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Dev Diary #99 - Ground Combat & Army Rework

Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris dev diary. Today's dev diary is about some changes coming to ground combat and armies in the 2.0 'Cherryh' update. This will be the last dev diary before we take a break for the holidays, so there will be no diaries in the next week or the week after that. Stellaris dev diaries return on Thursday January 11th, 2018.

Defense Armies and Fortresses
Constructing Defense Armies have always been largely a meaningless exercise in Stellaris. While they are useful for reducing Unrest and occasionally might be able to beat off an unprepared attacker, the fact that a planet is capped on how many armies can be defending it while the attacker is *not* capped on how many armies are attacking, coupled with the general weakness of defense armies, means that defending a planet against a ground invasion is generally an exercise in futility and will at most delay an attacker by a few weeks. However, if we solved this by just making defense armies a lot stronger or capping the number of attacking units, the result would turn every invasion of a backwater colony into a big affair - something that is not particularly desirable when a war can involve several different actors with hundreds of planets between them.

For this reason, we have decided to rework Defense Armies into something that is actually useful, but requires a significant investment of resources to muster more than a token defense. Instead of being directly buildable by the empire, defense armies are created from certain buildings. The capital building will produce defense armies depending on its level, as will some other planetary uniques like Military Academy. If you want a planet to be well defended, however, you will need to construct Fortress building on its tiles. Fortresses require a pop to work them, do not produce any other resources than a small amount of Unity, but provide a significant amount of defense armies to protect the planet. Armies spawned by Fortresses are also impervious to orbital bombardment, and will not be able to be killed without first ruining the building itself. The armies generated by a building have their species and type set by the pop working it, so a Very Strong Battle Thrall will produce several powerful defense armies if placed on a Fortress, and special pops like Droids will produce their own variants like Robotic Defense Armies rather than the normal ones. Fortified worlds will also be able to be fit with an FTL inhibitor (the exact way they get them is not yet determined) that prevents enemy fleets from leaving the system unless the world is captured, which allows for the creation of Fortress Worlds to protect strategically important systems.
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(Building icon is a placeholder)

One more important change related to Defense Armies is a change to Unrest: Armies on planets no longer reduce Unrest directly. Instead, to handle a planet with high Unrest, you will need to construct Fortress-style buildings or take other measures (such as using Edicts) to reduce the planetary Unrest. This means you cannot simply capture a planet and then spam a dozen defense armies to immediately zero out the Unrest. As part of this, we will be balancing certain events and effect to ensure newly captured worlds do not instantly defect back to their former owner.

Finally, as part of all these changes Defense Armies have received a general buff and there are several new technologies that unlock additional tiers of forts and various improvements to Defense Armies' combat ability, meaning that they will grow stronger alongside the invention of new, more powerful assault armies.

Assault Army Management
A major aim of our changes to armies is to reduce the amount of unnecessary micromanagement of armies. For this reason, and to make Assault Armies' role more explicit, we have decided to change Assault Armies to always be based in space. Whenever not directly engaged in an invasion, Assault Armies will now always automatically embark onto their transports, ready to be used to invade another world. We also aim to fix the minor but immersion-breaking bug where transport fleets are giving endlessly increasing sequential names whenever they land and embark again.

Combat Width, Retreating and Collateral Damage
Another change to ground combat is the introduction of new mechanics in the form of Combat Width. Combat Width is determined by the size of the planet, and decides how many armies can be taking and receiving damage at the same time: For example, if 20 assault armies invade a world held by 10 defense armies with a combat width of 10, all 10 defense armies will be immediately engaged in battle while only half the assault armies will be able to deal and receive damage, with additional assault armies joining the fray as the armies in front of them are destroyed. This means that it is no longer possible to take a well defended world without losses by simply throwing a hundred clone armies at it: If you wish to minimize losses (and thus War Exhaustion), you will need to invest in expensive, high-maintenance elite armies.
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(Interface not final)

We've also added the concept of Collateral Damage: As armies fight on the planet, civilians and civilian infrastructure is caught in the fighting. Each time an army deals damage in battle, it will inflict a random amount of Collateral Damage, which increases Planetary Damage similar to Orbital Bombardment (see below) and can lead to the death of Pops and the destruction of buildings and tiles. Some armies will deal more Collateral Damage than others: For example, Xenomorph armies are highly destructive and cost-efficient, but will wreak immense havoc on the planet, potentially leaving it in ruins in the process of capturing it for your empire.

