Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[kilakan]

In my experience the weapon tech you go into largely determines what size of ship fits you best.  Ballisitcs tend to be really short range where corvetts shine, however torpedoes and lance's are where battleships come in king.

In my current fairly late game (just killed my first fallen empire) I have now transition to a pure battleship fleet.  Usually I kill anything they throw at me before it even gets into range for them to fire.

[NullForceOmega]

I managed to deal with that annoying little empire that I couldn't directly declare war against, they foolishly decided to ally themselves with my nearest rival, who I have been biting sizable chunks out of with my 35k main battlefleet.  After the most recent conflict they evidently surrendered themselves to me after I bombed their homeworld, I guess being stuck between two of the four largest empires in the galaxy, who happen to be allies, made them nervous.

[Orange Wizard]

I think we've just been spoiled by Toady's moderation.

I think other sites don't get your nitpick-dere disposition whereas here we all know you.

Except the CK2 forum is ostensibly the same rules and mostly the same mods as the Stellaris one, and I've gone there for years about as often as you can before being considered a regular.

Huh, weird. Maybe whoever banned you was having a bad day.

[Flying Dice]

there's another thing they missed out on, specialty capital ships and active abilities for ships based on class and modules.

Battleships have passive auras based on modules. Lack of active effect is like the lack of active involvement in general. Which works in most Paradox games because you have a lot of unimportant little engagements none of which singly matter that much.

Yeah, I know, but the auras are pretty limited insofar as that there are very few and they can only be fielded by battleships.

Hell, the whole combat computer thing should be a lot deeper than it is. It was a mistake to tie the stat bonuses to the behaviors (not that the behaviors are particularly elaborate). What if you want to make a long-range missileboat? Obviously you want the damage increase, but that module makes the ship charge in blindly. It should have been split into two subsystems, a "systems computer" and a "tactics computer", with the former giving a stat bonus and the latter dictating how the ship behaves in battle.

All it would take is a simple set of design-specific options: "maintain maximum range", "close with enemy", "screen long-range combatants", "pursue enemy long-range combatants", and "escort capital ships". Give a fleet focus toggle to tell the whole fleet if it should concentrate fire on a single random enemy, on one of the largest enemies, split fire between an appropriate number of the smallest enemies (to avoid overkill), or divide fire evenly across the enemy force. Lock that stuff behind some fleet tactics techs.

Bam. There. I just fixed combat. More tactical depth and less micromanagement. As it stands I feel like I have to baby my fleets because they're so willing to lemming-train into danger and there's nothing to do after you blunder into combat. I've seen a lot of people talking on the Paradox forums about how combat's fine because this is grand strategy blah blah--fuck them, no. This is a 4X, and it needs to have a solid, tactically-oriented combat system, because "lol bigger number and OP designs win everything ever" is dull. 

[Cyroth]

Hell, the whole combat computer thing should be a lot deeper than it is. It was a mistake to tie the stat bonuses to the behaviors (not that the behaviors are particularly elaborate). What if you want to make a long-range missileboat? Obviously you want the damage increase, but that module makes the ship charge in blindly. It should have been split into two subsystems, a "systems computer" and a "tactics computer", with the former giving a stat bonus and the latter dictating how the ship behaves in battle.

All it would take is a simple set of design-specific options: "maintain maximum range", "close with enemy", "screen long-range combatants", "pursue enemy long-range combatants", and "escort capital ships". Give a fleet focus toggle to tell the whole fleet if it should concentrate fire on a single random enemy, on one of the largest enemies, split fire between an appropriate number of the smallest enemies (to avoid overkill), or divide fire evenly across the enemy force. Lock that stuff behind some fleet tactics techs.

That sounds kinda like Gratuitous Space Battles grafted on top of the current Stellaris combat system. Which, now that I think about it, sounds totally awesome.

[Sirus]

Hell, the whole combat computer thing should be a lot deeper than it is. It was a mistake to tie the stat bonuses to the behaviors (not that the behaviors are particularly elaborate). What if you want to make a long-range missileboat? Obviously you want the damage increase, but that module makes the ship charge in blindly. It should have been split into two subsystems, a "systems computer" and a "tactics computer", with the former giving a stat bonus and the latter dictating how the ship behaves in battle.

