Why do occupied planets still provide full production for the original owner?

[Harkinian's Dinner]

This part of war is always such a cheeseable and illogical design. When fighting against a stronger AI opponent, it's often a good idea to just let them send their strongest fleet and armies into a densely populated part of your empire, where they will spend their time harmlessly conquering your planets which does absolutely nothing other than raise your war exhaustion, while you send your own fleets into their territory and take over their shipyards, crippling their ability to wage war. Even if they are able to force a status quo sooner, they usually don't have claims on systems deep in your empire, and you can just surgically retake the systems that do have a claim and not bother with the rest. Or more likely, just fully conquer the enemy's systems and force a surrender. Even though the enemy ostensibly occupies all your core planets.

Shouldn't occupation at least lower production by 50% or something? Maybe even have a policy for how oppressive your occupying forces are?

This "no effect until the war is over" design goes hand in hand with the similarly illogical design of war exhaustion, which also has no effect until it reaches 100%. Shouldn't war exhaustion gradually decrease your fleet power and stability on your planets as it increases or something? These parts of the war system just feel half baked, and lead to very "gamey" strategies that hurt the grand strategy design of the game.

 

[HFY]

harmlessly conquering your planets which does absolutely nothing other than raise your war exhaustion

If your defense armies kill enough of their assault armies, you can end up giving them more WE than they give you.

(Losing defense armies doesn't increase your WE.)

 

[Harkinian's Dinner]

If your defense armies kill enough of their assault armies, you can end up giving them more WE than they give you.

(Losing defense armies doesn't increase your WE.)

Even more reason to just let them ravage my planets then. Of course, you have to make sure not to have *too* many defense armies, because then the enemy will start bombarding the planets, which DOES reduce production. Another illogical and gamey result of the system.

 

[Serenity84]

There is a mod that tries to address some of this:

Steam Workshop::Occupied Resources

steamcommunity.com

There is also "Under Siege", which has some similar aspects like needing local production to withstand a siege, but it also has long sieges cause stability issues, so you can't necessarily bounce right back after retaking a planet.

 

[Cordane]

I think one of the big issues with trying to make occupation work "correctly" is that Stellaris doesn't model how much of any given resource is produced or stored on a given planet, nor how much is getting shipped off of or on to a planet. If it did, you could cut off any movement to or from the occupied planet, while the local production and stored resources would still be available to the planet itself (but not the rest of the system). Depending on the nature of the occupation, smuggling operations could still move some resources back and forth - a larger or more capable occupying force would prevent more of this smuggling. You could also allow for some "humanitarian" aid (i.e., Food, Minerals, or Energy, depending on consuming Pops) to be brought in, at some conversion rate to account for difficulty in dealing with the blockade. Occupying empires that don't allow that aid to pass through might be subject to negative reactions from the galactic community.

 

[Tamwin5]

I was under the impression that occupied planets only give half production to the original owner, is that not the case?

 

[DamnedLackOfTropicalFruit]

Interestingly, we have another active thread complaining about the opposite problem right now:

Reflecting on Planets

My friends and I play a decent amount of multiplayer Stellaris, but we usually play coop. For a lark we decided to play pvp and ran into a curious problem: It takes ages to build an empire, and seconds to lose it. We had one climactic battle on...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

When occupation does take (or at least deprive the defender of) resources, such as in a total war, taking any planet is an irrecoverable swing in favour of the attacking empire. The defending empire not only needs to recover their fleets, but they also need to handle their economy being thrown into a completely unbalanced state.

When planets are as significant and specialised as they are, it's always going to be impossible to adapt to the loss of a couple key worlds. You either specialise too much and collapse if you lose a world, or balance your production evenly everywhere and get demolished because you've crippled yourself.

 

[ZomgK3tchup]

I assume it's one of their anti-death spiral mechanics.

Losing one planet can cascade into losing all of them and "losing leads to more losing" is something Paradox tries to design against.

 

[Franton]

The only way to cause an enemy loss of production is bombarding them until they hit 0 stability and then let a single ship keep up the bombardment, so they don't recover. However, that takes a lot more time than simply invading the planet.

 

[Serenity84]

balance your production evenly everywhere

It doesn't have to be one extreme or the other. Specialization can be for reasonably secure core planets, while frontier planets would be better as generalist worlds under such a system

 

[Harkinian's Dinner]

Interestingly, we have another active thread complaining about the opposite problem right now:

Reflecting on Planets

My friends and I play a decent amount of multiplayer Stellaris, but we usually play coop. For a lark we decided to play pvp and ran into a curious problem: It takes ages to build an empire, and seconds to lose it. We had one climactic battle on...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

When occupation does take (or at least deprive the defender of) resources, such as in a total war, taking any planet is an irrecoverable swing in favour of the attacking empire. The defending empire not only needs to recover their fleets, but they also need to handle their economy being thrown into a completely unbalanced state.

When planets are as significant and specialised as they are, it's always going to be impossible to adapt to the loss of a couple key worlds. You either specialise too much and collapse if you lose a world, or balance your production evenly everywhere and get demolished because you've crippled yourself.

You mean players would actually have to make strategic decisions and balance risk and reward in a strategy game? Worm forbid!

You just inadvertently supported my argument.

