Feedback Requested: War and War Resolution

[Casko]

However, it likely makes attacking a dedicated defender simply impossible. Defenses are far too weak and they need more tiers of starbase, faster platform building, ideally the option to assign admirals to starbases, etc. But this would make defenses virtually always win, which isn't great either.

on flip side I would also just like that end game stations don't just vanish to a single alpha strike either way.

 

[Enero]

And defense platforms should not be destructable, or should be rebuit automatically.

 

[Tannhäuser Cake]

I don't hate that in principle, and it makes command limit matter again beyond now-capped admirals...

However, it likely makes attacking a dedicated defender simply impossible. Defenses are far too weak and they need more tiers of starbase, faster platform building, ideally the option to assign admirals to starbases, etc. But this would make defenses virtually always win, which isn't great either.

Subspace jumping past the bottleneck is in the base game.

Catapulting is available with a DLC.

Cloaking is available with a DLC.

Starbase-disabling operations are available with a DLC (hopefully specific targets can be picked in the future).

Colossi are available with a DLC, and could be changed so that they can be used in combat (especially against big targets, such as a Citadel; Colossi could be the ultimate counter to the ultimate defense installations).

 

[Thiend]

Subspace jumping past the bottleneck is in the base game.

Catapulting is available with a DLC.

Cloaking is available with a DLC.

Starbase-disabling operations are available with a DLC (hopefully specific targets can be picked in the future).

Colossi are available with a DLC, and could be changed so that they can be used in combat (especially against big targets, such as a Citadel; Colossi could be the ultimate counter to the ultimate defense installations).

Most of that assumes chokepoints, rather than simply many defensive installations.

It would require something like a colossus destroying starbases to resolve the deadlock, however if that's reliable it makes the final "ultimate defense vs ultimate offense" match up nothing more than a "has colossus AP" check - without it you're still screwed, with it the defenses are once again worthless. And if it's not reliable, it doesn't solve the core issue.

Jumping past a chokepoint is effective if there are only defenses at chokepoints, which the existence of virtual guarantees is not necessarily true. All the rest is stuff that largely acts as a "worthless or makes defenses worthless" check, none of which I want to be in the game.

 

[RhysTheT00n]

Trade actually, is one of the bigger drains in systems also, and removing trade routes increases performance massively. which is odd. There are few mods that remove Trade routes, and make trade be just auto collected. which is a big performance boost. Making pops as of right now a much less of a big issue, at least on my end.


Another performance drain is absurd sized fleets in combat. But, this is more a late game issue. But Fleets and number of ships could well be compressed when it comes to fleets.

One suggestion I've seen here (to use Battleships as an example since I use those almost exclusively after the Crises are beaten) is instead of having fleets of 25+ Battleships (we'll ignore Titans for the moment), you'd scale up the strength and resilience and probably the cost and maintenance of Battleships and reduce how many you actually have in each fleet. So instead of 25-30 Battleships, even a Battleship-only fleet would be about 5 incredibly powerful ships, with maybe one Titan per fleet, which would actually make sense considering they're supposed to be Flagships.

I mean, after all techs have been researched plus the Supremacy tradition tree, my Machine Empire has a max fleet cap of 230 and I usually fill them with 24 Battleships and 2 Titans and make 10 fleets to hit the 20 Titan cap. Could we bring that down to 23 Fleet Cap and make each ship hull-type consume one additional point of fleet cap? So Corvettes would take 1 point and Titans would take 5, so I'd have 4 Battleships and 1 Titan per fleet. The only problem for me with that is that if I wanted the nice round number of 5-Battleships and 1 Titan (25 Fleet Cap), I'd have to take that Ascension Perk that gives you +20 Fleet Cap (or 2 if we scale it down), which to me is a massive waste of an AP

 

[FibreglassSam]

They could limit the number of ships that can pass through a hyperlane at once. The rest have to queue up and wait their turn. This would be upgraded by researching the technology. So instead of 'Fleet Command Limit', your empire has a 'Hyperlane Transport Width'. This solves doomstacking, giving the defender the advantage by parking a larger fleet by the hyperlane exit. But if the aggressor has researched the tech to cram 600 ships through a hyperlane, you'd better move aside.

I think this is the best suggestion so far, both in terms of this feedback example and in terms of giving a purpose to espionage, which is one of the other feedback topics. War would be more about tactics and positioning than the current 'big fleet go smash' playstyle.

 

[3ishop]

I think this is the best suggestion so far, both in terms of this feedback example and in terms of giving a purpose to espionage, which is one of the other feedback topics. War would be more about tactics and positioning than the current 'big fleet go smash' playstyle.

