Transports: why in K'reel's name are they free?

[Cordane]

One of the core problems I have with the armies system in Stellaris is that it treats armies as though their primary means of attacking each other is with sticks and stones, not technologically powerful personal weapons and armor, never mind atmospheric and surface armed/armored vehicles. An assault army might not need to be hundreds of thousands of beings large (perhaps only tens of thousands), but will largely consist of the vehicles and equipment it will use planetside, the shuttlecraft and escorts necessary to get them to the planet, and the transports necessary to get all of those to the star system. Defensive armies would trade all the shuttles and transports for fortifications and little to no upkeep.

Going through the existing army types, I would look for the following changes:

• Slave armies should have defensive versions (probably primarily), with assault versions being more expensive (upkeep) in the field, as overseers would have to accompany them and have control over the major transport means. Their primary advantages are in speed of recruitment and disconnection from consequences for the ruling species.
• Clone armies might combine the advantages of slave armies with the capabilities of standard armies, but would be more expensive to produce and possibly in upkeep, as the operational life of the clones might not be as long as a well-supported organic.
• Psionic "armies" (multiples of 10K beings) only make sense if very substantial portions of a species are psionic (fraction of number of Pops available as number of psionic armies, with the remainder available as assault armies).
• Xenomorph armies might have less infrastructure requirements, but would still need "handlers" on site to keep them under control and might not necessarily be that much more capable than an equal operational mass/volume of weapons and vehicles.
• Some of the other army types get big stats for their individual size without any real consideration for how that would limit their numbers in an army unit. Similar to the xenomorphs, a technologically advanced unit should be more comparable to these "big individual" armies.

 

[Exasperation]

Actually... when I think about it your point about logistics might be the answer to capping armies and it can even work for all 3 main empire types. Basically supply and manpower all rolled in to a single ambiguous admin stat (which is par for the course for stellaris lol) - Deployment Capacity "DC"

Or even some sort of "Administrative Capacity"?

 

[Katsue]

One of the core problems I have with the armies system in Stellaris is that it treats armies as though their primary means of attacking each other is with sticks and stones, not technologically powerful personal weapons and armor, never mind atmospheric and surface armed/armored vehicles.

Infantry is arguably more powerful relative to armour than it was 70 years ago. I don't think it's necessarily the case that sci-fi warfare would be a war of small numbers of highly mobile troops. An actual planetary occupation would presumably require 10s if not 100s of millions of troops.

 

[OnyxAbussos]

Every once in a while we propose alloy based troop carriers that dont land on the planet, combined with troops made of food or something, and point out how much strategic depth and tactical complexity and planning it would add. And the players throw an absolute shit fit because it would interfere with their alloy spam-rush play style. So it never happens.

 

[CrazyJ]

Every once in a while we propose alloy based troop carriers that dont land on the planet, combined with troops made of food or something, and point out how much strategic depth and tactical complexity and planning it would add. And the players throw an absolute shit fit because it would interfere with their alloy spam-rush play style. So it never happens.

i wasn't even suggesting anything that complex, just a bit of alloy cost so that the loss of an army isn't completely meaningless by endgame. i mean any cost is trivial by endgame, but minerals are especially so. alloys are the only resource you legitimately care about by the endgame, so an alloy cost would at least help mitigate spam

 

[OnyxAbussos]

i wasn't even suggesting anything that complex, just a bit of alloy cost so that the loss of an army isn't completely meaningless by endgame. i mean any cost is trivial by endgame, but minerals are especially so. alloys are the only resource you legitimately care about by the endgame, so an alloy cost would at least help mitigate spam

Carry on then. As you were.

 

[Cordane]

Infantry is arguably more powerful relative to armour than it was 70 years ago. I don't think it's necessarily the case that sci-fi warfare would be a war of small numbers of highly mobile troops. An actual planetary occupation would presumably require 10s if not 100s of millions of troops.

Probably not 100s of millions - maybe 100M tops when compared to a 10B human-analogue population (1 in 100). If paramilitary equipment (not parallel to that of an army, but 1+ orders of magnitude behind) is available in large measures to the target population, then perhaps 100s of millions, but that's assuming a dense population. A planet with a smaller population would require a proportionally smaller occupying force.

