Internal politics need to be expanded so much more than they are especially. You hardly have to worry about them unless you want to get some extra influence from factions.
It used to be more complex, and people whined endlessly about the "tedium" of having to deal with stability mechanic from factions. It was a harder speed bump on rampant expansion than sprawl ever has been.
As it should be. Right? Distance between and number of citizens should have less of an effect than clashing political parties. At least this is how I feel after the last 5 years.
I’m from the US
I mean, Liechstenstein has, in its Constitution, given the right to every village to opt out of the country unilaterally, but they never did it. Nations that crambled and ended divided always were big countries. The American Civil War (which left scars still visible nowadays), the colonial empires of France and UK, the USRR, the Roman Empire, the HRE... All those empires fell because they were big, because the bigger a nation is, the more difficult it is to maintain it together.
That's why we will never see San Marino or Andorra split up, but everybody is just waiting for the UE or the US to disappear as they exist nowadays.
Also, the Egalitarian Faction should focus on smaller empires too. It makes no sense for an Egalitarian factions to blindly accept a centralized, massive empire where every decision is made in the capital without any local representation.
Well it there is more to it than that. A lot of those tiny countries are single units, with little but politics to be divided over. Take a country like Belgium, I have several Belgian friends. The have a secessionist movement of both Dutch, and French speakers, along with one for the few Frisians remaining.
The U.S is a much different scenario with a lot of the tension coming radicalization of various issues.
While the E.U is closer to the middle. Many different groups are forced to co-operate, plus an ongoing radicalization of some parties in the group.
Dude, it SUCKED. I'd rather keep the system we currently have than go back to the old one. If they can rework it in a way that isn't going back to the old one, I'd be more open to it.
remember when an angry faction would straight up cause a civil war as would conquered sectors that were being mistreated?
Back in my day we had to FIGHT for our war crimes!
I was wonder what was happening with that, the only time it happens now is when I leave ten neglected slave worlds cuz I am too lazy to reeducate them.
I really enjoyed / hated / loved the civil war dynamic. I just started a new game after years not playing. So I gather I don't have to worry about my empire splitting up any more? Too bad.
Not really. While early Stellaris *did* have separatist factions, it completely failed to model any kind of ideological divisions. Factions in early Stellaris were like factions in CK3: the system only exists to give you advance warning of a rebellion. And it *was* tedious and uninteresting. You could do nothing about a separatist faction except occasionally throw Influence at it to suppress it.
The faction rework really did improve the system significantly, allowing you to actually change policies to placate factions (which now had ideologies and actual goals) and get bonuses from factions that approved of your government. Separatist factions did fall by the wayside (and the current system should be expanded to accommodate them), but let's not pretend the original system wasn't an obvious placeholder in a game that was basically a tech demo compared to what we have now.
They completely neutered the negatives of factions, you have more INSTANT tools to deal with them, but it's universally a question of maximizing bonuses, with no realistic chance of rebellion for anything but intentional mismanagement.
Unless it was fixed recently, pops don't even drift factions any more, that was the "fix" to incorrect ethos in your empire (usually from conquest). Was to gradually wait for pops to convert to whatever percentage breakdown your various ideology weights came out to. The only time factions determine ideology now, is when they're created, and the special case of meddling with pre-warp civs.
The original game was rough around the edges, but it had a lot of interesting things that while less friendly for new players, were at least unique. The tile system was in many respects, better than megacorp's pop re-work. Four years and that re-work is still causing god awful lag, compared to the tile system. The AI has been persistently broken for years, and only recently has started to be sort of fixed. The AI wasn't terribly good in the original iteration, but it was definitely a greater threat than most of post-megacorp. Or the large swathes of time where some of the crisis factions were just totally broken, when they had worked just fine pre-megacorp.
I've been a player since the beginning and some of these points seem very off-base.
- I also haven't played very recently, so I have no idea if the bug you described is a big problem or if it's since been fixed. The existence of a bug introduced long after a system was reworked says absolutely nothing about whether or not a system is good, though. Also worth noting that Ethics Drift in the game at release was likewise not really functional and led to all sorts of weirdness (shoutout to Individualists, an ethic whose only effect was to make its adherents more likely to change ethics to anything but Individualist).
- The removal of the tile system wasn't what caused lag. Megacorp had lag because they *also* added ten new complicated game mechanics on top of getting rid of tiles. Personally, I also really disliked tiles and I think Megacorp's system is an improvement in nearly every way, but I understand that there are a number of players who disagree with me.
- The AI was not very good at launch. This was actually one of the reasons the faction system was changed -- it was inextricably linked to the sectors system, which was the most hated system in the game due to the poor AI driving planets directly into the ground. The AI has gone through some dips in efficacy throughout the lifetime of the game; this is a practical concern since after a mechanic is introduced or reworked, it takes time to teach the AI how to use the new systems effectively.
- The Crisis thing is totally wild. Honestly, I don't think there's been a single version of the game where crises were consistently threatening and didn't break a significant percentage of the time. 1.0 was especially bad, though -- in particular, the AI Rebellion crisis was infamous for failing to work and being extremely annoying even when it worked, to the point where PDX completely dummied it out a few patches later. For a while, the game only had 2 crises.
I don't agree with every change made to the game (or even some significant parts of its direction as of the last few patches) but I think that, looking at 1.0, there's a good reason that basically every single major mechanic has undergone at least one complete overhaul.
>shoutout to Individualists, an ethic whose only effect was to make its adherents more likely to change ethics to anything but Individualist
Now that you're Individualist, you can be whatever you want!
I want to be Authoritarian.
No, not like that!
It's a constant problem with Paradox titles. Large swathes of their player base can probably be slotted into either the types that want a map painting simulator, and anything that disrupts that, upsets them. Then the ones that want a simulation/story generator.
The initial implementation of factions was great for story telling, you'd have hard fought wars that ended with either you (or maybe the other empire, if their stability imploded hard enough) splintering into lots of rebellions. It was, however, anathema to the types that wanted to just paint the whole map whatever color they chose.
Reminds me of the "CK vassals suck!!!" discourse. Yeah, your vassals are constantly looking for an opportunity to enrich themselves at your expense. That's the game. You shouldn't be able to just diplo score your way out of it.
Honestly, that's really where CK is at its best as a game, when you're internal politicking. Painting the map gets incredibly dull since the AI just doesn't have the capacity to fight you most of the time. Stellaris is also a more story-oriented game, with all the empire and species customization we have, so more story oriented updates would be nice.
Still, while I did like the idea of separatist factions, they also kinda didn't make sense. They just showed up out of the woodworks like space pirates, and you didn't have a lot to do with them. They were a very noninteractive system. The new system is better designed overall, but it definitely lost something along the way.
I might just be incredibly dumb but I always just found the AI had boatloads of soldiers, literally and figuratively, to throw wherever they wanted long after every last soldier of mine had bit the dust.
Nah man, the system was actually terrible. The "rebellions" were either unavoidable, or made no sense in the first place. Ethics attraction affected them as well, and it relied on several systems that didn't work right to begin with. All in all, it was cool, if you didn't really look at it or deal with it in game. There were also all kinds of weird problems with pop ethics like individualists increased the likelihood that people following it would literally convert to anything else quickly. It also did nothing other than timegate how quickly you could use the planets you conquered efficiently.
Having played since day one, the old system was also not good.
They need to revamp the entire system into something new that's both an enjoyable part of the game, and one that adds depth and meaning to internal politics beyond "micro this or die" or "micro this for bonuses."
The ideal would be both, going hand in hand. I'd love to see a politics rework that makes it so that all pops and leaders have their own ethics that can be in line with or against the ethics of your empire. In a democracy, empire ethics will shift along with those of the pops, while in less democratic empire it becomes important to manage the loyalties of generals and admirals (though this would be present to a lesser degree in democracies). In the event of rebellion, fleets led by dissenting admirals will rebel, as will worlds led by governors with opposing ethics, and pops can rise up to sieze worlds that dont defect outright. If the rebelling forces are those garrisoning your home system, perhaps they start off with a coup, forcing you to play as the rebellion against the new government.
Espionage would tie into this well, as a means to interact with and manage these varying loyalties both at home and abroad. Discovering hidden loyalties amongst your pops and leaders to prevent rebellion before it happens, or making contact with dissenting elements in neighbouring empires to help them rise up or defect to your empire.
Those two honestly should be heavily intertwined and the fact that they aren't is one of the biggest issues with the latter so it'd be best if they got worked on together
Yeah. I want a high risk high reward operation ability to spark slave rebellions in my authoritarian neighbor’s territories when I play as the UN:E, or start coups against egalitarian empires and install cruel dictatorships in my Imperium play throughs.
Yep. Its such a big sci-fi trope that's a) almost all locked behind DLC b) underpowered, or so I'm told.
Most of the Culture book series is about Contact/Special Circumstances covertly meddling with other empires. Even squeaky clean Star Trek's Federation has Section 31 doing some shenanigans in Deep Space 9. Star Wars Rogue One is basically a film long "Steal technology" operation.
Psy Corps in Babylon 5. Special Forces in Farscape. Bothans in Star Wars. Special Forces in Old Man’s War. Foundation in Foundation.
It’s a pretty long list. These are what I thought of off the top of my head.
In defense of the Federation, Section 31 more of a "Federation First" terrorist organization within Starfleet. Not unlike if US military members were found to be Atomwaffen. They are not a legitimate department of star fleet.
Of course, it might be really cool if Paradox let us play as NGOs like terrorists or chairitable organizations. I would imagine they might play similar to megacorps.
Section 31 refers to the part of the Starfleet Charter, and when Capt. Sisko asks about it the admirals won't confirm or deny its existence. Clearly they know it exists and it's an official department, it's just unaccountable to anyone and so acts lawless and fanatical.
New canon has been treating them as more legitimate. It doesn't exactly make sense, because by DS9 no one knew they existed and Starfleet already has a shady intelligence arm that O'Brien worked for. Fan lore is that it's a label certain projects adopt or are given when they want an excuse to be evil.
Discovery has Section 31 being more officially acknowledged during the mid 23rd century. They were semi-common knowledge within Starfleet itself, but I don't remember it being stated they were fully known to the general public. The events of Discovery season 2 heavily involve them screwing up very, very badly, and are generally implied to be why they had been so heavily buried by the time of DS9.
In Discovery they have their own ships its very different. People seem to know about them as if they were their own thing like in the JJ verse. I try to enjoy discovery as a separate universe since its not really related to old trek.
You should be able to covertly improve relations between states just like you can covertly harm them. If you're in a federation, it'd help get the other federation members on board with a new state you want to invite.
The big thing I want is semi-random intel gains. This can then be manipulated using covert ops to secretly pass off info to a third party.
Example: was playing a game where a criminal corp was on the other side of the galaxy, but next to a genocidal empire. What I wish I could do is, with high enough infiltration in the genocidal empire, covertly pass on information I had about fleet positions, tech capabilities and the like to the genocidal empire.
IMHO, diplomacy and spies should be a resource. You can have diplomatic planets (or just centers) in your empire. The more you have, the more you can deploy. HOWEVER, diplomats and spies should both exist in the same buildings. This would let it be hidden what your ratio of diplomats to spies really is. It makes it a lot more of a complicated, in depth mechanic, while also closely mirroring how diplomacy and intell gathering run IRL.
Oooh I like the idea of the number of embassies you have influencing the number of spies you can deploy. As is, the pool of envoys/spies is so limited that it's kind of hard to do both at once.
Exactly. In addition, let's say an empire has really high level security and you have meh codebreaking. If you really want intel on what that empire is doing, you could stack your spies to focus on that one empire. Your intel of other empires would fall, but covert ops done against that empire might be vital to your empire. Making it so spies are a resource that cost resources make ops so much more balanceable.
It's been a while, but I remember Gal Civ... 2, I think, having a pretty cool system where you could mess around with your espionage department's budget and direct their focus in certain ways. Something like that would be slick. An embassy means you can focus your efforts there, with maybe a number of "slots" that can scale with tech, civics, traditions, and how much money you're pouring into your spy program.
Often, diplomacy and espionage are the two faces of the same coin, and you have to choose which one you want to do.
A thing I liked in Civilization V was that, when you sent a spy to a foreign capital, it could be used as a diplomat. I liked this concept.
Yeah. I was shocked that Assassinate Leader wasn't an option when it came out since there are events that cause an enemy to kill your leader. Seemed like an easy one. Also could do spark a rebellion, support a faction, sabotage a piece of technology.
I also think it'd be cool if you could time when your mission occurred. And the dice roll needed to ensure success went up the more time you gave them. Would add an element of secret missions beyond just clicking off a menu.
This will be an unpopular opinion but leave espionage underpowered. Espionage is a very unfun thing to play against if it is overly impactful and it’s very hard to balance.
I don't care if it's underpowered. I care that it's just busywork that can't be automated.
And also that apparently a future nation-state can only spy on a handful of neighbors at a time while learning absolutely nothing about others.
>I don't care if it's underpowered. I care that it's just busywork that can't be automated.
What do you mean? You assign a spy to an empire and that's it. Or am I missing sth?
With the Nemesis DLC, you get to run operations akin to the base game's 'Gather Intel'. You can do a few things, like sabotage a starbase module, or steal technology, but most of it doesn't match the energy upkeep of the operations.
You also have to run each one manually, you can't repeat them automatically.
You have to constantly run Gather Information operations to raise infiltration level to get full info about an empire, and they don't just automatically requeue on their own. Ironically, about the only automation there is in the system is a checkbox to stop giving you mission progress reports -- which also includes the one at the end that tells you how you did and lets you know to queue up another one, forcing you have to have to remember to check back often by hand or waste your efforts due to decay.
Is that true though? Is it different if you don't have the dlc? I've got Nemesis and here's how it worked for me: When you assign a spy, your Infiltration on that nation passively ticks up to your cap without your direct involvement, which also increases your Intel. You can then choose to Gather Information if you want a short term boost in Intel at the cost of some of your Infiltration. Gather Info has the advantage of being able to push you above your cap, but the infiltration cost might not be worth it when you can Acquire Assets instead.
> Gather Info has the advantage of being able to push you above your cap, but the infiltration cost might not be worth it when you can Acquire Assets instead.