Not really runs in to a lot of problems. It doesn't stop doomstacking as a defender can still do it which can make a war a stop.

It also means if you end up in a fight with a more advanced enemy, their larger and more advanced fleets can take you down before you could mount a real defence.

 

[VonGustang]

Stellaris has enough content for exploration and diplomacy.
But war needs more content.
Ground warfare can bring more content and immersion!
Please put different war widths for each planet.
Normal and Gaia planets need additional war widths.
Planetary cities, on the other hand, need less war width.
Because street fighting is a tough battle.

It is also a good way to divide ground warfare into three types.
1. The invading forces will try to penetrate the planet and the defending forces will use anti-aircraft guns to defend themselves. At this stage, the invading forces have a lot of casualties.
2. If the invading forces successfully landed, the battle begins in earnest.
There's a lot of casualties in this battle.
3. If they fail to defend, the invading forces will unilaterally clear the remaining defenders. The planet will be successfully occupied by the invading forces.


It might be hard to reflect this in the game. But if you add a little bit of a picture split into 3 phases in the mechanism of the existing ground war, that would be good content!

Space battles are already great, but I hope there are some tweaks.
Historically, one of the important missions of the Navy has been to protect its course. And going on an expedition required a lot of supply.
I think this should be reflected in the game as well.
If an expeditionary fleet has entered the enemy's territory in the imperial war, it can be defended by cutting off the route because as the safe supply route disappears, the fleet gets debuffed from fire, speed, and so on.
Players will need to plan more strategic operations for this. And this is cool for gameplay!
Also, it's unfair for a fleet to unilaterally bomb a planet. This is because the people of the planet will fight for their hometowns and do whatever it takes to disrupt the bombing. How about adding anti-aircraft buildings to the planet or giving extra buffs to the fortress to reduce the fleet's durability?

That's all for my opinion. I know developing a game is a struggle. Still, Stellaris is a great game to give you more content. Particularly war-related content will give players more fun and immersion!

 

[FibreglassSam]

Not really runs in to a lot of problems. It doesn't stop doomstacking as a defender can still do it which can make a war a stop.

It also means if you end up in a fight with a more advanced enemy, their larger and more advanced fleets can take you down before you could mount a real defence.

I suppose that a defender can bunker into one system in advance of your arrival, however, that means they are also stuck there, which I would counterplay by attacking other systems and forcing them to chase me. With the current approach, their doom-stack can just plot a circuit of their space and clean up after me, even if I manage to circumnavigate them, without any micro needed. We already have lots of tools that facilitate hit and run combat and to incentivise fleet splitting but we still have the issue that fleet cap doesn't practically prevent fleets from flying in formation with each other, and a doom-stack is untouchable so long fleets fly together.

I recently played a storm-chaser game, where I stacked as many early game sub-light speed bonuses as I could find and fired any admirals that weren't full to the brim with such bonuses by mid-level. In one war, I mis-judged what weapons the enemy used and ended up at a severe fire disadvantage with a missile heavy build vs P/d. Strategically, it played similar to the suggestion, as the AI would try to group fleets, but would be confused enough by my mobility that they tended to go into the target system one at a time, with a short delay between each. Likewise, to kite the fleets apart, my fleets had to split and avoid engagement until I could attack two on one. It was very fun, and much more challenging. Pincer movements and flanking attacks from adjacent systems when they caught one of my fleets suddenly mattered.

As for losing a pitched battle against a more advanced enemy, why shouldn't this be the case? Surely they should win in combat fleet vs fleet. If more fleets are in play, you're both in the same boat. Both in a battle where your reserves will arrive on day 50-100. No difference to two doomstacks, except the fleet with the more dense firepower inflicts more casualties, rather than absolutely everything being decided by Lannister's law.

 

[3ishop]

1. The invading forces will try to penetrate the planet and the defending forces will use anti-aircraft guns to defend themselves. At this stage, the invading forces have a lot of casualties.

They wouldn't have time to do any real damage. It takes us with our limited tech 4 hours to get from the ISS back to Earth, so I'd expect advanced species could create even faster landing methods and as we see they have armour and shield technologies which can easily resist a short burst of AA fire.

Please put different war widths for each planet.

Planets do get different combat widths based off the size of the planet.

If an expeditionary fleet has entered the enemy's territory in the imperial war, it can be defended by cutting off the route because as the safe supply route disappears, the fleet gets debuffed from fire, speed, and so on.

