Feedback Requested: War and War Resolution

[Calvax]

I would really like to see some sort of "Space Nuremberg" protocol in place. I once made a suggestion about this. It's a clean-up method to avoid weird situations in the aftermath of a war. I've seen this happen a few times with NPC Xenophile civilizations. Here's a retelling of what first had me thinking about this:

I witnessed a dwarf warrior civilization doing great in an observer game and they were in route to become top dog in the galaxy until the fanatical purifier empire next door declared war while the dwarves were busy fighting another war. The purifiers managed to take the dwarven capital and as purifiers do they began a horrific genocidal campaign on the planet. It took about 2 years for the dwarves to take back their home planet but that was enough time for about 10 pops to get killed and one Purifier pop to grow and take a Ruler job. Upon liberation, the dwarves being Xenophiles allowed the purifier pop to keep their cushy ruler job and gave them full citizenship! Can you imagine the outrage? The very same guys who were organizing the deaths of billions are allowed to stay and at a privileged spot at that! That really broke the illusion for me. There were no consequences for the material authors of this crime.

Even open-minded civilizations have to have a limit and genocide surely is a line in the sand. So:

1. Remnant pops of the genocidal species within the empire face:
   • Expulsion. A one-time displacement is allowed against a species to expel the fiends that attacked the people! Maybe you get a one-year license to displace?
   • Execution. Genocidal pops are executed for their crimes after a legal process. Does not count as genocide for purpose of other empires' opinions.
   • Penal Colony. If the empire owns a penal colony, the culpable pops earn a one-way ticket there.
   • Mix and match. Some expelled, some executed, some sent to the penal planet.
2. If nothing can be done about the pops, then the rest of the populace where they live should get a huge happiness hit and start shifting towards Xenophobe. At the very least, demote the pops to worker status, who in their right mind would leave those pops as part of the ruler stratum?

This is possibly a controversial opinion (I'll put it in the form anyway and the devs can see what the consensus is) but total wars should be removed from the game. Instant flipping of territory interacts poorly with loads of other mechanics. There's other ways to have these civilisations work (like purging pops on occupied planets) without this clunky system.

The other bonus is it would limit the ridiculous border gore that inevitably happens in the late game. Particularly between allies. It's so frustrating to lose a system to a total war civ or a crisis only to have allies swoop in to grab it.

 

[Calvax]

What about topics that was already mentioned in a forum? Do You read those and include in Your report, or I have to copy everything into form?

If they were going to include the thread they likely wouldn't have made a feedback form. Seems pretty sensible to fill out the form to be sure.

 

[Lorenerd11]

Remnant pops of the genocidal species within the empire face:

• Expulsion. A one-time displacement is allowed against a species to expel the fiends that attacked the people! Maybe you get a one-year license to displace?
• Execution. Genocidal pops are executed for their crimes after a legal process. Does not count as genocide for purpose of other empires' opinions.
• Penal Colony. If the empire owns a penal colony, the culpable pops earn a one-way ticket there.
• Mix and match. Some expelled, some executed, some sent to the penal planet.

Pops are entire populations. You can easily assume that when you conquer a genocidal empire, all the military leadership, key political figures, and soldiers guilty of atrocities were executed, but those are generally not represented by pops, but by armies and leaders (neither of which are preserved).

There is no sensible legal process that would lead to the execution of an entire species, or their expulsion from their home planet.

 

[Great_Triangle]

Some peace deals I'd like to see added:

-A more powerful Empire promises to declare war on anyone building starbases in a neutral zone, using a variation of the holy world mechanics.

-Placing a member of the winning Empire's primary species in charge of the government, providing an ethics shift and hefty trust bonus.

-War reparations in the form of slaves or refugees being sent to the winning Empire.

-Locking out the losing Empire from a victory condition for a period of time.

-Mandatory chemical bliss living standards for pops that don't match the ethics of the winning empire.

-conversion of a nomad Empire to a planet based Empire, or vice versa.

 

[Liquid Ghost]

Pops are entire populations. You can easily assume that when you conquer a genocidal empire, all the military leadership, key political figures, and soldiers guilty of atrocities were executed, but those are generally not represented by pops, but by armies and leaders (neither of which are preserved).

There is no sensible legal process that would lead to the execution of an entire species, or their expulsion from their home planet.

Sure, which is why I think expulsion back to their homelands or taken to a penal colony would be better. What would be ridiculous is the Poles keeping the German bureaucrats and elites from the General Government in place after WWII, which is what I witnessed.

 

[Calvax]

Pops are entire populations. You can easily assume that when you conquer a genocidal empire, all the military leadership, key political figures, and soldiers guilty of atrocities were executed, but those are generally not represented by pops, but by armies and leaders (neither of which are preserved).

