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Stellaris Dev Diary #18 - Fleet Combat

Good news everyone!

Today’s Dev Diary will be about Fleet Combat and the different things affecting it. Like always it is important for you to remember that things are subject to change.

In Stellaris we have a number of different types of weapons that the player may choose to equip his/her ships with. All weapons can be grouped into either energy, projectiles (kinetic), missiles, point-defenses and strike craft. Their individual effects and stats vary somewhat, so let’s bring up a few examples. One type of energy-weapon is the laser, using focused beams to penetrate the armor of a target dealing a medium amount of damage. Mass Drivers and Autocannons are both projectile-weapons with high damage output and fast attack-speed, but quite low armor-penetration. This makes them ideal for chewing through shields and unarmored ships quickly, but are far worse against heavily armored targets. Missiles weapons are space-to-space missiles armed with nuclear warheads. Missiles have excellent range, but they are vulnerable to interception by point-defense systems. There’s of course far more weapons in the game than these mentioned, but it should give you a notion of what to expect.

Strike crafts are different from the other weapon types since they are actually smaller ships that leave their mothership. Cruisers and Battleships can in some cases have a Hangar weapon slot available, in which you may place a type of strike craft. Currently, we have two types of craft; fighters and bombers. Fighters will fire upon ships, missiles and other strike craft. Bombers however may not fire on other strike craft or missiles, but they will do more damage than fighters against capital ships. Point-defense weapons can detect incoming missiles and strike-crafts and shoot them down. These weapons may also damage hostile ships, if they are close enough, but will do significantly less damage against those.

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When it comes to defenses, you may increase the durability of your fleet in combat by placing armor and shield components in the utility slots on your ships. Armor components will reduce the incoming damage and can’t be depleted during combat. Shields work much more like an extra health bar to your ships and will be depleted if they take too much damage. Shields will automatically regenerate after combat, unless you have certain components that allow your shields to regenerate during combat. Both shields and armor can have their efficiency reduced if the enemy uses armor and/or shield penetrating weapons.

The different components you place on your ships will also affect certain other key combat values:… Hull points is a value corresponding to the “hit points” or health of your ship. Evasion affects the chance for your ship to evade a weapon firing at it. You may also affect the overall stats (values) of your fleet by assigning an Admiral to it. The stats of your fleet will both be affected by the skill and the traits of your leader. But be aware that traits will not always have a positive effect. I would recommend everyone to always have good admirals assigned to their military fleets since they can really improve your stats, like +20% fire rate and +10% evasion.

Once the combat has begun, you very few options to control what happens, much like it works in our other grand strategy games. For this reason it is really important not to engage in a battle that you are not ready for. As a fallback, it is possible to order a full retreat through the “Emergency FTL Jump” option, this will basically cause your fleet to attempt to jump to the closest system. However, during the windup for the EFTL jump your ships will not be able fire back at the hostile ships, so you put yourself in an exposed situation. Depending on what type of fleet you have, you might want them to always engage in combat or always try to avoid it; for this purpose we have different fleet stances. The evasive stance will try to avoid combat and the fleet will leave a system if a hostile arrives. Civilian fleets have this stance on per default. Aggressive stance will actively make your fleet attempt to attack any hostile that enters the same system as them. Passive stance will, like the name suggest, make your fleet only engage in combat when enemies are within weapon range.

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The combat might be off-hand, but you can still indirectly affect how each individual ship will behave. When you design your ship you may specify what combat computer to use on the ship. These computers range from making your ship super aggressive, and basically charge the enemy, or be really defensive and keep formation. At the start of the game only the default combat computer is available, but more are unlocked through normal research or reverse engineering.

It is very possible that your fleet might end up in combat with multiple fleets. This means that you can have a combat with three different empires that are all hostile to each other. To help you keep track of everything that happens we have a combat view, which will appear as soon as a combat is initiated. This view will list you (and any other friendlies or neutrals) on the left side and every hostile on the right side. The combat view is currently being reworked, so you will get to see that interface at a later date, but the idea is to provide you with crucial feedback on how effective your weapons and defenses are.

Once the battle is over, you may want to investigate any debris left from destroyed vessels. If you weren’t the one being wiped out, perhaps you can salvage something?

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Sadly, neither the “Picard Maneuver” nor the “Crazy Ivan” are currently possible in the game, but who knows what the future might hold…

Stellaris Dev Diary #19 - Diplomacy & Trade
 
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Here is another thing that i find confusing:

Although i can see that there is a certain romantic(?) element to the concept of missiles in space, i really dont understand the concept of missiles in space.

