Stellaris Dev Diary #380 - Defenders in the Stars

[Ajacoba]

Well yes and no, you can spread damage across ships when a doomstack rolls in — but stations really can’t. They’re capped, limited, and stuck with hard platform limits per system. It’s always a numbers game, and stations will never outnumber fleets. So you either dump time and resources into fortifying one system just to slow a doomstack, or you build your own. And sure, once you're deep into soft cap and your economy’s stretched, maybe you start throwing alloys into citadels — but by then, you probably don’t need them. - Oh well, you could just make stations hilariously OP and create the precedent that fleet power numbers aren’t a real metric anymore. But where’s the fun in that?

That’s the problem. If orbital rings or stations were actually viable, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. This Deep Space Citadel feature is just another patch on top of a broken foundation — a way to see if defenses can feel meaningful, without addressing the core issue: the game is built around doomstacks. The mechanics that make it shallow — uncapped fleets, simplified combat, brute-force meta — those are untouched. And yet we’re capping the few things that might actually diversify play. It's not that depth isn’t possible — it’s that this isn’t the way to get there.

Idk, even with just 30 platforms per citadel, which is a relatively low amount, you would have a total of 120 defense platforms

All shooting at least 2 torpedoes each at any fleet jumping into the system, that's gonna hurt your artillery fleets pretty badly

And that's not even maximum numbers, you can breach 50 capacity on a starbase, I assume citadels will be similarly silly, so you may be looking at like 200 defense platforms, which a bunch of fancy auras

That's a lot of cheap firepower, on top of the fleets your target has

You may be able to outclass the citadels eventually, but you will never be able to outclass the citadels reinforcing your victim's fleets

With the citadels and the starbase you can also stack a whole bunch of silly auras, so that anything that attacks gets lower stats and anything that defends gets higher stats

 

[Critical Ethics]

Bad choice of words on my part. I meant a system where fleet presence is measured/supported per system. I don’t know what the game designers wanted to come up with — I’d guess a hard cap (lol). If it were me, I’d just have a soft cap that, if overstepped, ramps up costs and decreases effectiveness.

I think we're on the same page we're just quibbling over per ship vs per fleet and per system vs per combat.

Basically a doomstack isn't a doomstack unless it's in combat. Out of combat it's just a bunch of ships that happen to be near each other. Effectiveness only matters in combat so there's no point in applying it out of combat, and costs out of combat lead to weird incentives like microing all your fleets one system apart to converge on the actual combat or swearing because two fleets crossed paths on different missions and dinged your treasury just by passing by each other.

So I'd be looking for out of combat:
Jam as many ships as you like wherever you like. Density doesn't change anything. Maybe have a note giving out if it's a silly amount that could cause problems if a fight broke out.

But when combat starts:
-> perform some kind of number of ships in combat (or in system) check
--> oh that's like twice the "correct" amount, I'm gonna multiply your in-combat logistics spends by a chunk lol.
--> and I'm gonna give the other guy some bonuses.
--> and a bunch of your excess ships don't get a bunch of bonuses* they're normally entitled to.

It sounds like some form of the first one is coming in, the second one is kinda already there but could be beefed up a bit, and we'd both like the last one (*except penalties feel worse than losing expected bonuses even if the result is identical)

 

[Toby-wan_Strife]

Part of me is unimpressed by this. From the artwork I expected it to be like the Maginot worlds from the gigastructures mod. I expected it to be a massive complex the size of an entire planet. I think time will tell whether or not this will be as useful as I think it will be. It honestly depends on how many defensive platforms you can build on it. If it's anything like a fully upgraded and fully defended citadel in the late game, it could potentially be enough to take on a 25x crisis.

Nevertheless, I'm excited to finally be able to properly defend the L-cluster.

 

[endersaim]

Unlike orbital rings and regular starbases, Deep Space Citadels can be placed far more freely within a system, provided they aren’t too close to a gravity well (or each other).

I'm old enough to remember when this was how defense platforms worked in general.

 

[Tannhäuser Cake]

I'm old enough to remember when this was how defense platforms worked in general.

One-fourth score and four years ago, the developers brought forth on this market a new game, conceived in sci-fi, and dedicated to the proposition that ...?

 

[stilgarpl]

I'm old enough to remember when this was how defense platforms worked in general.

And in another patch districts will be organized into a neat grid, so that we'll be able to see terrain features and build buildings at the same time. And perhaps we'll even get adjacency bonuses!

 

[namewhichisnottakenyet]

I've scanned through the entire thread and couldn't find anything about it, so I think this hasn't been brought up yet:

With yet another megastructure in the game, I suggest you have another look at the megastructure construction UI and consider overhauling it.

With all the once-off megastructures, several habitat buildings, orbital rings, ringworlds and now DSCs, the UI is getting really cluttered.

In pretty much every game I have to think about whether or not I've already built this or that unique megastructure because they keep appearing in the build list even if I can't build them anymore, or if they're just greyed out because I selected the wrong celestial body. Like, does the mega shipyard go around a star and the strategy center around a planet or vice versa? Or did I just forget about the sentey array at the edge of the system and that's why I can't build anything else?

Adding an option to remove all megastructures for which one has reached the build limit already would already clean up the UI a lot, but maybe it makes sense to build two separate UIs, one for megastructures which can only be built once (together with a few quality of life features to identify them on the galaxy map at a glance or search for possible sites for new constructions), and one for structures which can be built multiple times.