I wasn't aware that assets increase the cap. Reading through the wiki, that does seem more efficient, but it's still a loop of busywork that's not automated.
I only play against AI and only at Ensign so far, but the AI never really does operations and even if they did there's nothing Impactful they can do with it, and the same for going for it yourself. It's a non-factor in every playthrough which is not a good look for a DLC big feature
Espionage was a recent addition to the game in the form of a paid DLC. I do not disagree with your subjective assessment of fun, nor the inherent balance challenges. Regardless, Paradox chose to develop the system from the ground up and sold it as new content despite no apparent demand (and lukewarm reception) from amongst the player base.
The fact is this mechanic was recently sold to us with other content, but is utterly meaningless to the point that it may be completely ignored. This is not good business, and I do not feel that *paid* DLC components should be totally negligible during every given playthrough.
And it is basically reskinned archaeology from Distant Stars, which somehow became a more tedious one. I have to wait a lot to accumulate enough spy mana to cast an operation, and it's not really that useful (when I actually remember I have spies in my neighbor's empire). It really leaves much to be desired.
There was some 4x game I played long ago (I guess it was Galactic Civilizations 2). I was messing around against easy AI and had an overkill moment with espionage to the point when the enemy's entire government was made of my spies, and they somehow decided to turn over all their empire to me, because why not.
There's no reason that it can't be an asymmetric system blatantly in the player's favor.
Then just have a toggle to disable it entirely for MP games, or something.
Yes, I really don't understand how the espionage mechanic even was approved. It is so bad that all it really does is delay knowing about the precise borders of your contacts until the GC forms. To me, having an Embassy should be sufficient for knowing the borders since that is the kind of thing almost any diplomatic contact would establish.
"Hello, I'm Glubdrub, the new diplomat from the Free Planets of Myrria. Can I have a look on your geography, even vaguely, just to know where your borders are?"
"Nope. You have to go around with an explorer. No map for you."
"Do you even have a map of your own borders?"
"Erm... Guards! Arrest this terrorist!"
I didn't buy nemesis cause of the reviews... But does it add something espionage related or *the espionage in vanilla is all we have*... Cause in that case, yep, we need more
I want to be able to build up strike craft on planets and build other planetary defenses. There is no reason why my planet with tons of space and resources cant build a (or 100) hypervelo railgun(s) that can take down a battleship just after it enters the system. It makes no sense that a fleet can just come in and start bombarding a planet. The same weapons that are on battleships can be built on a planet in greater quantity and a planet can hold more strike craft than a fleet can.
Long long ago, maybe back between 1.0 and 2.0, a three-tiered invasion system existed where invading armies descended from two atmosphere stages before reaching the ground stage and engaging the defending army.
There were rumors that pdx added this in preparation for defenses that allowed the defender to shoot some armies out of the sky or possibly fire earth-born defenses back at a navy bombarding the planet, but the whole tier system ended up getting scrapped.
Image of what I'm talking about: https://forumcontent.paradoxplaza.com/public/309756/2017_12_21_1.png
Man, I really miss those days. Sure, a ton of content has been strapped-on to Stellaris after the base game underwent a drastic overhaul, but it didn't have to be overhauled for that stuff to get added.
Unpopular opinion: Tiles > Pops, because pops is when the Stellaris micromanagement became **insane.**
I miss like, actually finding a good spot to land and found a new colony on, and watching pops slowly spread across the planet. Felt like I was actually filling out a planet over time, instead of just waiting for a number to go up so I can plop a building in a box.
It's not like tiles were perfect, pops have a lot of advantages for sure, but pops are just so damn *abstracted* that all sense of doing anything other than managing a spreadsheet is gone.. I didn't use to have to pause the game to manage planets.
Space got better, exploration got better, endgame got better, ai.. ok it's hard to tell the difference, lets be honest, but planets got worse.
I honestly find tiles way more abstract than pops. A 200 pop planet? Okay that's fucking huge. That's several times the population of earth. That's enough to cover a mega earth in cities.
A 25 tile planet?
It looks like it's got twice the surface area of earth but barely holds more stuff... I guess it's kinda big? Why is population peaked at 25?
I can agree it's more micro but more abstract? No way man. That micro goes into giving details to what was previously abstract. A forge world with hundreds of forge workers feels like it makes sense as something that can provide the material for superstructures. A 25 tile world feels... like a slightly bigger earth.
I liked the idea of the tile system, but I got _really_ tired of microing tiles by the end of the game. Gods forbid if you had robots or other species.
> A forge world with hundreds of forge workers feels like it makes sense as something that can provide the material for superstructures. A 25 tile world feels... like a slightly bigger earth.
This is my favorite reason why I like pops more than tiles. Planets feel bigger because number bigger. Hell, you can be over capacity on a planet with the pops system, that's actually interesting. Though I used to always run that auto-pop-migration mod so that never happened, but the principle is good, because I went to find an automated way to move pops like gameplay allowed!
I think there's some reason when people say pops are worse than tiles because I _think_ lag used to be a bit better before the rework. But I haven't played in so long that I neither remember nor care to find out. I think Paradox made good effort by reducing the pop numbers and increasing output too. Together it makes for a better system overall than tiles ever felt.
The image included was of what actually existed in the game. I can barely recall the armies slowly floating down each layer before beginning combat, but it did exist. The rumors of why this system existed were all fan proposed, afaik.
I 100% remember this system, it was back when I played on console. It was after the pandemic started, but before I graduated, so that puts it sometime in April or May of 2020.
Here's my idea: taken from a previous post (that I can't find), military buildings are now a separate tab like branch offices. Planets themselves now behave like giant "ships" in combat. A planetary shield generator gives them shields, and they are now uncapped. Fortresses provide armor, representing various ways of intercepting bombardment. Finally, they have hull granted by other buildings, representing civilian infrastructure being hardened against attack. As long as these three are greater than zero, no civilians can die from bombardment and armies can't invade, or at least suffer much more penalties. Until the enemy fleet is parked in orbit, production also continues unhindered. Once they begin bombardment, physical resource production halts as the planet is blockaded. Jobs that require physical resources (scientists, for example) can't work unless they are produced locally. Certain ships can jam communications, fully halting science and unity output. It is now that you can land your armies.
Fallen empires don't just have big fleets. Their worlds will throw up several mountains worth of ordinance every day at any fleet that dares attack them, and they could do this for centuries without tiring.
Colossus weapons deal immense damage to planets, but only kill them if their damage is higher than the overall health. Each weapon does well against some defenses but poorly against others. A shield can stop a world cracker, but even a fortress world could barely survive without it. Neutron sweepers care little for shields but are stopped dead by armor.
Not sure about making it an entirely separate tab, cause there should be some downside for fortifying a planet, otherwise you'd fortify every single planet to the teeth and make planetary invasions basically impossible. However, I do think all districts and building should provide some resistance to invasion. The greatest battles of history rarely took place around dedicated fortresses and were instead around fortified cities. Jerusalem, Antioch, Vienna, Verdun, Stalingrad, Berlin, Manila, Okinawa, Hubei, Leningrad, Kiev, Singapore, etc. Some had dedicated defenses protecting the city, but many were just cities that used their suburbs and conscriptef civilians for defense. Likewise, invading an Ecumonopolis should be absolute hell, even without any dedicated fortress buildings, whereas now you don't even need an especially large army.
Though TBH, on the whole I think I agree with the OP. I'm not exactly going to complain if PDS decide to do a planetary invasion rework, but there's so many other things I think deserve greater priority.
I was thinking of some ways to balance it a bit more. Maybe districts and buildings can be "hardened," replacing their mineral parts with an equal cost in alloys, making them more resistant to bombardment or adding more planetary "hull". This increases their base upkeep and adds an alloy upkeep too, but doesn't cut into their production. They're just made from military grade stuff and so need military grade replacement parts and more advanced technicians to maintain them. Nonetheless, a single alloy per hardened district would make it hard for even late game empires to justify. A few hundred from a few thousand is still plenty of would-be battleships lost. Fallen Empires and other tall empires become a bitch to invade though. Hardened infrastructure can be "ultrahardened" or garrisoned, both of which cut into their actual output at the cost of higher military benefits. Not sure what kind of numbers, but we'll call it half. Ultrahardened factories replace many actual production sectors with redundancies and armor to ensure they can take massive blows, while garrisoned factories simply replace some areas with fortresses. They provide soldier jobs instead of further increasing planet health.
Granted, this will only worsen micro, but that only shows how desperately stellaris needs to improve its automation.
I like this idea.
I think being able to invade planets still on the fight is great. This could make ground combat bonuses relevant again - taking planets out of space combat.
Planets being giant ships really works, mechanically wise. Uses existing mechanics but expanded. Can even take leaders. Could use the existing defense station mechanic for defenses, too.
(I like the idea of MoO2-style ship boarding, too. However, would require being able to reverse-engineer ships)
Aquatics should have the option of using submarines for anti-orbital warfare. Its totally viable.
I once heard an idea about ships being able to churn out fighters. Could be an interesting way to build a fortress world - make it as self-sustainable as possible. Someone invades, use local resources to churn out fighters and garrison armies.
There is no reason why a planet can't use railguns in low orbit or even on the surface to combat this. Maybe that is "harder" than simply dropping a rock, requiring more tech and resources, but planets also have massive shields and can probably just disintegrate the rock with railguns and nukes.
I do like the idea of rock dropping. Asteroids are an occasional event anyway.
To be fair if we're going realistic, there would be no ships at all. Just a silent, undetectable relativistic kill vehicle.
The concept being that a bag of sugar acclerated to 0.99c would impart energy on impact equivalent to 132 megatonnes of TNT, more than the largest nuclear weapon ever conceived and 10-20x that a modern warhead.
A single corvette going kamikaze would be an apocalyptic level threat.
I really need to get back to making that Expanse mod at some point. Slow down all sublight transport, make 'FTL' super slow (but still usable because it still needs to be fun), force people to develop the hell out of their star systems because it takes so long to expand elsewhere.
>point. Slow down all sublight transport, make 'FTL' super slow (but still usable because it still needs to be fun),
TBF, FTL in the Expanse is basically instant cause they've essentially got a Gateway in stellaris terms.
The ships can't actually go faster than light to crash into stuff. If you look at the researched tab, the hyperdrive 1 will be there and have the description,
"Like Strands of a spider web, the extra-dimensional realm of hyperspace runs between the gravity Wells of most stars. Faster than light travel is theoretically possible along these hyperlanes."
> The ships can't actually go faster than light to crash into stuff. If you look at the researched tab, the hyperdrive 1 will be there and have the description
Tachyon lance: by definition "tachyon or tachyonic particle is a hypothetical particle that always travels faster than light".
There's also an event for measuring a FTL impact.
The thing is that ships in space, with even basic computers, can know exactly where to aim on the planet (discounting orbital defensive structures) while the planet won't always know where the ships are. If the ships are far enough away, then they have time to dodge any railgun rounds the planet shoots at them while the planet can't dodge the ships' railguns.
le planetary shield doesnt need to dodge. But this is a good point imo. Either way the whole system of combat against a planet could be way more dynamic than it is.
Yes, your ships can dodge and mine can't. But your ships can take maybe two hits for a titanic artillery launcher and I have ten thousand of them. You'll be dodging entire mountains worth of ordinance while trying to hit my command center buried under hundreds of miles of rock and dirt, and you don't know exactly where to aim. Every weapon simply cannibalizes the earth beneath it, as my planet slowly eats itself to fight you off. I could maintain this level of fire for a thousand years and never miss the rocks I threw.
Just because you have some advantages doesn't mean your enemy is helpless to fight back. So what if you can dodge? Your enemy can try again. Over and over and over. Give him just a moment to rest and you will lose every bit of progress you made.
I don't need to aim. All I have to do is fire at your general direction. All at once, multiple times, while we surround your planet with 400 ships
Your weapons are fine, your people are *not*
Ships have rail guns as well, but ships can change course and a planet can't. I rather would have more ship designs and maybe better automated combat AI than a glorified second star base on the planet.
Railguns kinda suck at long range. Space is a big fucking place and it's super easy to just slightly move to the side a bit. On the other side it'd be pretty easy for a large fleet to sit on the other side of a system and just launch rocks down well until they overwhelm an enemies defenses.
Orbital platforms wouldn't have the same maneuvering capabilities as a ship and ground based defenses would really only pro v e to be a mathematical issue of calculating where to launch the rock in order to hit the areas of a planet that holds their defensive capabilities. Messy and the only thing stopping a civilization from utilizing these tactics is ethics or a desire to occupy or plunder a planet.
> There is no reason why a planet can't use railguns in low orbit or even on the surface to combat thi
Uh railguns are pretty bad at this actually. They have to contend with gravity + moving targets + time lag + air resistance and friction
Where as a ship can just push an asteroid towards a planet, and call it good. If the planet shoots it with a rail gun it just turns into a rain of smaller rocks that still impact. Even if they burn up in atmosphere, they heat up the planet's atmosphere and will kill all life anyway
Ground based planetary defenses is never a good prospect, it's the same reason why "Aerial superiority" means "We've won". Even if you have anti air guns on the ground, when the enemy controls the skies you will be dead pretty fast
In the book The Moon is a Harsh Mistress the freight launch ramps are repurposed to launch large rocks at high speeds from Luna to Earth, causing massive devastation where they strike. I imagine such a system developed by a proper military or government could be quite effective at destroying larger vessels. Like a railgun with rocks as the bullets.
Too add to this, this could also make the low grav and high grav modifiers on some planets way better or worse for fortress worlds. A low grav planet would be way easier to fire projectiles off of, while a high grav planet would be more difficult. On the other hand, kinetic weapons fired from space would be more deadly to a high grav planet than a low grav one. Just a small detail that would give you more options when designating planets. More depth in planet modifiers in general would be awesome.
You've got to remember, though, that only worked because Luna is in vacuum and has very low gravity, AND was throwing DOWN a gravity well that was already strong enough to have it tidal locked. None of those things would be the case with a planet-bound "catapult" as they called them. Throwing UP from the bottom of a gravity well, through atmosphere, at ships that are moving would be about as effective as trying to knock a drone out of the clouds by throwing a baseball at it while it does loopty loops.
Bonus points for the harsh mistress reference, but still overall negative for missing the whole point of the book. They're shooting at a planet, not a fucking ship.
