Why all the hate for static defenses?

[BrokenSky]

Paradox's design disdain towards static defenses is simple.

This is a studio whose foundation lay in games like Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron, and Crusader Kings.

Notice that static defenses in any of those games will NOT win you wars. They only buy time until your enemy sieges them down, starve them into submission, flank around and isolate, or simply punch a hole through them with superheavy artillery and tanks.

Paradox's design philosophy is well grounded in real-world military theory where turtling is simply not a viable strategy and will only bring a slow death. The only purpose of defense is to buy time for a counterattack.

Stellaris is one of the only titles that opened up to the casual crowd, who are more interested in their own playstyles rather than learning military doctrines that the rest of us HOI or EU veterans already know.

In both EUIV and CK2 static defense can and will win you wars. All that has to happen is the attacker has to try to fight them in a straight up fight (storming/assaulting rather than sieging) without having a ridiculous numbers advantage against the defender. The AI and most competent players will, of course, resort instead to sieging in this case because they aren't too stupid to live.

The point I'm making is that comparing EUIV and CK2 forts to stellaris fails because in stellaris you beat forts by assaulting them, not sieging. The reason people think they should have good odds vs. 6 battleships and the fleet that comes with them is that in CK2 and EUIV and most of earth history, in an assault they can and do win against numerically stronger enemies. (I recall a story of a garrison of 6 holding a noble's castle against an assaulting force of 80, though I can't remember the reference off the top of my head).
If paradox want forts to be a roadblock, they need better siege mechanics. That probably means keeping a system under siege (i.e. with a blockade) and that requires something like trade or something which can be blocked to impose a defense penalty and induce surrender.

But yeah the reason people dislike the current implementation of stellaris forts is that they can't be sieged, since proper siege mechanics don't exist (imaging CK2 if the only forts were the lvl 1 ones you build to hold nomad provinces), but they also don't win vs. a non-overwhelming assault force.

 

[zanaikin]

In both EUIV and CK2 static defense can and will win you wars. All that has to happen is the attacker has to try to fight them in a straight up fight (storming/assaulting rather than sieging) without having a ridiculous numbers advantage against the defender. The AI and most competent players will, of course, resort instead to sieging in this case because they aren't too stupid to live.

The point I'm making is that comparing EUIV and CK2 forts to stellaris fails because in stellaris you beat forts by assaulting them, not sieging. The reason people think they should have good odds vs. 6 battleships and the fleet that comes with them is that in CK2 and EUIV and most of earth history, in an assault they can and do win against numerically stronger enemies. (I recall a story of a garrison of 6 holding a noble's castle against an assaulting force of 80, though I can't remember the reference off the top of my head).
If paradox want forts to be a roadblock, they need better siege mechanics. That probably means keeping a system under siege (i.e. with a blockade) and that requires something like trade or something which can be blocked to impose a defense penalty and induce surrender.

But yeah the reason people dislike the current implementation of stellaris forts is that they can't be sieged, since proper siege mechanics don't exist (imaging CK2 if the only forts were the lvl 1 ones you build to hold nomad provinces), but they also don't win vs. a non-overwhelming assault force.

I have never seen an AI assault a castle / fort unless they're completely steamrolling you...

It's kind of hard to imagine a fortress being sieged, since Stellaris isn't a game based on relativistic physics where you can hurl rocks at them from super-long range (whereas in relativistic games like Star Ruler 2, max speed only caps out at C; ships only have a max acceleration). With stellaris' "standard 4X" engine, it simply doesn't make sense to mount a super-long-range siege weapon that the fortress can't also mount (and you're back to assaults, just longer range), and you can hardly cut supplies from fortresses near friendly planets.

Stellaris wars also end much faster, so it makes sense that static defenses only buy you a limited amount of time. It actually reminds me of naval battles in Hearts of Iron -- you spend years building up a fleet, which cripples one another within just a few battles if you're not careful.

 

[BrokenSky]

I have never seen an AI assault a castle / fort unless they're completely steamrolling you...

It's kind of hard to imagine a fortress being sieged, since Stellaris isn't a game based on relativistic physics where you can hurl rocks at them from super-long range. With stellaris' "standard 4X" engine, it simply doesn't make sense to mount a super-long-range siege weapon that the fortress can't also mount (and you're back to assaults, just longer range), and you can hardly cut supplies from fortresses near friendly planets.

Yes exactly! The game doesn't have the siege mechanics necessary to make fortresses act like roadblocks in the same way as in other paradox games, so instead you have to assault them, which would in other games require you to be able to steamroll your enemy but doesn't in stellaris, since assaulting is default behavior rather than a costly way to speed up fort removal.