All it would take is a simple set of design-specific options: "maintain maximum range", "close with enemy", "screen long-range combatants", "pursue enemy long-range combatants", and "escort capital ships". Give a fleet focus toggle to tell the whole fleet if it should concentrate fire on a single random enemy, on one of the largest enemies, split fire between an appropriate number of the smallest enemies (to avoid overkill), or divide fire evenly across the enemy force. Lock that stuff behind some fleet tactics techs.

That sounds kinda like Gratuitous Space Battles grafted on top of the current Stellaris combat system. Which, now that I think about it, sounds totally awesome.

That would be incredible.

[IronyOwl]

Hell, the whole combat computer thing should be a lot deeper than it is. It was a mistake to tie the stat bonuses to the behaviors (not that the behaviors are particularly elaborate). What if you want to make a long-range missileboat? Obviously you want the damage increase, but that module makes the ship charge in blindly. It should have been split into two subsystems, a "systems computer" and a "tactics computer", with the former giving a stat bonus and the latter dictating how the ship behaves in battle.

All it would take is a simple set of design-specific options: "maintain maximum range", "close with enemy", "screen long-range combatants", "pursue enemy long-range combatants", and "escort capital ships". Give a fleet focus toggle to tell the whole fleet if it should concentrate fire on a single random enemy, on one of the largest enemies, split fire between an appropriate number of the smallest enemies (to avoid overkill), or divide fire evenly across the enemy force. Lock that stuff behind some fleet tactics techs.

Bam. There. I just fixed combat. More tactical depth and less micromanagement.

Would still be kind of disappointing in that strength disparity still scales exponentially, but yeah, there'd be actual moving parts now. Throwing in tactics/order following complications when trying to use a larger fleet against a smaller one could deal with some of that and give another (hopefully not obtuse) layer of decisionmaking for both fleet building and divisions.

Some kind of "destroyed ships limp back to port and can be repaired for less than it'd cost to make new ones, and get a discount to being upgraded at the same time" system on top of all that could make war itself more fluid and interesting, or just muddy and cheapen everything.

Another major issue for the battles themselves, though, is that the random element is either meaningless or obtuse. I don't know how ships select their targets, but damage ranges and hit/miss chances are really only impactful if the individual attacks are. With the gradual grinddown thing it's got going on at the moment, it's hard for anything important to happen or be noticed, which means most battles go exactly as statistically predicted. A system wherein hits and crits and damage to certain modules and such were all important, unpredictable, and noticeable could do wonders for making combat (and to an extent by extension, shipbuilding) interesting on a local scale.

Battleships have passive auras based on modules. Lack of active effect is like the lack of active involvement in general. Which works in most Paradox games because you have a lot of unimportant little engagements none of which singly matter that much.

I've seen a lot of people talking on the Paradox forums about how combat's fine because this is grand strategy blah blah--fuck them, no. This is a 4X, and it needs to have a solid, tactically-oriented combat system, because "lol bigger number and OP designs win everything ever" is dull. 

Alternatively, they could just abstract combat out into blobs that sit where they're assigned and do stuff according to their combat power relative to the combat power of anything opposing them. So small fleets are still useless against larger fleets, but they're passively useless rather than get rekt and need to be replaced useless.

[EuchreJack]

But with the way fleets work, a war is pretty much decided by the first big engagement, so if they did that the only limit on blobbing would be how long you feel like eating war exhaustion.

I strongly disagree, at least early game.  Maybe I'd doing it wrong, but I always have far more minerals than Energy, so I find it a lot cheaper to just poof a fleet at wartime and hope they're all dead by peacetime.  I see wars as a battle of resources: I outproduce ships until I win.

Another common misconception (or at least, I didn't get it for a while) is that Fleet Limits are hard limits.  You can go over, but it'll cost you Energy.  Obviously, if you expect heavy losses from a Big Engagement, then no problem.  Which means that you can always out-build your opponent temporarily, provided you win the mineral war.

