When a board game has a better ship fitting mechanic than Stellaris

[safe-keeper]

This discussion makes me wonder if maybe Stellaris should encourage players to "play the map" more. In Civ, you'll have randomized strategic and luxury resources around you, and it'll also be random whether you start next to water, hills, etc. Maybe Stellaris could have more different resource types, lending themselves to different strategies.

And what is the difference between having pre-defined units like "Torpedo Destroyer", "Submarine Hunter", "mine layer", like strategy games use...?

Firstly, as I already said, tinkering with these things and coming up with various designs for various roles and situations is always fun, the same way it can be fun to build a character from the ground up in a role-playing game, instead of just playing a generic automatically generated rogue, fighter, etc. Secondly, if you're going to make every single possible combination its own hull type, you end up with a ridiculously long list of ship types for the player to choose from. And before you say "but you end up with a just as long list when you design ships yourself!", no, with a ship designer I obviously only design the ships I actually need.

Being able to actually design ships myself also allows me to easily tweak the designs as needed.

 

[Ragnarok Ascendant]

One of my favorite shipset mods is Kurogane.
Why?
Because it adds a ton of new hull types. You have M-slot corvettes, missile destroyers, etc. It shakes up what I usually do in the early and mid game and makes the late game interesting as I can use off-the-wall ship types freely.

What I would recommend is something like this:

Each new ship type is one 'hull section' bigger than the previous. So:
Corvette: 1 section
Destroyer: 2 sections
Cruiser: 3 sections
Battleship: 4 sections
Titan: 5 sections

Each section has a point and power value. The former is improved by hull boost techs, the latter by better reactors.
Ship behavior is largely the same but fixed to actually function rather than just turning into 'charge directly at enemy' as it is in the current state. Engine and sensor types remain largely the same, but can be boosted by components.
When building a ship type, weapons consume both points (representing how much tonnage the hull section has for a weapon, spare parts, ammo, etc) and power (the weapon's energy requirements). Energy weapons consume more power and less points, missiles the opposite, with kinetics being a middle ground. The bigger the gun, the more it consumes of both.
Armor consumes tonnage points, while shields consume power.
You can mount reactor boosters in place of armor or shields, and if you want to do something stupid like mounting an L-sized gun on a Corvette you're probably going to have to because those things are power hogs. Similarly, mounting an X-size weapon on a battleship will cost you most of its fighting ability beyond that X-slot weapon, to the point where carriers become a major threat to the battleship.

Now, obviously, with the possibility of building hulls freely you run into the big stumbling block of Stellaris - AI incompetence. But if other games can do it, this one should be able to too. It helps that preferences for ship loadouts are already engrained into AI personalities.

 

[Elordis]

And what is the difference between having pre-defined units like "Torpedo Destroyer", "Submarine Hunter", "mine layer", like strategy games use...?

The difference is in that warm and fuzzy feeling of making your own ship design. Stellaris isn't simply an 4X strategy it's also a cosmic opera story generator.
The problem is that ship designer is mostly sham. The only real choice you have is in type of weapons and ship size. Everything else you can effectively replace with bonuses based on your tech level.

 

[Dragatus]

Everyone here use battleship-spam or used naked corvetes not because it was their 'self-expression', but because it was the most-eficient strategy.

That's true, hence why I added the "in theory" part. In practice the game has a few designs that stand out too much. The issue though is a too large gap between the top designs and the general designs (like the ones that the AI uses) more so than the ability to design your own ships. Having a number of premade ship designs would make balancing easier, but you lose the "warm fuzzy feeling" mentioned by Elordis. Whether that trade is worth it is a subjective matter and there is no right or wrong answer. It really depends what you want from the game.

 

[safe-keeper]

And where is the "higher degree of self-expression" ? From the release date until today, I never saw this on Stellaris. Everyone use 'self-expression' until they lose a battle. After this everyone will just use the most efficient design.

Everyone here use battleship-spam or used naked corvetes not because it was their 'self-expression', but because it was the most-eficient strategy.

This is the same in all kinds of games, even card games.

I think self-expression appears more when the game is more balanced with pre-defined limited number of units. I see much more variety of Strategies and tactics in a age of empires 2 tournament than in a game of stellaris.

Yes, obviously min-maxing players currently end up making the same designs because they all (mostly) have access to the same policies and edicts, technologies, and resources.

It's far from impossible to make things more varied, though. You don't have to look farther than Hearts of Iron, where the difference in ministers, national spirits, starting technologies, and so on makes for very different play styles from nation to nation, with different ways to play both offensively and defensively, and army compositions that differ from nation to nation. For example, as Germany you'll build advanced divisions with tanks as your spearhead. As the Russians, you can train lots of rifle divisions as you have lots more manpower.

Granted, Stellaris has all players start off at a more equal footing, but there are always ways to shake things up. In Stars!, the primary and secondary traits you picked could make your species very different from each other. The aforementioned Eclipse also makes players design their ships very differently because the techs you're given are so different from each other.

 

[Avian Overlord]

Do you guys really prefer a "Ship Design" where you 'design' your ships instead of simple having Ship options....? The best warfare of strategy games is not by designing your unit, but having a roster of units that counter themselves, like Age of Empires 2.

It's a space 4X. It has to have a pointless bolted on ship designer or they take away your license. If you don't have the micromanagement of swapping laser 1 for laser 2 every five minutes, why are you even bothering to play the game?

Seriously though, if you designed a space 4X where I didn't have to design ****ing ships, I would buy it on general principle.

 

[safe-keeper]

It's a space 4X. It has to have a pointless bolted on ship designer or they take away your license. If you don't have the micromanagement of swapping laser 1 for laser 2 every five minutes, why are you even bothering to play the game?

A ship designer needs more depth than that, yes.