My point is that this mode of thinking, forts => slow, comes from a place where forts => sieges, and sieges => slow. Trying to make stellaris forts => slow without making them => sieges comes off as poorly done because of it, I think?

Edit: also really interesting article in your signature!

 

[Kat Tsun]

and most of earth history, in an assault they can and do win against numerically stronger enemies.

TBF, sieges were most often broken by arriving reinforcements and assaults succeeded more often than they failed. Camaron, Saragarhi, Lille, Multan, Masada, and the Alamo are a more common experience when dealing with outnumbered troops fighting desperate last stands, in the sense that everyone dies and the besieger wins. More often than not it wasn't as storied as those battles, rather just a straight flush for the besieger, which is why people remember the Jews against the Romans, the French at Lille, the Texans at the Alamo, and the Sikhs at Saragarhi.

Debecka, Bastonge, and Dunkirk are the exception to these, which is why they are so extraordinary.

But yeah the reason people dislike the current implementation of stellaris forts is that they can't be sieged, since proper siege mechanics don't exist (imaging CK2 if the only forts were the lvl 1 ones you build to hold nomad provinces), but they also don't win vs. a non-overwhelming assault force.

You mean they don't win enough, right? If they are destroyed then they've, by definition, been overwhelmed.

The lack of a siege mechanic isn't the problem forts have. It's more nuanced and can probably be fixed with a stats balance.

 

[terrycloth]

How about having natural fortress points in a system where you can build some sort of super-fortress into an asteroid or something? That would give them tons of hit points (because they're built into a freaking asteroid) and prevent them from being destroyed, just 'damaged to non-functionality' and able to repair themselves as soon as the fleet that bombarded them leaves. Unless they were invaded with ground troops, maybe?

Don't let the asteroid fortress hold a snare -- planets can't hold snares, so maybe it's a gravity thing. Make the snare be a separate station that the invading fleet can destroy.

Then have a different kind of station you build with a construction ship that fires a massive, slow projectile that destroys whatever it hits. -100% tracking so it can't hit ships ever. Long construction time so that it takes a while to zap a station with it.

So to get past a super-fortress, you need to warp in a fleet big enough to destroy the snare and then have it e-warp out (taking it out of commission for a while), then have a construction ship build a tiny vulnerable station to blow up the asteroid's defenses, then invade it with ground forces to keep it from coming back.

Now your only problem is making it so the enemy can't just ignore the system entirely and go around... you can put these in your important systems at least. With a garrison fleet to hunt down constructors or just replace the snare, the enemy can't build the fortress-destroying installation without a second fleet to protect it, so it might help defeat them in detail if they try to force their way through under fire.

 

[BrokenSky]

TBF, sieges were most often broken by arriving reinforcements and assaults succeeded more often than they failed. Camaron, Saragarhi, Lille, Multan, Masada, and the Alamo are a more common experience when dealing with outnumbered troops fighting desperate last stands, in the sense that everyone dies and the besieger wins. More often than not it wasn't as storied as those battles, rather just a straight flush for the besieger, which is why people remember the Jews against the Romans, the French at Lille, the Texans at the Alamo, and the Sikhs at Saragarhi.

Debecka, Bastonge, and Dunkirk are the exception to these, which is why they are so extraordinary.

More I meant that most of the time the attacker won, the defender surrendered, rather than having the attacker properly assault the place, and that in paradox games other that stellaris, assault mechanics trade increased speed for increased casualties. This was in the context of comparing stellaris forts to CK2 and EUIV forts, where they act as roadblock.

You mean they don't win enough, right? If they are destroyed then they've, by definition, been overwhelmed.

The lack of a siege mechanic isn't the problem forts have. It's more nuanced and can probably be fixed with a stats balance.

It's entirely likely that there are a lot of ways to fix forts. A stat resemblance may well be better.

How about having natural fortress points in a system where you can build some sort of super-fortress into an asteroid or something? That would give them tons of hit points (because they're built into a freaking asteroid) and prevent them from being destroyed, just 'damaged to non-functionality' and able to repair themselves as soon as the fleet that bombarded them leaves. Unless they were invaded with ground troops, maybe?

Don't let the asteroid fortress hold a snare -- planets can't hold snares, so maybe it's a gravity thing. Make the snare be a separate station that the invading fleet can destroy.

Then have a different kind of station you build with a construction ship that fires a massive, slow projectile that destroys whatever it hits. -100% tracking so it can't hit ships ever. Long construction time so that it takes a while to zap a station with it.

So to get past a super-fortress, you need to warp in a fleet big enough to destroy the snare and then have it e-warp out (taking it out of commission for a while), then have a construction ship build a tiny vulnerable station to blow up the asteroid's defenses, then invade it with ground forces to keep it from coming back.

