The moment you restrict doomstacks.....

[aruon]

i'd prefer if doomstacks weren't a key to the game. only once have i ever split my fleet in war, and that was to blanket a large enemy empire who's fleet i had annihilated in one go.

and the " fleet size limit based on admiral skill" is the best way to do it.

 

[Secret Master]

I use wormholes, and I split my fleets up sometimes to improve wormhole generation times.

Note that I still send them to the same places, so they are fighting together, but they aren't all technically in one fleet.

I'm not sure I hate or love doomstacks, though. I mean, fleet concentration (and dealing with fleet concentration) is a central concept in Mahan's theories of naval warfare. Concentrating a fleet to force a decisive naval engagement is one of the important aspects of 20th Century naval warfare (even when various countries failed to achieve it).

I think that artificial mechanics that discourage doomstacks will just irritate players. But let's consider this: there is no strategic reason right now not to concentrate your naval force. There is no interstellar trade to interdict. Raiding orbital facilities is okay, but does not require anything more than 1k worth of ships quietly wandering around. Blockades generate nice warscore, but in most middle or late game wars, I have enough troops to quickly seize planets, making carpet blockades less useful.

If there was some kind of naval supply mechanic, or trade to disrupt, doomstacks would see less use for more natural reasons. It would also be possible to raid an enemy that has a superior navy.

 

[Jorlem]

People would just split one doomstack to smaller ones and use them in tandem. You would need to give the said negative modifiers based on how far apart the fleets are from one another and yet, people would just keep them in the same system at max range and attack from the sides when needed. More micro but the number of ships per system would remain the same. And if we would be realistic, a huge fleet would face the enemy as a wall, with ships on top of another so no line-of-sight problems.

Now I don't mind micro at war, but it should be kept at strategic level, that's the scope of the game after all. Flanking bonuses do seem nice but ships should do that automatically anyway. Fighters already do to some extent.

You could also apply penalties based on the number of separate fleets in combat (counting attached fleets from other empires as part of the fleet they are attached to), and a similar penalty for a time after merging fleets if one is above a certain threshold with the size of that penalty based on the amount of combat power that has been merged in recently. (This would allow for newly build ships to join without any sort of significant penalty, but if you merge two roughly equal fleets, it would hurt. That would prevent sidestepping the "multiple comparable fleets in combat" penalty unless you have a long enough time before the battle starts.)

 

[The Founder]

Think of Ships like Navies irl, your fleet can only be so big, before you start having issues in terms of management, and such. One Admiral can only keep tabs on so many things at once. You need to split up the fleet into smaller parts, as realistically this would result in better management for the admiral, making the most effective use of his fleet.

Do not bring out the Realism argument. If you want to know how Realistic Space Warfare would be, play children of a dead earth.

In this game we have FTL, Psionics and working AI. Realism missed this galaxy by a few thousand lightyears.

Forcing doomstacks out:
The thing is as far as managing multiple fleets goes, the AI is so much better it would not even be a fair fight.

There are 3 resources as far as wars go:
Resource (Mineral and Energy)
Navy Cap
Attention

Attention is the one area the AI will actually be better then us humans. Play a few rounds of Planetary Annihilation agaisnt the AI, multiple planets.
One AI can manage a dozen planets as well as one. But you need 1 or more humans to manage one planet at top effectiveness.
The game is designed so multiple players can command one army, just to offset the fact that the attention demand would be way to high for one player. Without that, it is just a rush to defeat the AI before it can start nuke-spamming you or hit's you with a giant rock/laser.


FYI, if you want to split your Navy into multiple smaler fleets (like ones for bombardment), nothing stops you from doing just that. The maximum Navy Cap that adds to bombardment damage is 200 (for 100 damage on Full Bombardment). A 200 cap fleet of cheap corvettes can bomb the planet down just as well as the 1000 Cap fleet.
Of course there have been a few indications that they might remove armies from the game, wich might change the balance yet again.

 

[tinculin]

It's a real pain in the butt to press the pause button?

In multiplayer pausing is usually banned.

I assume these changes will also impact more than single player?

 

[gathomas88]

It's a real pain in the butt to press the pause button?

It's certainly not enough to offset the AI's inherent advantage with regard to managing fleet movement. It absolutely wouldn't be enough if you were juggling multiple fleets at once.

 

[Slarkon]

the whole point of pause in games with massive maps like sins, stellaris, supreme commander and planetary annihilation is to put us on par with the AI. use pause as often as you breathe. your reactions times are then as close as they can be to the AI?

 

[Darustet]

It's certainly not enough to offset the AI's inherent advantage with regard to managing fleet movement. It absolutely wouldn't be enough if you were juggling multiple fleets at once.

I'm currently juggling multiple fleets at once against multiple AI fleets using pause button. It's slow but very effective. The pause button gives the player all the time he/she needs, so the deciding factor is the ability to plan ahead and invent strategies, which is something the player is always better at.

Still, because mp is a thing, wars should be able to be won without excessive use of pause button. In mp one of the biggest advantages in player alliances is the increased attention span and pausing every few seconds to counter that would get you kicked out of the game.

