core worlds' popups could be a hinderance. However, that said, I do agree that more flavour in this game is better! Especially when it creates opportunities for catering to more different sort of game-styles.

 

[Lothmar]

Lets go, meet me behind the Kfc in an hour with your shirt off! *leaves work* [/SARCASM END]

 

[Mauer]

Even if you ignore the strategic angle, look at it from a story generation angle. The sea, for the most part, is negative space. People don't really live there, unless they live on a ship. Most people live on land. Like in Stellaris, the vast majority live on planets (or orbital habitations in Banks, but you get my point). This is a grand strategy game. It's not a space war simulator. It's about lots of sentient aliens trying to live their lives while all these galactic upheavals and grand machinations are going on. I'd like to see it go in a more Victoria 2 direction, where those ground-level stories about the 99.9% who aren't in the navy or the science corps are more involved in story generation. It adds a roundedness and believably that's lacking in Stellaris compared to other PDS games. I want to feel immersed more in those pops' lives, not just the negative space around them.

Stellaris shines when it looks not at what space 4x has been or is, but what it can be. Otherwise, we might as well all go play GalCiv or NewMoO.

I was thinking about this the other day, I want Stellaris to be more than a wargame and my empire more than a navy with planets to extract resources from, I want my POPs to live and do more than work for the expansion of the empire, including a better system for buildings and specialization of POPs where they do something other than mine, farm or research.

For all its flaws with the AI and other design choices, Civilization does offer something more to do, managing cities, wonders, trade, culture and art, etc., and in CK2 we have a very complex system of personal interactions between characters, governments and different states; Utopia seems like a step in the right direction, but I wish Stellaris expands to encompass much more of what a sci-fi strategy game can be.

 

[corny.1234]

In my opinion this feature would only unnecessary complicate the game.

Look how hard it is to keep track of a planet in a system with two or more empire, which by the way add nothing to the game, no tensions, no exchange between the planets.

 

[Tim_Ward]

On Twitter, Wiz said about this:

In an empire with 100 planets, or a war involving two or three such empires, having to care about situation on each not feasible.

Martin has mentioned this 'what if hundreds of planets' concern before, for example in thread on ground combat. Which I always found odd, given one of their stated design goals was to not have hundreds of planets.

So, what I did was I loaded up Stellaris and started a game with 1000 stars and set planetary habitability to 500%, then ran the 'planets' command. I found there were 762 habitable planets in the game.

In this extreme scenario, if the game somehow wound up with a dozen or so empires left in the game then you would have multiple empires with planets numbering in the 100s.

Then I loaded a game with the default settings (600 stars, 100% habitability) and there 243 habitable planets in the game. No room for more than 2 empires with 100+ planets there.

In short, this never actually happens. It may be possible in theory, but not in the actual games people are playing. Even in the more planet heavy scenarios, it's something that's only going to happen towards the very end game by which time most people will have long abandoned the campaign anyway.

Now, I'm not saying Martin is wrong in the fundamentals (fundamentals = this system is too complex), he may well be correct about that.

But I am saying that 'what if 100s of planets' is a total red herring, I don't think you should be making such balancing/game design decisions too accommodate such extreme scenarios at the expense of your actual day to day play where a few dozen is the high end.

 

[Jorlem]

I do have some minor doubts regarding the story generation and primarily the implementation which could become tedious for trivial events. I believe that the balance between the 'outer space' and the 'core worlds' popups could be a hinderance. However, that said, I do agree that more flavour in this game is better! Especially when it creates opportunities for catering to more different sort of game-styles.

Story generation isn't an events thing, it arises from the game's mechanics. Events can tell a story, but in every game, the event chain will tell the same story. If the game's mechanics work as they should, a unique story will form out of what occurs in the game.

In CK2, Charlemagne's story plays out in one of a few identical ways for every game in that start, as it is entirely event driven. However, in a save I played a few years ago, and still remember, a lunatic king of France declared war after war, hiring mercenaries he couldn't afford, and eventually his vassals rebelled against him. Then, towards the end of the war putting them down, his mercenaries turned on him, as he had run out of funds to pay them, and in the end the Irish Band ruled a significant portion of France. I've never seen that before or since, and the AI did it all by itself. I was playing as a vassal in the Byzantine Empire at the time, and had nothing to do with it.

I still remember that several years later, as one of the neatest stories I've seen play out in CK2, and there were no prescripted story event popups involved at all.

 

[RedPearlA]

Since you can not colonize planets in another nation's territory how would 2 nations control part of a planet?

 

[Red Death]

I do agree that "this is a space game" is not a good argument, since planets are so central in science fiction. As the place where most people live, they should receive far more focus then they do right now.

However, I do not believe this particular proposal is necessarily the best option to achieve that. Sure, it adds complexity, but it is of a kind that would just be hard to manage from the standard view in Stellaris, without differentiating them all that much. I also feel like the situations mentioned would actually barely happen during normal gameplay, making them ineffecient objectives to spend dev time on.

In the end, I believe land battles should be a lot more comparable in importance and complexity to space battle, but not more than that. I think pushing beyond that moves outside the scope of grand strategy.

 

[Alliegorical]

I came into this thread ready to give you the fight you asked for, but shit, you're right.

 

[PirateJack]

~snip~

If I recall this correctly, Wiz said that before he drastically reduced the number of habitable planets in the galaxy.

 

[Mauer]

If I recall this correctly, Wiz said that before he drastically reduced the number of habitable planets in the galaxy.

He reduced them by 50%, so the 500% habitables option still gives you 2.5 times as many as was normal before.