It really can't due to the hyperlane system. If you manage to get behind their fleet, their fleet is also thus behind yours.

Players will need to plan more strategic operations for this. And this is cool for gameplay!

Not really, the meta is already about choke points and trying to doomstack the enemy fleet if they can win it, this wont change that, would make playing whack-a-mole with small fleets a lot more annoying though.

Also, it's unfair for a fleet to unilaterally bomb a planet. This is because the people of the planet will fight for their hometowns and do whatever it takes to disrupt the bombing. How about adding anti-aircraft buildings to the planet or giving extra buffs to the fortress to reduce the fleet's durability?

They have the option to build a fleet and starbases to defend themselves. If these systems have failed pop guns on a planet really wont do anything but annoy the player having to cycle out damaged ships for repair.

I suppose that a defender can bunker into one system in advance of your arrival, however, that means they are also stuck there, which I would counterplay by attacking other systems and forcing them to chase me. With the current approach, their doom-stack can just plot a circuit of their space and clean up after me, even if I manage to circumnavigate them, without any micro needed. We already have lots of tools that facilitate hit and run combat and to incentivise fleet splitting but we still have the issue that fleet cap doesn't practically prevent fleets from flying in formation with each other, and a doom-stack is untouchable so long fleets fly together.

Not really. A defender can still split their fleets but the attacker will also need to split theirs. Both sides will end up focusing their fleets at a choke point for each access point. Both sides needing to keep enough force there to win reliably even if the enemy sends waves of fleets. Sure if you have overwhelming numbers of fleets and access points you can overwhelm them but that's not really any better than what we have now.

As for losing a pitched battle against a more advanced enemy, why shouldn't this be the case? Surely they should win in combat fleet vs fleet. If more fleets are in play, you're both in the same boat. Both in a battle where your reserves will arrive on day 50-100. No difference to two doomstacks, except the fleet with the more dense firepower inflicts more casualties, rather than absolutely everything being decided by Lannister's law.

Cuz having it always be a one way system is bad for gameplay and breaks much of the big events of the game. Khan, Grey Tempest, Fallen and Awoken Empires and the End game Crisis tend not to be something you can take on their fleets 1 v 1. Never mind if you have advanced empire start and they are near you. It also means the entire idea of counter play above ends up lost. Right now we have the counter play where if you build up your force you can win against quality with quantity, with this limiting system you can't even do that other than maybe try to make a last stand somewhere.

But your not in the same boat, a faction with more advanced tech can bring through more ships quicker and with higher combat value. This system magnifies the benefits of better tech in the strategic use of the fleets and means you can be closer to doomstacking the more advanced you get.

 

[Zaacplot300]

I don't believe I ever made a post here.

I want to like warfare but in practice its a bit of a pain, and also a source of lag thanks to all the ships it requires. My main points of contention are that micromanaging doomstacks and armies is both a bit tedious to do over anything larger than a border skirmish to claim a few systems, and that lag seems to spike during wars thanks to how combat works and the reality of each empire having hundreds of ships even only a hundred years into the game. Automating warfare and reducing the number of ships needed is a must to me.

Also, I'm in the "ground combat needs simplifying camp". Removing it is probably impractical but it feels stupid to me that an interstellar empire needs to carry its troops in separate, defenseless, troop transports that are easy to kill and serve as little more than pointless micromanagement to the player.

 

[Reimurr]

First of all forgive my english. Maybe i will say something that some people may not like but imho i think that army and ground combat needs a serious rework. Fleet too obviously. What i mean by that... (it's just still my suggestion/opinion) i wish it wasn't just ehm doom stacking(?) everything. I'd make few types of military. Army should have various type of units. For example: tanks, aircrafts, and of course infantry. Each of those type should have their strengths and weaknesses, but to not make things complicated for it i'd just make them like rock, paper, scissors and during invasion of planet i'd make it like a situation log bar progress where different choices appear and you have to make a decision based on what's going on the planet and what you think would be the best approach for it to conquer it.

Now regarding fleet (and army as well), i'd like to see pops actually matter in this. Right now you just spam the fleet/army and don't worry about anything other than resources. Imo ships should have it's crew from pops that your empire has. Same with army. It shouldn't work like it just magically spawns from nowhere. When you'd make a fleet or army some portion of your population from planets would be dragged into the military, i think it could make things more interesting. It would be a double edged sword, because on one hand you'd have a fleet/army but on the other hand the economy on your planets could suffer for it, because there are less pops to fill jobs on it. It's imo a perfect circle and logical way of how it should work. That's my few cents on the matter

 

[Cherubyn]

A thought crossed my mind under the shower:

The game gets really annoying in the late-game when one does big conquests.

