True. Though I always assumed it was because people were complaining Hyperspace fleets were too hard to catch, suffering from "whack a mole" syndrome, rather than wanting battles to happen inside systems specifically (as I recall plenty of "in system" battles when playing both mixed, and HS-only, games).
Either way, as I mentioned in the spoiler in my post earlier, battles
do now often happen on the outskirts of systems - later in a match with higher tech fleets. With how range (and the addition of XL weapons) have changed over time, fleets often engage the moment they jump in to a system. The art style holds the game's in-system combat back more, in this respect, with its cartoonishly-scaled star systems.
If systems were substantively larger, or engagement ranges/ships scaled down a lot, that could pave the way for real tactical fleet mechanics - but this is
both never going to happen,
and, per the direction the game has gone since 2.0++, outside the scope of Stellaris.
So we'll always have battles playing out like dogpiles with limited fleet manoeuvres once L slots are unlocked and range "caps out". Might as well just revert hyperlane functionality, too, rather than forcing fleets to always cross systems. Even ones devoid of enemies.
- I have a thread (also in my signature: Wormhole Drive Tests. 2.8.1. Proof Of concept. ) where I looked at the feasibility of implementing wormhole station-style FTL.
- Short answer is yes it can be done, but it's not really playable.
- Long answer is you can mimic the original wormhole drive -
- but with how bypasses are coded, you need to do some hackish things to create a wormhole drive unit for your ships (as ships need to be able to "go to FTL" to use a bypass - for some reason - so a ship with no FTL drive [one that cant also use a hyperlane] cant fly through a gateway (I assume this is due to some coding shortcut they took).
- Likewise sensors continue to render on a hyper-lane distance basis - though this can be fixed through (unperformative) scripts that update intel on all stars within "X distance" of your colonised systems, for example. OR only give you active sensor coverage on your current systems, killing off long range sensor cover entirely [which is viable - I once played a 1k star galaxy with Grand Admiral and Starnet, the galaxy was completely covered in nebulae, literally every system... It was an interesting experience].
- The UI needs heavy work done to it to make this "playable" - you cant re-create the old "range rings" (which showed how far you could jump) as we - via script - do not have access to spawn entities directly on to the galaxy map layer (though I've demonstrated that its technically possible via the console in the past).
- It would likely work best in a "total conversion" format, where all empires use warp, rather than some using warp and some using HLs.
- Yes... potentially ... but not for human players. **
- So quite a while back I saw a video on endless space 2's galaxy guns - weapons that fire shells (turn by turn) at enemy star systems and blow them up (think Stellaris star killers... but instead of a knockoff borg cube, its a big gun sitting lightyears away firing a superluminal shell at your star).
- And I did some tests [Link to that thread] and found that there are in fact ways to mimic warp drives, to a degree, you can spawn a hyperlane between star A and B, once a fleet begins charging up to go to that star, you can delete the hyperlane (preventing anyone from following that fleet) - and then that path has now been cached for that fleet and it will travel to star B ... along a "hyperlane free" route.
- This whilst interesting, is not too useful for a human player, as you cant right click on a random star to send a ship there. You need to spawn a HL, wait for fleet to begin wind up, delete the HL, and the automatic pathfinding wont work for this. This could be adapted for some modded crisis faction using warp drives, however.
- This MIGHT be more feasible if we got a new "on_action" that fires/triggers whenever a fleet is DEPARTING from a star system
- currently we have one for ARRIVAL, EMERGENCY RETREAT, ON BYPASS USE etc, but on departure is a ... "black hole" when it comes to on_actions,
- But there's no easy way (that doesnt involve performance intensive checks/polling) to bind scripts to fleets leaving a star system via hyperlane.
More simply, if youre interested in FTL modding, my advice is pretend warp was just a nice dream and focus on either
- making Hyperlanes "more mechanically interesting"
- or making gateways more interesting (i.e. reading in to the "bypasses" classes)
- or focus on creating warp as a standalone drive type (a big job)
** may have to click on the below image, it should take you directly to the video on imgur and play there.
