Doomstacks

Problem 1: Disproportionate Casualties

Problem 2: Decisive Battles

Problem 3: Lack of need for Admirals

Ship Reactors

Armor, Shields and Hull

Missiles and Hull Damage

Combat Computers

War Doctrines

Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. Today's dev diary is about the 2.0 'Cherryh' update, and will delve into the long-awaited topic of Doomstacks, combat balance and some changes coming to ship design and components.'Doomstacks', the concept of rolling all your ships into a single stack in order to be able to beat your opponent's single stack has long been a popular discussion topic on these forums. It's a fairly common design problem in strategy games owing to the principles of force concentration outlined in Lanchester's Laws : A larger force engaged with a smaller one will not only win the battle, but take disproportionately less casualties. In other words, if a 13k force engages a 10k force (all components being equal so there's no other factors at work), the 13k force will not only win, but will inflict far more than 1.3x the casualties on the inferior force that the superior force inflicts on the lesser force. This, combined with the high decisiveness and lethality of combat in Stellaris (and many other strategy games) means that bringing an inferior force to battle is always a no-win situation: Not only will you lose tactically, you will also lose strategically, as whatever damage you inflict on enemy is outclassed by the damage they inflict on you in turn.Many people have proposed solutions to Doomstacks. Some have been simple, others complex, but what most of them have missed (and the reason we have taken so long to address this) is that there is nosolution. It is a complex problem with multiple causes and problems, and the only way to begin to address it is to tackle those problems individually. To that end, what the Stellaris designers did was break down the Doomstack issue into its component problems, and then create solutions for those problems. I will now list the problems we identified, as well as our solutions to them.Disproportionate Casualties is the problem we talked about above: Engaging a larger force with a smaller one is virtually always a losing proposition because of the disproportionally greater casualties taken by the smaller force. Naturally, a larger forcemore powerful, but the fact that a force twice the size will annihilate the enemy while barely suffering any losses makes combat and warfare far too pain-free when you have the advantage in numbers. For this reason we have decided to introduce something called the. The Force Disparity Combat Bonus is applied when a smaller force is engaged with a larger one in battle ('force' being every ship engaged on one side of a battle, regardless of how many fleets and empires are involved on each side), and gives a bonus to the firing speed of all ships belonging to the smaller force. As an example () a force that is half the size of the enemy might gain a 50% bonus to its firing speed, representing the fact that the smaller force has an easier time manuevering and targeting the larger enemy force. The larger force is still more powerful and will likely win the battle (unless the smaller force has a significant technological advantage), but will almost certainly suffer losses in the process, making it possible to force an enemy to bear a cost for their victories even when they have overwhelming numbers.In Stellaris, fleets that are not ordered to make a manual retreat will fight to the death. Combined with the disproportionate casualties problem, this means that wars are often decided in a single battle, with the loser being at best diminished to the point of no longer being able to offer effective resistance. It also encourages excessive caution in warfare as every minor skirmish turns into a bloody battle of annihilation. To address this problem, we have introduced the concept of. Rather than always fight to the death, ships can now flee battle and survive to fight another day. In combat, any ship that takes hull damage while already below 50% health will have a chance to disengage from battle, depending primarily on the amount of damage inflicted, and secondarily on the ship class (smaller ships have an easier time disengaging than larger ones). A ship that disengages will instantly leave the battle and can no longer attack ships or be attacked, though it will still show up in the combat interface, with an icon clearly indicating it as Disengaged.If a fleet engaged in battle contains only Disengaged ships, it will be forced to make an Emergency FTL jump and become Missing in Action, limping home heavily damaged. However, if the combat ends without the fleet making an emergency FTL jump (manual or forced), the Disengaged ships will rejoin the fleet at the end of the battle, damaged and in need of repair certainly, but otherwise normally operational. The intention with this feature is that generally, more ships should Disengage than outright be killed in battle, making it so that an empire that loses a battle can pull back, repair their ships, and stay in the fight rather than having to replace every ship involved in a combat loss. In addition to the factors mentioned above, the chance for a ship to Disengage is also affected