Warscore seems to have gotten a lot worse

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stavern

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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.
 

Azhcristokos

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I am not opposed to the warscore mechanic because it features in every Paradox game I have played and is different than the usual "conquer everything in two years" genocidal wars of most 4X games. I like the CBs because you can do more interesting things than just take planets or money.

The problem is that the current system is too much like CK2's implementation rather than EU IV's. What I mean is this:

In EU IV, the peace screen is a joy because you get to go through and take provinces, liberate countries and vassals, break alliances, force unfavorable treaties, force vassalize and force convert religions, etc. You have a LOT of options as to how you wish to end the war and you are not usually restricted* to just taking what you declared for like you are in CK2, but rather some concessions are easier or more/less costly to secure than others in terms of aggressive expansion and province warscore cost. In addition, warscore is less of an issue because EU IV offers various options (technology and idea groups) that lessen the cost to take provinces over time. The primary detriments to expansion are soft modifiers rather than outright hard caps.

CK2 has a very, very restricted CB system because wars for territory are fought over titles because of the game's mechanics. However, it is much easier to win the wars because the game relies on decisive battles; you can usually get to 100% warscore by wiping out their armies, and taking the war target and maybe a few more counties to boot. I have never seen a situation in which I had to occupy every single province in a large empire when I wanted to lift a single duchy off of them, for example.

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.

Edit*: I am aware that some CBs bar certain peace conditions though.
 
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Almond_Brown

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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.

I would agree with this stance but with a Caveat. No Empire can have a Defensive Pact with another race unless they are adjacent to said Race. Then if said Race does get an adjacency Pact, they may add another to the Pact, via adjacency, but not the starting Empire, who ends up with 2 but is not allowed to go across the galaxy giving out free D Pacts like Halloween candy.

That way, if any race closes their Borders, and a D Pact setup had them in the middle of a D Pact Group, that D Pact Group is dissolved and will have to be remade, but it also has to eat the same rule as other such deals, (the 10 year minimum) ;)
 
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Saviour of Galaxy

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Problem is that what works in EU series and do not ends with snowballing is becouse the game posses things that prevent snowballing (the things that Stellaris lacks). It is:
1. Stability (kind of "global" happiness). Lose too much and civil war or initially powerfull rebels will wreck your state
2. Attrition that prevents overgrown doomstacks - your armies dies if they are too big and the sieged province is too "poor". It makes total victory time consuming.
3. Asimetric start - Even if you beat one empire and take all it ground (if game even allow you, in many cases you cant) there is most likely still a powerfull empire somewhere on a map that was spawn on the start. Its not the case with Stellaris. Fallen Empires do not compete before awakening, so you can pretty much dominate the map if there is no restrictions with conquering planets.
 
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sllohi

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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.

This is good.
I'd run 2+ scores at the same time, 1 for the federation, 1 for the empire you are attacking, (maybe more for def pacts not sure tho).
So I'd count the empire score as if it was a single empire without allies, but at 100% a timer runs down kinda. The more % the quicker. After a set time the population just doesn't want the war anymore and just takes the lesser evil and accepts the occupation.

Federation runs outside of that.
- if the time ran out and the attacked empire lost the fed gets a war score malus, and the chances to be able to make peace should be higher (no reason to fight if the ones you are fighting for, already gave up).
- If you want planets from more then one empire, you pretty much for every empire you want planets from a separate score.
- counting the distance between the empires to each other and how likely it is to win a war in comparison. If you just killed the whole fleet of all federation members, there's no way they win the war if you barely lost anything. Not sure how to fix it best, but maybe calculate the build time and resource output/savings and it should be possible to estimate how it will be going. Based on that I would raise or lower the war score points you get for killing the fleets.
So all fleets dead and 10-20 years rebuild time to match the enemy = war score 100%. Or some think like that.
 
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Sarmatian

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A principle applied in Vicky 2 might work, where if you attack someone who was guaranteed, you can make separate peace with him, but the other country was still in war with you and automatically got a "liberate nation" war goal.

