Why all the hate for static defenses?

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Drekivoli

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Maneuverability allows it to evade detection by changing orbits rapidly and dramatically. It doesn't need to be VLO or anything silly if it can simply move out of the way, out of sight of the radar that tries to track it.

Stealth in space: Accomplished.

Your definition of stealth is just too narrow. You show how little you read of Atomic Rockets when you didn't accept that "stealth is more than just hiding from sensors" as true, something Mr. Chung supports on his caveats page. I even quoted the Rocketpunk Manifesto which Mr. Chung links to a lot.

You clearly have no clue as to how vast space is. And how truly empty space is as well. Sure fine you can hide behind a planet. Good luck hiding in interplanetary space (you wont) or interstellar space(you wont).

The issue isn't the definition of Stealth, you literally cannot hide in space. Anyway we're off topic so I'll stop before the mods get angry at me.
 
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Kat Tsun

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You clearly have no clue as to how vast space is. And how truly empty space is as well. Sure fine you can hide behind a planet. Good luck hiding in interplanetary space (you wont) or interstellar space(you wont).

That's the other thing, though.

You wouldn't have a reason to hide in interstellar/interplanetary space because no one cares about that sort of space. There's nothing of value there worth protecting with weapons or soldiers. You said it yourself: space is big and empty. Sounds like Antarctica, honestly. There's no tank divisions in Antarctica.

The only place space combat will happen in a world that is totally realistic is in orbit of the Earth, because there is where all the people live, and all the countries with all their weapons too. How do we know this? Because it happens in real life, because people fight where valuable things are, which in this case is Earth and looks to only be Earth, since even the 'asteroid mining industry' talks about towing rocks into the Earth's orbit. China, USA, and Russia all have anti-satellite weapons, are making them, or can make them. The Space Shuttle had a military role in sabotaging Soviet satellites in orbit: it would transport the astronaut-saboteurs, and the USAF has looked at space based lasers for anti-satellite purposes. The Soviets even tried to launch one.

Selectively making weird and goofy "realism" arguments about a video game, or any fiction, and supporting your realism arguments with a fictional website describing a fictional world, is a bit like using Wookiepedia to support an argument about the US Navy needing more submarines or something. It's a "bad meme", even.

The issue isn't the definition of Stealth, you literally cannot hide in space.

Except you can.

Just like you can hide in the ocean, even.
 
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Seryss

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You clearly have no clue as to how vast space is. And how truly empty space is as well. Sure fine you can hide behind a planet. Good luck hiding in interplanetary space (you wont) or interstellar space(you wont).

The issue isn't the definition of Stealth, you literally cannot hide in space. Anyway we're off topic so I'll stop before the mods get angry at me.

I don't understand how saying space is large supports your argument that you can't hide in open space.

The only means we have of detecting ANYTHING now and probably ever is by radiation. The speed of light puts a hard limit on what you're going to be able to find, it's a very small needle, in a very large haystack full of all kinds of needles, that will be months/years away by the time you find the first sign of it barring extreme luck. Even if they made no effort to be hidden it would be very difficult to find anything, even slight alterations to course could throw off a pursuer, let alone any kind of countermeasures.

That said; games should be balanced as games, not as real life unless the game presents itself as an accurate as possible simulation.

Slightly more on topic:

For a thread that says why all the hate for statics, it seems by and large most people want stronger statics (i don't, turtling is a losing strategy, and slows the game down needlessly, but whatever)
 
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Person012345

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I fail to see the problem with having forts act as traps for larger fleets, allowing your fleet to catch theirs by dragging it into the gravity well and structures that can take out small detachments. I find it funny how one minute people will be whining that the AI is sending small fleets to blow up all their civilian stations wah wah then the next minute they'll be saying military stations are useless and there's no incentive to break up your fleet into anything other than a blob.
 

Seryss

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I fail to see the problem with having forts act as traps for larger fleets, allowing your fleet to catch theirs by dragging it into the gravity well and structures that can take out small detachments. I find it funny how one minute people will be whining that the AI is sending small fleets to blow up all their civilian stations wah wah then the next minute they'll be saying military stations are useless and there's no incentive to break up your fleet into anything other than a blob.

You really only need to blob for the initial engagement the one that decides the entire war, after that most people will split their fleet to end the war faster (unless you're fighting multiple empires, that still require most of your fleet to take on)

If you bring in strong 25k-100k statics (i feel several people posting in this thread have significantly different ideas on how strong statics should be, or what utility they should provide) you've got to blob every single system, and it drags a war that you have already won out way longer than it has to, and that's assuming that defensive structures won't dwarf ships in power earlier, which is a very real possibility considering how much they would have to scale up defenses to make them relevant. Look at the buff to spaceports, and how that killed the 10 year rush, now imagine multiple 1k+ structures and just how much longer it will take to amass a force that can deal with that and the enemies ships.

