Ship in combat circling issue - and the solution I suggest

[provet]

Reported this as well:

Stellaris - [4.0.6] (aa83) Biogenesis: Fleets won't engage deep stations

Description [4.0.6] (aa83) Biogenesis: Fleets won't engage deep stations Game Version 4.0.6 What version do you use? Steam What expansions do you have installed? Plantoids, Humanoids, Synthetic Dawn, Utopia, Leviathans Story Pack, Apocalypse...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

Also had my 70k elder-maulers-only-fleet getting defeated by like 3-4 carries because they ignored the carries..

 

[Imp0815]

Interesting find. Good fix. It's been a while since I played, I had to go look up Deep Space Citadels.

The awkward half-abstracted half-simulated battle system has long been one of Stellaris' original sins, dating all the way back to launch. I feel like the devs long ago gave up on improving it; I don't think much has really changed since disengagement was added. So much of the battle system is good-enough kludges to fix fatal flaws. It's workable, certainly, but does keep causing problems. However, that's not to say it needs to be ripped out. You could change a *LOT* in the battle system design-wise without changing the technical side of things very much.

Long ago I tried to rebalance the whole system via modding, but my whole design got broken overnight by a backend change that hardcapped evasion.

IMO, the biggest thing the current system is lacking is nonlinearity. The gritty details of ship design will change how things match up, but you're ultimately just applying multipliers to fleet power. Fighting a Leviathan is just a matter of eyeballing whether its armor or shields and bringing enough ships, there's no like hard technological requirement or game changing technology that gets you in the fight.

An example of nonlinear balance would be damage reduction armor that requires big guns to pierce, or weapons that scale up and hit every ship so you can't win by flooding in with numbers. I'd love it if combat strategy was a mix of fleet mass and 'chess pieces' and the leviathans were like extremist outliers. As is I barely see them. On a lesser scale you also have problems with like mining drones basically being nonentities because of how rapidly they get 'outdated' in fleet power, but thats a tougher problem to handle

edit: The unfortunate downside is that people would get mad if their 100k fleet got uselessly chumped because they didnt understand the mechanic. A system where you can make big differences at the edges but ultimately you can solve all your problems by throwing numbers at it has broader appeal in this manner, since you can play it successfully with less knowledge.

This sums it up pretty well.

This borders on derailing the thread about bugs and issues with ship behavior in battles, but I want to add that it's also adjacent to the issues we've been discussing. Stellaris' military system foundation is rotten and ancient. It was an experiment that works for the first 100–200 hours of gameplay, but it seems most people get lost far earlier.

Sure, on paper it sounds smart to have a system that works without much knowledge, but when that knowledge always leads to the same result — "solve every issue with more fleet power" — then the game has no real depth. Or rather, it has the illusion of depth.

To solidify my argument on whether Stellaris still works for both new and old players, I'd point to the performance of other Paradox GSGs. Games with a solid combat foundation, like HoI IV, perform much more consistently than Stellaris. And unless proven otherwise — for example, by higher player numbers — I’m convinced that this stems from the lackluster combat and military systems.

So yes, fixing the ship behavior bugs would help if the goal is to maintain the status quo. But as long as anything military-related touches almost everything in the game, then everything must change — and any time or money spent on "fixing" the old and rotten system is, in my view, wasted.

 

[PK_AZ]

edit Or in more clear words, if ship has fixed forward short range weapon, I expect to see animation of that, which means enemy must be in short range and directly ahead, and ... I don't see how they can do this without running a simulation and linking the graphics to it.

? Ship can calculate trajectory of target and rotate towards it?

If you ignore the range calculation, how does the graphics side know if it should draw the attack or not?

Viewed the other way with graphics as primary, if you ignore the range calculation, how does the simuilaton know that it can/can't do damage that that it should fly closer?

Instead of calculating range between pair of ships, you can calculate distance between ship and abstract line-of-contact. Target is in range, when sum of distances from LoC of source and target are below source selected weapon range. If ship cannot hit its selected target, it should push LoC forward. If it cannot do so, it should change target to closest in-range ship to its left or right. To make animations look smoother, ships could be so positioned than short ranged ones are put in the middle of first line, while long ranged are positioned behind, and send to flanks of first line when demanded by combat manager.

I don't understand people who think this could ruin the look of the fights.

Exactly! I mean, do they really think it can look even worse?

 

[Fnhatic]

Interesting find. Good fix. It's been a while since I played, I had to go look up Deep Space Citadels.

The awkward half-abstracted half-simulated battle system has long been one of Stellaris' original sins, dating all the way back to launch. I feel like the devs long ago gave up on improving it; I don't think much has really changed since disengagement was added. So much of the battle system is good-enough kludges to fix fatal flaws. It's workable, certainly, but does keep causing problems. However, that's not to say it needs to be ripped out. You could change a *LOT* in the battle system design-wise without changing the technical side of things very much.

Long ago I tried to rebalance the whole system via modding, but my whole design got broken overnight by a backend change that hardcapped evasion.

IMO, the biggest thing the current system is lacking is nonlinearity. The gritty details of ship design will change how things match up, but you're ultimately just applying multipliers to fleet power. Fighting a Leviathan is just a matter of eyeballing whether its armor or shields and bringing enough ships, there's no like hard technological requirement or game changing technology that gets you in the fight.

An example of nonlinear balance would be damage reduction armor that requires big guns to pierce, or weapons that scale up and hit every ship so you can't win by flooding in with numbers. I'd love it if combat strategy was a mix of fleet mass and 'chess pieces' and the leviathans were like extremist outliers. As is I barely see them. On a lesser scale you also have problems with like mining drones basically being nonentities because of how rapidly they get 'outdated' in fleet power, but thats a tougher problem to handle

edit: The unfortunate downside is that people would get mad if their 100k fleet got uselessly chumped because they didnt understand the mechanic. A system where you can make big differences at the edges but ultimately you can solve all your problems by throwing numbers at it has broader appeal in this manner, since you can play it successfully with less knowledge.

I also would see that as doing something about the current fact that most of the time, even when near matched, one fleet basically gets destroyed and the other takes like 5% losses.

 

[DarkSlayer352]

Thank you so much for this thread and the mod recommendation
After around 200 hours, i ran into an extremely noticeable bug for the first time. It probably happened before to some extent, but not in a way that was noticeable if not observed closely
My 7k fleet (mostly corvettes and a couple frigates) engaged a weak enemy fleet (around 700, mostly corvettes) and... both fleets proceeded to retreat to the edge of the system and just spin in circles, refusing to approach each other.
This continued for 5 minutes before i gave up, and saving/loading the game did not help

The moment i installed better ship behaviours and loaded the save with the stuck ships, all my ships engaged and crushed the enemy fleet. I can highly recommend the mod.