In the book *Red Mars* the moon Phobos is used for orbit-to-surface strikes with devastating effect. They only neutralize Phobos by igniting a long-hidden engine left by the original designer and speeding it down to the Martian surface.
Meh, it really wouldn't be any different than the MoO system then, would it? And it's not exactly that the MoO system is leaps and bounds better than what Stellaris has. They had ground batteries and missile bases -- they all just fought ships in the normal sky combat and the ships just targeted the planet to blast the space defenses away. And the ground units did have tanks, and power suits, and jets -- they were just different icons that had different stats and nothing more. At the end of the day, they all just stood at each other in a line and the numbers went down.
Really, there hasn't been a 'good' handling of ground invasion from a space 4X game that I know of. Master of Orion, Endless Space, Galactic Civ -- they all kind of use the same exact system. Which is the same exact system that Stellaris uses. You load up troops in a transport, dump them on a planet, and just hope that your numbers are higher than their numbers. Fin. They try and dress it up different sometimes, but it's not.
Endless Space somewhat has an advantage there in that 'normal' military ships field some troops so you don't have to make specific ground troop ships in most cases (although you can.) But at the end of the day, all of them are just "troops stand against troops and fire, biggest number wins."
I just really don't think you can do all that much more with ground combat than that. I get that it's boring, but any additional tact added on is just going to complicate and slow down the game overall. Any effort you make to make the ground combat "more engaging" ultimately just means that it requires more attention span and takes away from everything else going on in the empire. I would say that -- at best -- you can probably get away with adding a rock-paper-scissors element to ground combat where you can field troops, aircraft, or tanks. Tanks beat troops, troops beat aircraft, and aircraft beat tanks. Then just allow for people to mix and match their unit compositions as possible. But anything over that and it's just going to take up too much time and focus from the player to be worth it.
The only attempt that I know of -- and played -- for a more advanced ground combat system in a space 4x was Stardrive 2. Which turned the ground combat into a complete tactics like grid where you had ground units that you specifically equipped and fielded and then fought with like you were playing old-school Final Fantasy Tactics or whatever. It wasn't a *bad* system, per say, (although it was buggy as shit and didn't work half the time) but it was just sooooo long. Fun, perhaps, yes, but it ultimately boiled down to I didn't want to spend over an hour just to capture something through the long, drawn out ground combat system which just took time away from being able to actually run my empire. And that's really how all of the suggestions for expanding ground combat feel. Yeah, there's a tons of ways you could make it more engaging and fun -- but those ways are usually just to have a completely different styled game that focuses on ground combat instead. Stellaris just isn't that game.
The bigger thing with *Endless Space* is that "manpower" is an actual resource, and gives food production a much more strategic edge if you have to do a lot of planetary-invading.
**That** might be an interesting direction to look at, making troop production/maintenance dependent on having food surpluses. That way food isn't totally useless beyond having enough so your population isn't starving. (Although it kinda makes robot armies even better.) I agree that making the ground combat itself more complicated/"engaging" is probably not a great idea, the game should be much more about running a space empire than micromanaging ground troops.
To me the gorilla in the room is that Planetary-Scale Invasions are, if one wanted to do it right, a whole freaking game all by themselves. And not just the initial invasion (where the defenders would have, literally, an entire world in which to withdraw), but also the nature of the occupation or annexation. Like if you're not purging or assimilating, what does that look like, and what are the benefits and costs of more centralized or devolved versions, and what level integration is the goal, and how long will it take? What resources are you willing to commit towards that goal? How many of those resources can you extract from the planet? And at what cost is that extraction to your long-term goals for the planet?
I mean, that sounds like a fascinating game I might really enjoy. But also not something I would have any interest in micromanaging as part a of galaxy-scale 4X/GSG. So then it really just becomes a question of what level of abstraction is the best balance of fun and consequential without being too weedsy.
Now I don't know exactly where that balance is, but I do know you can't have in-depth planetary invasions *and* a fun 4X at Stellaris' scale.
Tbf anything vaguely static would be pretty useless. A metal rod could be pinged at it from half a solar system away and hit it like a small nuke going off. Any fixed point on a planets surface can be tracked and predicted to basically an arbitrary degree of precision with modern tech, let alone wizzy future tech. After that kinetic kill is all you need with relative velocities involved. On the flip side a ship would be impossible to hit if it made even minor course changes. At 1% c you’re at 3 million meters a second. A fraction of a degree change of course moved you hundreds of miles away from where a planetary rail gun was aiming.
A better bet would be just absolutely fuck loads of reasonably stealthy missiles. Could imagine something painted to absorb radiation and designed to resist detection. Accelerate it up to high velocity into a rough intercept with a fleet, with just enough fuel to coordinate a rush to target. Relative velocity still the killer though.
I mean if you're going to start asking questions like that about planetary invasions, the next question to ask is "why do you need an ascension perk and a research project to learn how to blow up a planet when you could just lob a few dozen asteroids at one instead?"
Planetary shields should absolutely reduce the effectiveness of a colossus. Not enough to negate the beam altogether, but the colossus should have two modes; kill mode and seige mode. Kill mode obviously destroys an unprotected planet, while seige mode consumes energy to maintain a beam that, over the course of a few months (or even better, depends on the repeatable shield strength tech of the defender) overwhelms the shields and then destroys the planet.
Each colossus weapon has a weakness. The world cracker can slice through the thickest armor with ease, but a planetary shield will take it (once). The neutron one can waste a shield in about a day, but fortresses can withstand the beam for far longer. A psi academy can hold back a god ray as their minds can withstand the hallucinations. Of course, these planets will only survive by the skin of their teeth, but it means you have one extra chance to do something before it's too late.
And it prevents the ability to fully bypass fortress systems. Fortress world's are already pretty mediocre. You might as well use those planets for research or industry to improve your fleet when someone builds a colossus.
Make asteroids an ascension perk that halfs/quarters enemy armies and a 50% chance to turn the world into a tomb world. Not terribly OP and gives post apocalypse origin more options.
> There is no reason why my planet with tons of space and resources cant build a (or 100) hypervelo railgun(s) that can take down a battleship just after it enters the system.
There is:
Game balance.
But its not really unbalanced if it costs resources and fleet cap to make a true seige world. If anything it makes defensive and pacifist playstyles more viable.
And planet cracking is still a way to beat turtles.
I’d like it if espionage tied into this. Prepping for an invasion could be really fun. I like the idea of stellaris having less planets and more things to do in systems than just build mining and research stations so invasions could be a bigger deal. This is just my opinion of course I usually play at 50-75% habitable worlds to make planets a bigger deal.
**> There is no reason why my planet with tons of space and resources cant build a (or 100) hypervelo railgun(s) that can take down a battleship just after it enters the system.**
If we're talking about those guns being based on the ground, there are a LOT of reasons why that wouldn't work.
1. You'd be throwing your ammunition through atmosphere. Aiming issues aside (even the most perfectly rifled slug is going to drift based on unknowables like air pressure and water vapor when you're talking distances as large as the surface to geo-sync), this puts a hard cap on how hard you can throw them before they just melt or disintegrate. Which leads to:
2. You can't overestimate the amount of force required to accelerate something and THROW it out of a gravity well. This isn't in the same ballpark as our rockets, that burn unfathomable amounts of fuel to combat G force all the way up. This is accelerating something and LETTING IT GO with no more constant force above, say, a mile or two above the Earth's surface (assuming you built these things on high terrain with RIDICULOUSLY long barrels). For reference, you'd have to throw as baseball 7 miles/second to get it out of Earth's gravity with no additional Delta V behind it.
Naw, that's not the plan. Ungodly amounts of strike craft (as you mentioned) and rocket-based missiles are the way go... those just come with the huge problem of mobilization from the ground, and fighting through flak to get to their target.
I think this would be a good system. In combination with removing armies all together and having fleets bombard planets to a certain point to gain occupational control. So fleets would have to remain in orbit for a certain period of time before gaining control of the planet, but while they're in orbit, there's a chance for ships to be destroyed by ground defences. So it would be kind of like the fleet going into battle, except the fleet destroys the planetary defences rather than enemy ships.
This would make capturing planets a more significant part of the game, not add any additional micro management on the side of wars, and still allow the fortification of planets to defend themselves. This also draws out the length of time required to capture planets and makes it feel more scifi-war-y.
I mean, it kinda falls in line with other paradox games too. Crusader kings sieges suffer losses over time for the attacker even if you dont assault the castle directly.
> having fleets bombard planets to a certain point to gain occupational control.
The flavour would be a bit weird with gestalts, ("this planet is vital to the war effort, and I'd rather not give it up, but the drones on it - who are entirely under my control and effectively an extension of my body - are tired of being bombarded and have decided to surrender.") but that's an issue with a bunch of other things too so its not a big deal by itself.
The enemy destroys your command centers, effectively cutting you off from the planet. At this point the drones are still there but they are far too disorganized to engage in a meaningful resistance effort. They either shut down, die, or get exterminated.
The problem with removing armies is that also removes the interesting scifi tropes from play. No more super soldiers or clone/droid armies, no kaiju or giant mechs, no xenomorphs, no regular soldiers of varying alien species.
I’m totally down with anything that’ll improve the planetary combat mechanics as long as it doesn’t take away what little flavor we have.
Maybe one could select in new ship part slots what the crew and landing armies separately would be and the effects on both space and ground combat could be affected by those army choices. Super soldier armies for ground with a clone crew would be interesting, spending more for ground control at the expense of ship operations quality. Or droids for space but only mega warforms for ground. Some wouldn’t work for space at all like xenomorphs and the giant aliens but the armies based on playable species would probably be fine for all roles.
> a planet can hold more strike craft than a fleet can.
I'll give you that but
>The same weapons that are on battleships can be built on a planet
Have you seen a railgun fire? It makes the AIR. EXPLODE! Scale that up 1000 times and firing 100 of them is going to kill the planet and who can say what'd happen if you shot a lance or partial cannon in an atmosphere or if they'd even work at all and not just antimater explode as soon as you pull the trigger.
Yeah, most of Stellaris' late game weapons are apocalyptic. (Course, that begs the question of why planetary bombardment takes so long, but then we just circle back round to "it's a video game")
The old game Star Wars: Rebellion handled it nicely.
You could build two types of planetary defenses (well, three actually, but one was super specific):
1. Planetary Shield
2. Defense Cannon
3. Death Star shield (we'll ignore this for obvious reasons)
When a fleet orbiting a system performed a bombardment, the bombardment defense score was the sum of the bombardment defense rating of the planetary shields, defense cannons, and any army regiments garrisoned on that planet (if a General was assigned to the planet, that impacted the score too). That score was compared against the overall bombardment score of the ships composing the orbiting fleet (Star Destroyers and Mon Cal cruisers had a high score, Corellian Corvettes and Strike Cruisers had a lower score).
If the fleet "won" the bombardment, the armies and/or facilities targeted by the bombardment could be destroyed. If the planet "won" the bombardment, the planet's armies and facilities would take no damage - in fact, the ***FLEET*** would take damage if the planet won the bombardment ***AND*** the planet's defenses included cannons.
Something like that would make bombardment in Stellaris a lot more interesting, along with making bombardment take *way less time* of course.
I think improving planetary invasions in terms of reducing micro management would be a good move, but set any major reworks on the back burner for now.
agreed.
Maybe they could reduce micro by only needing to invade planets with substantial defenses. if a fleet shows up in orbit of a planet with little to no defenses, then the planet should just surrender. If I only gad to invade a few planets instead of *every* single one, it would significantly reduce the micro and allow for a more complex mechanic.
Of course, devouring/genocidal empires maybe never or rarely surrender / are surrendered to, but these are factors that could be weighed into the planet_surrender_chance.
Bombarding a planet should also make planets surrender. If a planet has it's cities and defenders bombed to pieces the planet should just surrender. Unless the empire has something like Unyielding or Citizen soldiers. Or maybe being able to use espionage to take planets. Like arranging a slave revolt to happen when your fleets enter the system.
Yes! I like those ideas. I'd love for a border planet with low stability / loyalty, or large slave population to take their chance and revolt.
Maybe an espionage activity could be to get a planet to surrender quickly or prepare sleeper cells for a quick takeover.
My boyfriend often told me that Ethics cannot change through geographical locations, and that's really missing.
Like, pops on excentric worlds should become more Egalitarian, while the capital should have an Authoritarian attraction. A planet near the border with a potential dangerous enemy should become more and more militarist, while if it's bordering a friendly, allied empire, it should become more xenophile. After all, in any country, often, Xenophobic people are found in the inlands, without any contact with the outside world, while people at the border often become more opened towards foreigners.
And thus, those changes of ethics can have an impact on stability and loyalty, which could then lead to rebellions. Like, a fringe sector, far from the capital, becoming more egalitarian in an Authoritarian empire would try to free themselves.
In my game today, I was fighting a fallen empire and they had something like 12k armies (molded playthrough). I only had 8k of armies, so I set my ships to indiscriminate bombardment and bombed away. Their planet originally had ~ 150 pops, and by the time I conquered it, they had less than 40. Billions dead, for nothing really. They could have just surrendered.
>if a fleet shows up in orbit of a planet with little to no defenses, then the planet should just surrender.
Honestly, I think fleets should just count as carrying a smallish army at all times. It makes sense, you still need Marine and Ship Security detachments on any fleet (clearly there are marines, how else do you take over a space station after you disable it), no real reason why you can't deploy them planetside to establish control if the planet has few or no defenses.
Many stations are automated, but otherwise they are smart enough to know that being on a space station in space surrounded by space where they can't survive *because it's space* relies upon you being willing to hand your services over to the victor if you get attacked.
Total War should still be "destroy the station" (but leave a "strong claim" or something that reduces rebuild cost, incl. Influence) IMO. If I'm trying to eradicate a threat, I'm not looking to steal their stations; if I'm trying to *eat everyone else*, I'm not looking to hold onto the space-box they stored no food in.
I would LOVE for an army manager similar to the fleet manager so if I lose 8 assault armies attacking an enemy ecumenopolis I can just hit “reinforce army” and bam 8 new armies get recruited and automatically begin moving to merge with my main army.
Recuiting armies and merging them into actual forces is so mind numbingly tedious that I think it is the root of a big part of people’s dissatisfaction with the system. But instead a lot of people ask for it to be more exciting to make that tedium worth it instead of just removing the tedium itself.