The concern, however, is in determining how many "assault armies" would be equivalent to a force of even 100M front-line personnel, and how that subset would travel. If the goal is to break down that 100M into, say 40 units, then each would be 2.5M planetside personnel plus shuttle and transport crews. In the Star Wars SFU, a classic Imperial Star Destroyer (I would put this in at least the same Stellaris class as a Cruiser, probably a Battleship) is approximately 1 km in length and has a total complement of well over 45,000 (only 9,700 Stormtroopers). If instead 20% of that is ship's crew, another 20% in landing and recovery (including escorts), and the remaining 60% as planetary personnel, that's around 27K per ship - maybe use 25K for rough calculations.

If an army of 2.5M is being carried to an enemy planet, you would need either a single ship 100x the volume of a Star Destroyer or several ships adding up to a similar operational volume. That would be a sizeable fraction of the cost for 100 Stellaris Cruisers, by my measure. Then bring a fleet 40x that big and expensive in order to have even a 100M occupying force. That doesn't count the expected casualties during the invasion or any expectation of loss in transit.

If that seems like a ridiculous cost, it is - Stellaris does a horrible job in estimating the costs for virtually everything if it were viewed realistically, and even the act of abstracting it and balancing it around game utility is still seriously out of whack. I don't know how far you would want to move the needle from "laughably undershot cost" to "frighteningly accurate cost", but I would say a little bit of Alloys per army would be a pretty small shift in that direction.

 

[InvisibleBison]

In the Star Wars SFU, a classic Imperial Star Destroyer (I would put this in at least the same Stellaris class as a Cruiser, probably a Battleship)

If your assumptions result in the game not making sense, the problem is with your assumptions, not the game.

In the Star Wars SFU, a classic Imperial Star Destroyer (I would put this in at least the same Stellaris class as a Cruiser, probably a Battleship) is approximately 1 km in length and has a total complement of well over 45,000 (only 9,700 Stormtroopers). If instead 20% of that is ship's crew, another 20% in landing and recovery (including escorts), and the remaining 60% as planetary personnel, that's around 27K per ship - maybe use 25K for rough calculations.

Also, this is a bad analogy, because an ISD is full of war-fighting hardware- turbolasers, TIE fighter bays, shield generators, advanced sensor equipment, communication gear, spare parts for all of the above, etc - which a pure troop transport would lack. Thus, a pure troop transport the size of an ISD would be able to fit a lot more people than an ISD.

 

[Kahldris]

Im going to be honest with you, this is the last thing on the list of what stellaris needs lol.

 

[Cordane]

If your assumptions result in the game not making sense, the problem is with your assumptions, not the game.

Please grace us with your assumptions that put all this in perfect clarity - otherwise instead please leave the baseless snark to the side.

Also, this is a bad analogy, because an ISD is full of war-fighting hardware- turbolasers, TIE fighter bays, shield generators, advanced sensor equipment, communication gear, spare parts for all of the above, etc - which a pure troop transport would lack. Thus, a pure troop transport the size of an ISD would be able to fit a lot more people than an ISD.

• The numbers that you quoted from me above very clearly bump the embarked troops numbers up by a factor of > 2.5x. If you want to nitpick this point as being too small, make a suggestion, don't just say it's wrong.
• TIE Fighter bays would qualify among the escort craft I indicated.
• Per Stellaris Wiki: "Transport ships are unarmed but automatically upgraded with the latest defense components." That would include shields and armor, just not as much.
• Sensors would almost certainly be a very small percentage of the usable volume, and reducing it to a transport's needs wouldn't save any significant percentage of the hull for more troops.
• Coordinating a planetary assault would actually need more robust communications systems than that on an ISD.
• Transports would also need the same spares for general and combat operations as the pure warships.

Also, an ISD only carries 8 Lambda shuttles, each capable of carrying either/both 20 passengers or 80 metric tons of cargo, compared to 9,700 Stormtroopers. Also I don't see what they're saying transports the 20 AT-ATs or 30 AT-STs. Combat insertion would require more than 1/60th of the troops to come down at a time. THAT might be where all the operational volume gets used up.