There is no sensible legal process that would lead to the execution of an entire species, or their expulsion from their home planet.

Sure, which is why I think expulsion back to their homelands or taken to a penal colony would be better. What would be ridiculous is the Poles keeping the German bureaucrats and elites from the General Government in place after WWII, which is what I witnessed.

I definitely agree that the quirks of the pop system lead to all sorts of things that make no narrative sense. If a population was invaded, enslaved, had people of a different nationality moved in to form an enforced upper class, it makes little sense the oppressed would allow that upper class to stay after the war. But mechanically purging via displacement is clunky and can only be done at a whole species level, displacing to random empires, and can't be turned off for 10 years. Worse still pops in stellaris aren't really populations. They're mostly passive units of economic production. Outside of very crude modifiers like "xenophobes unhappy" there's no mechanics to support pops being temporarily aggressive towards other specific pops, or really anything of note to make pops not integrate fully into whatever empire they live in.

It's probably somewhat beyond the scope of the war rework but I'm really hoping that the pop rework at least lays the foundation for more detailed and dynamic pops that can have specific special interests. Interests that reflect recent events in game and that give the player interesting strategic and narrative options. Because really the question of what to do with a bunch of aliens who were shipped in as part of a war in order to lead and who were left behind is an interesting one. It's a great set up to a story and having things like events, special interest groups, or whatever could make for a very memorable emergent moment in a game beyond "that's dumb" or "oh good more pops, guess I'll build some science labs"

 

[jose2534]

I did my part!!! I sent the form, I will be waiting for the feedback from the dev team on the next DD!

 

[Zoomy]

Feedback on the feedback form: you ask for I'm unclear on the difference between "What do you like/dislike about the current implementation of Warfare in Stellaris?" and "What is good/bad about the current user experience in Warfare?" Aren't those basically asking the same thing?

 

[Znikii]

Feedback on the feedback form: you ask for I'm unclear on the difference between "What do you like/dislike about the current implementation of Warfare in Stellaris?" and "What is good/bad about the current user experience in Warfare?" Aren't those basically asking the same thing?

An idea behind a certain mechanic or the quality of implementation might not be the same as each persons taste / gamplay style&goals....

 

[crazy4ever]

Already filled in the Forms and generally don't like to comment but just wanna chime in on 1 topic, war.

Fleet cap, why does this exist? Just makes micromanagement of many fleets a pain, when I just want to wage war on 2/3 fronts. Just give me a single fleet I can split/manage however i want instead of having to deal with 30+ seperate fleets which i only need 2 of.

 

[MassFX]

Gunboat diplomacy! To pressure nations in stellaris to give up claims territories without going to war.

 

[Idle America]

And just because someone is winning a war doesn't mean they can indefinitely keep up the supply lines, war exhaustion is all the stuff that gets off-screened, be it hippy movements, supply lines, your soldiers getting homesick and exhausted or other such things

In that case, it should be better represented than a simple number. Perhaps after War Exhaustion gets to a certain point, several events can fire about troop morale or public support dwindling?

 

[NilsFabian]

I'd like to have an option that would force my opponent to disarm. Mechanic wise it could mean that they would get a heavy reduction of their naval capacity. They could still build up to their old strength but they would have to pay for it, thus simulating the need to keep the build up secret.

Another thing that would be appreciated is the neutral zone option. Either imposed to one side or mutually by both sides, the systems could be owned and peacefully exploited by the respective empire but no military fleet may enter and all stationary defenses i.e. Starbases have to be dismantled and colonies either abandoned or they have to, at least be stripped of all planetary fortresses, orbital rings and planetary shields

 

[Neal?]

From what I've reviewed war resolution seems to boil down to wanting more "win" conditions. For my money, I think that one great change would be to allow players to define win conditions for wars. There is a system in place that allows you to claim systems additional times that as far as I can tell, does nothing. What if spending influence to lay stronger claims on a system made that system worth more for warscore. So if a system is claimed 10 times its worth 10 times as much when captured.

 

[GnoSIS]

One thing which would be nice for Secret Fealty would be that any war with the Overlord would result in the vassals with Secret Fealty to you backstabbing him.

Currently you need to specifically make a war with the Secret Fealty objective, if you make any other war with (or get a war declared on you by) the overlord the Secret Fealty does not trigger.
It should be handled just like claims, which can be achieved in any (or at least most) war goals.

This,

and the mechanics of Secret Fealty are really crappy.

 

[GnoSIS]

And for war exhaustion, I never really liked that fixed 2 year timer once you reached 100%.