So basically, if we go:

Case 1) - where you are much stronger, you'd get a white peace after some time

Case 2) - if you actually get beaten by the ally of the defeated country, you have to return/liberate what you got.

With some tweaking, it might work.
 
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JWSIII

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I would agree thathat I feel that the ability to take planets in war is very low, especially on large system games; I killed a FE about 60 ywlears ago in my game, and am 4-6 deep in relevant repeat able techs, but still haven't won as every war, completely lopsided, still takes a few years for every three planets, or 2 if one is a capital

Overall, still enjoying the heck out of the game though; but I prefer the expansion phase of most games because of the above
 

CuddlyKitten

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I think ticking war score for holding the wargoals would go a loooooooooooooooong way in fixing this.

Essentially, if you hold a goal you get 0,1 warscore per month up to cost of the wargoal.
So if you want to take 3 planets from a minor empire you get 0,3 x 12 = 3,6 warscore per year.

It doesn't end the war instantly and you probably have to stomp on some faces in order to get the war over quicker but it would speed up the process significantly.
 
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stlemur

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Maybe tradeoff to prevent steamrollering is making the wars less expensive while making the peaces & occupations more expensive -- I hardly ever get rebellions in conquered territory. Think about what kind of infrastructure you'd need to actually occupy a planet of several billion people who didn't want to be, when you have to wait months for a relief ship to come in on sublight from the edge of the system.
 
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Sidereus

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I've uninstalled the game right now, but I'm pretty sure if you hover over the "War goals" part of the war negotiation screen, it mentions ticking war score. I noticed it was always zero for me, though. Is this known to be broken or was it removed on purpose?
 
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Druesling

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Planets that are your wargoal and have deeply unhappy pops should have a discount, because you could convince the unhappy pops to work with the occupation.

Planets that have only 1 or 2 tiles worked should have a discount, because it's a new colony and when you succeed to occupy it, the 300.000-3 Million pops that live there would have no option to resist.

Planets that have your species on it should have a discount like the unhappy ones, planets with races that aren't the owners founder race but ethicly or biologically nearer to your race should have a discount too.

Original homeworlds on the other hand should be very expensive.

I don't know how it's in detail done now, but I guess it's got something to do with the number of pops on the planet. But I think ethic, race, happyness and habitibility should matter too.


What is missing for me is also the ability to trade rights to colonize certain planets. Let's say I have arctic preference and a 25 tropical world in my realm, and the blorg have a 24 tile mineral rich arctic world in their commonality. We should be able to trade those worlds even without them being colonized, and we should be able to fight for the right to colonize those, when they lie in the proximity of the border. Maybe with an influence cost? I don't know, something like that.
 
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Oscot

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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.

The thing in CK2 is that you can declare wars that swallow a whole enemy empire in one gulp, but you can't declare those huge wars trivially.

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.

All that is both extremely fun, AND solves the problem that everyone complains about in Stellaris - namely that there's nothing to do diplomacy-wise and the game is nothing but war.

If Stellaris had CK2-style "Very convoluted, context-specific, but also very powerful CBs", rather than its current "You can DoW whenever you want but all the wars are boring, identical, and pointless because you can only take 2 planets", I think it would massively improve the situation for everyone.

Obviously you couldn't have "Marry ye princess" as the route for getting a huge CB in Stellaris, but you could do something appropriately sci-fi.
Maybe if you're a democracy, your task has to be to get some pops of the enemy empire's original species (let's say the Vulcans of the Vulcan Science Council), let them spread across your worlds, and once the number of Vulcan pops under your control exceeds a certain proportion of the Vulcan pops under the Science Council's control, you get a "We are the legitimate representative of the Vulcan People" CB and you can swallow the Science Council in one bite. That sorta jazz.
 
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Azhcristokos

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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.

First off, thank you for being respectful in your disagreement. Too often people here seem to invoke the Holy War CB when people disagree with them on the direction the game should take. I would also like to preface my post by saying that CK2 is my favorite game ever and I love Stellaris.