Further If defenses took similar investment as ships why would you take them, they have to outperform or you'd be better off with ships. I imagine the argument would then be okay well give them some better auras so that even with a small investment they support your fleets enough to be a decisive factor in a battle - okay now you just start a war, and sit in your gravity well until the other enemy attacks. That kind of behavior just leads to a turtling meta where no one attacks anyone until they have a massive advantage, which still ends up with the aggressive player prevailing anyway.
 

Drekivoli

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I don't understand how saying space is large supports your argument that you can't hide in open space.

The only means we have of detecting ANYTHING now and probably ever is by radiation. The speed of light puts a hard limit on what you're going to be able to find, it's a very small needle, in a very large haystack full of all kinds of needles, that will be months/years away by the time you find the first sign of it barring extreme luck. Even if they made no effort to be hidden it would be very difficult to find anything, even slight alterations to course could throw off a pursuer, let alone any kind of countermeasures.

That said; games should be balanced as games, not as real life unless the game presents itself as an accurate as possible simulation.

Slightly more on topic:

For a thread that says why all the hate for statics, it seems by and large most people want stronger statics (i don't, turtling is a losing strategy, and slows the game down needlessly, but whatever)

If you read what I said in previous posts you'd have the answer to your confusion. But I refuse to get into this argument again. Sorry, I received your invitation to a pointless circular argument and I rejected it.
 

Trithemius

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“A ship's a fool to fight a fort.” - except sadly not so much in Stellaris; sorry Nelson!

Can this be changed? Should it be?

Spaceforts could be part of a rock-paper-scissor like balance perhaps (fortkillers beat forts, fleets beat fortkillers; forts beat fleets)? Or possibly different tech tiers could have forts or fleets dominate somehow, modelling the offensive vs. defensive advantage shifts in European warfare?
 
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Adamsrealm

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Chung's "references" are a couple of like-minded people on Usenet and his own inferences, but unfortunately his inferences are very limited. "No stealth in space" is more or less a normative statement. If you define "stealth" as "retaining the ability to surprise," then stealth is possible anywhere. Even in space.

If you define "stealth" as "a limited series of technological/physical solutions to solving a problem," or "never being detected," or something equally narrow, then stealth is only possible within certain limited constraints and environments. Hiding in the Antarctic would be near equally difficult as vacuum by the latter definition, which is why no one serious uses the latter definition. It's too contrived. I suspect the association of "stealth" with "technological solutions" comes from people reading about VLO aircraft and thinking that emissions control is the only kind of "stealth".



That's the point, though. You have to be looking in the right spot at the right time. You have to have Sufficient Optics to get enough detail of what you're looking at to make an analysis, you have to have sufficient operators (or sufficiently powerful computers) to synthesize this information into useful targeting data, you have to know ahead of time where the enemy is going to be, etc.

All of this takes time, which is something the enemy can use to confound efforts to detect, track, or attack him. It only really applies when the target you're attacking doesn't move, can't defend itself, and doesn't bother trying to hide. Coincidentally that is pretty much every modern spacecraft.

Orbit around celestial bodies is the only thing of military value in space, at least in any "realistic" setting it would be the only place battles would (or even could) be fought, which means X-37B has effectively achieved stealth in space by virtue of having a giant object (Earth) to hide behind while it does orbit changes. You think you see it, you setup an ASAT launch the next time it comes around, and then it's not there when you look again, because the spaceplane changed orbits on the other side of the world.

If you're going to start complaining about "the laws of thermodynamics" or something in a setting where literal time travel exists, then you've much bigger fish to fry than a couple spaceships not cooking their contents to well done.



It does if you don't know where to look. Considering you need to search a large portion of sky to find even one satellite, imagine trying to keep a real-time picture of their movement if they were all switching orbits constantly and usually out of your view. It would be difficult to impossible.



I'm not being rude but I guess you could say blunt. Dramatic or obviously wrong statements like "crossing the line" and "no stealth in space" are a bit silly, though.



A better addition would be some sort of espionage or fleet intelligence that lets you see what modules enemy ships have, what ships they're building, etc. The picture would be patchy or prone to errors, like in Darkest Hour where you can get incorrect estimates of infantry divisions or build queues, depending on how much funding you put into it. In Stellaris case, it might be incorrect or unknown ship modules, and incomplete estimates of ship numbers. Ultimately though, you'd be able to see all the ship types your opponent has in service and their modules, so you could plan how to counter these specific ship types.

Misdirection wouldn't be terribly useful given this is a grand strategy game. Being able to mask fleet strength can already be done, technically, if you optimize a build. Optimal build ships tend to belie their true strengths substantially.

It might be possible to work in a fairly wide intelligence and counter-intelligence system where you'd feed players false information and obtain true information, or vice versa.

