Stellaris Dev Diary #41 - Heinlein patch (part 2)

[Wizzington]

Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. This is the second in a multi-part dev diary about the 'Heinlein' 1.3 patch that we are currently working on. This week's dev diary will be focusing on a series of changes made to ship design and fleets that we call the Fleet Combat Overhaul.


Dedicated Roles
One frequent critique of the ship types in Stellaris is that they don't really have roles - besides corvettes being unable to mount large weapons, there is basically no difference in what type of weapons can be mounted on what type of hull, meaning that there is no actual reason to use a proper mix of ship types - often the best strategy is just to find a single effective design (such as all-corvette fleets on release version or the currently popular destroyer tachyon lance fleet). To address this we sat down and thought about what the roles of each type of ship should be, and came out with the following:

• Corvettes are fast, agile ships that excel in taking out capital ships at close range.
• Destroyers are screens for your capital ships that excel in taking down corvettes and countering missiles and strike craft.
• Cruisers are close-range capital ship brawlers that tank enemy fire and engage enemy destroyers and capital ships.
• Battleships are artillery and carrier ships that provide long-range fire support.

Somewhat simplistically, you could say that corvettes are good against cruisers and battleships, destroyers are good against corvettes and strike craft, cruisers are good against destroyers/cruisers/battleships (depending on how they are designed) and battleships are good against cruisers, other battleships and fixed installations. This change should give each ship a clear purpose, while allowing for some flexibility within by purpose through the ship designer (for example, cruisers can either be tough battleship killers or fast attack ships that clear the way for your corvettes depending on design). It's worth noting that designs may not start with a dedicated role like this - at the very start, corvettes not have torpedoes and destroyers will lack the targeting that makes them such effective corvette killers. Their roles instead come fully into play as technology advances and capital ships enter the stage.

In order to make this specialization possible, we have made a few changes to ship design. First of all, we have added three new weapon slot types:

• Torpedo slots mount Torpedo and Energy Torpedo weapons, which are short range extreme damage weapons meant to take down capital ships. They can only be used by corvettes and cruisers.
• Point Defense slots mount point defense cannons, which is the primary defense against missiles, torpedoes and fighter craft. Destroyers can be designed to field large amounts of point defense weapons.
• Extra Large slots mount massive long-range weapons that can only fire in a fixed arc ahead, such as Tachyon Lances, Arc Emitters and Mega Cannons. These can only be mounted on battleships and take up the whole bow section.

We've also tweaked ship modules and retired a couple of modules that we feel did not fit the new design, so that it is no longer possible to make a 'corvette killer' battleship with huge amounts of small weapons, for example. While there realistically is no reason you couldn't mount small weapons on a battleship, going with a realism angle would simply put us right back where we are now, so we chose to sacrifice some realism for what we feel is better gameplay.


Utility Slot Rework
Another area we felt sorely needed some attention is the utility slots - right now there is often little meaningful choice, with the best strategy usually being to stack either armor or shields depending on ship size, enemy weapons and tech level. Most of the special utilities, such as shield capacitors or regenerative hull, are either woefully underpowered or extremely overpowered. To address these issues, we've made the following changes:

• The amount of damage reduction provided by armor now depends on the size of the ship, so a single piece of armor will do more for a corvette than for a battleship. This should make armor useful even for smaller ships.
• The 'special' utilities (crystalline hull plating, shield capacitor, etc) will use their own slot type that is limited by hull size, and so will only have to be balanced against each other instead of having to also be balanced against shields and armor.
• A new utility type, afterburners, provides additional combat speed, allowing you to design ships that can closely quickly with your opponents.

Misc Changes and Notes

• As part of these changes we're looking over the balance of every weapon in the game, especially strike craft, point defense and creature weapons.
• Combat computers will be changed from being universal to being based on ship type, so corvettes have specific corvette computers that focus on boosting evasion, while destroyers have computers that impove targeting, allowing them to keep up with corvette evasion better than other ship types.
• We're changing emergency FTL so that it sets the fleet as MIA, meaning that fleets that successfully escape combat will always be able to flee to friendly space rather than getting stuck and ping-ponged to death. To compensate, we're making it so every ship (no matter how undamaged) has a chance to be lost when you use emergency FTL, so it's always a risky maneuver.
• We're looking into creating a special class of flagships that are limited in number by your fleet size, and are the only ones able to use auras, instead of all-aura battleship fleets.
• We're looking at balancing the different FTL types and making it less hard to catch enemy fleets. Some of our current ideas is having fleet speed depend on how far away you are from friendly space (and thus resupply) and boosting the speed of warp.
• We're looking into fleet formations and some basic orders during combat (priority targeting, etc). At minimum the basic fleet formation will be changed to be more sensible (no more suicide corvette leading the charge).