You are correct in that you can declare empire-absorbing claim wars or swallow kingdoms with the Great Holy War CBs. You hit the nail on the head with the conclusion that the pre-war minigame is not a minigame, but rather the meat of CK2, at least with Christian countries in Europe; pagans focus mostly on rampaging across Christendom, in my experience. However, that point serves to highlight the extreme fundamental differences between the nature of CK2 and Stellaris and how war works. In CK2, during peacetime, particularly after wars and succession, you have a lotttt of stuff to take care of, including but not limited to the following:

1) Assigning counties, creating or distributing newly-acquired duchy and kingdom titles, and organizing vassals into their proper hierarchies.
2) Pruning the dynastic tree of useless heirs, dangerous rivals, or sending away unwanted tenth sons.
3) Dealing with factions through blackmail, murder, imprisonment, excommunication, and diplomacy.
4) Securing vassal support to change laws and strengthen central authority.
5) Converting conquered provinces.
6) Raising heirs.
7) Securing inheritances with strategic marriages followed by more strategic..."accidents."
8) Weakening vassals by dividing their territory through marriages, revocations, murders, and imprisonment.
9) Averting five civil wars or, failing that, putting them down without mercy.
10) DLC stuff like pagan reformation, becoming caliph, restoring the Zoroastrian priesthood, etc.

In Stellaris, peacetime is much more reflective of 4X games like Galactic Civilizations in that we occupy ourselves with constructing buildings and fleets. Internal politics are largely absent besides managing - or, if you are fanatic individualist, ignoring - ethics. Factions can be suppressed with the touch of a button and you run no risk of losing control of the empire due to civil war; I have never even had a planet rebel. Diplomacy is also skeletal. Simply put, there isn't really any human (or xeno) capital to use. The extremely specific war goals of CK2, and the three options of surrender/win/white peace, only work because holding together an empire in CK2 is, as you rightly pointed out, about manipulating human capital. War is about more than just battles. Stellaris lacks all of this at the moment, but has the potential for it.

I agree with you about the potential for deeper, more interesting gameplay because I think that the ideas you put forth would definitely be viable IF Stellaris had more in the way of internal politics and empire management. However, this relies on the hope, one I share, that the devs take the game in a direction towards grand strategy and away from being purely war-based 4X gameplay. If they do not move towards that noble goal, the least they could do is make ending wars more interesting and reducing the ridiculous warscore costs.

tl;dr: I still think that EU IV-esque peace deals would work better with the game as it stands now because Stellaris is much more similar to the invisible omnipresent guiding force gameplay of EU IV and 4X games like GalCivs. However, I would very much love to see the game embrace grand strategy and internal politics more, as this would, for me, make the game deeper and also make it stand out more from other space empire games.
 
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Mezmorki

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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.

I feel like they need to pick a direction more strongly for Stellaris. It could go more towards a traditional 4X, and lean more on a EU4 style system, or go more grand strategy heavy and lean on CK2 style systems. I actually think the last few patches have moved the game MORE towards being a typical 4X game, despite feeling that the community wants it to go in the other direction.
 
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nathelbiya

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I have less of a problem with the warscore cost of for example "cede planet" and more with the painful way in which to actually gain warscore.

Against single small empires it isn't that bad as conquering a planet will usually be nearly enough to pay the warscore cost. If you blow up their fleet as well, the fleet difference modifier will pay for the "shot war" modifier.

Destroying the whole of the enemies fleet gives way too little warscore, I think. In my current game I destroyed the 75k fleet of the FE netting me 5 points warscore. Blockading some remote planet already gives 7.5 warscore as comparison. This doesn't fit when thinking about how both these things affect the ability to actually fight in the war.

It goes completely crazy when there are multiple defenders though. In my experience, occupying planets only gives 5 points in that situation. Meaning blockading gives a bigger score than occupying. So best strategy here seems to be: Destroy enemy fleet, then split up your fleet and blockade as many planets as possible and quickly peace out.