Now your only problem is making it so the enemy can't just ignore the system entirely and go around... you can put these in your important systems at least. With a garrison fleet to hunt down constructors or just replace the snare, the enemy can't build the fortress-destroying installation without a second fleet to protect it, so it might help defeat them in detail if they try to force their way through under fire.

I really agree with the idea of asteroid (or moon?) based hard points for defenses. The whole idea here sounds really interesting. I feel like it would be a more fun limitation than the minimum separation rule, at least for things like being able to make tactical decisions - do you want to to harvest the moons minerals or turn it into a strong defensive emplacement?

 

[Ixal]

TBF, sieges were most often broken by arriving reinforcements and assaults succeeded more often than they failed.

Actually the attacker simply giving up and going away also happened a lot, but those events usually don't end up in history books very often.

 

[Kat Tsun]

Actually the attacker simply giving up and going away also happened a lot, but those events usually don't end up in history books very often.

Good point.

 

[Ixal]

Good point.

Remember that sieges were far from trivial back then. The defender had food stores prepared. The attacker had not so he had to scavenge and usually also bring the food etc. with him. And his force has to be a lot larger than the defenders force to conduct a siege properly so he also consumed more.
And there is also the problem of diseases and the weather in general which tend to hit non permanemt tent housings quite hard (although diseases are also a big problem for the besieged). So economically, sieges were a big drain on ressources and manpower (deaths and desertion)

 

[terrycloth]

Remember that sieges were far from trivial back then. The defender had food stores prepared. The attacker had not so he had to scavenge and usually also bring the food etc. with him. And his force has to be a lot larger than the defenders force to conduct a siege properly so he also consumed more.
And there is also the problem of diseases and the weather in general which tend to hit non permanemt tent housings quite hard (although diseases are also a big problem for the besieged). So economically, sieges were a big drain on ressources and manpower (deaths and desertion)

For some reason I'm now imagining a permanent siege, that lasted so long they built another city around the city they were besieging to house the attackers. "Eventually we sort of gave up on breaking the siege or actually taking the city. Technically, when we open the gates in the morning and everyone heads out to the marketplace, it's a sortie."

 

[romothecus]

In current Stellaris, static defenses don't make much sense in the first place.

In the future, if we have more and more useful civilian ships (like visible migration) or stealth ships, or spaceports that aren't tied to planets, or more interesting things than planets, or trade, or more interesting kinds of structures, or more and more interesting pirates/NPE, or basically anything else you can think of that isn't just 100% Space Navies With No Logistics + Monsters + Planets in space, then more static defenses will make more sense.

There's about a million things you can do with space structures and defenses, but just building immobile fleets for the sake of immobile fleets isn't one of them.

 

[Kat Tsun]

For some reason I'm now imagining a permanent siege, that lasted so long they built another city around the city they were besieging to house the attackers. "Eventually we sort of gave up on breaking the siege or actually taking the city. Technically, when we open the gates in the morning and everyone heads out to the marketplace, it's a sortie."

So Wales?

 

[Meneliki]

so maybe somebody could help me understand the hesitation for powerful defenses?

My major problem with insanely powerfull static D is that it's a completely build-and-forget investment(which in an RTS is kind of a big deal), whereas with a fleet you're constantly managing it, tweaking it, moving it around, fighting with it, etc. In traditional RTS, static D is meant to thwart early/light pressure. It's not meant to completely absolve you of having to defend your territory.

Now that being said, for their cost/maintenance/un-spammability(from what i understand you can't place them in close proximity), I'd argue they're probably a bit underpowered and could use a buff.

But it's important not to go overboard. I wouldn't want to see any 100k fortresses or anything like that.

 

[BlackUmbrellas]

My major problem with insanely powerfull static D is that it's a completely build-and-forget investment(which in an RTS is kind of a big deal), whereas with a fleet you're constantly managing it, tweaking it, moving it around, fighting with it, etc. In traditional RTS, static D is meant to thwart early/light pressure. It's not meant to completely absolve you of having to defend your territory.

Now that being said, for their cost/maintenance/un-spammability(from what i understand you can't place them in close proximity), I'd argue they're probably a bit underpowered and could use a buff.

But it's important not to go overboard. I wouldn't want to see any 100k fortresses or anything like that.

I don't think that "turtling" should be viable 100% of the time, but it's definitely possible to design a game where doing so can be viable with effort and attention. It's a bit of a different genre obviously, but I have fond memories of a Starcraft session where I fortified a choke point as Terrans with bunkers, siege tanks, supply depot barriers, and a barracks-door, weathering wave after wave of attacks from the Zerg AI until I'd exhausted their resources and was able to launch a counter attack that eventually succeeded by the skin of my teeth, my own more limited resource pool just barely able to supply my forces.

