Warscore seems to have gotten a lot worse

[Darkscis]

Personally, I would change war score to a ticking system, rather than a fixed score for doing 'X' and eliminate the war goal system altogether.

For example: Aggressor
I declare war and both sides start with 0 war 'points'.
I invade a pop 18 planet. This planet is worth 18 war 'points'.
To end the war, I now need to accumulate 18 war 'points' to force the victory.
I receive 2 war 'points' for each year that I hold this planet.
At this rate, if both myself and the defender did nothing else, the war would end in 9 years. (This prevents those ridiculous stalemates where the defenders allies can't reach you - but the defender still won't give up).
Let's say I want a second planet, so I invade a pop 17 planet. My total war 'points' to win is now 35.
I hold 2 planet's, so I am gaining 4 points per year now.
Now let's say I only want those 2 planets, but I want the war over earlier than 9 years (35/4 rounded up).
I blockade 3 of his planet's. Let's say that is worth 0.5 points each for a total of 1.5 per year.
I'm now gaining 5.5 points per year, meaning I can force victory in 6 years.

Defender:
He declares war on me and we both start with 0 war points.
To forcibly end the war as a white peace, I need to accumulate (No of planets * 5) points. Lets call it 5 planets, so 25 points.
I get 1 point for each unoccupied planet, each year. Thus, if the aggressor makes no moves or I hold him off and he cannot take/blockade a planet, I can force white peace in 5 years.
He takes a pop 18 planet. I now need ((No of planets - 1) * 5) + 18 points, 38, to force white peace. I'm losing the war now, it will take me (38/4) 10 years to force white peace if nothing else happens.
Now he takes a pop 17 planet as well. I now need 50 points to force the white peace. With only 3 planets unoccupied it's going to take 17 years to force a white peace, except he will accumulate his war points quick enough to forcibly end the war in his favour, so I need to do something.
I sneak round his forces and I occupy one of his planets, a juicy pop 22 planet. Now I still need 50 points to force white peace, but I am gaining 3 + 2 points per year, meaning I could force white peace in 10 years. Alternatively, I could try to win the war and force normal peace by reclaiming my planets, and then gaining an additional 22 war points to keep his planet.

Once the war is over, you decide what to do with the planets. Keep them, liberate, purge, return them (humiliate) etc. Basically, this system would allow you to occupy as much as you want, but the more you take the longer the war is going to take as you add to the points you need to accumulate. As long as a fair "point" value is worked out for each action (holding a planet, blockading a planet, destroying a fleet/ship/'X' amount of ships etc) it should work well. The above are only examples, I haven't really played with the numbers - that would be for the mathematicians to do. Essentially what it means though is that wars could be over really quick OR they could stretch on for a long, long time while planets are traded back and forth but eventually, someone will accumulate enough points to force a conclusion.

If you are only taking a few recently colonized outlying planets (pop has only reach 4/5/6) the war would be a quick relatively bloodless land grab, basically an annexation. Due to the speed of being able to do that, it would encourage people to actually defend their new colonies with land based forces as well as some fleets to buy time in case of war. Currently, I don't bother building a single land based army as I know that if someone declares war on me and takes a planet or two, the existing war system gives me more than enough time to build an army to re-take it. This shouldn't happen, and should be punished. If I want to colonize a backwater planet right against the edge of a militant xenophobe then I should be more than prepared to defend it immediately, not in 15 years when I decide to get around to it. With this system, if it only takes 6 months for him to accumulate the war points needed to force the war - I had better have those armies already trained and stationed on the planet to defend it. Pretty much - exactly like real life.

 

[pieman]

Now that all the small pleb nations spam out tons of defensive pacts its extremely annoying to expand in a galaxy with a lot of races.

I picked 35 races in the 1k star galaxy and pretty much every pleb has 3 or more other plebs going to war for them 60 years in.

This would not be an issue if the Warscore was not calculated in such an absurdly stupid way. When I declare war, I can only claim some 3-4 planets in my war goals at 100 warscore, however when fighting some coalition of xeno scum i have to take all the planets of 2 out of the 4 empires i fight against just to claim the 3-4 planets and give the others back, while defending against 3-4k fleets constantly sniping my stations (the station buff seems to have done very little to prevent this).

Basically at this point im bogged down in 30+ year wars just to take a couple of planets, which is absurd. Warscore should either be gained a lot more quickly or I should be able to claim some 2-3 extra planets for each empire in the opposition.

I'd say that it's really not viable to play an expansionist empire in a galaxy with more than 20-25 empires right now, since you get surrounded very quickly and pushing out through warfare is INSANELY slow thanks to everyone being in defensive pacts with each other.

I think they should definitely make it so that you could theoretically take out an entire empire in a single war, but make it difficult to do. like, maybe you have the ability to add new wargoals to your list after you've started a war at influence cost? maybe enemy planets that you've invaded and had in your possession for decades shrink in total warscore required. like, if there was some border world that belonged to empire B, but Empire A conquered it 10 years ago in a long war, that planet is basiccally the property of empire A now, it should cost much less warscore to take in the end.

On that note, i'd like to see occupied planets slowly gain the ability to be used for resupply etc by the occupying force mid war. maybe it takes several years to properly supress the local pops, and to get the infrastructure back in line, but we should eventually be able to use occupied planets as points of resupply etc. of course, the pops would likely have a very high rebellion chance, and would require troops on the ground to quell uprisings.

This way, you could have one war where you progressively steamroll an enemy empire, slowly adding new planets to wargoals, and waiting for occupied worlds to shrink down in warscore, maybe theoretically you could take 100 planets at once if you waited long enough and all the planets shrunk to 1% warscore. But this way, the reason an agressor would end a war would be because they'd reach a point where the influence cost of adding new wargoals is too much, or managing all their occupied planets in wartime is becoming too much, not an arbitrary limiter that says "oop, you've hit 100%, time for a 10 year coffee break".