Note that the changes listed in this DD are not fully done, so some of them may not show up in below screenshots.

That's all for this week! Next week we'll talking about yet more features and changes coming in Heinlein.

 

[Wizzington]

Interesting.

Were defence stations made stronger/cheaper to be cost-effective defense?
Will they have dedicated segments for XL weapons?
Do flak cannons go into PD or XL slot?

Flak Cannons are M-only weapons right now, basically intended to be cruiser weapons.

We're reviewing defense stations and seeing how feasible it is to put X-large weapons on them.

 

[Wizzington]

I'm concerned that this could be an overcorrection for existing problems. Will there still be possibilities for various ships to fulfill unconventional roles? At the moment a player can adapt his navy for a number of purposes, including highly specialized roles beyond those that have been outlined in this Dev Diary. My concern is that with these changes the player is going to be locked into far less overall strategic choices for their fleets.

You can still design unconventionally, like anti-corvette corvettes or long-range destroyers. Some unconventional designs won't be available though (like battleships that are strong against corvettes) because it would nullify the entire point of the roles.

 

[Wizzington]

I generally like these changes, especially the limiting of weapons to certain ship classes. I do have a few concerns:

My first concern is if corvettes won't be useless in the late game when everyone has enough destroyers to counter it. The way it sounds here is that corvettes are really strong, unless the enemy has enough destroyers with PD, then they're utterly useless. Seems like battleships and cruisers will be the late-game way to kill other cruisers and battleships (not that that's necessarily a bad thing, I just wonder if that's what the dev team wants).

Also, corvettes seem heavily focused on using torpedo tech. How is this balanced with the other two starting weapon types? What if I start with kinetic weapons, for instance? Am I forced to also research explosives in order to make an effective corvette?

The second thing I'm worried about is static stations. Right now, fortresses and other defense stations are fairly useless, apart from being an FTL snare or providing a healing aura. I never rely on stations as an actual defense mechanism, since they can be blown up by a single battleship, most of the time, and the smaller platforms are often about as strong as a spaceport. I wonder what role static stations will play in this new system? Can we give them varied roles? Do they have loads of PD to defend against corvette spam, do they have big weapons to blow up cruisers? Since it sounds like torpedo corvettes are even stronger in this patch, it sounds like any station is almost defenseless against a small fleet of corvettes if it doesn't have destroyers defending it.

But the thing I'm most worried about is Emergency FTL. While I applaud the deleting of ping-ponging, and I think the MIA solution is pretty ingenious, I feel like the game is desperately missing an 'Ordered Retreat' option. In fact, there's no disengage option at all. If my raiding fleet is blowing up mining stations in an enemy system, and an enemy fleet warps in, I can't tell my corvettes to get the heck out of there. I can only use the Emergency FTL and risk damage or loss of ship, all because I'm "In combat" with a freaking mining station! It's the same for attacking military stations or smaller fleets: I should have the option to tell my fleet to escape combat using sub-FTL speed, then use FTL to get out in a controlled manner.

The lack of this ordered retreat option causes these all-or-nothing battles, where you can't retreat from a fight you're losing (even if your fleet is faster and could outrun their pursuers), because the Emergency FTL will just blow up your fleet even more. Heck, I'd even accept the option to sacrifice ships as a diversion, leaving a couple of cruisers behind to delay the enemy while the rest of my fleet flies away. But now either the entire fleet stays and dies, or the entire fleet E-FTLs out and gets badly damaged, skewing the war even further in the advantage of whoever won the first engagement.

Destroyer spam to counter corvettes can be in turn countered with aggressive use of cruisers. The idea is to have shifting fleet compositions depending on what your enemies are using.