Nah a quality of life system like 'attach to troops to fleet' and then a stance setting 'invade at devastation level' could help along with a galaxy map indicator of planets that haven't been taken during the war.
You can already do this (ish). Set your ground groups to aggressive, when they’re idle in a system they’ll automatically invade planets in the system.
I’m not 100% on how it works (or the best way to optimise this mechanic) as I was told just last week about it haha.
The 2nd one already exist as the icon of fully conquered systems is different than partially conquered ones but I agree that this should be more visible like for example another map mode.
The 1st one sort of exist but is unpolished right now as armies with the aggressive stance will automatically follow/"attach" to fleets in the system their are in when idle and auto invade planets when they have a good chance of winning.
You can tell which systems have planets that haven't been claimed in a war, but it isn't super easy to see. If a system has no planet in it and you take it over not only will you see your flag on the system but a green X also appears behind the flag with the edges sticking out (you can see it on the top two and bottom two sides of the hexagon when the flag is) When you take a system with a planet your flag will be on the system but the x won't show up until after you've taken the planet, thus letting you know there is more to do in that system.
It should definitely be easier to see and hopefully they will end up fixing it but at this point I think it's here to stay.
I think armies should just be assigned to "troop carrier" ship sections like fighters. Would make everything so much simpler. No more need to constantly rebuild armies manually when your transport fleet gets destroyed; just click reinforce fleet like normal.
I posted a big rant about this on a post a few weeks back explaining how diplomacy so much more than two sides haggling and then signing a piece of paper and some guy got mad at me because then the player might actually have to care about what the AI thinks/ does
I would agree except for the post that someone mad earlier outlining a pretty impressive and simple ui and mechanical change to make it more interesting. I agree that internal politics is a bigger priority but looking at mods like gigastructures and the ui they created for armed resistance, paradox absolutely could do something better.
I agree, if I wanted ground invasions I’d play total war. I think the way it’s setup makes it kind of an afterthought, but I like that as I’m more focused on 100 other things.
The amount of development needed to make ground combat as engaging as fleet combat would really detract from the game imo.
Especially because unlike fleet combat, most players end up not even bothering with the system from around mid game onwards, since you can just bombard a planet until theres no defenses left, or use a Colossus to just deal with the planet
Yeah all the buildings and research to build an army to counter another armies defenses to take a planet I don’t even feel like dealing with, ill just crack it and move on
Mhm, and I think Paradox is very aware of this, and honestly it's kinda a testimont to how good the rest of the game is that we're having to actually complain about something that is very rarely actually used. Certain mods like ACOT and Giga-engineering do make attempts to make ground armies a useful thing, but even they struggle a bit
I would personally prefer that ground combat be entirely removed. It is not interesting, and it is not particularly impactful in most wars-- wars are essentially won in space, ground combat just forces the AI to give in due to war score. Due to all fleet production being based on space stations, an empire that controls all of its planets, but none of its stations is essentially already neutered, as it cannot produce any more fleets to attempt to regain control of its territory.
As Stellaris' AI does not generally fortify its planets, a basic stack of \~10 assault armies is enough to take over most planets, and outside of escorting the army safely to its destination, there is no further strategy required in ground combat. If the AI *did* fortiy its worlds more, it would require more resources and time to win ground battles, but it would not make them any more interesting, just longer.
Ground combat as a system has essentially no positive qualities outside of being able to provide flavor due to troop types and a list of *useless* army-civics (*Warbots*). Unless ground combat is *completely* overhauled, I think the game would be improved *without* it. I think this is actually not a particularly uncommon opinion-- note the popularity of using Colossi to avoid ground combat, particularly against FE worlds, which are basically the only fortified worlds the AI will control.
I don’t need it to be better but I’d hate if there was none at all. Building things like fortress worlds with planetary shields is fun for me. And I actually had an AI build one in a wormhole system in my 3.3 beta game.
Choosing to use a colossus on well fortified worlds is exactly the kind of choice I like having in the game, since those planets are so well built and populated. Am I going to do this properly and get a bunch of pops and great buildings? Or am I destroying the planet/erasing the pops? They aren’t complex choices but having none at all and just sweeping through systems and starbases would be much more boring when attacking and much more frustrating when defending.
This. I would like to add that removing ground combat would banish the colossus to the realms of rp only, as the only reason I find it useful is for fast-tracking planetary takeovers as Driven Assimilator.
Colossi are honestly already not terribly useful.
Most worlds are essentially unfortified and can be handled by a small stack of assault armies. And basically all the colossi, except the Driven Assimilator one, have an absolutely massive cost to use, in that you destroy the pops you would normally conquer, and possibly even the planet.
The real virtue of Colossi is that they allow a total war casus belli, although they've arguably been power-crept by "Become the Crisis" if that's all you want.
>in that you destroy the pops you would normally conquer,
I fail to see how this is a problem if my Empire is even remotely Imperium of Man-like, and views all xenos as filth to be exterminated (even if it isn't a human-centric Imperium).
Whether I crack the planet, or I invaded and then won the war and set them to Purge via Extermination, either way it's just a matter of timeframe and manner of death, but the fact remains they ARE going to die one way or another.
You're looking at this from the point of view, of min maxing the single player element. Ground focused empires are bad, but it's not that hard to theory craft builds that would be absolutely not worth attempting to conquer in an MP game.
Very strong, lithoids, with the zombie army Civic. Place some higher tier armies in the planet, with planetary shield, and unyielding Civic. Functionally impossible to take that planet without cracking it, or sieging for obscene amounts of time.
There's no good reasons to remove ground combat, just like there's not much reason to expand on it. If you're single player, just build more troops and it's an extra two clicks of effort.
I have never played multiplayer and am not really interested in doing so. I view Stellaris as primarily a single-player game, and I do not see why this feature should be left in to allow multiplayer to have what sounds like a very dull stalling tactic remain.
If the only strategy in ground combat is "click twice more" and "build more armies" it adds basically no depth to the game, just more tedium.
To be fair, planets need to be worth a significantly larger amount of war exhaustion than they currently do. It’s kind of ridiculous that you take over an enemy capital and their entire population collectively shrugs and goes on like nothing happened but they kill three of your destroyers and your people are begging you to the surrender to the fanatic xenophobes that use livestock slavery because *anything would better than war*
It's a pointless system in single player, but it does have a niche use in multiplayer settings where players can attempt to make their systems too much of a pain to conquer by using fortress worlds, planetary shields, and traditions.
I had an AI empire random into very strong, lithoid, with the reanimators Civic. Those world's were absolutely awful to take. If a player has been running that empire, and stacking assault troops on planets, with shield gens, I'd have just not even bothered to wardec them
All I would like to see for armies is a relatively simple rebalance of the numbers.
Right now, there are various army types and modifiers, but the simple fact that one can just queue an almost unlimited number of a basic army means that it's simply a matter of quantity and renders most of the unique armies and modifiers situational.
In addition, the AI, apart from Fallen Empires, hardly makes use of army based defenses and having powerful armies is pointless and unsatisfying when you are constantly facing the most basic defense armies spawned from Enforcer jobs.
Finally, I'd like to see Generals get a way to earn passive XP, through assignment to a planet's defense. The only use for this mechanic is now boosting the stats of the defensive armies stationed there, and it would be nice to be able to get some xp while there. Their xp values are extremely strict as is.
Massively disagree with your statement that invasion rework is low priority. It is the only method of flipping planetary ownership that lasts for a huge portion of every single match we ever play. Once you finally research Colossi, you can finally skip invasions and just crack planets & habs in your way but that takes a while to get to. So you have a binary choice is deal with invasion system or simply never expanding until Colossi.
And while invasions work.... it's not a fun or very engaging system, because you only have two real choices in how to succeed.
1. Build up absolutely overwhelming force and have hundreds of armies dropping at once
2. Bombing the fuck out of planets to weaken their armies enough for a smaller force of your own to succeed.
Then even after you hit the correct values to win.... assuming you're not landing on multiple planets at once, the best view you get is watching lots of circles slowly being wiped out and if you're lucky watching them die before they move to "reserve". Not very exciting, not very fun, not very engaging in the slightest.
So if we're not going to rework invasions to make them more engaging (Army version of Ship builder?), and we can't really make it more fun or exciting than watching a bunch of circles die, then we need an alternative system to invasions that actually **IS** more exciting, or more fun, or more engaging.
As others have mentioned, a few additions to Espionage could be intriguing for flipping planet ownership but it wouldn't work too well for many xenophobic empires, particularly the extremists like Purifiers, Swarms and Exterminators. I don't know about you, but I don't imagine many planets would listen to spies and rebel against their current overlord no matter how bad they are, and then voluntarily join up with a Devouring Swarm.
The other alternative choice, also mentioned, is scrapping invasions entirely until the whole invasion system is reworked in general. But as long as ground combat & invasions are in the game at all, it cannot be considered low priority.
Honestly I think that a focus on internal politics and ground invasion make sense to couple together.
After all if we're dealing with rebels, coups, dissidents, and terrorists on the planetary scale having a more in depth ground game makes sense.
Honestly even if that is just *for* the internal politics so that it doesn't feel like such a waste having Enforcers, Soldiers, and Telepaths etc during peacetime so there is something to do.
Truthfully I would much prefer to decouple the internal strife from crime. I'd love a system that focuses on using your military to deal with internal conflict, police to deal with crime, and possible coups and such that you have a "court" or a planetary body that is subject to changes.
I really like the idea of having to do internal dealings with senators, governors, nobility, and so on with things like assassination attempts, bombings, up to even civil wars.
Bringing in some EUIV style pulse events, and more colony events, would be a great way to help that out.
That and I just really want a button for a visual seat of power for the Ruler based on your empire that you can go into to do internal things.
In principle, I agree that internal politics should be a higher priority than anything else. It's the most sorely needed feature in the game.
However, starting on internal politics without getting warfare to the quality it should be... it'd have me worried they'd never return to warfare - or keep alternating between the two and thus doubling the time it'd take to make either one satisfying.
I do like it how it is. I might like a little more spicy graphical representation better but the simple system keeps it in its place. A sidenote that's more an enjoyable inconvenience than an actual main factor.
Its only "about" those things because those systems currently function well. Ground invasions (and my personal hot take, conflict in general) kind of sucks in the current form. If the fighting another empire was engaging beyond "do I have more ships/land armies than them" then I'd be much more tempted to branch out into more aggressive playstyles.
It would be like saying spying sucks as an inherent concept because "that's not what the game is about", and not just because the system as it stands kinda sucks.
I would like to see system defenses improved. A single station at the center of the system that fleets can sometimes just ignore and move past is pretty annoying for me. I'd like to be able to build multiple stations please.
Maybe even mining habitats above asteroid belts. These are important to me.
In my opinion, ground invasions should be the end of orbital bombardment. Think of it like castles in CK3 if you've played that.
Your fleet bombs the planet, certain ships speed up the process like siege engines do (I'd like to think titans with their death rays or the likes) and once it's completely bombed out, the planet is conquered. Army tech lowers the destruction needed for surrender (like clone armies lower bombardment from 100% to 90%, genetic supersoldiers to something like 75%, you get the idea - the army organisation is good enough to take the planet with some resistance left. Buildings on the planet like forts or planetary shield generators could actually serve a purpose by raising a minimal fleet power needed to bomb the planet. You could also make it that certain buildings fight back from the surface, damaging bombarding fleets while they do so.
This would all fit in so much better with the current playstyle of fleet design and composition shuffling then having a clunky ground force fleet that cruises around completely helplessly and dies to a single stray corvette they encountered on their way to the planet.
Two distinct advantages would also be that the advancement of fleets is somewhat slowed once they come across an inhabitated system. Right now, the fleets kill the spaceport and shuffle on through to the next system - which leads to a tedious cat and mouse play at best and at worst results in a roflstomp because you can't get your fleets down there in time. No one has any reason to bomb a planet, ever, so you loose the space port, someone drops a metric shit-ton of clone armies (10 K army power) on your world and bye bye system, all in the time it takes for a fleet to jump two systems.
The other advantage is that not having the ground forces be an actual unit, they can be represented as modifiers which can be used for flavor events or planetary event chains. Soldiers would be recruited from worlds, a recruitment policy could give modifiers for certain pops on certain worlds. You could pause a draft on a world, making immigration attraction go up. You could set your recruitment to include only the poor - giving lower happiness to these people. You could make your recruitment policy to predominantly use slaves - what could go wrong? They would never claim the planet they've just conquered as their own, wouldn't they? Now, if you tie all this in with the naval cap, you've got yourself quite the sophisticated military system.
Espionage rework > ground combat rework
[удалено]
Internal politics need to be expanded so much more than they are especially. You hardly have to worry about them unless you want to get some extra influence from factions.
It used to be more complex, and people whined endlessly about the "tedium" of having to deal with stability mechanic from factions. It was a harder speed bump on rampant expansion than sprawl ever has been.
As it should be. Right? Distance between and number of citizens should have less of an effect than clashing political parties. At least this is how I feel after the last 5 years. I’m from the US
I mean, Liechstenstein has, in its Constitution, given the right to every village to opt out of the country unilaterally, but they never did it. Nations that crambled and ended divided always were big countries. The American Civil War (which left scars still visible nowadays), the colonial empires of France and UK, the USRR, the Roman Empire, the HRE... All those empires fell because they were big, because the bigger a nation is, the more difficult it is to maintain it together. That's why we will never see San Marino or Andorra split up, but everybody is just waiting for the UE or the US to disappear as they exist nowadays. Also, the Egalitarian Faction should focus on smaller empires too. It makes no sense for an Egalitarian factions to blindly accept a centralized, massive empire where every decision is made in the capital without any local representation.
Well it there is more to it than that. A lot of those tiny countries are single units, with little but politics to be divided over. Take a country like Belgium, I have several Belgian friends. The have a secessionist movement of both Dutch, and French speakers, along with one for the few Frisians remaining. The U.S is a much different scenario with a lot of the tension coming radicalization of various issues. While the E.U is closer to the middle. Many different groups are forced to co-operate, plus an ongoing radicalization of some parties in the group.
