So, there's been a new Dev Diary (Link). Thoughts?
Also, the game is on sale, at a percentage that buying the base game (not either of the special editions), Leviathans Story Pack, Utopia, and Synthetic Dawn is about $5 above the base price for the game.
I mean, they're not bad changes, but it's a bit like polishing a turd. I was hoping for a much larger overhaul of the ground combat system. The fact that they went less complicated and cut features instead of seeing the features through to their fullest conclusion is disappointing but sadly consistent with the general thrust of Stellaris development.
They are already overhauling a ton of stuff, and your reaction is 'they aren't doing enough'? They kinda have to get an update out at some point.
As for cutting features, they kinda seem to be streamlining to have a better ability to expand the game. Just look at how much was opened up by just limiting things to hyperlanes. And looking at the other reactions, was there really a point to keeping the old army system as it stood? Hell, this one could potentially be expanded to a greater degree of customization with the potential addition of different fortress paths to provide defensive armies with different focuses, with one type going for quantity provided, another for boosting damage, another for boosting health, and those latter two could be split into specializing in different ways (ie. one expands morale more than health which can be useful for fighting off psi empires) while being a hell of a lot more condensed than it would be on an army screen.
Although at this point I'm kinda rooting for the changes to fail to produce a satisfactory result because I think Wiz is way too smug about them.
I personally am driven in the opposite direction by the reactions of everyone here.
I probably won't build them anywhere outside of key frontier choke points where you can place those fancy planetary FTL inhibitors, and that only as a definite maybe.
It is stated in the Dev diary that there will be multiple tiers of fortress. If each increases the amount of unity, then why would you not build them instead of autochation monuments? Granted, if you are playing Spiritualist it is slightly more of a tradeoff, but still.
One major oversight I see is that they're removing defensive armies so you need to build fortresses... except you can just station a bunch of offensive armies on the planet for the same effect.
Offensive armies don't reduce unrest and are vulnerable to orbitable bombardment so it's really not the same. More of a stop-gap solution than a proper one.
While I agree with pretty much all of the changes, I also agree with Culise. Who cares who wins the ground war? As long as you have space superiority you can pretty much bombard planets to dust at will. Heck. With the new war weariness and warscore system I wouldn't be surprised if you could win some smaller conflicts simply by grinding the enemy's fleets down and blockading their planets.
Because now planets can flat out prevent your ships from leaving the system entirely unless captured if an FTL inhibitor is placed on them, and you can only change that with a ground invasion? And while you could bombard the buildings to dust it would likely take a hell of a long time to do so and you can't kill all the pops on the planet unless you have a bombardment stance that seems to be available only to fanatic purifiers?
One major oversight I see is that they're removing defensive armies so you need to build fortresses... except you can just station a bunch of offensive armies on the planet for the same effect.
Fortresses flat out prevent the armies they spawn from being able to be damaged by orbital bombardment, and assault armies wouldn't benefit from that.