And I said production should be reduced by 50%, not to zero. If losing 50% production on a single planet destroys your economy, then you deserved to have it destroyed.

 

[zZander56]

I think the occupation modifier is additive (subtractive?) rather than multiplicative, while devastation is the other way around, meaning occupation is much less than half as good as bombarding into dust. That's coming from a vague memory though so feel free to quote me if you want, I won't tell anybody.

 

[SirBlackAxe]

The most immediate reason is that adding mechanics complicating wartime economics when the AI doesn't even understand that planetary bombardment is almost always a complete waste of time, and is incapable of planning planetary development strategically, will likely result in economic collapse for every AI empire in almost every war. Even if no human players are involved.

More generally, it's because Stellaris doesn't model logistics. If occupying a planet interferes with its with its resource output, you need to decide how and why.

• Are intangible resources - unity and research - effected? What about naval capacity from soldiers? Do they still count towards factions?
• Are occupying forces appropriating the output? If so, logically the pops should simply stop working.
  • Do we need a mechanic to enslave them and force them to work? What if the defending player disables all jobs before you take control of the planet? Does letting a planet get conquered temporarily so your pops are enslaved and instantly demoted become a valid strategy for bypassing demotion time if you happen to be at war, or do we need a way to prevent that?
  • Is deliberately prolonging wars to camp on occupied worlds for the empire size free and possibly upkeep free resources a desired strategy?
  • Does whether or not a pop keeps working need to be individually calculated for each one individually based on their relative preference for either their owner or the occupier based on ethics, species rights, and faction approval?
  • Does economic code need to be rewritten so planets produce enough resources to pay as much of their own upkeep as possible before taking imports/exports into account?
• If pops aren't working, how do we implement that and what are they doing instead?
  • If you close jobs to unemploy them, what do you do about pops with living standards that still produce resources while they're unemployed? Does putting all pops on a demotion timer matter? Depending on how jobs are filled when re-enabled, the planet could end up with many unemployed higher stratum pops and empty lower stratum jobs.
    • Missing your once a decade pop conversion because a planet was occupied and unemployed all your necrophytes at the wrong time seems like it would be very frustrating for Necrophages. Empires running assimilation would also have a less severe form of this for missing the yearly assimilation day.
    • This could end up resetting robot assembly progress.
    • Do high levels of unemployment events trigger? For whom?
  • Do you leave them employed but reduce their output and job upkeep? What about crime reduction, amenities, or any other non-resource job effects?
    • What if this leaves a planet unable to pay its own upkeep, even if it normally could?
  • What about direct resourses that come from buildings or planet features instead of jobs? Or that go to holding owners?
  • Do pops produce some form of insurgency instead of resources? Or do they sit around doing nothing? Does this varying depending on whether they like their owner or occupier better?
• Is the occupying empire blocking resources from being transported offworld without stealing them?
  • You'll need a mechanic for saving the produced resources to give later based on control and ownership changes.
• If exports are interupted, imports should be too. Who's paying upkeep for all the pops and jobs?
  • If it's the owner, do you need to find a way to apply resource output penalties after subtracting pop upkeep, or is needing your border worlds to overproduce food and CG so that they remain self-sufficient even while taking a -50% penalty acceptable?
  • If it's the occupier, they risk instant deficits on resources they don't normally use, or at least sudden spikes in resource use. Does this make putting your highly specialized high upkeep worlds near your borders as economic bombs a valid strategy?
  • Do you need to be able to change living standards to reduce CG upkeep?
  • If multiple worlds are occupied, should they be able to pay each other's upkeep if necessary? What if they have different occupiers and/or owners?
  • Do you need a mechanic allowing you to preemptively stockpile resources on planets so they don't start to starve while occupied?
• Any effects that impact pop happiness or planet stability need to account for the consequences of this.
  • What do you do about rebellions?
  • Do you prevent crime modifiers, add a way to remove them early if planet control changes and crime instantly vanishes, add a seperate resistance mechanic that replaces crime on occupied worlds, or just let occupied worlds suffer from crime modifiers for years after the war ends?
• What if the starbase is occupied but the planet isn't, or there's otherwise no safe path for civilian transports to carry resources to the empire capital? Shouldn't that also cause most of the same effects?
  • Should a capital connection actually matter, or is connecting resource output to resource upkeep or shipyard preferable? That means giving each seperate disconnected bit of your empire its own resource income and stockpile, though.
  • Do you extend the same logic to fleet supply lines, so ships cut off from your resource production suffer unpaid upkeep penalties?
• How do you implement this in a way that:
  • isn't just a way for human players to punish the AI for poor strategic prioritization? I don't think "make the AI even worse at warfare" is a desirable design goal.
  • Doesn't mean the player who wins the initial doomstack vs. doomstack battle is able to cripple their opponent beyond any possible chance of recovery even more so than they already can?

Implementing wartime logistics seems like it would take an awful lot of work that I'd personally prefer go to more important or actually broken mechanics, basically.

 

[Eled the Worm Tamer]

We need proper supply lines and interior structure, both of economies and war fleets. That would not only address this issue in a gamable way but also hedge against doom stacks and open up tactics like 'pin fleet with one battle group, and send another to cut off its resupply' this would favor defenders, but attacker have the advantage of choosing when to declare of they do so unready that's on them.

Making one's empire less internally homogenous would also help add internal politics.