Seriously though, if you designed a space 4X where I didn't have to design ****ing ships, I would buy it on general principle.

If only Stellaris gave you the option to auto-design ships.

 

[Dragatus]

I've been thinking and I think there is one simple change to the game that would actually help quite a bit: having technology costs scale harder.

T1 techs like Blue Lasers have good costs, but T2 techs are only 2x as expensive when upgrading from basic research labs to improved ones gives you 2.5x science without even counting that you're increasing the number of labs. This means that T2 and T3 techs get breezed by because at that stage of the game your science output is growing faster than the tech cost.

Simply making tech costs scale by a factor of 4 per tier would extend the time you spend in the middle tiers of technology, where you don't have battleships yet and so no X weapons either and even cruisers and advanced L weapons only appear at the tail end of the technological era. Weapons you get from exploring and events like Mining Lasers and Null-Void Beam would also be more relevant and for longer.

 

[Avian Overlord]

A ship designer needs more depth than that, yes.

If only Stellaris gave you the option to auto-design ships.

Those two things are mutually exclusive.

 

[safe-keeper]

Those two things are mutually exclusive.

?

1. I state that a ship designer should be more deep than what AO described.
2. I sarcastically point out that Stellaris lets you auto-design ships.

I don't see the contradiction, so I think you're reading more into my post than what I actually wrote.

 

[Orphalesion]

Honestly I'm not that interested in min-maxing the ships. I know others might disagree (and it's their right) but I'm happy to just click the update-button at regular intervals. I don't want to spend any length of time on building ship types.

To some degree I might add that Stellaris failed to diversify the technology tree between the different species. Something that was promised as a feature. To be honest I really have no idea how that can be done. It is truly complex to balance the species while keeping the research tree as much as random as possible. So the races actually get different type of weapons and modules and stick with them.

Just wondering, might this be because the board-game has pre-defined player factions/races/empires? I think a lot of the lack of diversification among the species is because of the randomly generated nature of Stellaris. Same with the galaxy maps being the same everywhere without many special or unique areas.
If it had pre-defined species/factions/empires like say, MOO it would naturally be easier to diversify them from each other.
But it would also lead to the same species/empires repeating over and over and over.

 

[Katsue]

Just wondering, might this be because the board-game has pre-defined player factions/races/empires?

Factions in Eclipse (1st Ed anyway) all use the same tech tree as each other, though they have different starting technologies* and different ship templates. Their diversity mostly comes from different faction abilities. As is often the case with boardgames, the expansion factions were weirder than the ones in the base game.

 

[fabeto]

Honestly I'm not that interested in min-maxing the ships. I know others might disagree (and it's their right) but I'm happy to just click the update-button at regular intervals. I don't want to spend any length of time on building ship types.



Just wondering, might this be because the board-game has pre-defined player factions/races/empires? I think a lot of the lack of diversification among the species is because of the randomly generated nature of Stellaris. Same with the galaxy maps being the same everywhere without many special or unique areas.
If it had pre-defined species/factions/empires like say, MOO it would naturally be easier to diversify them from each other.
But it would also lead to the same species/empires repeating over and over and over.

Yes faction, do matter a bit, but the majority of divercification comes from limited technologies, and once a tech is claimed by someone, chances are there won't be another tech token of the same tech.

 

[arosenberger14]

I've been thinking and I think there is one simple change to the game that would actually help quite a bit: having technology costs scale harder.

T1 techs like Blue Lasers have good costs, but T2 techs are only 2x as expensive when upgrading from basic research labs to improved ones gives you 2.5x science without even counting that you're increasing the number of labs. This means that T2 and T3 techs get breezed by because at that stage of the game your science output is growing faster than the tech cost.

Simply making tech costs scale by a factor of 4 per tier would extend the time you spend in the middle tiers of technology, where you don't have battleships yet and so no X weapons either and even cruisers and advanced L weapons only appear at the tail end of the technological era. Weapons you get from exploring and events like Mining Lasers and Null-Void Beam would also be more relevant and for longer.

Tech costs are still based on the pre-beuraucrat sprawl values. Essentially, it's far faster to research higher tier techs than it used to be since sprawl can be negated. In fact, since the Megacorp economy they re-balanced tech costs, but I think they still made the higher tiers too low since it's been relatively easy to get through the entire tech tree by default endgame since then.

 

[BrokenSky]

Tech costs are still based on the pre-beuraucrat sprawl values. Essentially, it's far faster to research higher tier techs than it used to be since sprawl can be negated. In fact, since the Megacorp economy they re-balanced tech costs, but I think they still made the higher tiers too low since it's been relatively easy to get through the entire tech tree by default endgame since then.

What about if tech costs scaled with just sprawl as well as the sprawl-over-the-cap penalty?
(base cost * (1 + A*sprawl) * (1 + B*(Sprawl - Capacity, minimum 0) ), for A and B constants)

So you'd get something similar to the scaling-with-size values seen pre-bureaucrats, but still need to have bureaucrats to avoid scaling-quadratically-with-size?

 

[Orphalesion]

Yes faction, do matter a bit, but the majority of divercification comes from limited technologies, and once a tech is claimed by someone, chances are there won't be another tech token of the same tech.

I see. I don't think I'd like research in Stellaris to work like that though.

 

[arosenberger14]

What about if tech costs scaled with just sprawl as well as the sprawl-over-the-cap penalty?
(base cost * (1 + A*sprawl) * (1 + B*(Sprawl - Capacity, minimum 0) ), for A and B constants)

So you'd get something similar to the scaling-with-size values seen pre-bureaucrats, but still need to have bureaucrats to avoid scaling-quadratically-with-size?

That'd be a good fix to the present situation. Eventually I'd like to see them roll out a whole new tech system as the current implementation is rather lackluster IMO, but we'll see.