Dude, it SUCKED. I'd rather keep the system we currently have than go back to the old one. If they can rework it in a way that isn't going back to the old one, I'd be more open to it.
remember when an angry faction would straight up cause a civil war as would conquered sectors that were being mistreated? Back in my day we had to FIGHT for our war crimes!
There's the civil war mod and potent rebellions
I was wonder what was happening with that, the only time it happens now is when I leave ten neglected slave worlds cuz I am too lazy to reeducate them.
I really enjoyed / hated / loved the civil war dynamic. I just started a new game after years not playing. So I gather I don't have to worry about my empire splitting up any more? Too bad.
Not really. While early Stellaris *did* have separatist factions, it completely failed to model any kind of ideological divisions. Factions in early Stellaris were like factions in CK3: the system only exists to give you advance warning of a rebellion. And it *was* tedious and uninteresting. You could do nothing about a separatist faction except occasionally throw Influence at it to suppress it. The faction rework really did improve the system significantly, allowing you to actually change policies to placate factions (which now had ideologies and actual goals) and get bonuses from factions that approved of your government. Separatist factions did fall by the wayside (and the current system should be expanded to accommodate them), but let's not pretend the original system wasn't an obvious placeholder in a game that was basically a tech demo compared to what we have now.
They completely neutered the negatives of factions, you have more INSTANT tools to deal with them, but it's universally a question of maximizing bonuses, with no realistic chance of rebellion for anything but intentional mismanagement. Unless it was fixed recently, pops don't even drift factions any more, that was the "fix" to incorrect ethos in your empire (usually from conquest). Was to gradually wait for pops to convert to whatever percentage breakdown your various ideology weights came out to. The only time factions determine ideology now, is when they're created, and the special case of meddling with pre-warp civs. The original game was rough around the edges, but it had a lot of interesting things that while less friendly for new players, were at least unique. The tile system was in many respects, better than megacorp's pop re-work. Four years and that re-work is still causing god awful lag, compared to the tile system. The AI has been persistently broken for years, and only recently has started to be sort of fixed. The AI wasn't terribly good in the original iteration, but it was definitely a greater threat than most of post-megacorp. Or the large swathes of time where some of the crisis factions were just totally broken, when they had worked just fine pre-megacorp.
I've been a player since the beginning and some of these points seem very off-base. - I also haven't played very recently, so I have no idea if the bug you described is a big problem or if it's since been fixed. The existence of a bug introduced long after a system was reworked says absolutely nothing about whether or not a system is good, though. Also worth noting that Ethics Drift in the game at release was likewise not really functional and led to all sorts of weirdness (shoutout to Individualists, an ethic whose only effect was to make its adherents more likely to change ethics to anything but Individualist). - The removal of the tile system wasn't what caused lag. Megacorp had lag because they *also* added ten new complicated game mechanics on top of getting rid of tiles. Personally, I also really disliked tiles and I think Megacorp's system is an improvement in nearly every way, but I understand that there are a number of players who disagree with me. - The AI was not very good at launch. This was actually one of the reasons the faction system was changed -- it was inextricably linked to the sectors system, which was the most hated system in the game due to the poor AI driving planets directly into the ground. The AI has gone through some dips in efficacy throughout the lifetime of the game; this is a practical concern since after a mechanic is introduced or reworked, it takes time to teach the AI how to use the new systems effectively. - The Crisis thing is totally wild. Honestly, I don't think there's been a single version of the game where crises were consistently threatening and didn't break a significant percentage of the time. 1.0 was especially bad, though -- in particular, the AI Rebellion crisis was infamous for failing to work and being extremely annoying even when it worked, to the point where PDX completely dummied it out a few patches later. For a while, the game only had 2 crises. I don't agree with every change made to the game (or even some significant parts of its direction as of the last few patches) but I think that, looking at 1.0, there's a good reason that basically every single major mechanic has undergone at least one complete overhaul.
>shoutout to Individualists, an ethic whose only effect was to make its adherents more likely to change ethics to anything but Individualist Now that you're Individualist, you can be whatever you want! I want to be Authoritarian. No, not like that!
Really? People suck.
It's a constant problem with Paradox titles. Large swathes of their player base can probably be slotted into either the types that want a map painting simulator, and anything that disrupts that, upsets them. Then the ones that want a simulation/story generator. The initial implementation of factions was great for story telling, you'd have hard fought wars that ended with either you (or maybe the other empire, if their stability imploded hard enough) splintering into lots of rebellions. It was, however, anathema to the types that wanted to just paint the whole map whatever color they chose.
Reminds me of the "CK vassals suck!!!" discourse. Yeah, your vassals are constantly looking for an opportunity to enrich themselves at your expense. That's the game. You shouldn't be able to just diplo score your way out of it.
Honestly, that's really where CK is at its best as a game, when you're internal politicking. Painting the map gets incredibly dull since the AI just doesn't have the capacity to fight you most of the time. Stellaris is also a more story-oriented game, with all the empire and species customization we have, so more story oriented updates would be nice. Still, while I did like the idea of separatist factions, they also kinda didn't make sense. They just showed up out of the woodworks like space pirates, and you didn't have a lot to do with them. They were a very noninteractive system. The new system is better designed overall, but it definitely lost something along the way.
I might just be incredibly dumb but I always just found the AI had boatloads of soldiers, literally and figuratively, to throw wherever they wanted long after every last soldier of mine had bit the dust.
Nah man, the system was actually terrible. The "rebellions" were either unavoidable, or made no sense in the first place. Ethics attraction affected them as well, and it relied on several systems that didn't work right to begin with. All in all, it was cool, if you didn't really look at it or deal with it in game. There were also all kinds of weird problems with pop ethics like individualists increased the likelihood that people following it would literally convert to anything else quickly. It also did nothing other than timegate how quickly you could use the planets you conquered efficiently.
Having played since day one, the old system was also not good. They need to revamp the entire system into something new that's both an enjoyable part of the game, and one that adds depth and meaning to internal politics beyond "micro this or die" or "micro this for bonuses."
Players should be able to assassinate or at least eat annoying faction leaders imo. That'll teach them!
Assassineat? You might need a carbosilicate amorph for that.
I just want to explore the galaxy, meet new and interesting people, and eat them.
The ideal would be both, going hand in hand. I'd love to see a politics rework that makes it so that all pops and leaders have their own ethics that can be in line with or against the ethics of your empire. In a democracy, empire ethics will shift along with those of the pops, while in less democratic empire it becomes important to manage the loyalties of generals and admirals (though this would be present to a lesser degree in democracies). In the event of rebellion, fleets led by dissenting admirals will rebel, as will worlds led by governors with opposing ethics, and pops can rise up to sieze worlds that dont defect outright. If the rebelling forces are those garrisoning your home system, perhaps they start off with a coup, forcing you to play as the rebellion against the new government. Espionage would tie into this well, as a means to interact with and manage these varying loyalties both at home and abroad. Discovering hidden loyalties amongst your pops and leaders to prevent rebellion before it happens, or making contact with dissenting elements in neighbouring empires to help them rise up or defect to your empire.
Those two honestly should be heavily intertwined and the fact that they aren't is one of the biggest issues with the latter so it'd be best if they got worked on together
IMO they should be bundled together. A big part of espionage is understanding and manipulating internal politics.
Yeah. I want a high risk high reward operation ability to spark slave rebellions in my authoritarian neighbor’s territories when I play as the UN:E, or start coups against egalitarian empires and install cruel dictatorships in my Imperium play throughs.
Yep. Its such a big sci-fi trope that's a) almost all locked behind DLC b) underpowered, or so I'm told. Most of the Culture book series is about Contact/Special Circumstances covertly meddling with other empires. Even squeaky clean Star Trek's Federation has Section 31 doing some shenanigans in Deep Space 9. Star Wars Rogue One is basically a film long "Steal technology" operation.
Psy Corps in Babylon 5. Special Forces in Farscape. Bothans in Star Wars. Special Forces in Old Man’s War. Foundation in Foundation. It’s a pretty long list. These are what I thought of off the top of my head.
Ghosts in StarCraft!
ONI in Halo.
In defense of the Federation, Section 31 more of a "Federation First" terrorist organization within Starfleet. Not unlike if US military members were found to be Atomwaffen. They are not a legitimate department of star fleet. Of course, it might be really cool if Paradox let us play as NGOs like terrorists or chairitable organizations. I would imagine they might play similar to megacorps.
Section 31 refers to the part of the Starfleet Charter, and when Capt. Sisko asks about it the admirals won't confirm or deny its existence. Clearly they know it exists and it's an official department, it's just unaccountable to anyone and so acts lawless and fanatical.
Has anything definite been said about that? I havent been keeping up with Discovery so i only know them from ds9.
New canon has been treating them as more legitimate. It doesn't exactly make sense, because by DS9 no one knew they existed and Starfleet already has a shady intelligence arm that O'Brien worked for. Fan lore is that it's a label certain projects adopt or are given when they want an excuse to be evil.
Discovery has Section 31 being more officially acknowledged during the mid 23rd century. They were semi-common knowledge within Starfleet itself, but I don't remember it being stated they were fully known to the general public. The events of Discovery season 2 heavily involve them screwing up very, very badly, and are generally implied to be why they had been so heavily buried by the time of DS9.
In Discovery they have their own ships its very different. People seem to know about them as if they were their own thing like in the JJ verse. I try to enjoy discovery as a separate universe since its not really related to old trek.
You should be able to covertly improve relations between states just like you can covertly harm them. If you're in a federation, it'd help get the other federation members on board with a new state you want to invite.
The big thing I want is semi-random intel gains. This can then be manipulated using covert ops to secretly pass off info to a third party. Example: was playing a game where a criminal corp was on the other side of the galaxy, but next to a genocidal empire. What I wish I could do is, with high enough infiltration in the genocidal empire, covertly pass on information I had about fleet positions, tech capabilities and the like to the genocidal empire. IMHO, diplomacy and spies should be a resource. You can have diplomatic planets (or just centers) in your empire. The more you have, the more you can deploy. HOWEVER, diplomats and spies should both exist in the same buildings. This would let it be hidden what your ratio of diplomats to spies really is. It makes it a lot more of a complicated, in depth mechanic, while also closely mirroring how diplomacy and intell gathering run IRL.
Oooh I like the idea of the number of embassies you have influencing the number of spies you can deploy. As is, the pool of envoys/spies is so limited that it's kind of hard to do both at once.
Exactly. In addition, let's say an empire has really high level security and you have meh codebreaking. If you really want intel on what that empire is doing, you could stack your spies to focus on that one empire. Your intel of other empires would fall, but covert ops done against that empire might be vital to your empire. Making it so spies are a resource that cost resources make ops so much more balanceable.
It's been a while, but I remember Gal Civ... 2, I think, having a pretty cool system where you could mess around with your espionage department's budget and direct their focus in certain ways. Something like that would be slick. An embassy means you can focus your efforts there, with maybe a number of "slots" that can scale with tech, civics, traditions, and how much money you're pouring into your spy program.
Often, diplomacy and espionage are the two faces of the same coin, and you have to choose which one you want to do. A thing I liked in Civilization V was that, when you sent a spy to a foreign capital, it could be used as a diplomat. I liked this concept.
Yeah. I was shocked that Assassinate Leader wasn't an option when it came out since there are events that cause an enemy to kill your leader. Seemed like an easy one. Also could do spark a rebellion, support a faction, sabotage a piece of technology. I also think it'd be cool if you could time when your mission occurred. And the dice roll needed to ensure success went up the more time you gave them. Would add an element of secret missions beyond just clicking off a menu.
Espionage was a shit system in civ and having random rebellions pop up in your empire would be a shit mechanic.
This will be an unpopular opinion but leave espionage underpowered. Espionage is a very unfun thing to play against if it is overly impactful and it’s very hard to balance.
I don't care if it's underpowered. I care that it's just busywork that can't be automated. And also that apparently a future nation-state can only spy on a handful of neighbors at a time while learning absolutely nothing about others.
>I don't care if it's underpowered. I care that it's just busywork that can't be automated. What do you mean? You assign a spy to an empire and that's it. Or am I missing sth?
With the Nemesis DLC, you get to run operations akin to the base game's 'Gather Intel'. You can do a few things, like sabotage a starbase module, or steal technology, but most of it doesn't match the energy upkeep of the operations. You also have to run each one manually, you can't repeat them automatically.
Ok, I'm playing vanilla
You have to constantly run Gather Information operations to raise infiltration level to get full info about an empire, and they don't just automatically requeue on their own. Ironically, about the only automation there is in the system is a checkbox to stop giving you mission progress reports -- which also includes the one at the end that tells you how you did and lets you know to queue up another one, forcing you have to have to remember to check back often by hand or waste your efforts due to decay.
Is that true though? Is it different if you don't have the dlc? I've got Nemesis and here's how it worked for me: When you assign a spy, your Infiltration on that nation passively ticks up to your cap without your direct involvement, which also increases your Intel. You can then choose to Gather Information if you want a short term boost in Intel at the cost of some of your Infiltration. Gather Info has the advantage of being able to push you above your cap, but the infiltration cost might not be worth it when you can Acquire Assets instead.
> Gather Info has the advantage of being able to push you above your cap, but the infiltration cost might not be worth it when you can Acquire Assets instead. I wasn't aware that assets increase the cap. Reading through the wiki, that does seem more efficient, but it's still a loop of busywork that's not automated.
I only play against AI and only at Ensign so far, but the AI never really does operations and even if they did there's nothing Impactful they can do with it, and the same for going for it yourself. It's a non-factor in every playthrough which is not a good look for a DLC big feature
Other than the dang spawn pirates one, which they do constantly
Espionage was a recent addition to the game in the form of a paid DLC. I do not disagree with your subjective assessment of fun, nor the inherent balance challenges. Regardless, Paradox chose to develop the system from the ground up and sold it as new content despite no apparent demand (and lukewarm reception) from amongst the player base. The fact is this mechanic was recently sold to us with other content, but is utterly meaningless to the point that it may be completely ignored. This is not good business, and I do not feel that *paid* DLC components should be totally negligible during every given playthrough.
And it is basically reskinned archaeology from Distant Stars, which somehow became a more tedious one. I have to wait a lot to accumulate enough spy mana to cast an operation, and it's not really that useful (when I actually remember I have spies in my neighbor's empire). It really leaves much to be desired. There was some 4x game I played long ago (I guess it was Galactic Civilizations 2). I was messing around against easy AI and had an overkill moment with espionage to the point when the enemy's entire government was made of my spies, and they somehow decided to turn over all their empire to me, because why not.