While working on combat mechanics we also took the time to change the way Morale Damage works, making it something that is suffered by both sides (instead of just the loser) and making the effects of it more gradual, so that armies suffer a drop in combat efficiency once they are <50% morale, and then another, sharper drop when they are broken (0% morale). This should make certain armies, such as Psi Armies, highly effective against low-morale opponents like Slave Armies, but less effective against an unfeeling army of Droids. Finally, we've also tweaked the damage-dealing algorithm so that damage is less evenly spread among combatants, making it so that even an outnumbered force can destroy regiments and inflict war exhaustion on the enemy.
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Finally, we have made some changes to retreats. When an attacker retreats from a ground combat, there is now a significant chance that each retreating regiment is destroyed while attempting to return to space, making retreat a risky endeavour and eliminating the tactic of simply send in the same army again and again in wave attacks, instead making retreats something you do in order to preserve at least some of your army in a poorly chosen engagement.

Orbital Bombardment Changes
Finally, again in the interest of reducing the micromanagement needed during war, we've changed the way orbital bombardment works. Fortifications have been entirely cut from planets, so that there is no need to bombard lightly defended worlds before going in with the ground troops. Instead, we have added a requirement that planets cannot be invaded if there is a hostile Starbase in the system, so that transports cannot snipe worlds that are protected by defensive installations present in the same system. Orbital Bombardment, instead of being something you have to manage and wait for in every single planetary engagement, is now something you do to soften up a particularly well defended target, or simply to wreak havoc on the enemy's planet and drive up their War Exhaustion.

As a planet is bombarded, the fleet will deal Planetary Damage, ruining buildings and killing Pops. Bombarding fleets will also do damage to armies present on the planet (unless those armies are protected by a Fortress), and over a long enough time can decimate a defending force, though doing so will likely cause heavy damage to the planet and may delay the attacker long enough that the owner of the planet has time to build up their forces or inflict enough war exhaustion to force a peace. The rate at which the planet is damaged can also be slowed with the construction of buildings such as Planetary Defense Shield, further dragging out the process.

As part of these changes, we've consolidated the Bombardment Stances into the following:
  • Selective: Deals normal damage to armies/buildings and light damage to pops. Cannot kill the last 10 pops.
  • Indiscriminate: Deals heavy damage to armies, buildings and pops. Cannot kill the last 5 pops.
  • Armageddon: Deals massive damage to armies, buildings and pops. Can turn planets into depopulated Tomb Worlds with enough bombardment. Only available to certain empires such as Purifiers.

Attachments
Finally, on the topic of attachments, we have decided to cut them entirely from the game. We discussed a variety of ways to improve the way you assign them, but ultimately decided that we already have so many types of armies and not nearly enough combat mechanics to justify a significant investment of UI time that could go towards something like the Fleet Manager instead. The technologies that previously unlocked attachments will be changed to give other effects, such as direct buffs to certain army types.

That's all for today! As I said, we're now going on hiatus, so I'll see you again on January 11th with a dev diary about... well, that's a secret, actually. You'll just have to wait and see!
 
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Still no word as to what the DLC is going to be. A few people seemed to have it pegged as being combat focused, but it seems the bulk of the combat changes are gonna be part of the free update. Can you respond with a cryptic clue or acrostic poem pointing us in a vague direction please Wiz. For Christmas like.
 
If you have a FTL inhibitor on the planet, why would you have one on the star fortress, as they require to take the fortress, before invading the planet anyway.

Because while they are busy taking your starfort and planets, your fleets can be invading their systems, and there wouldn't be a lot the invader could do about it.
 
Fortified worlds will also be able to be fit with an FTL inhibitor (the exact way they get them is not yet determined) that prevents enemy fleets from leaving the system unless the world is captured, which allows for the creation of Fortress Worlds to protect strategically important systems.

Oh, look. A system-wide FTL inhibitor that wouldn't require stripping warp and wormholes from the game.
 
The rate at which the planet is damaged can also be slowed with the construction of buildings such as Planetary Defense Shield, further dragging out the process.

