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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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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.
 
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Nueva12 said:
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)".
Click to expand...

We're doing some work on this front, yes.
 
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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. You can have an enormous bunch of destroyers, if you can't defeat the enemy cruisers or destroyers, you're screwed. This makes big players even stronger, since you can't possibly counter a fleet that's simply bigger than yours, it seems. There's also the big problem that when player A researches cruisers before player B, player B will be utterly crushed by player A because he doesn't have cruisers to counter the enemy DDs, while his DDs get blown up left and right.

So I see that you're trying to balance the fleet combat, but I'm worried that it will be TOO balanced, your entire fleet composition resting on a knife's edge where having a fleet that has just too many destroyers and too few cruisers, for instance, will mean utter defeat.
 
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Welp, can't say I'm overly happy with the change to pre-determined ship roles. If it makes warfare more interesting, however, I might come around to the idea.

I do like the concept of increasing the variety of slot 'types', I think that can work well with the More Ship Classes mod and its greater number of hull types. In my opinion these changes would work very well if there were techs or some kind of system to move an empire's military thinking/design towards certain builds. Say a tech that unlocks a PD slot-heavy corvette versus a torp one. This would represent a combination of cultural attitudes towards war and the political structure and forces that underpin military development.

Unfortunately, I don't think the design team wants to move away from the 4-ship class approach, with flagships potentially counting as a 5th class. Hopefully the design choice the devs made will turn out alright in the long run.
 
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Wiz said:
  • 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).
Click to expand...

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?
 
Torakka said:
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?
Click to expand...

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.
 
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Well, I suppose that's one way to keep all ship classes relavent throughout the game.

Of course, I'm not sure that ships should remain relavent. An interestellar empire's space fleet isn't bound by the same concerns as a terrestrial navy, after all. Why shouldn't a battleship simply be better than a corvette? That would also create periods of weakness for an empire, as it starts to phase out old ships in favor of newer models.

Ah well, that might just be my preference for ships of the line/age of sail in space over WWII in space talking. I'm sure it will be fun either way.
 
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Dragnar said:
So if Cruisers wreck Corvettes, then Corvettes aren't really "Anti-Capital ship" and more "Anti Battleship", right?
So it's Corvettes < Destroyers < Cruisers < Battleships < Corvettes?
Click to expand...

The class names are what confuse me now. I would rather have them change the class names to make it sound better.
Instead of:
Corvettes < Destroyers < Cruisers < Battleships < Corvettes
rename it
Destroyers < Light Cruisers < Heavy Cruisers < Battleships < Destroyers

I would also say they should make a dedicate carrier class that packs a lot of PD but little or no heavy weapons meaning you have to use the other ships to screen them. Like what happened in the later half of the WW2 in the Pacific.
 
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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).
Click to expand...

Priority targeting is actually one of the bigger changes to combat. I enjoy it a lot. Ordering corvettes to to make attacking the most damaged BB priority instead of a random ship in range, would make battle far more interesting.
 
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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.
Click to expand...

The upgrading system in Stellaris has to be one the most immersion breaking features in my opinion. Sure, there may be more effort in running a game system where there is limited upgrading, but it would be so much more immersive to have older ships fighting alongside newer models. Star Trek, Babylon 5 and many science fiction books all have this as a core part of their imaginary worlds. It's all based on real life, of course, where we see ships gradually made obsolete as newer models are made.
 
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Silmarion said:
Well, I suppose that's one way to keep all ship classes relavent throughout the game.

Of course, I'm not sure that ships should remain relavent. An interestellar empire's space fleet isn't bound by the same concerns as a terrestrial navy, after all. Why shouldn't a battleship simply be better than a corvette? That would also create periods of weakness for an empire, as it starts to phase out old ships in favor of newer models.

Ah well, that might just be my preference for ships of the line/age of sail in space over WWII in space talking. I'm sure it will be fun either way.
Click to expand...

Honestly, I'd like to see some kind of HoI style tiering of ship hulls. It seems kinda weird to me that very first spaceship a space empire built hundreds of years ago refitted to carry the latest equipment is just as good as a brand new corvette seems a bit silly to me. While upgrading the modules is important to maintain your power there should just come when a specifc hull design is just as outdated as a specific gun design is, without necessarily meaning that its entire role is unnecessary.

EDIT: Got to say it is interesting to see another person with the same avatar and the same join year post a post with the same general idea just before you, but in response to another post. ;)
 
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Oh my, the priority targeting is actually very nice if it gets through! Gone will be the days of half of the fleet deciding to go pillage a random civil ship and mining station while the rest gets destroyed by a spaceport and enemy fleet! ^_^

Wonder if there's plans for a "Non-total war" policy, where your fleets won't go ham on absolutely every civil along the way?
 
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Glad to see you are finally fixing armor scaling.

And people saying that It'd be cooler to mothball/disassemble older ships, that's a fun idea, but the fact of the matter is that tech simply advances too quickly in this game.
 
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Nueva12 said:
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)".
Click to expand...

Well the second formula, at least, is bogus. With that one low accuracy weapons are always better than high accuracy ones. Consider a weapon that deals 1 damage with 100% accuracy vs one that deals 100 damage with 1% accuracy. No matter how much evasion you get the second weapon will always deal more damage. For instance with 1000% evasion the accurate weapon is dealing 1/11, while the low accuracy one deals 100/1001. It's easy to show that this will be the case with any amount of evasion.

The first one is more interesting and might be worth thinking about.
 
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Personally I don't like ship designer thing in 4X games. Often it offers you 1000 possible variants but you will only build 2-3 most efficient of them. I'd rather have 10 predesigned well balanced ships with their uses. After all I play as an emperor and my job is to give general directions not fiddling with ship parts.
 
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Sorry to say I'm not a fan. Seems the approach is to force certain hull sizes into certain roles by introducing arbitrary restrictions, rather than finding a design where they will fall into certain roles naturally. For example, limiting torpedoes to certain hull sizes? Nonsense.

I would start with having larger weapons be overall more powerful, but have a hard time targeting smaller ships. Torpedoes might for example be very bad at targeting small ships, but do a lot of damage. You also need to have small ships act as screens, effectively creating a defense for large ships just by being part of your fleet.

There's no need to say a battleship can't mount lots of point defense (for example), just make that a waste of a battleship's slots.
 
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Well. i actually like that roles-thing, but i feel it isnt the best for everyone. So i ask only for posibility change all this for modders. Because this type of logic... it isnt work perfectly. And for some mod-worldsconversion-mods it tactic feel... stupid.
 
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