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.
 
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EnochDagor

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I'm torn on this. I do not like the mechanic of warscore with defensive/guarantee/federation stuff. Seems that I have to inflict more carnage than necessary to get what I want. I'm all for carnage but seems excessive... like the makers of the game don't like war or something (in real life).

I can see a fix in one of the following options:

1) Empires smaller than me (using whatever ruler you want) -- should have a lower warscore value per planet than I. I know this promotes steam rolling but... it is what it is. Don't fight the natural order of things.

2) To influence the AI from making long distance pacts --- include a higher Influence penalty for pacts made based on distance of borders (there's a calculation for this somewhere already called Border Friction). This would cause the AI to not pick long distance pacts but instead prefer closer ranged pacts. This penalty could be reduced by upgraded FTL tech.

3) Incorporate a Siege attribute for the AI. Basically, if I conquer all of the planets of an AI --- the AI begins to generate this Siege score. Starvation will increase it quicker. Pacifist will generate it quicker. Etc... basically it is a score that says "Alright, you win. You kicked our butts and we concede." At which point, they will offer to the player a peace offering. This would directly tie in to the system like the current negotiate peace system. In these cases, the Warscore is considered but is not a limiter of what the AI may propose. So, if I attack an AI with 3 planets who has a pact with a much larger empire, that larger empire has a time element to come to the rescue of the AI before its Siege score gets the better of them and they give in. When the AI gives in, the defensive pact/guarantee/federation status should be re-evaluated... since someone did not uphold their end of the bargain. The other AI could then use its own rules of superiority to determine whether it wants to stay in the war with the player or not.

Just throwing thoughts around. But this is one of the most annoying things about warscore with regards to defensive pacts. It is unrealistic and only slows things down. Especially when the AI seems to get in these permanent pacts. At that point, you just have to build up bigger than them so you can destroy everything... but then, why do I only get a few planets when I conquered your entire federation and laid waste to every planet you own (just to get warscore)? *scratches head*
 

Almond_Brown

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Not to sound sour or anything, things change, I get that, but if the D-Pact issue is not reduced in the next Patch to a level that can be somewhat tolerated, I will be rolling back hard.

The D-Pact situation has totally soured my enjoyment of Stellaris, when all the piss-ant empires can hide behind the skirts of those Protective Mothers, with their Superior Fleets and Techs from the games outset, that I have stopped playing, and truthfully, the Roll-Back idea is not very enticing really.

But that is just me and the Dev have decided that War was to rampant but now a Game gets concluded before the 4th different Race is discovered fcol... :(
 
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Azhcristokos

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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.

This is a problem in other Paradox games too, moreso in EU IV than CK2. I wrote in my (now outdated) guide for the Maya that wars against European empires become much more frustrating because once they have colonized an island in Oceania, they will suddenly form long-lasting alliances with technologically backwards, landlocked, heathen-religion nations 2,000 miles into the interior of Asia. This serves to artificially reduce warscore by factoring these allies' armies and provinces into the equation even though they will almost never participate in the war itself and taking their provinces does absolutely nothing to affect the power of said European nation. Of course, it makes sense that these rapidly expanding colonial empires would forge alliances with local kingdoms, but that applies to say, the Portuguese making alliances with countries in Southern India, or Spain vassalizing some Indonesian states after it spreads to that region; there is no reason that Nepal or some random horde in Central Asia should seek formal alliances with the UK the moment the British colonize an island near Madagascar, for example.

I am kind of turned off from war in Stellaris right now because of the random, scattered defensive pacts leading to drawn-out, boring wars and diplomatic stalemates as well. Fixing both this and warscore should be priorities, in my opinion...but I am just one player and that is just my opinion. I am pretty optimistic about the future at least.
 
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Azhcristokos

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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.

This is a very concise and very accurate assessment of the state of war in the game right now. Thank you for putting it in clearer English than I can manage at the moment!
 
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