IMO an infinitely stacking increase on ship upkeep would be better there. Then you would have depending on your economy more freedom when to end the war, but it would still have a soft cap.
Of course, if you are on the losing side you can reach it before your opponent. But on the other hand, you usually do not have much of a fleet left then. It would penalize attempts to rebuild your fleet during a war, but that is rarely something which is possible even with the current system.

This would also end the situation where the war with space fleets is really over, but you're left with conquering 5-10 more planets and can take 20 more years. Practically exhaustion should be expanded and it should count more as bonus score/points towards filling the meter for the other side to surrender.

 

[Drullo321]

I keep it simple and short as I'm not the deepest into Stellaris warfare and is probably my least spend time of 1500 hours.

My biggest complaint would be the rather limited way how multi-faction/empire warfare (with and without federations) is handled. When you are not the recipient or initializer of the war, your actions are rather limited. You could be part of a 5vs5 war and personally dominating the enemy but you have no or rather limited options how to handle this war.

Therefore I would like to see more possibilities to interact (diplomatically) as a general participant in wars. Maybe split war exhaustion into personal and federation/vasallation group different graphs.

 

[ThexLoneWolf]

I think the main addition I want to see in a warfare update is Defence Condition levels, or DEFCON. Setting different DEFCON levels provides bonuses for your fleets and armies, at the cost of other areas of your economy and research. To prevent players from abusing this, DEFCON could be set automaticilly, scaling with whatever empire you happen to be at war with. Here are the levels as I envision them working:

• DEFCON 5: Fade Out. Normal peacetime conditions, no effects on your economy, research, or ships and armies. Best used if you don't believe you're in imminent danger.
• DEFCON 4: Double Take. Research and economy take a slight hit, but ships and armies take less time to produce. Planets take slightly less damage from bombardment. Ideal for low-intensity conflicts.
• DEFCON 3: Round House. Research, economy, and now espionage take a larger hit, but ships and armies take even less time to produce and start to gain combat bonuses. Planet damage from bombardment is moderately reduced. Best in medium-intensity conflicts with the potential of having your space get invaded.
• DEFCON 2: Fast Pace. Research, economy, and espionage take a substantial hit, but ships and armies are produced very quickly and have even larger combat bonuses. Planets take highly reduced damage from bombardment. Best in high-intenst conflicts with a serious threat of invasion. Being in this DEFCON level reduces opinion penalties from the use of most Colossus Weapons on foreign worlds.
• DEFCON 1: Cocked Pistol. Research, economy, and espionage are virtually non-existent, but ships and armies are produced in less than half the time and their combat capabilities are doubled. Planets take virtually no damage from selective bombardment stances and significantly reduced damage from all other stances. Being in this DEFCON level completely removes the opinion penalty from using most Colossus Weapons on foreign worlds. Best used for total war scenarios.

 

[Critical Ethics]

Please stop trying to force four-hull-size fleets, especially with the current level of ship customization. Stellaris combat does not have the mechanical breadth to support four generic ship types while also giving them meaningful niches while also making researching the larger hulls rewarding while also keeping the earlier hulls relevant while also allowing for anything even close to the current level of ship customisation. Every attempt to do so feels more forced and is more heartbreaking than the last. Unless you significantly, and I mean significantly, reduce ship customisability, or massively increase the tactical nature of fights to the level where it would be kinda obnoxious, it literally cannot be done. There's just not enough levers. I don't care what you do instead but please stop. Just please. Please. I know I sound incredibly obnoxious right now but I am being genuinely, 100% sincere here, I am literally, sincerely, heartfeltly, unironically begging you to stop doing this. Please.

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Related but not directly related, it's crazy that we construct combat ships down to the individual gun only to feed several thousand of them into a giant mishmash of flashing lights and an unhelpful end of battle spreadsheet. I hate how fighting other empires is so samey, because all their stuff also just feeds into a giant mishmash of flashing lights and an unhelpful end of battle spreadsheet. My big request (other than, once again, falling to me knees and repeating my last paragraph but with even more pleases) is to significantly increase the visibility and discernible impact of individual ship design choices. Possible options include:

- significantly reducing ship numbers
- reducing the granularity of the ship designer (e.g. researching a new weapon type unlocks a visually and mechanically distinct preset hull segment with fixed weapon placement instead of it unlocking a weapon that needs to be basically exactly as good as every other weapon that takes the same slot. Seriously I don't get excited unlocking a new M slot gun for my M slots or a new torpedo for my torpedo slots, I get excited researching strike craft or beam weapons because they unlock new hull segments which means I get something actually new, or researching titans because that's a whole new kind of ship that does new things, not just what my other ships do with the numbers slightly tweaked. Make the whole game this.)
- just giving up on corvettes

 

[Critical Ethics]

I also think ground combat should be a bombardment stance but that's a bit more controversial.