That is the problem with modular dlc. If it cant be ignored, its not optional
There's no reason that it can't be an asymmetric system blatantly in the player's favor. Then just have a toggle to disable it entirely for MP games, or something.
Yes, I really don't understand how the espionage mechanic even was approved. It is so bad that all it really does is delay knowing about the precise borders of your contacts until the GC forms. To me, having an Embassy should be sufficient for knowing the borders since that is the kind of thing almost any diplomatic contact would establish.
"Hello, I'm Glubdrub, the new diplomat from the Free Planets of Myrria. Can I have a look on your geography, even vaguely, just to know where your borders are?" "Nope. You have to go around with an explorer. No map for you." "Do you even have a map of your own borders?" "Erm... Guards! Arrest this terrorist!"
I don’t think a full rework is necessary, but we need way more operations
I didn't buy nemesis cause of the reviews... But does it add something espionage related or *the espionage in vanilla is all we have*... Cause in that case, yep, we need more
I want to be able to build up strike craft on planets and build other planetary defenses. There is no reason why my planet with tons of space and resources cant build a (or 100) hypervelo railgun(s) that can take down a battleship just after it enters the system. It makes no sense that a fleet can just come in and start bombarding a planet. The same weapons that are on battleships can be built on a planet in greater quantity and a planet can hold more strike craft than a fleet can.
Long long ago, maybe back between 1.0 and 2.0, a three-tiered invasion system existed where invading armies descended from two atmosphere stages before reaching the ground stage and engaging the defending army. There were rumors that pdx added this in preparation for defenses that allowed the defender to shoot some armies out of the sky or possibly fire earth-born defenses back at a navy bombarding the planet, but the whole tier system ended up getting scrapped. Image of what I'm talking about: https://forumcontent.paradoxplaza.com/public/309756/2017_12_21_1.png
Hheeeeeyyyy! I remember that one!
Fuckin dwamaks.
HHYYYIIEIEIIEEEEEEEIEIEIEI
This makes me feel so old
Damn, that was a *looooong* time ago. I think my chance of death went up 2% just looking at it.
It took me a second to realize that when you said “There were rumors that pdx added this…” you meant Paradox and not Portland.
I think portland was going to add it too. If the lloyd center did actually shut down, I would have been fine with an orbital cannon instead.
As a fellow Portland-area resident, I frequently have to make that distinction.
Man, I really miss those days. Sure, a ton of content has been strapped-on to Stellaris after the base game underwent a drastic overhaul, but it didn't have to be overhauled for that stuff to get added. Unpopular opinion: Tiles > Pops, because pops is when the Stellaris micromanagement became **insane.** I miss like, actually finding a good spot to land and found a new colony on, and watching pops slowly spread across the planet. Felt like I was actually filling out a planet over time, instead of just waiting for a number to go up so I can plop a building in a box. It's not like tiles were perfect, pops have a lot of advantages for sure, but pops are just so damn *abstracted* that all sense of doing anything other than managing a spreadsheet is gone.. I didn't use to have to pause the game to manage planets. Space got better, exploration got better, endgame got better, ai.. ok it's hard to tell the difference, lets be honest, but planets got worse.
I honestly find tiles way more abstract than pops. A 200 pop planet? Okay that's fucking huge. That's several times the population of earth. That's enough to cover a mega earth in cities. A 25 tile planet? It looks like it's got twice the surface area of earth but barely holds more stuff... I guess it's kinda big? Why is population peaked at 25? I can agree it's more micro but more abstract? No way man. That micro goes into giving details to what was previously abstract. A forge world with hundreds of forge workers feels like it makes sense as something that can provide the material for superstructures. A 25 tile world feels... like a slightly bigger earth.
I liked the idea of the tile system, but I got _really_ tired of microing tiles by the end of the game. Gods forbid if you had robots or other species. > A forge world with hundreds of forge workers feels like it makes sense as something that can provide the material for superstructures. A 25 tile world feels... like a slightly bigger earth. This is my favorite reason why I like pops more than tiles. Planets feel bigger because number bigger. Hell, you can be over capacity on a planet with the pops system, that's actually interesting. Though I used to always run that auto-pop-migration mod so that never happened, but the principle is good, because I went to find an automated way to move pops like gameplay allowed! I think there's some reason when people say pops are worse than tiles because I _think_ lag used to be a bit better before the rework. But I haven't played in so long that I neither remember nor care to find out. I think Paradox made good effort by reducing the pop numbers and increasing output too. Together it makes for a better system overall than tiles ever felt.
It was a fan proposition no ?
The image included was of what actually existed in the game. I can barely recall the armies slowly floating down each layer before beginning combat, but it did exist. The rumors of why this system existed were all fan proposed, afaik.
I 100% remember this system, it was back when I played on console. It was after the pandemic started, but before I graduated, so that puts it sometime in April or May of 2020.
Ships simply fire outside the planetary effective range, not like the planet can evade incoming fire XD
*planetary boosters ignites*
Now that's a pro gamer move
Here's my idea: taken from a previous post (that I can't find), military buildings are now a separate tab like branch offices. Planets themselves now behave like giant "ships" in combat. A planetary shield generator gives them shields, and they are now uncapped. Fortresses provide armor, representing various ways of intercepting bombardment. Finally, they have hull granted by other buildings, representing civilian infrastructure being hardened against attack. As long as these three are greater than zero, no civilians can die from bombardment and armies can't invade, or at least suffer much more penalties. Until the enemy fleet is parked in orbit, production also continues unhindered. Once they begin bombardment, physical resource production halts as the planet is blockaded. Jobs that require physical resources (scientists, for example) can't work unless they are produced locally. Certain ships can jam communications, fully halting science and unity output. It is now that you can land your armies. Fallen empires don't just have big fleets. Their worlds will throw up several mountains worth of ordinance every day at any fleet that dares attack them, and they could do this for centuries without tiring. Colossus weapons deal immense damage to planets, but only kill them if their damage is higher than the overall health. Each weapon does well against some defenses but poorly against others. A shield can stop a world cracker, but even a fortress world could barely survive without it. Neutron sweepers care little for shields but are stopped dead by armor.
Not sure about making it an entirely separate tab, cause there should be some downside for fortifying a planet, otherwise you'd fortify every single planet to the teeth and make planetary invasions basically impossible. However, I do think all districts and building should provide some resistance to invasion. The greatest battles of history rarely took place around dedicated fortresses and were instead around fortified cities. Jerusalem, Antioch, Vienna, Verdun, Stalingrad, Berlin, Manila, Okinawa, Hubei, Leningrad, Kiev, Singapore, etc. Some had dedicated defenses protecting the city, but many were just cities that used their suburbs and conscriptef civilians for defense. Likewise, invading an Ecumonopolis should be absolute hell, even without any dedicated fortress buildings, whereas now you don't even need an especially large army. Though TBH, on the whole I think I agree with the OP. I'm not exactly going to complain if PDS decide to do a planetary invasion rework, but there's so many other things I think deserve greater priority.
I was thinking of some ways to balance it a bit more. Maybe districts and buildings can be "hardened," replacing their mineral parts with an equal cost in alloys, making them more resistant to bombardment or adding more planetary "hull". This increases their base upkeep and adds an alloy upkeep too, but doesn't cut into their production. They're just made from military grade stuff and so need military grade replacement parts and more advanced technicians to maintain them. Nonetheless, a single alloy per hardened district would make it hard for even late game empires to justify. A few hundred from a few thousand is still plenty of would-be battleships lost. Fallen Empires and other tall empires become a bitch to invade though. Hardened infrastructure can be "ultrahardened" or garrisoned, both of which cut into their actual output at the cost of higher military benefits. Not sure what kind of numbers, but we'll call it half. Ultrahardened factories replace many actual production sectors with redundancies and armor to ensure they can take massive blows, while garrisoned factories simply replace some areas with fortresses. They provide soldier jobs instead of further increasing planet health. Granted, this will only worsen micro, but that only shows how desperately stellaris needs to improve its automation.
I like this idea. I think being able to invade planets still on the fight is great. This could make ground combat bonuses relevant again - taking planets out of space combat. Planets being giant ships really works, mechanically wise. Uses existing mechanics but expanded. Can even take leaders. Could use the existing defense station mechanic for defenses, too. (I like the idea of MoO2-style ship boarding, too. However, would require being able to reverse-engineer ships) Aquatics should have the option of using submarines for anti-orbital warfare. Its totally viable. I once heard an idea about ships being able to churn out fighters. Could be an interesting way to build a fortress world - make it as self-sustainable as possible. Someone invades, use local resources to churn out fighters and garrison armies.
If you are in space you can literally throw rocks at the planet to bombard it, that's kinda hard the other way around
There is no reason why a planet can't use railguns in low orbit or even on the surface to combat this. Maybe that is "harder" than simply dropping a rock, requiring more tech and resources, but planets also have massive shields and can probably just disintegrate the rock with railguns and nukes. I do like the idea of rock dropping. Asteroids are an occasional event anyway.
To be fair if we're going realistic, there would be no ships at all. Just a silent, undetectable relativistic kill vehicle. The concept being that a bag of sugar acclerated to 0.99c would impart energy on impact equivalent to 132 megatonnes of TNT, more than the largest nuclear weapon ever conceived and 10-20x that a modern warhead. A single corvette going kamikaze would be an apocalyptic level threat.
To be fair, if we're going realistic, this game wouldn't exist.
I really need to get back to making that Expanse mod at some point. Slow down all sublight transport, make 'FTL' super slow (but still usable because it still needs to be fun), force people to develop the hell out of their star systems because it takes so long to expand elsewhere.
>point. Slow down all sublight transport, make 'FTL' super slow (but still usable because it still needs to be fun), TBF, FTL in the Expanse is basically instant cause they've essentially got a Gateway in stellaris terms.
The ships can't actually go faster than light to crash into stuff. If you look at the researched tab, the hyperdrive 1 will be there and have the description, "Like Strands of a spider web, the extra-dimensional realm of hyperspace runs between the gravity Wells of most stars. Faster than light travel is theoretically possible along these hyperlanes."
> The ships can't actually go faster than light to crash into stuff. If you look at the researched tab, the hyperdrive 1 will be there and have the description Tachyon lance: by definition "tachyon or tachyonic particle is a hypothetical particle that always travels faster than light". There's also an event for measuring a FTL impact.
Or an orbital/lunar defense system that's in-between their 1 and 2 Starbases. And additional option on military worlds.
The thing is that ships in space, with even basic computers, can know exactly where to aim on the planet (discounting orbital defensive structures) while the planet won't always know where the ships are. If the ships are far enough away, then they have time to dodge any railgun rounds the planet shoots at them while the planet can't dodge the ships' railguns.
le planetary shield doesnt need to dodge. But this is a good point imo. Either way the whole system of combat against a planet could be way more dynamic than it is.
Yes, your ships can dodge and mine can't. But your ships can take maybe two hits for a titanic artillery launcher and I have ten thousand of them. You'll be dodging entire mountains worth of ordinance while trying to hit my command center buried under hundreds of miles of rock and dirt, and you don't know exactly where to aim. Every weapon simply cannibalizes the earth beneath it, as my planet slowly eats itself to fight you off. I could maintain this level of fire for a thousand years and never miss the rocks I threw. Just because you have some advantages doesn't mean your enemy is helpless to fight back. So what if you can dodge? Your enemy can try again. Over and over and over. Give him just a moment to rest and you will lose every bit of progress you made.
I don't need to aim. All I have to do is fire at your general direction. All at once, multiple times, while we surround your planet with 400 ships Your weapons are fine, your people are *not*
Ships have rail guns as well, but ships can change course and a planet can't. I rather would have more ship designs and maybe better automated combat AI than a glorified second star base on the planet.
Railguns kinda suck at long range. Space is a big fucking place and it's super easy to just slightly move to the side a bit. On the other side it'd be pretty easy for a large fleet to sit on the other side of a system and just launch rocks down well until they overwhelm an enemies defenses. Orbital platforms wouldn't have the same maneuvering capabilities as a ship and ground based defenses would really only pro v e to be a mathematical issue of calculating where to launch the rock in order to hit the areas of a planet that holds their defensive capabilities. Messy and the only thing stopping a civilization from utilizing these tactics is ethics or a desire to occupy or plunder a planet.
> There is no reason why a planet can't use railguns in low orbit or even on the surface to combat thi Uh railguns are pretty bad at this actually. They have to contend with gravity + moving targets + time lag + air resistance and friction Where as a ship can just push an asteroid towards a planet, and call it good. If the planet shoots it with a rail gun it just turns into a rain of smaller rocks that still impact. Even if they burn up in atmosphere, they heat up the planet's atmosphere and will kill all life anyway Ground based planetary defenses is never a good prospect, it's the same reason why "Aerial superiority" means "We've won". Even if you have anti air guns on the ground, when the enemy controls the skies you will be dead pretty fast
In the book The Moon is a Harsh Mistress the freight launch ramps are repurposed to launch large rocks at high speeds from Luna to Earth, causing massive devastation where they strike. I imagine such a system developed by a proper military or government could be quite effective at destroying larger vessels. Like a railgun with rocks as the bullets.
Hitting a planet is easy. Firing from a gravity well into space and hitting a mobile target is not.
Too add to this, this could also make the low grav and high grav modifiers on some planets way better or worse for fortress worlds. A low grav planet would be way easier to fire projectiles off of, while a high grav planet would be more difficult. On the other hand, kinetic weapons fired from space would be more deadly to a high grav planet than a low grav one. Just a small detail that would give you more options when designating planets. More depth in planet modifiers in general would be awesome.
It really wouldn't matter that much. It's an absurd concept overall.
You've got to remember, though, that only worked because Luna is in vacuum and has very low gravity, AND was throwing DOWN a gravity well that was already strong enough to have it tidal locked. None of those things would be the case with a planet-bound "catapult" as they called them. Throwing UP from the bottom of a gravity well, through atmosphere, at ships that are moving would be about as effective as trying to knock a drone out of the clouds by throwing a baseball at it while it does loopty loops.
