XL and L only meta

[TrotBot]

This forum is so weird sometimes. People complain about the good things as if they're bad.

It's good that once battleships are out everything else is trash. That's the real world. [edit: more like real world scifi]. You can still run covette fleets but you need to have massive numbers on them, and you better hope they're not smart battleship designers who have 4 kinds in each fleet including carrier battleships like I do, or your corvettes will get wrecked.

Both cruisers and corvettes are useable if you lean into the weaknesses of battleships and design them correctly. but battlships will always be better.

 

[Bayushi Tasogare]

This forum is so weird sometimes. People complain about the good things as if they're bad.

It's good that once battleships are out everything else is trash. That's the real world. You can still run covette fleets but you need to have massive numbers on them, and you better hope they're not smart battleship designers who have 4 kinds in each fleet including carrier battleships like I do, or your corvettes will get wrecked.

Both cruisers and corvettes are useable if you lean into the weaknesses of battleships and design them correctly. but battlships will always be better.

Um.

If by 'real world', you mean 'real world navies', your statement of 'once battleships are out everything else is trash' has been demonstrably false for nearly a century.

If you look at most (American) naval groups today, they are composed of many different hull types, from small to large, and each has their own use. Part of the reason for this is because of naval elements that Stellaris has no analog for (e.g., submarines), but it's very doubtful that Aegis cruisers and their ilk are every going to go away from modern naval configurations.

 

[Tobasco da Gama]

If the Navy could afford to have a battlegroup composed of a dozen supercarriers, you bet your ass they would do it in a heartbeat. It's only because they can't afford to do so that they use varied ship classes; the air wings could fulfill all the roles of the escort ships, but one flight deck can't keep enough planes in the sky for that.

 

[HFY]

If the Navy could afford to have a battlegroup composed of a dozen supercarriers, you bet your ass they would do it in a heartbeat. It's only because they can't afford to do so that they use varied ship classes; the air wings could fulfill all the roles of the escort ships, but one flight deck can't keep enough planes in the sky for that.

Honestly not sure about that.

Real-world missile cruisers and stealth destroyers each have capabilities which a supercarrier can't emulate, and that's just two classes.

But anyway, it's certainly true that real-world navies DON'T just crack out mono-hull fleets of their latest design. If Stellaris wants to emulate navies in space, then the game might want to include some mechanic which either rewards mixed-hull fleets, or at the very least remove the current mechanic which punishes non-mono fleets.

 

[TrotBot]

sorry, i meant real world in the sense of tech. yes true that this stuff would not be the case in naval warfare, but in my real world conception of scifi, a massive fleet composed on entirely larger ships should win unless you SPECIFICALLY equip you nimble craft to their weaknesses and outnumber them by sheer mass of ships being thrown at them. you need to really lean into some very specialized corvettes for them to matter late game. i don't want to build a lot of corvettes. i don't want to deal with corvettes. you want to do that, and you think late game tech corvettes could use a buff, i would be down, but i don't want a "meta shakeup" that forces me to abandon battleships when i'm finally getting the hang of designing an entire fleet just the way i like it.

i'd be down for making late game corvettes and cruisers more competitive with cool late game tech, or more hangar bays on cruisers late game or whatever, and i would run them as rapid response fleets. i might even run cruisers if they become a lot stronger late game. but i do not want it to be a rework of how the classes play against each other or making them rock paper scissors each other in a weird way like overwatch trying to make its hero select a card game and ruining the fun and balance of just maining a hero or a strategy and climbing with it.

lean into speed mattering more. let excess speeds be expressed in evasion or something? let there be more upgrades for the lower level weapons? more utility slots added on through rare tech late game? i don't know, there are things that can make them stronger without making it a whole fundamental rework that makes fun scifi battles feel more like boring cheerio colonial english naval battles.

OH I KNOW! reduce the naval capacity used by smaller ship classes a little bit so you can run fleets with similar punch to a big ship smaller number fleet? or would that just make them hard meta?

 

[Derp]

smaller ships simply don't have a reason to exist once bigger ones are available, because bigger ships are just... well, bigger ships. they have more HP and DPS and range, and a bit lower speed, and that's basically it.
to change this (without simply inverting the balance so that battleships are trash) you'd either need much more sophisticated combat and warfare systems, or some kind of hamhanded "have X screens for Y capital ships or die" mechanic.

 

[Dragatus]

It's not just smaller vs bigger ships. It's also about what weapons big ships use. Currently there is absolutely no reason to ever design a battleship with a Broadside Bow or Broadside Core and only a marginal use for the Broadside Stern for a penetration design if you lack Cloud Lightning.

I'm fine with big ships phasing out smaller ships (among other things it helps performance), but I'd like there to be multiple competing big ship designs and I'd like the AI to get the memo to stop building small ships once it can build big ships.

