Also surprising how the empire you declare war on can make so much more demands than i can. Yesterday fought a war for 3 planets. The federation i fought had humiliate and cede 9 planets on me as war demand.
Funny that you should say that. After the Battle of White Mountain in the European Thirty Years' War the Palatinate was conquered by the Catholic imperial-Spanish troops, only being restored at the end of the war. Warscore simulates that when large alliances are at war the loss of a small portion, or even one of members, will not necessarily force capitulation because they have untouched resources to fall back on. Whether that makes for a fun game or not is moot, but it is realistic that a large alliance will not quit after a couple of setbacks.
add ticking warscore for occupying wargoals. add some timer like the 5 year rule in eu4 whereby if you full occupy someone for 5 years you get 100% warscore on them.
either or both of those will solve the problem of allies that cant actually participate in the war or in any way stop you from taking your wargoals stalemating a war.
I disagree with this extremely strongly. CK2's war goals system is much, much better for Stellaris than EUIV's, and in fact the Stellaris system needs to become much more like CK2's.Stellaris' mechanics seem to have been based more on CK2, which I think was a mistake because this is not a game about feudal lords scheming to take a duchy from a rival house they have been at odds with for three hundred years. I think Stellaris would benefit from more flexible, detailed, comprehensive peace negotiations where the attacker could dictate conditions beyond the scope of the war's declared goal. In addition, I think it would benefit from reducing the war score needed to take planets as time goes on with technologies that reduce the warscore costs. In the beginning of the game, in a war between two empires with a total of five systems each, it makes sense that you would need to occupy all of their worlds to conquer two planets considering that two planets is a huge deal for them. What doesn't make sense is that you have to wage a 50 year crusade and occupy dozens of worlds to take a random fringe colony later on. I don't think the Mrrhunn Interstellar Directorate is going to wish to lose decades of production and research for the sake of holding onto a 10-tile border planet with one pop on it, for example.
tl;dr: Warscore and peacemaking in Stellaris should be more like in EU IV and less like CK2. I love this game though and I think the devs will at least look into reducing the costs soon enough.
I disagree with this extremely strongly. CK2's war goals system is much, much better for Stellaris than EUIV's, and in fact the Stellaris system needs to become much more like CK2's.
In CK2 you have a whole pre-war minigame (which actually is less of a minigame than it is the main point of the game because it takes so much more time and skill than the wars themselves) in that you have to carefully nurture your war goals in the form of human capital. Finding princesses, bribing their fathers into agreeing marriage, crossing your fingers for a son, maybe accepting a little cuckoldry in the name of the greater good, raising him for good traits, assassinating the rulers of the target country until there's a weak title holder, shoring up your own alliances, declaring war for the kingdom, winning the war, winning the 5 subsequent civil wars that try to displace the usurper, ensuring the inheritance laws function correctly, and finally, dying at the right time so the son inherits the original kingdom.
The biggest issue is with defensive pacts at the other end of the galaxy as others have mentioned. I think those just shouldn't be allowed as in practice the ally will often not have the ability to affect the war at all.
Excellent posts from you both on the merits of the CK2 vs EU4 systems. Stellaris is, rightly pointed out, kinda stuck in the middle. It has the worst of both systems but with none of the good that comes along with them, both in the system itself and in the context that sets the stage for war. So, yeah, it has a long way to go IMHO.
Warscore should be based on something (size of military, empire, w/e) not just a flat random number