I'm not sure how the diplomatic screen makes the "fleet power" judgment, but being able to change it actively would be interesting. You could provoke opponents into attacking you by portraying yourself weaker than you are, etc.

Hate to burst your bubble, but we can already see all of the ship modules used, the menu is just poorly optimised amd so doesn't us quickly identify enemy ship build types overall.
 

GloatingSwine

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I don't mean to sound condescending. I'm genuinely asking why, because I feel like I'm missing something. Anytime somebody brings up static defenses there always seems to be several people saying "Static defenses are only meant to buy time for your fleet to arrive."
I just don't understand that mindset. Why do we only want them to have one viable strategic use? Wouldn't it add more depth to the game by giving them multiple possible uses?
Also, this one I kinda get, but really disagree with. I also see a lot of people saying "I'm not saying defenses should be able to take out an entire fleet." and again I'm left wondering why? I mean, if someone put in an obscene amount of resources into a stations defenses (so much so that it prevents them from having much of an offensive fleet) why shouldn't it be able to go toe to toe with a fleet of similar resource cost? Why does the combat have to be fleet v fleet?
I'm new to this community, so maybe somebody could help me understand the hesitation for powerful defenses?

The simple fact is that there is no upper limit to fleet concentration, but there is an upper limit to how strong a defence station can be because they're fixed by the available designs in the ship designer.

Even if the game had a ludicrous endgame Iserlohn style space fortress that was expected to defeat fleets of hundreds of thousands of fleetpower by itself, it would still be possible to build enough to overwhelm it, and building enough to overwhelm superfortresses would simply become what everyone did.
 

Kat Tsun

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Hate to burst your bubble, but we can already see all of the ship modules used, the menu is just poorly optimised amd so doesn't us quickly identify enemy ship build types overall.

Where do you view enemy ship modules before you fight them?

As far as I'm aware, this can only be done during combat, which is the last place you'd want to know that your enemy has ships designed to counter yours.
 

GloatingSwine

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Where do you view enemy ship modules before you fight them?

As far as I'm aware, this can only be done during combat, which is the last place you'd want to know that your enemy has ships designed to counter yours.

As long as you've contacted them and have ships in the same system, you can click on an enemy fleet and inspect them.
 
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Kat Tsun

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As long as you've contacted them and have ships in the same system, you can click on an enemy fleet and inspect them.

This is the same thing, though.

You should be able to gather some intelligence on enemy ships without having to see them on the map in the first place. Otherwise, ship design is mostly hit, miss, or metagaming.
 

GloatingSwine

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This is the same thing, though.

You should be able to gather some intelligence on enemy ships without having to see them on the map in the first place. Otherwise, ship design is mostly hit, miss, or metagaming.

You don't have to be at war with them to do it though, just investigate them before the war.

You do have intelligence on them, you just have to gather it manually.
 

Kat Tsun

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You don't have to be at war with them to do it though, just investigate them before the war.

You do have intelligence on them, you just have to gather it manually.

I'm aware of this mechanic. It's sorta clunky if you can't actually get inside their space to investigate them because they've closed their borders, if you're in a state of cold war with them, or whatever. It's fine if you want to back stab someone I suppose. It just doesn't work for long-term rivalries between two blobs suddenly turning into a hot war.

I'm talking about the ability to gather intelligence from a function key menu, by spending so many energy credits a month or whatever on intelligence gathering. Eventually it spits out a reasonable picture of what their fleets look like and what they're made of if you keep at it long enough.

I guess the biggest obstacle is making the AI not get gimped because it's running into optimal builds all the time?
 

Almond_Brown

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Why not just make mine fields their own construction, like SOASER, requiring special ships to detect them so they can be shot at (why not just a science ship? Thats requires a scientist to perform the function?).

That would require a Science ship to have guns. They do not. ;)
 
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IkkeTM

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I find them to be quite decent force multipliers actually, when you use overlapping fields... Defence stations are more like prepared positions for your fleet to use, rather than things that stand on their own... but so what?
 

Pchang

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Wow - I get away for a few days and a science debate breaks out.

All that stuff about being a few hundred degrees hotter than deep space..... is based upon black body radiation. There is no reason That a space ship I build for the express purpose of fighting other space ships has to behave like a black body. I can design it to cool in one direction and radiate away in another direction. I can even use lasers to radiate away in a very narrow band. And I can make that direction away from you if I know the general direction of where you will be.
 

BlackUmbrellas

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Wow - I get away for a few days and a science debate breaks out.

All that stuff about being a few hundred degrees hotter than deep space..... is based upon black body radiation. There is no reason That a space ship I build for the express purpose of fighting other space ships has to behave like a black body. I can design it to cool in one direction and radiate away in another direction. I can even use lasers to radiate away in a very narrow band. And I can make that direction away from you if I know the general direction of where you will be.
Unfortunately, neither of those are workable solutions. You should do some reading on Atomic Rockets, they get into it pretty clearly.