 

[Iosue Yu]

I think one big reason why the fleet combat is the way it is now is that when the combat systems were made, there weren't really one big central piece of reference to make modifications on. That's why we get systems that are simply "too perfect".

By "too perfect", I mean things that are simply perfectly controllable.

1. When fleets get larger, their power is simply stacked without diminished return. In most SF works, however, would have larger fleets just little bit more powerful than a fleet slightly smaller because of how all fleets are still commanded by one guy.
   1. In other works by Paradox, this is at least somewhat addressed by Combat Width. But in Stellaris, all fleet performances are additive. You have more you are stronger.
2. In SF works, particularly the militaristic ones, would particularly stress the importance of good pilots and crewmen. A country would just have a fail military if they really don't have combat experience and drilling.
   1. In Stellaris, we only have Experience on ships. You generally never run out of pilots and everything is just bounded by naval capacity that just can be built instead of trained or invested.
3. And the almost absolute lack of geography and terrains.
4. And the accuracy depending solely on weapon type and stacked bonus.
   1. But in reality, a weapon's accuracy is partly a tangent function depending on the distance and the errors from imperfect smoothness of the polishing of the gun barrels. So large distances should really make thing hard to hit. Missiles are very good weapons in space because they are able to track.
   2. And in Stellaris, the PD are probably too strong and long.
   3. And somehow I have no idea why missiles are mainly fired individually. And I don't really know what these "Swarm Missiles" are. I think the sensible thing to fire missiles is to fire them in a barrage in the Alpha Strike so you hit a large area.
   4. The Missiles in Stellaris are not equivalent to cruising missiles, because you fire them in an active engagement instead of offline. I think they resemble Homing Missiles carried by fighters.
5. And somehow we have no weapons with area damages. Everything is shot by one to one. I think when you build ships as large as ones like a Battleship, you'd at least include some weapons that just fire towards a general direction and let it spread to maintain pressure against your enemies instead of having to point the gun one to one to get a hit.

So, it can't be helped. I'd prefer they actually refer to some good SF works and redesign the combat systems. But well, that's where I just accept this as a game so... We just can't ask for perfection.

 

[Coconut_Cookie]

Yeah this is one of the few things that can be done. Limit the number of L/XL guns one can field, which mostly dodges/mitigates the issue, without directly tackling alpha strikes.
I was looking at it pre 3.0 here.

I've got a minimod on my drive somewhere that applies this, and then skews its limit up/down if you're militarist, pacifist, gestalt or bypasses it if you are an exterminator. And lengthens repair times/build times.

I know a lot of people are all for the "tidal wave of ships" / big battle thing. But to me it doesnt actually benefit the game, and just looks messy after a certain level of ships are participating in a battle.. I'd much rather have fewer ships on average, with tighter limits on numbers of classes you can field, with each ship being more impactful. Seeing a stack of 20 battleships flying in, escorted by a 40 plus cruisers could be just as powerful as 200 BBs if tweaked right. It would be more performative, and would let things like ship XP, even ship names matter more.

Or maybe trade could require specific quantities of ships. Each ship would just count as 1 because it can only be in one place at any given time. The player would still be free to build nothing but battleships but trade efficiency would decline as you would have too few ships to control all the trade that is going arround.

 

[Coconut_Cookie]

an assumption that you "should" have X starbases per Y systems seems perfectly reasonable to me.

That is an arbitrary rule imposed by the game. Why not ditch that rule entirely and link starbases more directly to economy by making them depend on a specific pop job? Introduce a spaceport building for planets, this building would house all the jobs that are in space in that particular star system. Each upgrade and perhaps each building on the starbase requires a pop working on it. Smaller empires could possibly have an effeciency bonus somewhere to make them a bit more competitive.

 

[Iosue Yu]

Um.

If by 'real world', you mean 'real world navies', your statement of 'once battleships are out everything else is trash' has been demonstrably false for nearly a century.

If you look at most (American) naval groups today, they are composed of many different hull types, from small to large, and each has their own use. Part of the reason for this is because of naval elements that Stellaris has no analog for (e.g., submarines), but it's very doubtful that Aegis cruisers and their ilk are every going to go away from modern naval configurations.

Submarine is a nice concept. I think only the Yamato series has ever used this, a dimensional submarine.

It'd be OP in Stellaris. But a nice change in the perfect battlefield we have now

 

[grommile]

Why not ditch that rule entirely and link starbases more directly to economy by making them depend on a specific pop job?

Attaching starbase cap to a pop job could certainly work...

Introduce a spaceport building for planets, this building would house all the jobs that are in space in that particular star system.

but this wouldn't, because we're allowed (and, indeed, encouraged by the hyperlane network) to build starbases in systems with no planets.