A few questions regarding the planetary shield. Are there any ideas to make that building a bit more interesting? Instead of just dragging out the time of a bombardment it could for example prevent the bombardment from totally reducing the defensivenes. So that with the shield instead of reducing the defensiveness by 100% it could just for example be be capped at whatever value fits like not going below 20% or so as long as the building is active.

Also for the planetary shield is there a chance we might ever see a vanilla shield effect for planets with a shield generator? Right now it is possible to kind of recreate such an effect but it is more of a workaround prone to errors.

Now some more questions regarding some older dds.

The modifier to improve the chance of ships escaping from combat when being defeated as shown in the hit and run doctrine. Will this modifier be applyable to single ships (usable in ship scope)?

Systeminitializers and clusters: Will it be possible to define clusters and connections between systems of said cluster as well as their connectivity to the rest of the galaxy? So that standard starlanes could be deactivated to the outside systems and only be visitable via gates. Can a single systeminitializer be set to only connect via special means and without starlane and be spawned mid game?

Gatenetworks: Will those be moddable? Can we create an extra kind of gate that is only connectable to gates of its own kind and not of the vanilla version? I would like to be able to use them like a whormhole connection between two points.
 
Lovely! Especially the bombardment changes, never been a fan of carpet sieging and those would have been even worse with the defense station changes.

And good to see attachments finally getting scrapped.
 
Oh, look. A system-wide FTL inhibitor that wouldn't require stripping warp and wormholes from the game.

True! But they said this wasn't the only reason - they want predictable travel like land travel so that things don't pop up all over the place. They also really, really want space chokepoints and fortresses.
 
@Wiz , will psychic pops also provide their own unique defensive armies?
Also, will the change be made to Enigmatic Observers not to use highly destructive xenomorphs in their crusade of pacification?
"I hear the peace of the grave is eternal..."
- Morrigan (2009), Enigmatic Observers (2018)
 
Instead of just dragging out the time of a bombardment it could for example prevent the bombardment from totally reducing the defensivenes.

They dropped idea of defensiveness. Want to conquer a planet, bring an army and win ground invasion. Defending army too strong? Destroy fortress/capital to reduce number of armies. Planet has shield? It will take much longer to take down fortress.
 
It's still something we're potentially interested in doing but we settled on a lesser, more targeted rework for now.
Good to hear, I do hope it gets worked on more in the future. This rework is near certainly a step up from the current state of affairs and looks like it'll be a decent stopgap, but I do think ground combat has much more potential that could be reached.
 
A few questions, apologies if already asked or answered.
How quickly are the armies produced once a POP begins working that tile? What happens if the POP moves from that tile for any reason, killed during combat for example, or if the building is destroyed during orbital bombardment......do those defense armies disappear immediately? What if the POP on the fortress migrates and you don't notice?

Also, is there any reason why the fortress building can't actually produce energy, minerals or food if placed on a tile with that resource? I mean these are basically the equivalent of reserve forces, national guard, militia, levies, whatever you want to call them.....why can't they plow a field or dig a mine in between invasions?
 
I can't wait for this patch anymore. I think after this patch Stellaris might become my most beloved Paradox game. It really touches on so many of the aspects I dislike about the current version it really makes me wonder how this all came to pass. Although the next HoI 4 patch is also of supreme quality additions, Stellaris 2.0 easily wins the race for me.
 
Because while they are busy taking your starfort and planets, your fleets can be invading their systems, and there wouldn't be a lot the invader could do about it.

I think we have a misunderstanding here, I meant why would you have a FTL inhibitor on a starbase, in a sector with a planet that got an FTL inhibitor on it, since the starbase need to be taken before planetary invasion anyway. There is no point in doubling down on FTL inhibitor if they are not all planet side.
 
They dropped idea of defensiveness. Want to conquer a planet, bring an army and win ground invasion. Defending army too strong? Destroy fortress/capital to reduce number of armies. Planet has shield? It will take much longer to take down fortress.

I read his post too. And Bombardment damages units and buildings as he said. Dragging it out is just waiting. Having the shield preventing armies to be completely obliterated and their damage being capped would still soften them up but making an invasion necessary where without the planet would be lost. This would be a feature making the shield generator attractive.