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

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.
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That's all for this week! Next week we'll talking about yet more features and changes coming in Heinlein.
 
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aantia said:
Something I would consider is removing the ability to upgrade ships. It doesn't really make sense, being able to just rebuild the things in a totally different configuration, and I think it actually detracts from the feeling of making technological progress. Also, I often need to interrupt my fleet half-way through upgrading, and it feels wrong that I can do that. You'd obviously need to be able to junk obsolete vessels for resources, or something similar, if you went down that route. It would also make giving ships to an ally more attractive.
Think about, say, the first Honor Harrington book, where she has to use some experimental model ship with an ineffective weapon configuration, or about that series as a whole (or the CRN, or a bunch of others), where the gradual phasing in of new models over the course of the war is a theme. I'd really like to see something like that in Stellaris.
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I like how they handled it in Sword of the Stars II. If you had an energy weapon in a slot, it can only be upgraded into another energy weapon, kinetic into kinetic, torpedo into torpedo, etc. You couldn't change ship sections at all. Now I can replace the entire BB Garganthian Core section (2 x hanger bays) with a Singularity Core (3 x large turrets) on all of my battleships, no muss, no fuss.
 
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Paradox, since you take the names of the ship classes from actual WW1-2 classes, you could also take a lot of inspiration from their actual use. For example, a corvette against a battleship in WW2 would not stand a chance, unless swarmed in a suicide mission. Of course I understand the limitation of the naming given that although you say "battleships", these babes have missiles, something that most battleships and other classes did not have back in the 40s. So it's like the crossbow moment of the middle ages. From the moment you have missiles (arrows), even the mightiest night can fall from afar. ;)

Anyway, I like the changes, this is a very delicate matter you need to account for indeed so thanks, from my side, that you're working on it. I really hope you have also surprises for ground combat for this or a next patch. In theory ground combat, although auxilliary, it can become as complex as a CK2 battle. That would be tons of fun if we ever achieved such level of sophistication.
 
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Pavane said:
I don't like this idea. I never heard Captain Kirk say "Intercept the Klingon ship at warp 2 because we are running low on anti-matter and need to rendezvous with a collier dfor a fuel top up".
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And the Voyager fired some 80-90 photon torpedos out of its complement of 38. Supply and logistics generally don't make for riveting space opera.

Then there's also the fact that there is something of a difference in the logistics between a long-range exploration mission and a military campaign.
 
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Wiz said:
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.
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How is that supposed to work? There's no espionage, so when are you supposed to adapt? It's not possible to during war as it's all Civilization-IV-style doomstacks. It's not possible before the war, as there is no espionage and it is pointless after the war as the enemy is now either totally broken or completely dominating.

It's even more confusing if you have more than one enemy, and you usually will. In the end there are only two possible stable equilibria: an all around fleet that is decent against anything (although perfect against nothing) or a single unbalanced design (e.g. corvette swarm, tachyon lances).
 
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I'm not too keen on the dedicated roles for ships. First, I always thought the corvettes should be beam armed and I look at them as a heavy version of strikecraft. They should follow the missiles and strikecraft in to take out damaged ships. Second, I always thought of cruisers as the area defense ships and destroyers as the fast missile armed ships.

I think allowing players to have some say on their fleets formation would be a great starting point. Corvettes and destroyers following BB's until close enough to sprint ahead and engage. Coupled with priority targeting, and it would change the game a lot.
 
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DennisRoos said:
What I worry about right now is that in any engagement, you need to have enough counters to any enemy ship type. if you don't have enough destroyers to blow up their corvettes, you're screwed. If you don't have enough cruisers to blow up their destroyers, you're screwed. If you don't have enough corvettes to blow up their big ships, you're screwed. You only need to miss one type of ship to be utterly crushed.
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I mostly play single player and my fleets are always balanced. Only at the start depending on research I have heavy corvette and destroyer fleets.
In my last game I had 8 x 32 K fleets (+-1750 nav capacity, so lots of upkeep) and they are all balanced.
 
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Interesting but it would be nice if you lowered the fleet-size and increased ship-costs and buildtime so that ships actually matter instead of beeing cannon-fodder that can be reproduced with lightspeed.
 
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Holy Batman I like these news a lot :)

Would be interesting if Admirals got an expanded role in fleet combat beyond a % here and there, to add some personality to them.

Like personally leading a (flag)ship for added bonus. Or enabling/disabling different formations or tactics settings depending on their traits.

Or giving bonuses to different styles, for instance strike craft (think like the mercenary heroes in MOO2). And make experience matter a bit more.

Some more personality for the leaders would do wonders for this game, and make you really care about losing for instance your favourite Admiral, instead of simply shrugging and hiring a new one.
 
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Dr. B said:
Holy Batman I like these news a lot :)

Would be interesting if Admirals got an expanded role in fleet combat beyond a % here and there, to add some personality to them.
Like personally leading a (flag)ship for added bonus. Or enabling/disabling different formations or tactics settings depending on their traits.
Or giving bonuses to different styles, for instance strike craft (think like the mercenary heroes in MOO2). And make experience matter a bit more.
Some more personality for the leaders would do wonders for this game, and make you really care about losing for instance your favourite Admiral, instead of simply shrugging and hiring a new one.
Click to expand...

I like the way combat is done in Ageod Civil War II. The generals have strategy, offensive and defensive stats. They affect the stats of the troops and what maneuvers they can execute.
Just before a big battle's, you can choose the tactic limited by the stats of the commanding general.
It works great and as you suggested, in some form admirals could maybe play a bigger role in the fleet performance.
 
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I like the changes. I just hope battles wont be that one-sided anymore. By introducing heavy counter mechanics people reasonably assume that if u cant adjust your army, and for some reason have the "wrong" ship composition u might just get completely wiped out. Since there is no espionage at all you can basically only assume what kind of ships your opponent has. Might be cool though if u would introduce some kind of "normal" retreat. Might take some time in which your ships deal less damage but at least u can retreat.

Please consider the weapon technology as well. Most of the time researching multiple weapons just doesnt make any sense. Id prefer 1 or 2 upgrades to a certain weapon type like lasers instead of 5. Instead just give us more weapon options, so later in the game u can actually swap to laser technology if you used kinetic or missiles before. Right now its just never an option. And if you rework alien weapons plz make them useful but not overpowered so multiplayer will just end up like "whoever finds the right aliens first".
 
I would definitely like to see a few more options for disengaging from combat. At the moment, you can't really do hit and run harassing tactics on a larger but slower-moving fleet, because fleets are trapped in engagement once they're in range.

Emergency warp is handy, but sometimes i just want to make a fighting withdrawal, or pull my ships back a bit into a friendly aura or range of a station. at the moment, none of those options are available.
 
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Since you used the arthropod ships for this dev blog, I feel it's not out of place to ask that you take a look at many of the graphical glitches and inconsistencies that plague the arthropod ships. Turrets in the wrong place on the model, turrets either freakishly large or small on some hulls, hull sections not lining up, etc.
 
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Wiz,

The fleet changes look great. I know this is outside of the scope of this DD, but can you comment on the colony events? I saw you hired a writer on PC Gamer that is going to start work on writing events in September, but I wanted to know if this is planned for the October update or later?
 
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What about fleet morale that forces retreats? In general, I think ships need to be more interested in self-preservation. You could create modifiers to morale and retreat thresholds based on admiral, technology, government type, and ethos (Fanatic Collectivist plus Divine Mandate might never retreat without a direct order, for example). That would be quite cool.
 
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