 

[Pancakelord]

IDK about the rest of that wookiepedia suff, but PDX seem pretty adamant about avoiding hard numbers for pops and armies. So any army rework (if we ever get one) will definitely stick to ambiguous "army" units (maybe armies might get renamed to "battalions" with the term "army" being re-branded as the new ground-equivalent of "fleets" (much like ships make up a feet, battalions would make up an army, as part of an Army manager system).

But there are a few interesting points here:

Going through the existing army types, I would look for the following changes:

• Slave armies should have defensive versions (probably primarily), with assault versions being more expensive (upkeep) in the field, as overseers would have to accompany them and have control over the major transport means. Their primary advantages are in speed of recruitment and disconnection from consequences for the ruling species.
• Clone armies might combine the advantages of slave armies with the capabilities of standard armies, but would be more expensive to produce and possibly in upkeep, as the operational life of the clones might not be as long as a well-supported organic.
• Psionic "armies" (multiples of 10K beings) only make sense if very substantial portions of a species are psionic (fraction of number of Pops available as number of psionic armies, with the remainder available as assault armies).
• Xenomorph armies might have less infrastructure requirements, but would still need "handlers" on site to keep them under control and might not necessarily be that much more capable than an equal operational mass/volume of weapons and vehicles.
• Some of the other army types get big stats for their individual size without any real consideration for how that would limit their numbers in an army unit. Similar to the xenomorphs, a technologically advanced unit should be more comparable to these "big individual" armies.

Bearing in mind that PDX seem pretty keen to avoid numbers at all costs, how would you actually enact those differences, mechanically to make different armies stand out?

Some of them are already baked in to the flavour texts, at least, case in point: Neural Implants (required tech to unlock slave armies & slave processing facilities) has the following technology text:

Cognition is little but the processing of sensory input. It can be altered. Free will is nothing more than a sensory illusion.

More than likely, the slave armies we use in the game are less like, say, soviet penal battalions, requiring commissars and overseers, and more like ... mostly autonomous servitors in Warhammer 40k.
Slave armies would to walk a fine line between nerve stapled (which lacks both free will and self-preservation instincts - based on that trait's flavour text, and self-preservation is pretty important for a soldier) and chemical coercion, to lower their inhibitions. Judging by the above quote and the existence of a slave processing facility - I (personally) assume it to mean that all slave-soldiers walk around with

1. A bomb embedded in their brain/neck (or their nearest species equivalent) &
2. A suite of chemical implants and audio/vision processing computers that suppress their free will or otherwise bias their senses into making them accept their master's view of reality.

In other words, slave armies probably require no actual oversight at all. Maybe just a server on the troop transport that can check whose implant has failed or is acting up, then set off the associated bomb collar - Battle Royale style (I mean the OG BR film not the sensitised crap played online these days) - properly designed anti-tamper electronics could even do this autonomously without the need for excessive remote oversight, beyond a typical military network, too. Straying too far from your Objective's coordinates? BOOM. Your gun camera hasn't recorded enough xeno kills in the last solar-cycle to meet your "living quota"? BOOM Youre a Megacorp combat slave and haven't bought enough munitions lately? BOOM ... etc.

Maybe slave armies should take a constant minor attrition in battle, even if in reserves, to reflect excessive bomb collar use.​

But, slave armies literally die by the dozens already, so it wouldn't make much difference *shrug*.​

 

[InvisibleBison]

Please grace us with your assumptions that put all this in perfect clarity - otherwise instead please leave the baseless snark to the side.

Assume that the game doesn't contradict itself. Assume that if your assumption about what a game element represents yields an absurd result, then your assumption is wrong and the game element represents something else.

In this specific instance, your assumptions are

1. Transports are the size of an ISD
2. An assault army represents 2.5 million people
3. An ISD-sized transport can carry 25,000 passengers

Since these three assumptions result in the conclusion that the game is incorrectly depicting how many transports an assault army needs, at least one of them must be wrong.

 

[Katsue]

One way to really restrict army spam would be to tie Army numbers to pop jobs - e.g. you can have X Assault Armies per Soldier job, X Clone Armies per Medical Worker job, X Psionic Armies per Telepath, and so on. Xenomorphs and Gene Warriors could perhaps be tied to new planetary unique buildings.

