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Hej
An interesting diversion in the game would be the expansion of ground troops. It would be interesting to design military vehicles such as fighters or tanks to attack planets. For this add some vehicles for infantry and armament of soldiers. Everything could be designed like a navy.
the fact ground combat exsists is rather silly in the first place cause orbital bombardment could actually be exponentially more devastating than it is in game to the point that the mere threat of doing so should make a planet capitulate once a fleet has tactical control of a system
the fact ground combat exsists is rather silly in the first place cause orbital bombardment could actually be exponentially more devastating than it is in game to the point that the mere threat of doing so should make a planet capitulate once a fleet has tactical control of a system
By that logic, orbital bombardment is just as pointless, just fly around with a Colossus and everyone instantly surrenders. Who needs war in a strategy game anyway.
Ground combat needs some tweaks or total overhaul.
But i think that military ships should be able to get barrack module where we put our desirable army, just like we put weapons. When planet is bombarded, all troops are Landing on bombarded planet. This needs some tweaks and balance, but i think this would be good step im ground combat. This would req more strategic approach target than "make 99999999999 armies and land them on planet". Nymber of armies would be decreased, because it would be tied to used ships which sacrifice their combat capabilities. Short, quick planet fights would be rare, and in most cases defenders would win, but ship armies could respawn in 30 days and attack again, so that longer bombardments would be more needed.
If devs don't want to overhaul ground combat, that is their prerogative. I understand that resources are limited so they must be employed in things that will be more relevant to the gameplay experience or the commercial success of the game.
But you can make ground combat way more streamlined / less annoying with a couple of quite inexpensive tweaks. Just halving the number of required transports for invasions would save a lot of micro (you can always double their cost in order to compensate for it).
Also, just by giving ground battles defeats more penalties (say, population loss, influence loss, increased war exhaustion, etc) you could make ground combat actually relevant, without needing to touch its system.
By that logic, orbital bombardment is just as pointless, just fly around with a Colossus and everyone instantly surrenders. Who needs war in a strategy game anyway.
i was being a bit tongue in cheek with that comment. ha e been reading a Sifi series that's a little bit less squishy than stellarises as far as how technology works and equivalent of the in-universe Geneva conventions basically makes orbital bombardment illegal with a mandatory civilization-wide requirement for all states to retaliate against the party if they do it but by the same token planets had a responsibility to surrender if their governments space battle was lost. the rules only having been implemented about a thousand years earlier after they had sort of learned their lesson about had just how bad the cycle of retaliation can get if they go around engaging in things like dropping asteroids on each other
Hej
An interesting diversion in the game would be the expansion of ground troops. It would be interesting to design military vehicles such as fighters or tanks to attack planets. For this add some vehicles for infantry and armament of soldiers. Everything could be designed like a navy.
That's all part of the invasion armies. They are all too small to make any difference and not be worth designing as there's quite likely thousands-tens of thousands of each per army so they can comfortably include all variants to handle all situations while also being able to swap out equipment on the fly.
That's all part of the invasion armies. They are all too small to make any difference and not be worth designing as there's quite likely thousands-tens of thousands of each per army so they can comfortably include all variants to handle all situations while also being able to swap out equipment on the fly.
Where we can mod them to fill a specific role on a planet with multiple traits that benefit them. Armies have a single role and do one thing with it. If you min-max then yeah you will mod more pops to get the most out of their jobs. With armies? Choice of increased damage or lower damage isn't going to really be a choice.
Ground combat needs some tweaks or total overhaul.
But i think that military ships should be able to get barrack module where we put our desirable army, just like we put weapons. When planet is bombarded, all troops are Landing on bombarded planet. This needs some tweaks and balance, but i think this would be good step im ground combat. This would req more strategic approach target than "make 99999999999 armies and land them on planet". Nymber of armies would be decreased, because it would be tied to used ships which sacrifice their combat capabilities. Short, quick planet fights would be rare, and in most cases defenders would win, but ship armies could respawn in 30 days and attack again, so that longer bombardments would be more needed.
One other advantage of troops on fleets is boarding troops.
Imagene the fun of being able to send ship to ship drop ships and hijack enemy ships? which adds a nice bit of RPS ness to it, a ship with no troops is vulnerable to boarding actions, but more effective in ship to ship fights.
the fact ground combat exsists is rather silly in the first place cause orbital bombardment could actually be exponentially more devastating than it is in game to the point that the mere threat of doing so should make a planet capitulate once a fleet has tactical control of a system
I'm not convinced that this is correct. I find the argument in this article to be pretty persuasive. In short, the article argues that orbital bombardment is an evolution of the concept of strategic bombing, which has consistently failed to make ground forces obsolete despite the claims of its proponents.
Hello everyone! Today I thought I would talk more about the process of directing an expansion such as Nemesis. As we’ve talked about in the past, finding a strong theme is one of the most important things that we do. Whenever we’ve had ideas...
forum.paradoxplaza.com
Looking back at DD#99 - the DD that touched on the first (and so far only) ground army rework, We see that paradox there too simplified the design somewhat, whilst also adding a little "hands off" mechanical depth in the form of planet sizes becoming combat width.
Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris dev diary. Today's dev diary is about some changes coming to ground combat and armies in the 2.0 'Cherryh' update. This will be the last dev diary before we take a break for the holidays, so there...
forum.paradoxplaza.com
Whilst it was never outright stated, I believe the original / pre-Apocolypse (pre-alpha?) concept for ground armies would have also featured air-to-air combat or air-to-orbit combat. as the original UI (pre apocalypse) looked like this, armies would graphically move from the top segment down to the bottom one (there is still a defines to determine how many days army drops should take), pausing briefly on level "2" before entering combat on the ground:
This UI was stripped back in to the simpler one we ended up with (likely - as grekulf intimated - to make way for a proto-archaeology-style army invasion UI instead, which didn't ultimately arrive).
But there have been a few mockups over the years for what a "full-on" ground overhaul could have looked like if things had gone the other way; my personal favourite - if for no other reason than for the effort - is this one:
This is how I have always wished ground invasions worked. For so long the UI was teasing me with possibility. Now that its gone I felt the need to play around in photoshop for far too long. Image Text: 1. Invading Armies are carried directly by...
forum.paradoxplaza.com
However, whilst we do have a new director in charge of the game now, I doubt we'll get something like the above (and for all of its mechanical complexity, something like the above probably wouldn't drastically shake up the game - even if it would be very cool), despite me being pleased if we got it.
IF we see a ground combat rework I imagine it would take influences from the CK series - ships [or captured starbases acting as beach-heads for your troops in the system] essentially act like roaming levies and ground invasion + orbital bombardment are rolled in to one cohesive package, shelling a world and then rolling invasion events/cards/effects each 1-3-6 months or whatever. This may also be used to blunt the effects of absolute conquest, and serve as an "immersive" way to stop players capturing worlds with little to no pop-deaths or infrastructural damage.
In the interim, I've personally found some success in the past via modding
Reducing the number of armies in the game by scaling their stats and costs up by a large factor.
Make them Cost Alloys rather than minerals.
Make them Upkeep Unity + the army's pop's base type's resource (energy = robots / food = bio / minerals = litho).
I've also tried soft capping armies to X% of your empire population count, and exceeding that will start to add a negative influence modifier.
e.g. you can have 10 assault armies with 100 pops before -inf scaling kicks in, adding +0.1 inf upkeep to all assault armies for every army point you exceed your "army cap" by.
And some armies, like mega warforms, count as '2' rather than 1.
10 armies might not sound like a lot but they're individually considerably stronger given point #1
strongholds don't add defence armies, instead instead add extra defense army damage and HP to existing armies. Military academies [and equivs] add armies linked to planet size + colony capital tier (and maybe .
General traits expanded to make picking ones for fighting on certain world-types
e.g. "urban warrior" = +army damage & morale on ecumenopolis / Nexus / Habitat worlds
"anti-hiver" = bonuses fighting against gestalt hive armies.
Army rank modifier effects have been inflated, elite(R3) armies are effectively worth 3 junior ones and will crush an R1 army 1:1 easily.
Losing an assault army adds a faster warscore gain modifier against you for 6months. Stacks. Don't do any operation human shields, or it'll cost you a war fast.
This makes assault armies much scarcer/stronger. But, also having stronger defence armies - alongside planet combat width - mean that you do want quality over quantity for your assaults. I've never really understood the whole spam billions of armies out thing. We dont know how many people are in a POP, yet we happily spam out trillions of armies. They ought to be equally gamey imo.
The effects of undead armies and certain "OP" builds like subterranean lithoids do make this... problematic to balance around. But as a personal mod that i've not shared - i can conveniently ignore these issues or break out the planet-cracker.
Overall these changes are extremely minor for the most part, as they're just tweaking and tuning stats, probably less work than re-balancing army invasions around ships would be [as, if your armies respawn from the ships when they die, you might as well just remove the ground invasion interface totally and swap it for a simple "occupation timer" after grabbing the Starbase - you'd need to account for that endless supply of warm bodies from the orbiting ships, wearing down the defenders, somehow].
I'd wager we'd either get something like these army stat tweaks, making them less common (to partially curtail the micro of spam-clicking - if you only have 20 armies, and they're more powerful/valuable/costly, your finger will thank you), Or something like armies on ships alongside some sort of "trained troops" empire resource to prevent endless spam - trained troops would be distinct from manpower in something like HOI4 - as man power is basically just population, which would be functionally limitless in a galactic empire. But actually making all those people capable of dropping on to a planet and fighting in interstellar warfare is less easy.
I think a bigger issue is occupation and post-war strife - or the lack of mechanics therein, and any army-related stuff should probably focus on that over the invasion itself. But that's a topic for another time.
But, in the end, anything to do with armies will probably only happen, if at all, if someone on the Stellaris team feels inspired to do it - rather than as a core imperative or dlc thing - eg. as a personal challenge/experiment over holidays.