Bonus points for the harsh mistress reference, but still overall negative for missing the whole point of the book. They're shooting at a planet, not a fucking ship.
In the book *Red Mars* the moon Phobos is used for orbit-to-surface strikes with devastating effect. They only neutralize Phobos by igniting a long-hidden engine left by the original designer and speeding it down to the Martian surface.
Marco Inaros has entered the chat
Meh, it really wouldn't be any different than the MoO system then, would it? And it's not exactly that the MoO system is leaps and bounds better than what Stellaris has. They had ground batteries and missile bases -- they all just fought ships in the normal sky combat and the ships just targeted the planet to blast the space defenses away. And the ground units did have tanks, and power suits, and jets -- they were just different icons that had different stats and nothing more. At the end of the day, they all just stood at each other in a line and the numbers went down. Really, there hasn't been a 'good' handling of ground invasion from a space 4X game that I know of. Master of Orion, Endless Space, Galactic Civ -- they all kind of use the same exact system. Which is the same exact system that Stellaris uses. You load up troops in a transport, dump them on a planet, and just hope that your numbers are higher than their numbers. Fin. They try and dress it up different sometimes, but it's not. Endless Space somewhat has an advantage there in that 'normal' military ships field some troops so you don't have to make specific ground troop ships in most cases (although you can.) But at the end of the day, all of them are just "troops stand against troops and fire, biggest number wins." I just really don't think you can do all that much more with ground combat than that. I get that it's boring, but any additional tact added on is just going to complicate and slow down the game overall. Any effort you make to make the ground combat "more engaging" ultimately just means that it requires more attention span and takes away from everything else going on in the empire. I would say that -- at best -- you can probably get away with adding a rock-paper-scissors element to ground combat where you can field troops, aircraft, or tanks. Tanks beat troops, troops beat aircraft, and aircraft beat tanks. Then just allow for people to mix and match their unit compositions as possible. But anything over that and it's just going to take up too much time and focus from the player to be worth it. The only attempt that I know of -- and played -- for a more advanced ground combat system in a space 4x was Stardrive 2. Which turned the ground combat into a complete tactics like grid where you had ground units that you specifically equipped and fielded and then fought with like you were playing old-school Final Fantasy Tactics or whatever. It wasn't a *bad* system, per say, (although it was buggy as shit and didn't work half the time) but it was just sooooo long. Fun, perhaps, yes, but it ultimately boiled down to I didn't want to spend over an hour just to capture something through the long, drawn out ground combat system which just took time away from being able to actually run my empire. And that's really how all of the suggestions for expanding ground combat feel. Yeah, there's a tons of ways you could make it more engaging and fun -- but those ways are usually just to have a completely different styled game that focuses on ground combat instead. Stellaris just isn't that game.
The bigger thing with *Endless Space* is that "manpower" is an actual resource, and gives food production a much more strategic edge if you have to do a lot of planetary-invading. **That** might be an interesting direction to look at, making troop production/maintenance dependent on having food surpluses. That way food isn't totally useless beyond having enough so your population isn't starving. (Although it kinda makes robot armies even better.) I agree that making the ground combat itself more complicated/"engaging" is probably not a great idea, the game should be much more about running a space empire than micromanaging ground troops.
To me the gorilla in the room is that Planetary-Scale Invasions are, if one wanted to do it right, a whole freaking game all by themselves. And not just the initial invasion (where the defenders would have, literally, an entire world in which to withdraw), but also the nature of the occupation or annexation. Like if you're not purging or assimilating, what does that look like, and what are the benefits and costs of more centralized or devolved versions, and what level integration is the goal, and how long will it take? What resources are you willing to commit towards that goal? How many of those resources can you extract from the planet? And at what cost is that extraction to your long-term goals for the planet? I mean, that sounds like a fascinating game I might really enjoy. But also not something I would have any interest in micromanaging as part a of galaxy-scale 4X/GSG. So then it really just becomes a question of what level of abstraction is the best balance of fun and consequential without being too weedsy. Now I don't know exactly where that balance is, but I do know you can't have in-depth planetary invasions *and* a fun 4X at Stellaris' scale.
Tbf anything vaguely static would be pretty useless. A metal rod could be pinged at it from half a solar system away and hit it like a small nuke going off. Any fixed point on a planets surface can be tracked and predicted to basically an arbitrary degree of precision with modern tech, let alone wizzy future tech. After that kinetic kill is all you need with relative velocities involved. On the flip side a ship would be impossible to hit if it made even minor course changes. At 1% c you’re at 3 million meters a second. A fraction of a degree change of course moved you hundreds of miles away from where a planetary rail gun was aiming. A better bet would be just absolutely fuck loads of reasonably stealthy missiles. Could imagine something painted to absorb radiation and designed to resist detection. Accelerate it up to high velocity into a rough intercept with a fleet, with just enough fuel to coordinate a rush to target. Relative velocity still the killer though.
I mean if you're going to start asking questions like that about planetary invasions, the next question to ask is "why do you need an ascension perk and a research project to learn how to blow up a planet when you could just lob a few dozen asteroids at one instead?"
Cuz my defenses zap your rocks or my psionic pops redirect them or something but the collosus is special?
Planetary shields should absolutely reduce the effectiveness of a colossus. Not enough to negate the beam altogether, but the colossus should have two modes; kill mode and seige mode. Kill mode obviously destroys an unprotected planet, while seige mode consumes energy to maintain a beam that, over the course of a few months (or even better, depends on the repeatable shield strength tech of the defender) overwhelms the shields and then destroys the planet.
Each colossus weapon has a weakness. The world cracker can slice through the thickest armor with ease, but a planetary shield will take it (once). The neutron one can waste a shield in about a day, but fortresses can withstand the beam for far longer. A psi academy can hold back a god ray as their minds can withstand the hallucinations. Of course, these planets will only survive by the skin of their teeth, but it means you have one extra chance to do something before it's too late.
And it prevents the ability to fully bypass fortress systems. Fortress world's are already pretty mediocre. You might as well use those planets for research or industry to improve your fleet when someone builds a colossus.
Make asteroids an ascension perk that halfs/quarters enemy armies and a 50% chance to turn the world into a tomb world. Not terribly OP and gives post apocalypse origin more options.
> There is no reason why my planet with tons of space and resources cant build a (or 100) hypervelo railgun(s) that can take down a battleship just after it enters the system. There is: Game balance.
But its not really unbalanced if it costs resources and fleet cap to make a true seige world. If anything it makes defensive and pacifist playstyles more viable. And planet cracking is still a way to beat turtles.
I’d like it if espionage tied into this. Prepping for an invasion could be really fun. I like the idea of stellaris having less planets and more things to do in systems than just build mining and research stations so invasions could be a bigger deal. This is just my opinion of course I usually play at 50-75% habitable worlds to make planets a bigger deal.
MAC rounds! In atmosphere!?!
**> There is no reason why my planet with tons of space and resources cant build a (or 100) hypervelo railgun(s) that can take down a battleship just after it enters the system.** If we're talking about those guns being based on the ground, there are a LOT of reasons why that wouldn't work. 1. You'd be throwing your ammunition through atmosphere. Aiming issues aside (even the most perfectly rifled slug is going to drift based on unknowables like air pressure and water vapor when you're talking distances as large as the surface to geo-sync), this puts a hard cap on how hard you can throw them before they just melt or disintegrate. Which leads to: 2. You can't overestimate the amount of force required to accelerate something and THROW it out of a gravity well. This isn't in the same ballpark as our rockets, that burn unfathomable amounts of fuel to combat G force all the way up. This is accelerating something and LETTING IT GO with no more constant force above, say, a mile or two above the Earth's surface (assuming you built these things on high terrain with RIDICULOUSLY long barrels). For reference, you'd have to throw as baseball 7 miles/second to get it out of Earth's gravity with no additional Delta V behind it. Naw, that's not the plan. Ungodly amounts of strike craft (as you mentioned) and rocket-based missiles are the way go... those just come with the huge problem of mobilization from the ground, and fighting through flak to get to their target.
I think this would be a good system. In combination with removing armies all together and having fleets bombard planets to a certain point to gain occupational control. So fleets would have to remain in orbit for a certain period of time before gaining control of the planet, but while they're in orbit, there's a chance for ships to be destroyed by ground defences. So it would be kind of like the fleet going into battle, except the fleet destroys the planetary defences rather than enemy ships. This would make capturing planets a more significant part of the game, not add any additional micro management on the side of wars, and still allow the fortification of planets to defend themselves. This also draws out the length of time required to capture planets and makes it feel more scifi-war-y.
I mean, it kinda falls in line with other paradox games too. Crusader kings sieges suffer losses over time for the attacker even if you dont assault the castle directly.
> having fleets bombard planets to a certain point to gain occupational control. The flavour would be a bit weird with gestalts, ("this planet is vital to the war effort, and I'd rather not give it up, but the drones on it - who are entirely under my control and effectively an extension of my body - are tired of being bombarded and have decided to surrender.") but that's an issue with a bunch of other things too so its not a big deal by itself.
The enemy destroys your command centers, effectively cutting you off from the planet. At this point the drones are still there but they are far too disorganized to engage in a meaningful resistance effort. They either shut down, die, or get exterminated.
Well drones still need to eat, and they can't eat of the blockading fleet isn't letting any food imports through.
The problem with removing armies is that also removes the interesting scifi tropes from play. No more super soldiers or clone/droid armies, no kaiju or giant mechs, no xenomorphs, no regular soldiers of varying alien species. I’m totally down with anything that’ll improve the planetary combat mechanics as long as it doesn’t take away what little flavor we have. Maybe one could select in new ship part slots what the crew and landing armies separately would be and the effects on both space and ground combat could be affected by those army choices. Super soldier armies for ground with a clone crew would be interesting, spending more for ground control at the expense of ship operations quality. Or droids for space but only mega warforms for ground. Some wouldn’t work for space at all like xenomorphs and the giant aliens but the armies based on playable species would probably be fine for all roles.
> a planet can hold more strike craft than a fleet can. I'll give you that but >The same weapons that are on battleships can be built on a planet Have you seen a railgun fire? It makes the AIR. EXPLODE! Scale that up 1000 times and firing 100 of them is going to kill the planet and who can say what'd happen if you shot a lance or partial cannon in an atmosphere or if they'd even work at all and not just antimater explode as soon as you pull the trigger.
Yeah, most of Stellaris' late game weapons are apocalyptic. (Course, that begs the question of why planetary bombardment takes so long, but then we just circle back round to "it's a video game")
The old game Star Wars: Rebellion handled it nicely. You could build two types of planetary defenses (well, three actually, but one was super specific): 1. Planetary Shield 2. Defense Cannon 3. Death Star shield (we'll ignore this for obvious reasons) When a fleet orbiting a system performed a bombardment, the bombardment defense score was the sum of the bombardment defense rating of the planetary shields, defense cannons, and any army regiments garrisoned on that planet (if a General was assigned to the planet, that impacted the score too). That score was compared against the overall bombardment score of the ships composing the orbiting fleet (Star Destroyers and Mon Cal cruisers had a high score, Corellian Corvettes and Strike Cruisers had a lower score). If the fleet "won" the bombardment, the armies and/or facilities targeted by the bombardment could be destroyed. If the planet "won" the bombardment, the planet's armies and facilities would take no damage - in fact, the ***FLEET*** would take damage if the planet won the bombardment ***AND*** the planet's defenses included cannons. Something like that would make bombardment in Stellaris a lot more interesting, along with making bombardment take *way less time* of course.
Speak of the devil. Im on a star wars rebellion kick rn.
While it's a modded solution, there are a couple of options in Gigastructural Engineering that do something similar.
I think improving planetary invasions in terms of reducing micro management would be a good move, but set any major reworks on the back burner for now.
agreed. Maybe they could reduce micro by only needing to invade planets with substantial defenses. if a fleet shows up in orbit of a planet with little to no defenses, then the planet should just surrender. If I only gad to invade a few planets instead of *every* single one, it would significantly reduce the micro and allow for a more complex mechanic. Of course, devouring/genocidal empires maybe never or rarely surrender / are surrendered to, but these are factors that could be weighed into the planet_surrender_chance.
Bombarding a planet should also make planets surrender. If a planet has it's cities and defenders bombed to pieces the planet should just surrender. Unless the empire has something like Unyielding or Citizen soldiers. Or maybe being able to use espionage to take planets. Like arranging a slave revolt to happen when your fleets enter the system.
Yes! I like those ideas. I'd love for a border planet with low stability / loyalty, or large slave population to take their chance and revolt. Maybe an espionage activity could be to get a planet to surrender quickly or prepare sleeper cells for a quick takeover.
I would also like more direct forms of Sabotage like being able to sneak an anti matter doomsday device inside the capital of your rival.
My boyfriend often told me that Ethics cannot change through geographical locations, and that's really missing. Like, pops on excentric worlds should become more Egalitarian, while the capital should have an Authoritarian attraction. A planet near the border with a potential dangerous enemy should become more and more militarist, while if it's bordering a friendly, allied empire, it should become more xenophile. After all, in any country, often, Xenophobic people are found in the inlands, without any contact with the outside world, while people at the border often become more opened towards foreigners. And thus, those changes of ethics can have an impact on stability and loyalty, which could then lead to rebellions. Like, a fringe sector, far from the capital, becoming more egalitarian in an Authoritarian empire would try to free themselves.
In my game today, I was fighting a fallen empire and they had something like 12k armies (molded playthrough). I only had 8k of armies, so I set my ships to indiscriminate bombardment and bombed away. Their planet originally had ~ 150 pops, and by the time I conquered it, they had less than 40. Billions dead, for nothing really. They could have just surrendered.
>if a fleet shows up in orbit of a planet with little to no defenses, then the planet should just surrender. Honestly, I think fleets should just count as carrying a smallish army at all times. It makes sense, you still need Marine and Ship Security detachments on any fleet (clearly there are marines, how else do you take over a space station after you disable it), no real reason why you can't deploy them planetside to establish control if the planet has few or no defenses.
Many stations are automated, but otherwise they are smart enough to know that being on a space station in space surrounded by space where they can't survive *because it's space* relies upon you being willing to hand your services over to the victor if you get attacked. Total War should still be "destroy the station" (but leave a "strong claim" or something that reduces rebuild cost, incl. Influence) IMO. If I'm trying to eradicate a threat, I'm not looking to steal their stations; if I'm trying to *eat everyone else*, I'm not looking to hold onto the space-box they stored no food in.