In Stellaris, the only option for military victory is basically "attack attack attack"- you can't so much fortify yourself, make yourself an unappealing target, weather a siege and then counter-attack.

 

[shadowrook]

What about the ability to make a limited number of large overpowered stations? This would avoid spamming them but also add strategy to placement. You could build a huge station at your border of an aggressive empire to force them around the system or to protect the homeworld or a key system.

 

[Afrotoaster7]

My major problem with insanely powerfull static D is that it's a completely build-and-forget investment(which in an RTS is kind of a big deal), whereas with a fleet you're constantly managing it, tweaking it, moving it around, fighting with it, etc. In traditional RTS, static D is meant to thwart early/light pressure. It's not meant to completely absolve you of having to defend your territory.

Now that being said, for their cost/maintenance/un-spammability(from what i understand you can't place them in close proximity), I'd argue they're probably a bit underpowered and could use a buff.

But it's important not to go overboard. I wouldn't want to see any 100k fortresses or anything like that.

So it's the set it and forget it that turns you off to them? What about if they used a system like the star bases in sins of a solar empire, where once you built it you could research and upgrade specific modules on it to power it up, as well as custom fit it to a number of different strategies? Depending on the faction you played as, star bases could be upgraded to move, have self-destruct buttons, etc. You weren't fiddling with them as much as you were your fleet, but you still had to interact with them a bit after the initial placement.

 

[BlackUmbrellas]

So it's the set it and forget it that turns you off to them? What about if they used a system like the star bases in sins of a solar empire, where once you built it you could research and upgrade specific modules on it to power it up, as well as custom fit it to a number of different strategies? Depending on the faction you played as, star bases could be upgraded to move, have self-destruct buttons, etc. You weren't fiddling with them as much as you were your fleet, but you still had to interact with them a bit after the initial placement.

I think that one possible solution along those lines would be to rework the, uh... footprint? Of the stations. Instead of stations being "mutually exclusive" to each other, what if you could "stack" them more? Not infinitely, but like, what if the footprint was as big as the spaceport, instead of... well, as massive as it was now?

This'd go along with some modifications to how station modules and such work- I'm picturing larger weapons platforms supported by shield-generators, repair stations, etc. An attack might wipe out large portions of your smaller, weaker defensive platforms, so you'd need to replace them as a war went on.

Hell, even if it wasn't based around a "support" mechanism, I can see "walls" of stations that, while still fairly weak on their own, can be built close enough to each other to become imposing weapons emplacement fields in their own right as a pretty good way of making the defenses more "involved", insofar as you'd need to replace them on a scale somewhat comprable to fleet maintenance.

 

[Ixal]

I think that one possible solution along those lines would be to rework the, uh... footprint? Of the stations. Instead of stations being "mutually exclusive" to each other, what if you could "stack" them more? Not infinitely, but like, what if the footprint was as big as the spaceport, instead of... well, as massive as it was now?

Leave the footprint as it is but make it so that you can attach the smaller platforms to the larger.

 

[BlackUmbrellas]

Leave the footprint as it is but make it so that you can attach the smaller platforms to the larger.

That'd require a whole new mechanic. I'm thinking more along the lines of things that could be changed more easily. An "attachment" system seems needlessly convoluted when stations are already as weak as they are- just letting you build them closer together so they can combine their fleet strength values more effectively would do wonders I bet.

 

[faljen_isus]

what comes to mind when thinking of powerful static defenses is ST: DS9 when they arrive at Cardassia Prime and see a defense grid of mines, ships, defense platforms and whatnot

if you test out your fortresses against small corvette flotillas or 2-3 battleships you will find them useful to the extent reason and logic allows

2 things i noted from the comments are:
1. people want OP static defenses that rival the Death Star, and i for one welcome smaller iterations of such monstrosities
2. people still argue the whats the best strategy for space warfare, but fail to comprehend that we can only theorize because there are no precedence in that field

i would love to see elaborate defense grid types of defenses for planets where you need hundreds of ships just to make a crack in them, because logic dictates that a powerful enough empire that has the ability to create thousands of ships can very well create a defense grid that just screams "you shall not pass"

also to mention, there is a game called stardrive 2 where they had fuel as an important factor, and where a ship can only travel outside his borders how much his fuel reserves allow them - this was solvable by constructing tanker ships that have no other parts except fuel tanks, however it also meant that taking out the tankers just left your fleet dead in space