Granted, there are certain "totally boned" moments, but one battle isn't going to do it.  I also acknowledge that the first massive battle is likely to have an unfair effect on the War Score, but counter that with the fact that you have to occupy a planet to demand it in peace talks.  And apparently if you successfully Emergency Jump away, the battle doesn't count.

Speaking of which, any advice on integrating captured territory into my Empire?  Especially if I'm Xenophobic?  Additionally, what to do with disloyal vassals.  I'm not even sure how I can destroy disloyal vassals.  Ironically, disloyal vassals are still very much loyal in sending ships to support my fleets and declaring war on my enemies.  I just don't get free stuff, from what I can see.  And they might rebel.

Despite the complaints about the AI, non-player empires are certainly capable of taking advantage of the unwary player.  I frequently get offered migration deals from empires whose population would be toxic for my empire, and the weakest empires are keen to ally so I can get sucked into their unwinnable wars.  If I ever get offered a mutual civilian border transit agreement, I'm going to suspect a fleet of colony ships ready to cut off my routes of expansion.

[Majestic7]

If you are a xenophobe, you need to clap conquered population in irons, genocide them or keep the planets racially pure, ie. don't let your main population migrate on the planet. Otherwise you will have both the conquered population unhappy and your main population unhappy because they are surrounded by filthy xenos.

I can't help but be a little amused at how fucking genocidal half the players seem to be, based on forum/reddit chatter on the subject. If 40K has done something, it has sure made people think killing billions of sentient beings is fine and fun.

[Chiefwaffles]

...he says, while on the Bay12 forums.

[Neonivek]

Outside Fallen Empires... Genocide is oddly a MORE effective way to handle your empire then not.

[Cyroth]

...he says, while on the Bay12 forums.

And dwarven child care is not even the most hilarious thing around. There are also mermaid farming or Mr. O. M. whose full name is not to be mentioned on this forum, for example.
Now that I think about it, it has passed quite a lot of time since the last good atrocity.

[Orange Wizard]

If anything stands as eternal testament to human depravity, it's O

USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST

[Majestic7]

...he says, while on the Bay12 forums.

Are you calling my childhood an atrocity? I'm just fine and it was beavers, not dogs. *twitches* Anyway, massacring elves doesn't count, they are walking plants.

[Sirus]

Turns out that you can in fact be clever about combat if you're willing to micro a bit.

Tensions between me and a race of democratic crusader slug people have been building for decades, and it finally erupted into a shooting war. Thankfully my military had been building up, and a fleet of 21 top-of-the-line corvettes jumped into the slug systems in order to made a nuisance of itself. It destroyed numerous mining and research stations before obliterating a star port without losing a single ship, leaving the colony below vulnerable to bombardment.

Meanwhile, on the opposite end of the slug empire, my defense fleet lay in wait with all sensors active. It was a mere 5 corvettes strong, all I could manage before hostilities erupted. And lo and behold, the slug's main war fleet went zooming by on a direct course for my home world. I literally could not afford to lose the star port there, as it was my primary warship construction yard and its loss would cripple my ability to replace destroyed ships. Hyperdrive got my defense fleet to the home system not long after the slug fleet, but the power disparity meant that engaging in open space would be suicidal.

So instead, I waited. I waited until the slug fleet committed itself against my star port (which was putting up a rather impressive fight, but could not hold out for long) and then sent my torpedo-armed defenders charging in from behind. The slugs decided to concentrate on my mobile forces, but being stuck within range of the star port they continued to get battered by it. And yet it still almost wasn't enough. I lost three corvettes before hitting the emergency retreat button, and the remaining slugs turned back to continue the duel against the star port.

And that's when the nearby mining station got involved. It began launching its pitiful missiles, and the slugs turned to destroy it instead. They ignored the far more dangerous and valuable target to destroy a completely replaceable EC mining station. Which they managed, no surprise there, but it took time for them to do that. Long enough for more of their ships to get damaged or destroyed. Long enough for the surviving defense fleet, battered and bloody but with shields recharged for Round Two, to return and end the battle once and for all.

Just a few days later, a second (much smaller) slug fleet arrived. It didn't stay very long.