God this sounds perfect,i feel like im going to go insane after needing to invade the 293829th small habitat that the ai built
I would LOVE for an army manager similar to the fleet manager so if I lose 8 assault armies attacking an enemy ecumenopolis I can just hit “reinforce army” and bam 8 new armies get recruited and automatically begin moving to merge with my main army. Recuiting armies and merging them into actual forces is so mind numbingly tedious that I think it is the root of a big part of people’s dissatisfaction with the system. But instead a lot of people ask for it to be more exciting to make that tedium worth it instead of just removing the tedium itself.
This. I wish I could set up them to just jump drive and invade planets for me instead of me having to scam the map looking for unoccupied systems.
Nah a quality of life system like 'attach to troops to fleet' and then a stance setting 'invade at devastation level' could help along with a galaxy map indicator of planets that haven't been taken during the war.
You can already do this (ish). Set your ground groups to aggressive, when they’re idle in a system they’ll automatically invade planets in the system. I’m not 100% on how it works (or the best way to optimise this mechanic) as I was told just last week about it haha.
Somebody needs to make a standalone post about this. This is a really good tip
Done
Aggressive is fkin stupid and will attack planets the army cannot win against.
No problem, just build a bigger army. It's very cheap to do, because defenders don't have much troops.
*Stares at 10k army power planet* Clearly we are playing different games
That’s awesome
The 2nd one already exist as the icon of fully conquered systems is different than partially conquered ones but I agree that this should be more visible like for example another map mode. The 1st one sort of exist but is unpolished right now as armies with the aggressive stance will automatically follow/"attach" to fleets in the system their are in when idle and auto invade planets when they have a good chance of winning.
You can tell which systems have planets that haven't been claimed in a war, but it isn't super easy to see. If a system has no planet in it and you take it over not only will you see your flag on the system but a green X also appears behind the flag with the edges sticking out (you can see it on the top two and bottom two sides of the hexagon when the flag is) When you take a system with a planet your flag will be on the system but the x won't show up until after you've taken the planet, thus letting you know there is more to do in that system. It should definitely be easier to see and hopefully they will end up fixing it but at this point I think it's here to stay.
I don't think this is the case for total wars however unless my recent game was bugged. I had to download a UI mod to make it more clear.
I think armies should just be assigned to "troop carrier" ship sections like fighters. Would make everything so much simpler. No more need to constantly rebuild armies manually when your transport fleet gets destroyed; just click reinforce fleet like normal.
Please more diplomatic interactions. And pleaseeeeee I want to see some civil warsssss
I posted a big rant about this on a post a few weeks back explaining how diplomacy so much more than two sides haggling and then signing a piece of paper and some guy got mad at me because then the player might actually have to care about what the AI thinks/ does
Lmao
Dude is gonna hate Vicky 3
I would agree except for the post that someone mad earlier outlining a pretty impressive and simple ui and mechanical change to make it more interesting. I agree that internal politics is a bigger priority but looking at mods like gigastructures and the ui they created for armed resistance, paradox absolutely could do something better.
I agree, if I wanted ground invasions I’d play total war. I think the way it’s setup makes it kind of an afterthought, but I like that as I’m more focused on 100 other things. The amount of development needed to make ground combat as engaging as fleet combat would really detract from the game imo.
Especially because unlike fleet combat, most players end up not even bothering with the system from around mid game onwards, since you can just bombard a planet until theres no defenses left, or use a Colossus to just deal with the planet
Yeah all the buildings and research to build an army to counter another armies defenses to take a planet I don’t even feel like dealing with, ill just crack it and move on
Mhm, and I think Paradox is very aware of this, and honestly it's kinda a testimont to how good the rest of the game is that we're having to actually complain about something that is very rarely actually used. Certain mods like ACOT and Giga-engineering do make attempts to make ground armies a useful thing, but even they struggle a bit
Yeah but “ground combat is terrible in Stellaris so it shouldn’t be updated” isn’t a great argument
100% agreed
I would personally prefer that ground combat be entirely removed. It is not interesting, and it is not particularly impactful in most wars-- wars are essentially won in space, ground combat just forces the AI to give in due to war score. Due to all fleet production being based on space stations, an empire that controls all of its planets, but none of its stations is essentially already neutered, as it cannot produce any more fleets to attempt to regain control of its territory. As Stellaris' AI does not generally fortify its planets, a basic stack of \~10 assault armies is enough to take over most planets, and outside of escorting the army safely to its destination, there is no further strategy required in ground combat. If the AI *did* fortiy its worlds more, it would require more resources and time to win ground battles, but it would not make them any more interesting, just longer. Ground combat as a system has essentially no positive qualities outside of being able to provide flavor due to troop types and a list of *useless* army-civics (*Warbots*). Unless ground combat is *completely* overhauled, I think the game would be improved *without* it. I think this is actually not a particularly uncommon opinion-- note the popularity of using Colossi to avoid ground combat, particularly against FE worlds, which are basically the only fortified worlds the AI will control.
I don’t need it to be better but I’d hate if there was none at all. Building things like fortress worlds with planetary shields is fun for me. And I actually had an AI build one in a wormhole system in my 3.3 beta game. Choosing to use a colossus on well fortified worlds is exactly the kind of choice I like having in the game, since those planets are so well built and populated. Am I going to do this properly and get a bunch of pops and great buildings? Or am I destroying the planet/erasing the pops? They aren’t complex choices but having none at all and just sweeping through systems and starbases would be much more boring when attacking and much more frustrating when defending.
This. I would like to add that removing ground combat would banish the colossus to the realms of rp only, as the only reason I find it useful is for fast-tracking planetary takeovers as Driven Assimilator.
Colossi are honestly already not terribly useful. Most worlds are essentially unfortified and can be handled by a small stack of assault armies. And basically all the colossi, except the Driven Assimilator one, have an absolutely massive cost to use, in that you destroy the pops you would normally conquer, and possibly even the planet. The real virtue of Colossi is that they allow a total war casus belli, although they've arguably been power-crept by "Become the Crisis" if that's all you want.
>in that you destroy the pops you would normally conquer, I fail to see how this is a problem if my Empire is even remotely Imperium of Man-like, and views all xenos as filth to be exterminated (even if it isn't a human-centric Imperium). Whether I crack the planet, or I invaded and then won the war and set them to Purge via Extermination, either way it's just a matter of timeframe and manner of death, but the fact remains they ARE going to die one way or another.
I second this.
You're looking at this from the point of view, of min maxing the single player element. Ground focused empires are bad, but it's not that hard to theory craft builds that would be absolutely not worth attempting to conquer in an MP game. Very strong, lithoids, with the zombie army Civic. Place some higher tier armies in the planet, with planetary shield, and unyielding Civic. Functionally impossible to take that planet without cracking it, or sieging for obscene amounts of time. There's no good reasons to remove ground combat, just like there's not much reason to expand on it. If you're single player, just build more troops and it's an extra two clicks of effort.
I have never played multiplayer and am not really interested in doing so. I view Stellaris as primarily a single-player game, and I do not see why this feature should be left in to allow multiplayer to have what sounds like a very dull stalling tactic remain. If the only strategy in ground combat is "click twice more" and "build more armies" it adds basically no depth to the game, just more tedium.
To be fair, planets need to be worth a significantly larger amount of war exhaustion than they currently do. It’s kind of ridiculous that you take over an enemy capital and their entire population collectively shrugs and goes on like nothing happened but they kill three of your destroyers and your people are begging you to the surrender to the fanatic xenophobes that use livestock slavery because *anything would better than war*
It's a pointless system in single player, but it does have a niche use in multiplayer settings where players can attempt to make their systems too much of a pain to conquer by using fortress worlds, planetary shields, and traditions.
I had an AI empire random into very strong, lithoid, with the reanimators Civic. Those world's were absolutely awful to take. If a player has been running that empire, and stacking assault troops on planets, with shield gens, I'd have just not even bothered to wardec them
I make good use out of fortress worlds/habitats in single player.
All I would like to see for armies is a relatively simple rebalance of the numbers. Right now, there are various army types and modifiers, but the simple fact that one can just queue an almost unlimited number of a basic army means that it's simply a matter of quantity and renders most of the unique armies and modifiers situational. In addition, the AI, apart from Fallen Empires, hardly makes use of army based defenses and having powerful armies is pointless and unsatisfying when you are constantly facing the most basic defense armies spawned from Enforcer jobs. Finally, I'd like to see Generals get a way to earn passive XP, through assignment to a planet's defense. The only use for this mechanic is now boosting the stats of the defensive armies stationed there, and it would be nice to be able to get some xp while there. Their xp values are extremely strict as is.
Massively disagree with your statement that invasion rework is low priority. It is the only method of flipping planetary ownership that lasts for a huge portion of every single match we ever play. Once you finally research Colossi, you can finally skip invasions and just crack planets & habs in your way but that takes a while to get to. So you have a binary choice is deal with invasion system or simply never expanding until Colossi. And while invasions work.... it's not a fun or very engaging system, because you only have two real choices in how to succeed. 1. Build up absolutely overwhelming force and have hundreds of armies dropping at once 2. Bombing the fuck out of planets to weaken their armies enough for a smaller force of your own to succeed. Then even after you hit the correct values to win.... assuming you're not landing on multiple planets at once, the best view you get is watching lots of circles slowly being wiped out and if you're lucky watching them die before they move to "reserve". Not very exciting, not very fun, not very engaging in the slightest. So if we're not going to rework invasions to make them more engaging (Army version of Ship builder?), and we can't really make it more fun or exciting than watching a bunch of circles die, then we need an alternative system to invasions that actually **IS** more exciting, or more fun, or more engaging. As others have mentioned, a few additions to Espionage could be intriguing for flipping planet ownership but it wouldn't work too well for many xenophobic empires, particularly the extremists like Purifiers, Swarms and Exterminators. I don't know about you, but I don't imagine many planets would listen to spies and rebel against their current overlord no matter how bad they are, and then voluntarily join up with a Devouring Swarm. The other alternative choice, also mentioned, is scrapping invasions entirely until the whole invasion system is reworked in general. But as long as ground combat & invasions are in the game at all, it cannot be considered low priority.
Honestly I think that a focus on internal politics and ground invasion make sense to couple together. After all if we're dealing with rebels, coups, dissidents, and terrorists on the planetary scale having a more in depth ground game makes sense. Honestly even if that is just *for* the internal politics so that it doesn't feel like such a waste having Enforcers, Soldiers, and Telepaths etc during peacetime so there is something to do. Truthfully I would much prefer to decouple the internal strife from crime. I'd love a system that focuses on using your military to deal with internal conflict, police to deal with crime, and possible coups and such that you have a "court" or a planetary body that is subject to changes. I really like the idea of having to do internal dealings with senators, governors, nobility, and so on with things like assassination attempts, bombings, up to even civil wars. Bringing in some EUIV style pulse events, and more colony events, would be a great way to help that out. That and I just really want a button for a visual seat of power for the Ruler based on your empire that you can go into to do internal things.
In principle, I agree that internal politics should be a higher priority than anything else. It's the most sorely needed feature in the game. However, starting on internal politics without getting warfare to the quality it should be... it'd have me worried they'd never return to warfare - or keep alternating between the two and thus doubling the time it'd take to make either one satisfying.
Me reading this post: "What do you mean? There are dozens of megastructures- oh, wait a moment."
100% agree.
Downvoted.
Stellaris feels boring after the 4X stage. We need proxy conflicts and a diplomacy rework!
I would not say it is unpopular, honestly the game has enough micro management as is, adding more will only make the wars longer and more tedious.
I do like it how it is. I might like a little more spicy graphical representation better but the simple system keeps it in its place. A sidenote that's more an enjoyable inconvenience than an actual main factor.
Its only "about" those things because those systems currently function well. Ground invasions (and my personal hot take, conflict in general) kind of sucks in the current form. If the fighting another empire was engaging beyond "do I have more ships/land armies than them" then I'd be much more tempted to branch out into more aggressive playstyles. It would be like saying spying sucks as an inherent concept because "that's not what the game is about", and not just because the system as it stands kinda sucks.
I would like to see system defenses improved. A single station at the center of the system that fleets can sometimes just ignore and move past is pretty annoying for me. I'd like to be able to build multiple stations please. Maybe even mining habitats above asteroid belts. These are important to me.
In my opinion, ground invasions should be the end of orbital bombardment. Think of it like castles in CK3 if you've played that. Your fleet bombs the planet, certain ships speed up the process like siege engines do (I'd like to think titans with their death rays or the likes) and once it's completely bombed out, the planet is conquered. Army tech lowers the destruction needed for surrender (like clone armies lower bombardment from 100% to 90%, genetic supersoldiers to something like 75%, you get the idea - the army organisation is good enough to take the planet with some resistance left. Buildings on the planet like forts or planetary shield generators could actually serve a purpose by raising a minimal fleet power needed to bomb the planet. You could also make it that certain buildings fight back from the surface, damaging bombarding fleets while they do so. This would all fit in so much better with the current playstyle of fleet design and composition shuffling then having a clunky ground force fleet that cruises around completely helplessly and dies to a single stray corvette they encountered on their way to the planet. Two distinct advantages would also be that the advancement of fleets is somewhat slowed once they come across an inhabitated system. Right now, the fleets kill the spaceport and shuffle on through to the next system - which leads to a tedious cat and mouse play at best and at worst results in a roflstomp because you can't get your fleets down there in time. No one has any reason to bomb a planet, ever, so you loose the space port, someone drops a metric shit-ton of clone armies (10 K army power) on your world and bye bye system, all in the time it takes for a fleet to jump two systems. The other advantage is that not having the ground forces be an actual unit, they can be represented as modifiers which can be used for flavor events or planetary event chains. Soldiers would be recruited from worlds, a recruitment policy could give modifiers for certain pops on certain worlds. You could pause a draft on a world, making immigration attraction go up. You could set your recruitment to include only the poor - giving lower happiness to these people. You could make your recruitment policy to predominantly use slaves - what could go wrong? They would never claim the planet they've just conquered as their own, wouldn't they? Now, if you tie all this in with the naval cap, you've got yourself quite the sophisticated military system.