One might have a robust economy but taking over even just a couple of AI systems may completely crash. Basicially forcing alot of long pauses to fix whatever the AI cookes up.

That much makes sense from a standpoint of how conquest works I guess but its really exhausting and often makes me quit then and there.

So what idea crossed my mind:
Empires should have the option to starve newly aquired worlds to safeguard their core economy. In reality a aggresor wouldnt fairly dustribute his food over his primary culture and the conquered population - at leat not all the time.

Instead they would make sure to keep the capital fed and let the new guys suffer.


a syatem wehere an empire could set a maximal resource allocation for newly conquered systems could provide the player with a choice: use everything at your disposal to integrated your acquisition or starve them at the risk of ethics shifts and or rebellions.

 

[hhooven4]

Get rid of ground combat entirely. Instead, make Troop Transports an A-slot system for ships that reduce devastation (and maybe improves bombardment.) You could then create a bombardment stance that uses only Troop Transports and Strike Craft to determine the bombardment pace on a planet, but then *drastically* reduces devastation. Also, this could allow for different surrender thresholds. Extermination-style empires could require a greater threshold for surrender, and maybe pacifists have a lesser threshold.

 

[RoverStorm]

I missed the opportunity to respond to this particular feedback request due to being unavailable, so I would like to give a brief feedback here about one of my biggest pain points in all of Stellaris:

War Exhaustion is extremely frustrating as a system.

I understand it was added and operates the way it does to prevent the "endless wars" the AI would engage in, but I think it is a terrible system.
The problem is that most diplomacy is just unavailable when a country is at war, but there's no interaction with a warring country beyond that. If I have a new interest in a nation, but they're stuck at war, just "wait for the war timer to end" feels really sucky compared to having the option to intervene in the conflict.

I would like to see war and peace be expanded upon to be much more dynamic.

I can envision a sliding scale between peace and total war. Open battles? Slides toward war. Planets getting bombed? Slides toward peace. Pops getting genocided in a defensive war? Resting point is now at total war. And this balance naturally slides toward it's resting point, which can be influence but would normally be on the "peace" side.

This also means countries like barbaric despoilers, fanatic purifiers, and letters of marque can make extremely poor neighbors, as they may have a resting point much closer to the "war" side at the point where there is open hostility and either side can cross borders and attack eachother, but full invasions aren't allowed until the conflict scales more.

Big diplomatic features like "declaring war" can instantly set it far toward the "war" side, and signing a peace treaty with terms being met can lock it to "peace" for the duration of the treaty.


As for fleet combat and stuff, I think it suffers from a lack of build diversity. I think more exotic options for ship building, such as more reliable ways of getting very powerful ship modules but at the cost of being unable to get other powerful modules, and combat modifiers being very specific in what they buff, can help lead to more builds and at least circular "food chains" that can improive the impact of other parts of the game, such as the ability to supply many ship types or streamline a specific type, or the ability to gain intel to know how to counter what your opponent is doing.

 

[Gamblor22]

I also missed the survey due to being out for the holidays, but would like to chime in my 2 cents for a possible ground combat rework.

I'm sure there's plenty of reasons to not touch ground combat, especially because any effective, half-decent idea would require a complete, months-long overhaul, one that would probably have to become part of the base game rather than sold as DLC, so I'm sure that's a tough sell as well.

Having said that, while all of us want ground combat to be more interesting, I feel like a lot of ideas thrown around by players entail more micromanagement, or late-game tedium - in other words, the last thing most of us would want.

However, I don't think the end result needs to necessarily be more tedious. I've had this idea that instead of empires having dozens of individually insignificant armies (that are a stupid pain to manage for players), how about we instead treat each army almost as a grand, very important unit. Make it so that early-game empires have only one army to play with, but you can increase the number of armies as you advance through the game. So for example, 10 armies in the late game could be considered a lot. This would limit the need for micromanagement, while also potentially allowing for easier automation of invasions, hopefully by simplifying whatever coding is required to say "hey, take this army and just invade every planet in this system one by one".