 

[Summin Cool]

I'm currently juggling multiple fleets at once against multiple AI fleets using pause button. It's slow but very effective. The pause button gives the player all the time he/she needs, so the deciding factor is the ability to plan ahead and invent strategies, which is something the player is always better at.

Still, because mp is a thing, wars should be able to be won without excessive use of pause button. In mp one of the biggest advantages in player alliances is the increased attention span and pausing every few seconds to counter that would get you kicked out of the game.

In other words, somebody who is better at micro has the advantage.

 

[Fipse]

I'm currently juggling multiple fleets at once against multiple AI fleets using pause button. It's slow but very effective. The pause button gives the player all the time he/she needs, so the deciding factor is the ability to plan ahead and invent strategies, which is something the player is always better at.

The game is already slow enough during the endgame. No need to drag out big wars even more.

 

[The Founder]

In other words, somebody who is better at micro has the advantage.

Micro focus would be a stupid balance direction in a Grand Scale Game. Like Stellaris.

 

[Darustet]

The game is already slow enough during the endgame. No need to drag out big wars even more.

I fully agree. My comment was a counter argument to a claim, which stated that even with pause button, you can't offset the advantage that AI has with managing fleets.

 

[KopiG]

Am I the only one who has zero problems with doomstacks?

 

[Jularbo Kizn]

Slow travel times are indeed a good answer. Unfortunately I think people would still make doomstacks, then complain that they can't defend their territory with one giant doomstack off doing war somewhere. In fact, I think I remember a lot of complaints to that effect on these forums already, back when the AI split up its navy more.

Hell no, fleets already move at slomo speed, in the mid game - late game wars it takes forever to travel around unless you got the unique hyperdrives.

Having it take longer would make it impossible to play multiplayer with any fun since you can't play on Very Fast speed as everyone is doing different things.

I personally like the idea a few people have mentioned which ties max fleet size to the admiral.
There would be a standard fleet limit per system, going over the limit would incur problems. Having an admiral increases this limit, as would being in home territory, or a system with a spaceport.

Adding supply lines would also be a good move, although not necessarily a cure for doomstacks. The system I envision would see the requirement for clear travel to the nearest friendly spaceport. If this chain is broken, the fleet counts as 'out of power' after a certain amount of days, again relating to the size of the fleet. This would would mean small fleets could stay behind enemy lines longer, encouraging the use of small strike forces.

That is how they avoid doom stacks in EU with the supply limit, you can't use the same system in Stellaris but personally I would like fleets to have their own "energy bank" which requires refueling from civilian ships carrying the energy which would allow for players and AI to intercept supply ships and wreck havoc with doomstack fleets as they run out of energy and get a penalty of for example - 70% speed and fire rate.

But then we also need automated behaviors for fleet such as Defend systems (sectors) or defend supply route for fleet (1st task force) and so on. They need to give us more automated behaviors for fleet if we are not going to have doomstacks. There is enough micromanagement as it is.

 

[Slarkon]

Am I the only one who has zero problems with doomstacks?

not the only one Id be happy to keep them but id like to see 20-100K defence stations and much much much slower ship speeds so if you have a doom stack and are at war on one border that if someone on the other side declares against you it should be muinites not seconds to recall a fleet. when in a war you should only ever commit less than 50% of your forces with the rest patrolling other borders

 

[GC13]

Area attack weapons.

Area-attack weapons would be completely irrelevant to fighting doomstacks; if it's actually a good weapon them doomstacks will just equip it themselves and use their superior numbers to wipe out weaker fleets. Remember, the doomstack always has the advantage: if the weapon can only hit a defined area then the doomstack has its DPS more spread out than the more compact fleet, and if it can hit every enemy in the battle then the doomstack has more ships that can equip this weapon and so will still destroy the other fleet first.

 

[Summin Cool]

Micro focus would be a stupid balance direction in a Grand Scale Game. Like Stellaris.

It's a 4x

No seriously

 

[methegrate]

not the only one Id be happy to keep them but id like to see 20-100K defence stations and much much much slower ship speeds so if you have a doom stack and are at war on one border that if someone on the other side declares against you it should be muinites not seconds to recall a fleet. when in a war you should only ever commit less than 50% of your forces with the rest patrolling other borders

I don't mind them, you should totally be able to shock and awe if you want to. Sometimes it's fun! I just don't like that they're the only viable strategy. Especially since this is a war game (at least, as it's currently built), I'd like to be able to get more creative about how to approach the enemy.

 

[Lt Loco]

I don't mind a doomstack, but I'd love to see a system where a defense station could be upgraded beyond a fortress. Something like the development button from EU4 but for a station (that uses materials and influence) so you could get pops onto it or, with enough investment, make it actually a formidable defense, even to doomstacks. This would give small empires an advantage - less volume of space to defend means they could get a much thicker defensive line.

 

[rcasale]

It's a real pain in the butt to press the pause button?

It really is. You're not just pressing a pause button. You have to recognize there is a problem, either from an alert or just watching the map, press pause, figure out how to address, and then back to your previous task. It's a large interruption.

I'm not saying the solution is to keep doom stacks, but there should be more UI elements to help you with this (ideally in real time)