Why on earth would you want missiles in space?

In most settings, missiles will significantly out-range beams. Beams have maximum effective ranges against maneuvering targets due to beam dispersion and light-speed delay. Unless you are talking chemical rockets versus star-trek phasors, some sort of small guided spaceship will always have the edge there. So your efficient beams aren't much use if they are wrecked before getting in range of the enemy.

Missiles can be quite deadly if they aren't stopped from reaching their targets. It's sure expensive to lose the drive, electronics and warhead, but not as expensive as losing a full-sized ship.

It's not a given that you can stop them. Intercepting a missile isn't a question of how quickly you can calculate the intercepting trajectory. That's a matter of a millisecond, even on current-day cell phone. It's more a question of how well you can observe the trajectory, can you get something to the intercept location in time, can you anticipate how the missile might maneuver in between your last sensor reading and the intercept point. How good are you at confusing the missile? How good is the missile at confusing your countermeasures? If you are burning the missile down with a beam, does that have enough power to overcome the missile's defenses in time? There are a ton of possible factors, so how hard or easy it is to kill a missile depends on the details of the setting.
 
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Crap, kinetic weapons do low armor damage and energy weapons do high armor damage? Uhm, then why the us navy testing railguns? Fighting the chinese surface navy with their energy shields?

They should swap this. I mean, if i want destroy a planet, i redirect asteroids or comets to the planet and do not shine with a better led flashlight on the planet.

Energy weapons like laser are faster then kinetic weapons too, their energy is transmitted with lightspeed, kinetic stuff like projectil are much slower, but they will do more damage, when they hit.

Kinetic weapons: Slow traveltime, high potential energy (remember: e=mc²), weak again shields
Energy weapons: Fast traveltime, low potential energy, painful for shields
They did say ballistic weapons do more damage, they just have lower armor, which makes sense because armor would be designed to stop mass from hitting it. Lasers would be designed to counter the armor (by cutting through it), and so shields would be designed to counter lasers. However, shields overload when shoved full of mass rather than absorbing lasers.
 
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I think that the range of strike craft should not exceed that of missiles, as I imagine them having a fuel limit permitting vast use of maneuvering thrusters during sorties, then having enough reserve to return. Missiles would only need the one way trip.

Question: What is the next DD going to cover?

I disagree completely; strike craft must have a range greater than missiles, otherwise... what on earth's the point of strike craft? Bombers, I mean. Fighters could still have some utility as a point-defense screen, but... that's pretty weak. Carriers are powerful on earth because they allow fleets to attack ships at ranges well beyond what they'd normally be capable of. The only way to translate that into space combat is to give fighters and bombers more fuel, or at least make them more fuel efficient.

Missiles should move faster (much, much faster) than strike craft, but their powered range has to be smaller for attack craft to have any utility at all.
 
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It is very possible that your fleet might end up in combat with multiple fleets. This means that you can have a combat with three different empires that are all hostile to each other.

YESSSSSS!!!!!!!

Sadly, neither the “Picard Maneuver” nor the “Crazy Ivan” are currently possible in the game, but who knows what the future might hold…

NOOOOOO!!!!!!!
 
Take your time, don't rush it. The more work you put into it, the better. Many games came out are mostly unpolish or unfinish. Looking forward to try this out someday.
 
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Could Blind Jumps be a feature? If you get ambushed or suprised and dont have time for a normal retreat, and have the correct tech/component, you can do a much quicker retreat that will throw you to a random nearby system. For balancing purposes your FTL could be offline for a while, the fleet might get separated and/or end up inside a sun. Not sure if viable/feasible from a gameplay or design perspective, but it is very viable from a battlestar-galatica-fanboy perspective.
 
Some points to those who disagree with armor being better vs kinetic than energy weapon:
1. You have manufacture that ammunition you use
2. Most likely these ships are built in space shipyards, not on planets. In practice this means that only things that negate armor thickness are: How powerful your thrusters are, time and cost. If you're building a big ship with lots of armor you probably don't care how fast it moves... while building a large battleship with meters upon meters of armor might take time, this time can be reduced with a modular approach to ship contruction and since in (most) sci-fi genre space tech is MASSIVELY cheaper than today, cost probably won't be a massive issue.
3. As someone else pointed out, shield doesn't necessarily need to deflect the projectile, only either alter it's course or slow it down so it harmless bounces off!
4. A continuous laser beam cuts through metal by sheer factor of melting it, more power -> faster it melts, so I'm assuming each one of these lasers will practically be using as much power as a moderately sized COUNTRY does today. While a projectile has to not only withstand the force generate when launching it at what I'm assuming is 1000km/s then it would also have to be adle to withstand the impact with the armor material inquestion, which is probably several meters thick armor
5. We do not know how shields work, they could act like a hard surface or they could simply affect projectiles, beams or missile in other ways.
 