With each army, allow us to customize the make-up of their forces - like you mentioned, maybe their combat specialization on different worlds, or even their makeup of infantry, armored and air units, etc,. A lot of it would just mean different stat boosts and modifiers on the single army unit gameplay-wise, but it would be cool to have associated visuals as well, even if they were just simple icons (or re-using the species visual like how pops are represented). Of course, this is the part where we could also implement our roleplaying ideas for our race / faction, to make things more interesting in that regard. Having said that, for this part, I'm not sure what different, interesting stats could be used for diversity in army builds - I'm sure many players would just want to get their invasions over with as quickly as possible. Although I do imagine a lot of the strategy in the player designing these armies would involve being able to maintain their upkeep, while also considering their extreme resource expenditure when they commit to an invasion.

Similarly, planetary defense / garrisons would all be treated as a single army for the planet, with your tech and buildings just modifying the garrison army. When an invasion occurs, it's the invading army vs the defending army... kind of like a 1v1 between two divisions in Hearts of Iron. And hopefully, given that the system is basically just doing a back-and-forth autobattle between two units (the defenders and the attackers), maybe there could be some interesting combat text that tells you what's going on to add more flavor. If you really wanted, there could also be special events that pop up (with little or no interaction from the player) as a result of the force make-up of the attacking or defending armies.

The goal of this system would be to not only decrease army micromanagement, but also add army customization that would actually be fun and interesting and allow for roleplaying.

 

[3ishop]

I'd make few types of military. Army should have various type of units. For example: tanks, aircrafts, and of course infantry. Each of those type should have their strengths and weaknesses, but to not make things complicated for it i'd just make them like rock, paper, scissors

Doesn't really make sense or solve the issue you have. They are armies, they include infantry, tanks and aircraft and all other sorts of equipment developed in this scifi universe. If it's rock-paper-scissors, either we need to micro control them which is a big no, or it's done automatically which means you just build your doom stack of equal army types and dump them and let the AI best deploy.

Imo ships should have it's crew from pops that your empire has. Same with army. It shouldn't work like it just magically spawns from nowhere. When you'd make a fleet or army some portion of your population from planets would be dragged into the military, i think it could make things more interesting. It would be a double edged sword, because on one hand you'd have a fleet/army but on the other hand the economy on your planets could suffer for it, because there are less pops to fill jobs on it. It's imo a perfect circle and logical way of how it should work. That's my few cents on the matter

They don't they are made up of a small portion of the empires population, same way it's done in our world. Even during the world wars the number of people serving tended to be quite a small portion of the population. We've now advanced technology to reduce the need of personnel even more and a universe where robots, cloning and created biological monstrosities exist the need for people to be used in combat is greatly reduced.

Just to add your English seems fine to me.

 

[Shachza]

-I declare war on a devouring swarm to stop my ally from being eaten
-My fleet is chasing one of the swarm's fleets through my ally's space
-The swarm fleet conquers a random system ahead of me, making it their space
-My fleet jumps into that system
-My fleet reaches engagement range
-The swarm achieves Nemesis level 5
-The galaxy declares war on the swarm
-Because my fleet is "in the swarm's space" at the moment the galaxy switches my war against the swarm from a personal one to the galactic one, my fleet instantly emergency FTL's out of combat with the swarm and back to my space to "regroup," even though the emergency FTL timer has not ticked down, and is now MIA for 8 months.

Please change combat so that entering a new war with the same enemy you are already at war with doesn't evict fleets back to start, do not collect $200.

 

[AcolyteHW]

I know I'm very late on this, and apologies if someone has already covered it: but something I've been wanting for a while was greater Army relevance. The way I thought this might be achieved was through linking it both to cloaking and the espionage system. For instance, if you have sufficient cloaking tech, you could land armies without them being interdicted in space, which provides another dimension to warfighting. Furthermore, you might choose varying levels of cloaking or concealment for the troops themselves, enabling broader options ranging from assault, to augmentation of the espionage system in the form of covert attacks and surveillance.

It goes without saying that appropriate balancing and counter-measures would be needed, but I'm offering an option for how land forces might be used with a little more variety.

 

[President Park Lee Ng]

I plain don't like ideas that generally "force them to split their military", be it for defender side, or for attacker side

The issue, is micromanage is just a giant pain, not to mention that Big Brain Battles (that people fantasize they'll engage in) isn't actually the preferred way to fight. Winning generals don't go into battle with an evenly matched opponent hoping for an honorable battle where the best win: they only engage in combat if they think they're sure going to win. Only when they have no other option (because no plan ever survives contact with the enemy) do they start doing all those "Big Brain Maneuvers" people always dream about, and those usually require quick thinking on the ground that is done precisely because the commander doesn't do that

Personally, forcing people to "split their doomstack" is not the way to go. It's only natural to want a surefire win. An honorable battle where both sides are equally matched is only "fun" when you know nothing bad will happen even if you lose