 

[Drowe]

First things first, in general I would like a game with those mechanics, if done properly. And now come the buts.

Sharing planets between empires is not a good idea, and not particularly realistic. The reasons are simple, two empires sharing a planet will eventually go to war with each other, and as a result one side will gain complete control. The second reason is, that the situations in which that can occur is pretty rare.

The reason why a game where most empires have multiple planets focuses more on space than ground combat is, that wars are decided in space. If one participant in a war has ships and the other one doesn't, the one with ships has won regardless of how powerful the ground armies are. If you don't control space your armies are stuck.

Giving planets more depth is good, and the ground warfare mechanic will eventually need an overhaul, but it shouldn't be micro intensive and it shouldn't be anywhere near as relevant as space combat. A lot of other things can be done to improve planets, like some abstraction of a civilian economy for example.

 

[PirateJack]

He reduced them by 50%, so the 500% habitables option still gives you 2.5 times as many as was normal before.

That's also a grand total of 316/7 planets. Not exactly something you can divide between multiple empires and still have hundreds left.

 

[PirateJack]

First things first, in general I would like a game with those mechanics, if done properly. And now come the buts.

Sharing planets between empires is not a good idea, and not particularly realistic. The reasons are simple, two empires sharing a planet will eventually go to war with each other, and as a result one side will gain complete control. The second reason is, that the situations in which that can occur is pretty rare.

The reason why a game where most empires have multiple planets focuses more on space than ground combat is, that wars are decided in space. If one participant in a war has ships and the other one doesn't, the one with ships has won regardless of how powerful the ground armies are. If you don't control space your armies are stuck.

Giving planets more depth is good, and the ground warfare mechanic will eventually need an overhaul, but it shouldn't be micro intensive and it shouldn't be anywhere near as relevant as space combat. A lot of other things can be done to improve planets, like some abstraction of a civilian economy for example.

Also, this. Simply being in orbit gives you such a huge difference in energy potential for each weapon that anyone on the ground stands little to no chance of winning. You can very happily bombard from absolute safety if your opponent doesn't have any space-based weapons or any ground-based that drastically outstrip yours in energy output.

 

[bex I]

I wish the scale would move organically from planetscale to galaxy scale. Whats fun for 5-10 planets and with a small number of ships just isnt fun to me in the large scale, beginning in the midgame and getting worse every year. Stellaris should become way more abstract in the lategame. The focus during the midgame should switch to
- empire management: not management of single pops or upgrade of builduings but politics, demographics, special projects, large scale development projects etc.
- foreign policy: aggressive expansion mechanics, alliance systems, colonialism style by researching new form of ftl travel. regions of unexplored space, ready to be explored(not by single scientists please) and a race between sprawling empires.
and strategic warfare(not commanding single invasion ships, commanding theatres and not units, except in very few important cases).

Example: Fleet "Borderpatrol", which was commanded to patrol quadrant A1 on the north eastern border region to the enemy is now commanded to invade 3 planets in a given order. The fleet was designed in a unit designer where the amount of the different ships, the weapons (kinetic or laser heavy ? long mid short ?) and armor (shield armor hull) and attached ships like transports or planet destroyers are adjusted. It should be possible to designate support starports and to toogle if they should automatically replace loses.

 

[Cordane]

Also, this. Simply being in orbit gives you such a huge difference in energy potential for each weapon that anyone on the ground stands little to no chance of winning. You can very happily bombard from absolute safety if your opponent doesn't have any space-based weapons or any ground-based that drastically outstrip yours in energy output.

You can very happily do whatever you want if your opponent isn't given the option of having surface-to-orbit weapons. Any proper upgrade to ground forces and invasions has to include S2O weapons, and considering that planets have ever so slightly larger areas/volumes in which to build weapon systems than a starship (never mind heat dissipation), I don't think they'd have any issue building large enough, powerful enough weapons to give an orbiting fleet pause.

 

[BlackUmbrellas]

In short, this never actually happens. It may be possible in theory, but not in the actual games people are playing. Even in the more planet heavy scenarios, it's something that's only going to happen towards the very end game by which time most people will have long abandoned the campaign anyway.

Now, I'm not saying Martin is wrong in the fundamentals (fundamentals = this system is too complex), he may well be correct about that.

But I am saying that 'what if 100s of planets' is a total red herring, I don't think you should be making such balancing/game design decisions too accommodate such extreme scenarios at the expense of your actual day to day play where a few dozen is the high end.

"Hundreds of planets" might be a red herring, but at around 1-2 dozen planets I start losing track of what's going on. His numbers are off, his core reason isn't.

 

[Asa_TJ]

The reason why a game where most empires have multiple planets focuses more on space than ground combat is, that wars are decided in space. If one participant in a war has ships and the other one doesn't, the one with ships has won regardless of how powerful the ground armies are. If you don't control space your armies are stuck.

Allow me to recall my analogy, though: Why didn't we nuke Vietnam? I think the game could benefit from having de-escalated ground wars with fewer political and humanitarian ramifications. When the fleets come out, that should be the equivalent of launching all your ICBMs at the enemy. They are undeniably weapons of mass destruction (modulated somewhat but your bombardment policy), and unless you're deploying them in self-defense, the galactic community won't look kindly. Unless you're fanatic xenophobe or militaristic, your OWN PEOPLE won't look kindly. And the collateral damage can be devastating, especially if you're bombarding rebels on a world also housing loyalists. This gives ground war a definite niche, especially against rebel partisans and primitives (probably less likely to happen between two space empires).

 

[Finnway]

I'd prefer less micromanagement of planets, not more.