For strike craft, one must assume they would be highly mission-configurable and could trade off range (whether it is distance or degree of jump engine usage) and payload as well as protection and detection profile and other things to be decided by the strike package team (or computer), including one-way configuration which makes it more like a missile.

In a real-time game, I would think docrtinal settings in addition to general mission orders before battle would be a natural part of the package, particularly if comms are not FTL so orders and docrtine determine what actually happens in combat.

Seems a missed opportunity to go avoid the cheesy health bar (too 1980's) and go with damage effects. Structural integrity and resulting durability trade off with cost, mass , speed, performance and survivability - as it always has been in wet navies and air forces and doubtless will be in space navies - unless in the future the science dictates that ships all be built basically the same way including a (necessarily low) level of durability, in which case it is likely that weapons and defense tech would tend to converge to optimal results with little real variation.

Since the "everyone run" option is the only retreat option mentioned, does that mean no ability to have different fleet elements withdraw while others continue or serve as rearguard?

If there is a place where super stacks belong, it is open space, assuming that the builders manage shielding against EMP and other radiation (and no nova bombs are in play).
 
I come fully expecting a "Nope, not in a million years", but just for the sake of it: will there be some interface allowing modders to tweak or write new combat computers?
 
I disagree completely; strike craft must have a range greater than missiles, otherwise... what on earth's the point of strike craft? Bombers, I mean. Fighters could still have some utility as a point-defense screen, but... that's pretty weak. Carriers are powerful on earth because they allow fleets to attack ships at ranges well beyond what they'd normally be capable of. The only way to translate that into space combat is to give fighters and bombers more fuel, or at least make them more fuel efficient.

Missiles should move faster (much, much faster) than strike craft, but their powered range has to be smaller for attack craft to have any utility at all.

Missiles today have ranges that far exceed aircraft, but you are right about the speed thing. (Some less, some more) But in this game, they are nuclear missiles, like our ICBM's.

In WWII aircraft are what went after the carrier - as at Midway and other engagements.

Now, we don't need to send aircraft, missiles will destroy any ship.

So....the question is: Which mechanic do we mimic? But, there is also a balance issue!

For balance, if the fighter/bomber wings are the deepest range assets, people will just load-out their carriers to overwhelm the AI enemy. Assured victory, boring game.....and yet another game/balance failure for space fighters.
 
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nice. i was worried about how you will affect combat being only hands off. being able to choose the AI your ships will use will definitely help.

and empire free for all? been there done that. in the SOASE mod star trek armada 3, i was playing as the federation and came across a romulan and klingon fleet (big ones too, lots of capital ships) duking it out. lost a couple of Akiras but otherwise slaughtered both fleets.
 
Missiles should move faster (much, much faster) than strike craft, but their powered range has to be smaller for attack craft to have any utility at all.


This is not true. The Attack Craft can still be utilized "close in" for protection. And what is stopping bombers from working close in as well?


I see a mechanic where a Carrier would/could be deadly to smaller ships than try to strike it - due to their lower hit-point value. So larger Battleships with big weapons would need to attack it, with small ships in support.
 
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Missiles generally have a very explosive payload, compared to Mass Drivers, which is accelerated metal rocks being flung against the enemy. One missle hitting would take out the majority of the ship, whilst the shot will make a hole in it, which can be sealed off with todays technology easy enough.

Arguably, why even have fighters? Todays drones would do a better job at less loss of human life.
 
Missiles generally have a very explosive payload, compared to Mass Drivers, which is accelerated metal rocks being flung against the enemy. One missle hitting would take out the majority of the ship, whilst the shot will make a hole in it, which can be sealed off with todays technology easy enough.

Arguably, why even have fighters? Todays drones would do a better job at less loss of human life.
We don't know how drones do compared to first world countries with equivalent tech.
 
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Missiles generally have a very explosive payload, compared to Mass Drivers, which is accelerated metal rocks being flung against the enemy. One missle hitting would take out the majority of the ship, whilst the shot will make a hole in it, which can be sealed off with todays technology easy enough.

Arguably, why even have fighters? Todays drones would do a better job at less loss of human life.

thermite warheads.
 
Nice. Also @Zoft you haven't mentioned what will be in the next week's dev diary. :x
 
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