Submarine is a nice concept. I think only the Yamato series has ever used this, a dimensional submarine.

ST TOS episode "Balance of Terror" is literally a reskin of WW2 movie subhunting sequence

 

[Coconut_Cookie]

Attaching starbase cap to a pop job could certainly work...

but this wouldn't, because we're allowed (and, indeed, encouraged by the hyperlane network) to build starbases in systems with no planets.

That could be balanced by making jobs that work on starbases that are further away cost more, like extra pay for workers that are willing to be far way from home for extented periods of time.

 

[Pancakelord]

That could be balanced by making jobs that work on starbases that are further away cost more, like extra pay for workers that are willing to be far way from home for extented periods of time.

Running a system/job seek every day? week? month to see if a starbase is valid? that sounds like a great way to grind the game to a halt. At best it could be non-locational and just contribute to the national starbase cap [every x jobs = +1 starbase].

 

[Shorr Kan]

Um.

If by 'real world', you mean 'real world navies', your statement of 'once battleships are out everything else is trash' has been demonstrably false for nearly a century.

If you look at most (American) naval groups today, they are composed of many different hull types, from small to large, and each has their own use. Part of the reason for this is because of naval elements that Stellaris has no analog for (e.g., submarines), but it's very doubtful that Aegis cruisers and their ilk are every going to go away from modern naval configurations.

US carrier groups are built, you guessed it, around aircraft carriers which anchor them and provide main punch. Carriers replaced battleships as the ships of the line.
It would be nice to have a dedicated carrier hull.
Only Russia as a fallen empire has Kirov-class battle cruisers with a one aircraft carrier

 

[Pancakelord]

When fleets get larger, their power is simply stacked without diminished return. In most SF works, however, would have larger fleets just little bit more powerful than a fleet slightly smaller because of how all fleets are still commanded by one guy.

1. In other works by Paradox, this is at least somewhat addressed by Combat Width. But in Stellaris, all fleet performances are additive. You have more you are stronger.

There is force disparity that is calculated on battle start, but a general lack of combat mechanics means it just adds fire rate to one side or the other, rather than doing something more interesting

# For each 100% size disparity between combatants
fleet_force_disparity_effect = {
    force_disparity_fire_rate_mult = 0.5
}

I suppose one could throw tracking or evasion in there too. if you're facing a wall of ships, it should be hard to miss...

In SF works, particularly the militaristic ones, would particularly stress the importance of good pilots and crewmen. A country would just have a fail military if they really don't have combat experience and drilling.

1. In Stellaris, we only have Experience on ships. You generally never run out of pilots and everything is just bounded by naval capacity that just can be built instead of trained or invested.

I dont think manpower can ever work in stellaris, really. Once you get cloning or robotic production, on the scales we play at it just doesn't make much sense, unless you make up some contrived limitation (like clones only being bred on 1 world - a la starwars. Or modifying how AIs work, so you need something scarce like an "AI core" as well as a cheap body).
I do think admirals should have a buff, right now all they do is

skill_admiral = {
    ship_fire_rate_mult = 0.03
}

There is no fleet_command_limit_mult/add modifier, only a country one, but I do like the idea of most fleets being small, and only ones commanded by high ranking admirals getting big (it would also add an actual element of risk to battles, whilst nobody cares about the ships (more can be printed easily) it takes time to train up a rank 5 admiral, losing one is going to sting more if you need them for fleet-cap).
One small thing that would help, given the high turnover of ships, is to add ship_experience_gain_mult = 0.15 (so +15% XP gained per ship, per admiral level).

And the almost absolute lack of geography and terrains.

True. Despite the changes over the years not has been done much here. You could make nebulae into killboxes by making them multiply evasion, or demultiply tracking.

shipsize_corvette_evasion_mult = 1.6
shipsize_destroyer_evasion_mult = 1.3
shipsize_cruiser_evasion_mult = 1.15
shipsize_battleship_evasion_mult = 1.05

You'll very quickly start to hit the soft cap (90% for evasion) though.

One thing I've tried, and quite like, is adding varying ship speed with how far you are from the galactic core. So if you're out on the rim, ships move between stars as fast as in vanilla, but if you're at the core, they move between stars 1/10th the speed (a la old T1 warp speed) and it tweens between the extremes if you're somewhere in the middle (assume its to do with dark matter distributions or whatever), doesnt directly affects battles, but it certainly makes the galaxy feel a little more varied.

 

[Iosue Yu]

To me, I think maybe we should address the validity of crew quality and quantity instead of just the logistical capacity of navy.

I realise Stellaris is a resource game but manpower isn't one of the resources. So fleets now are actually just limited by the materials you need to construct them, and you will just have the excellent staff and crew to operate them. (Same thing applies to Armies as well.)