 

[Wizzington]

Nice, although I don't see much incentive to build cruisers or battleships, in extremis. With corvettes and Destroyers you have effectiveness against all types, it would seem.

To make warp more effective, you could give it (higher tech?) semsors that can see hyperlanes. Hyperdrives have huge limitations, but only a view of the hyperlanes makes it clear exactly what they are.

Finally, any intention to "fix" the odd FTL mix you get with uplifted/elevated races? If I assist a race to get to the stars, they can get a different FTL tech than me. If I then integrate them into my empire, I get some of their ships - which can be handy - but I can't upgrade them at all. Solutions here night include the ability to upgrade non-FTL elements of such ships, or (perhaps better) just have assisted/uplifted races get the same FTL type as their patron.

Cruisers and destroyers will wreck a corvette/destroyer combo, which means you'd want some battleships or cruisers of your own to counter their cruisers. That's the idea anyway - it will of course require playtesting and tweaking on our balance to get the balance right.

 

[Wizzington]

Cruisers are meant to wreck destroyers (if designed to, anyway). A corvette/destroyer/cruiser combo would be even more effective, most likely.

In general, try not to theorycraft too hard - this DD is our current intentions, implementation details will almost inevitably change as we test and balance this system.

 

[Wizzington]

Would you consider making the hit formula a bit more sophisticated than just "accuracy - evasion"? I was really stoked when the community discovered that it apparently had been changed to "(accuracy - evasion)/accuracy", but it turned out to be an UI bug in the battle report.

A better hit formula would allow to balance weapons against different evade values (and therefore ship sizes).

PS: A different formula to consider "accuracy/(accuracy + evasion)".

We're doing some work on this front, yes.

 

[Wizzington]

By "we're looking into" do you mean that you try to include these changes into the 1.3 patch, but it depends on if you manage to find suitable solutions, or are these only something you intend to revise in some later patch?

We're looking into whether we can do something with these areas for 1.3, if not they're likely to show up in 1.4.

 

[Wizzington]

I will only become interested in an update when you work out the problems with sectors. I'm having to manually set up every colonized planet with basic buildings just to make sure the colonies will actually have buildings when I give it over to a sector, rather than just letting a large portion of my population sit and be unemployed.

regardless, I appreciate the attention being put into ship combat. I'm most interested in seeing the fleet formations and how the different ones will let us customize which ships get into combat first. It would be nice if, along with all of these ships, you would introduce some sort of stealth ship that can ignore closed borders as a means to spy on the enemy and discover what kind of fleet they're building.

There certainly will be work done with sectors in Heinlein.

 

[Wizzington]

When can we expect more ship types to be added? The most disappointing thing to me so far is that I'm limited to 4 basic ship sizes.

I would like to see super-carriers and Dreadnaughts etc.

I also feel like there's too large a gap between destroyers and cruisers that another ship type should fill.

Do you feel there is a gap because there are ship roles missing, or do you feel there is a gap because there is a gap? I don't think it's a good idea to add ship sizes *just* to add more ship sizes.

 

[Wizzington]

Risk of FTL loss does scale with damage, it's just never 0.

 

[Wizzington]

Paradox: Hey, guys. We give you four hull sizes and you can mount them with everything you want!
Fans: It sucks! Ships should have strictly defined roles, for example BBs kills CAs, CAs kills DDs, DDs kills corvettes and corvettes kills BBs!

Paradox: Hey, guys. We decided to give every ship strictly definied role, for example BBs kills CAs, DDs kills corvettes, corvettes kills BBs etc.
Fans: It sucks! Equipment limitations based on completely arbitrary "roles" don't appeal to me in the slightest. Couldn't one simply design the modules so that a battleship strong against corvettes would be ineffective at normal battleship roles?

Gamedev. Sounds like fun

It's perfectly fine to have a dissenting opinion on what ship role design should be. The chances of us switching back to 'every ship can do everything' is probably close to zero, though, as dedicated ship roles is the way the entire design team wants to go (and have wanted to go for some time). No design will please everyone, but this is the design we think will be best for the game overall and so we're going for it.

 

[Wizzington]

How about we don't bump 5 month old threads. Start a new thread if you want to discuss ship balance.