 

[Lykus Cerebros]

Every once in a while we propose alloy based troop carriers that dont land on the planet, combined with troops made of food or something, and point out how much strategic depth and tactical complexity and planning it would add. And the players throw an absolute shit fit because it would interfere with their alloy spam-rush play style. So it never happens.

Out of interest so you mean you pay for the transport in alloys and it can the carry let's say around 10 armies that you pay for with food instead of minerals.

 

[OnyxAbussos]

Out of interest so you mean you pay for the transport in alloys and it can the carry let's say around 10 armies that you pay for with food instead of minerals.

Or whatever ratio. Maybe its 1:10 or 1:1 or 1:"Over 9000."

But yes. And maybe for organics, and minerals for machines and lithoids, or whatever. But yeah. Troop requires transport to move from one planet to another.

 

[Ixal]

Remember MoO (Or HoI if you want) which had abstracted freighters not represented on the screen, but were used to ship around food and population? Stellaris could use that....

 

[mammonmachine]

Troop transports should work roughly the same way as Colony Ships - they are built from shipyards, consume multiple resources including alloys, and species can be selected on construction. There will be one transport model per army type (i.e. assault, clone, xenomorph etc). Number of armies per species will be limited as before, and in addition transport fleets should be buildable from the Fleet Manager to lessen the present micro.

 

[Cordane]

Assume that the game doesn't contradict itself. Assume that if your assumption about what a game element represents yields an absurd result, then your assumption is wrong and the game element represents something else.

In this specific instance, your assumptions are

1. Transports are the size of an ISD
2. An assault army represents 2.5 million people
3. An ISD-sized transport can carry 25,000 passengers

Since these three assumptions result in the conclusion that the game is incorrectly depicting how many transports an assault army needs, at least one of them must be wrong.

"Do the numbers that you provided match up to the numbers identified in Stellaris?"
"No, because Stellaris doesn't actually specify any numbers."
"Then you failed to match their numbers - you're wrong."

My assumptions were:

1. Transports are the size they need to be to carry what needs to be moved. I indicated the ISD as a frame of reference, specifically in order to point out that an assault army of 2.5M troops would need to be transported in either a single vessel 100x as large as an ISD in volume/mass or multiple ships in total matching that volume/mass.
2. You actually didn't distort this one - I indicated that, if a force of 100M troops was split into 40 units, each would be 2.5M troops. /math
3. "Passengers" would seem to indicate the troops would each be carrying a service weapon and a light carry-on bag. A planetary assault army's transport requirements would actually have the troopers themselves be a small part of the carrying weight. Shuttles, escorts, planetary vehicles, gear, supplies, base structures, etc., would all take up many multiples of the volume and mass of the troops themselves. If all a transport the size of an ISD had to do was carry the troops 747-style to planet to be invaded, sure, you could fit bunches more, but with no way to get down to the planet (note that Stellaris ships can't land on planets or hover a few thousand feet in the air like an ISD) or do anything other than walk when they get there.

I'm not going to spend multiple screens explaining to you all of the details that would have to be considered in order to design a military vessel used in planetary invasions. I'm by no means any expert on the subject, but I've at least spent some time researching RL military units and equipment, enough to know I'm probably under-selling the transport requirements, which is why I allowed for a slightly greater amount of troops than I originally specified on the ISD reference.

Oh, and Stellaris absolutely, all over the place contradicts itself - I have no doubt that the choices made by the dev team were done primarily to have something manageable at a game level, and a very low priority was given to feasibility in a realistic scenario. That I'm pointing out what would be required in a realistic scenario and trying to connect to some touch points within the game does not mean that Stellaris' abstract and largely arbitrary system suddenly becomes the foundation that my suggestions fail to rest steadily on - Stellaris in its present form isn't capable of holding up to realism, but realism isn't the weak component here. Not that Stellaris absolutely has to be something more than it is - a GAME - but an all-perfect standard against which all else should be measured and found wanting, it is not.

 

[Katsue]

I think it is relevant to the debate on what armies should cost that Powered Exoskeletons is a tier 1 technology that can be presumed to be possessed by all non-Primitive combatants in just about any planetary invasion that is likely to happen in-game. Infantry in-game should arguably cost alloys because of the nature of their personal combat equipment, regardless of planetary or interplanetary transport vehicles, or any armour, artillery or air support that are attached to armies.