But a country really need to send more people to be career military-men in order to slowly improve in quality and professionalism. You would build military academies and military engineering corps and spend quite a large budget from the government just to maintain the quality instead of simply supporting the active crewmen.

Then there really should be some manpower requirements on different modules and hull sizes. Them each Admiral, according to his skills, can command a fleet measured by crew number. Then, for example an Admiral of a certain skill level can only command like 1000 crewmen, then you can only make fleets with 1000 crewmen, regardless of hull sizes. So more skilled Admirals can command larger battle groups with a larger number of crewmen.

Ships banded together shouldn't really just have total power stacked together. There should be some forms of diminished return so you are encouraged to split your fleets.

There should be some recipes of different ratios of different hulls, and then different modifiers can be applied for different tactics with emphases on different aspects of the fleets.

Planetary side, military academics shouldn't just give you naval capacity and starting experience for Armies (seriously there isn't really any reason to build one right now). Instead they should increase the Quality of your crewmen. And the Crewmen's Quality should matter more. Some green crews (like when you're building more than what is optimal, meaning you're either preparing for a grand campaign or you are desperate), should be operating the Fleets with around half its best potential, while Experienced and Battle-hardened crews should operate the Fleets with like 2 times its performance.

And there needs to be some forms of drilling to make new good crewmen instead of just some green face you get for free. Patrolling against piracy is a joke.

 

[grommile]

Them each Admiral, according to his skills, can command a fleet measured by crew number.

How does that differ from commanding a fleet by its hull count or size in Naval Capacity points?

 

[Iosue Yu]

There is force disparity that is calculated on battle start, but a general lack of combat mechanics means it just adds fire rate to one side or the other, rather than doing something more interesting

# For each 100% size disparity between combatants
fleet_force_disparity_effect = {
    force_disparity_fire_rate_mult = 0.5
}

I suppose one could throw tracking or evasion in there too. if you're facing a wall of ships, it should be hard to miss...


I dont think manpower can ever work in stellaris, really. Once you get cloning or robotic production, on the scales we play at it just doesn't make much sense, unless you make up some contrived limitation (like clones only being bred on 1 world - a la starwars. Or modifying how AIs work, so you need something scarce like an "AI core" as well as a cheap body).
I do think admirals should have a buff, right now all they do is

skill_admiral = {
    ship_fire_rate_mult = 0.03
}

There is no fleet_command_limit_mult/add modifier, only a country one, but I do like the idea of most fleets being small, and only ones commanded by high ranking admirals getting big (it would also add an actual element of risk to battles, whilst nobody cares about the ships (more can be printed easily) it takes time to train up a rank 5 admiral, losing one is going to sting more if you need them for fleet-cap).
One small thing that would help, given the high turnover of ships, is to add ship_experience_gain_mult = 0.15 (so +15% XP gained per ship, per admiral level).

True. Despite the changes over the years not has been done much here. You could make nebulae into killboxes by making them multiply evasion, or demultiply tracking.

shipsize_corvette_evasion_mult = 1.6
shipsize_destroyer_evasion_mult = 1.3
shipsize_cruiser_evasion_mult = 1.15
shipsize_battleship_evasion_mult = 1.05

You'll very quickly start to hit the soft cap (90% for evasion) though.

One thing I've tried, and quite like, is adding varying ship speed with how far you are from the galactic core. So if you're out on the rim, ships move between stars as fast as in vanilla, but if you're at the core, they move between stars 1/10th the speed (a la old T1 warp speed) and it tweens between the extremes if you're somewhere in the middle (assume its to do with dark matter distributions or whatever), doesnt directly affects battles, but it certainly makes the galaxy feel a little more varied.

I don't think force disparity is strong enough to be noticeable. It's just there and everyone is still using doomstacks and a bigger stack always win.

Manpower is one of the thing that should be there otherwise land invasion and fleet building will be going crazy. We may not need the same Manpower for reinforcement and filling numbers, instead Manpower should mean you have good soldiers staffing your ships. Once you've depleted those, you get green crewmen with inferior quality.

For other points, I love your accounts on the game files. Something still needs to be done to change them.

How does that differ from commanding a fleet by its hull count or size in Naval Capacity points?

Weapons and modules may not require the same number of crewmen. Also you get a command structure overhead that regardless of ship sizes you still need a few number of crew positions for each ship. So basically 2 Corvettes should have slightly more crewmen than a Destroyer.

And countries may also deliberately choose to maximise gun numbers by using unmanned weapon modules with inferior quality.

This creates a dynamic.

 

[grommile]

This creates a dynamic.

Right up until some git with a spreadsheet proves that one of the options is clearly superior.

And really, an Admiral doesn't care whether her fleet takes 500 crew or 5000, because she isn't giving orders to the crew.

She's giving orders to the captains.