The Stream and the Ship Combat Roles

[Shadow of Babylon]

Since no one seems to have posted an analysis of the stream. After watching the stream and evaluating it, I have some observations on the ship combat roles and ships in general. If you haven't watched it, go to https://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive/v/92028246 and watch 23:30-28:50. That goes over some of the changes with the weapon balancing. This post is broken up into two separate sections. The first is just observing what is there in the stream. (If you found it useful, please mark it as helpful) The second is my thoughts and questions surrounding the changes that we can see were made based on this information. (Agree or disagree as you like)

A couple of summary observations:
Torpedo (TD) slots replace medium ones in a decent number of modules and point defense (PD) slots replace smalls. This results in fewer configuration options for a large majority of the modules shown in the stream.

The total number of utility slots on at least the corvette, the cruiser, and the battleship have been buffed. This should allow for more power, armor, or shields per ship.

The customization ability for the ships and modules shown has went down notably. There are now fewer options on both the corvette and the battleship center. For the corvette this is not a particularly substantial loss as it combined the best of utility and offense. For the battleship center slot that we see, the flexibility has been reduced by two ship modules with only one of them having the ability to equip small weapons. This notably forces it into the defined roles that have been discussed. The cruiser remains approximately the same module wise apart from the TD and PD changes.

Tracking is a new stat that counters evasion. It cannot be known for certain, but based on the comments at minute 25 it seems that this is based on weapon size/type rather than specific weapons.

Thoughts and Questions:
I like the tracking. Very nice way to accomplish roles and balance out some serious game issues with the missiles and torpedo weapons.

I also like the a few of the range tweaks that I saw. In conjunction with some of the formation stuff I think this should deal with some of the range issues that the game currently faces now.

Nice buffs to handle the power issues and interesting choice on the Aux slots. I'm really glad to see the power issues dealt with. The aux slots are certainly an interesting choice and I think I'm going to end up liking that.

My biggest question is, can tracking be modded for individual weapons or would I have to make categorical changes to all of the slot sizes? I.e. is it possible to control the tracking value for each weapon, large, medium, or small, of a given weapon tier.

Did the play-testing indicate the need for so strongly forcing the ship designs or does it boil down to more of an executive design decision? Removing modules AND forced PD and TD as slot types seems like it really cramps ship design. I ask this as my biggest reservation since the comments on ship balancing have been a concern that the system would feel too much like it was forcing me to design specific ships. After watching the stream, that feeling has gotten substantially worse. The removal of the central battleship modules already felt majorly arbitrary when compared to past naval history (See a history of US battleship weapons). Combine that with the forcible elimination of numerous designs by the slot type changes for PD and TD, and it just feels very limiting. I understand this is a design choice as a fellow developer, but I would really like to better understand the reasoning.

On a completely un-related note, why not allow stacking of strategic resources? Maybe with noticeable diminishing returns to deal with balance. Were they made more rare as part of the change? Edit: see later post on strategic resources. This was dealt with in a more recent stream.

 

[Bob_the_Insane]

The tracking value for weapons countering the evasion value of ships is a great idea and the best part of this change to ships in my opinion . IIRC they mention Corvettes have a base evasion of like 80% as a base so it is going to be highly ineffective to try targeting them with heavy weapons and torpedoes which have a tracking value of zero.

I do wonder if corvettes are going to be extremely vulnerable to missiles if they (missiles) have a high tracking value and corvettes can't mount PD any more...

 

[Red Death]

The tracking value for weapons countering the evasion value of ships is a great idea and the best part of this change to ships in my opinion . IIRC they mention Corvettes have a base evasion of like 80% as a base so it is going to be highly ineffective to try targeting them with heavy weapons and torpedoes which have a tracking value of zero.

I do wonder if corvettes are going to be extremely vulnerable to missiles if they (missiles) have a high tracking value and corvettes can't mount PD any more...

That would likely still depend on the size of those missiles, since larger weapons have lower tracking. Missiles will probably be more effective at hitting corvettes than other weapons of the same size though. Small missiles will probably then be very effective indeed at hitting corvettes, but other weapons will probably deal more damage.

 

[Kiwibaum]

I am very exited for the changes. It makes the ship types feel more different and hopefully forces you to be more reactive to what your enemy has. The only problem with that is that you first have to find out about what the enemy which usually happens to late but that is another topic.

Tracking seems to me strange it does exactly what accuracy was supposed to do, counter evasion. I think it is strange that they added an additional stat instead of trying to fix accuracy. Makes the system just more complicated in an, in my opinion, unnecessary way.

I hope that the weapons also get reworked in a way that there isn't the best weapon and you have more of a choice. At the moment I usually just use tachion lance in single player since it has the most range and dps and kills most things before they get in range. Not sure if the same is true for multiplayer since AI is really stupid in countering this. (I Destroyed about 200k fleets of unbidden without losses)

 

[Bob_the_Insane]

I am not sure how accurate the Stellaris Wiki is but it shows the attack is carried out as a single roll against a percentages based on (Accuracy-Evasion)/Accuracy. So I guess this change simply adds in that tracking value so we get (Accuracy-(Evasion-Tracking)/Accuracy.

Interesting thing from those is that no matter the accuracy of a weapon, against a 0 evasion target it would hit 100% of the time.

Looking at a specific example (assuming nothing else changes) like a corvette being fired on by a small laser. Currently at the base level a corvette has 5 evasion (from the base level thrusters) so for a small red laser with 90 accuracy the to hit chance is (90-5)/90 = 94% (roughly). With this change i am guessing a corvette has a base evasion of 65+5 for basic thrusters, so 70. Also assuming all small lasers have the same tracking score of 60 we see (90-(65-60)/90 = 94%.. the same... interesting...

However previously if a torpedo was fired at the corvette and not intercepted by PD then it hit 100% of the time, now it is (90-(65-0)/90 = 28% to hit chance. And that is a basic corvette. In the stream they had a combat computer and level 4 thrusters giving an evasion of 80 which turns into an 11% hit chance with a torpedo (or any weapon with high accuracy and zero tracking).

See http://www.stellariswiki.com/Space_warfare

I was wrong in my numbers in the previous post, in that video the corvette has a base evasion of 65% and it goes up to 80% based on the upgraded thrusters and combat computer. On a side note it appears the thrusters and combat computer evasion bonuses has been nerfed, to minimize the max evasion of battleships maybe?

 

[Shadow of Babylon]

The new stream at https://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive/v/93306322 addresses the strategic resource that concerned me, namely betharian stone. The solution is quite nice!