by various modifiers such as terrain (see Dev Diary #92 for details on Galactic Terrain), War Doctrine (more on that below) and whether the ship is in friendly territory or not.Though not directly related to Doomstacks, one of the issues we identified and wanted to address was the fact that empires generally only need a single Admiral, regardless of whether it is a small empire with a handful of corvettes or a sprawling empire with hundreds of ships. To solve this problem, we have introduced the concept of. Command Limit is a limit on how large any one individual fleet in your empire can be (right now it's a hard-cap, though we might change it into a soft-cap), and thus how many ships an admiral can give their combat bonuses to. Command Limit is primarily given from Technology and Traditions,. The reason for this is that we do not want a fleet's command limit to suddenly drop due to the death of an Admiral or other temporary factors that would force frequent and annoying reorganizations of your fleets. Note that Command Limit is not meant to solve the problem of Doomstacks itself, but combined with the other changes (and the FTL changes that makes it so it's harder to cover your entire empire with a single fleet) it should naturally encourage keeping several fleets, as it is now possible to skirmish and fight delaying actions without risking the entire war in a single battle. As a part of this (and the FTL changes) we have also made it so that fleets that are following other fleets will now jump into FTL together, making it possible to have fleets following each other without becoming 'decoupled' as they travel across multiple systems.We believe that these changes, together with many of the other changes we are making (Starbases, FTL rework, etc al) will naturally change the way wars are fought away from Doomstack primacy. Certainly, there will still be wars decided by large-scale engagements of both sides' navies, and certainly it will sometimes be advantageous to keep all of your fleets in one place. But this should no longer be theway to play, and there should be many new tactical and strategic opportunities available to players in how they use their navies.Moving on from the topic of Doomstacks, we're next going to cover some changes coming to the ship designer and the way ships are built.The first and possibly most significant change is that we have changed the way Ship Power works. Instead of reactors being a component like any other, requiring a fiddly excercise of swapping reactors for shields/armor and vice versa, each ship now simply has a reactor with a certain power output depending on ship class and technology. For example, a starting Corvette has a Corvette Fission Reactor, outputting a measly 75 power, while a Zero Point Battleship Reactor gives you a massive 1550 power to balance between weapons, shields and Aux utilities. To add a little bit of flexibility into this system, we have created a new line of utilities called Reactor Boosters that go in the Aux slot and provide some extra power for the ship, allowing smaller power deficiencies to be addressed without needing to downgrade components. Basic Reactor Boosters are available directly at the start of the game, and better ones can be researched as you improve your reactor technology.Armor has always been a somewhat problematic mechanic in Stellaris. Originally, Armor was a direct damage reduction (where 1 armor negated 1 damage from any shot), but this effectively resulted in high-armor battleships being completely invincible, so we changed it into the percentage-based reduction system that is currently in the live version of the game. However, we couldn't simply map 1 armor to 1% damage reduction, as you once again ended up with invincible battleships and barely armored corvettes, so we created a formula for mapping armor to damage reduction that pretty much nobody understands, but largely can be broken down into 'put some armor on your cruisers and battleships, ignore it on corvettes and destroyers'. Add to this the fact that you can still get very high damage reduction numbers on bigger ships, and you begin to understand why plasma has frequently been the dominant weapon in the combat meta.To address this issue once and for all, we have decided to rework Armor to work more like Shields and create a more direct trade-off between the two. Each point of Armor is now effectively one extra hit point for the ship, forming a new health bar between Hull and Shields. Armor generally offers the same amount of extra 'health' as Shields of the same level, but unlike Shields will normally not repair itself over time, instead requiring the ship to head to a Starbase for repairs to restore its armor. However, Armor has the advantage of not costing any power, and is a more reliable protection, as unlike Shields it cannot be bypassed by missile weapons. Different weapons will do differing amounts of damage to Armor, Shields and Hull (for example, Autocannons shred shields and hull, but are very weak against Armor), and there are new components and resources that reward specialization (by for example making you choose between boosting all armor OR shields on a ship), making it so that specialized ships are more effective but vulnerable to other ships built to counter them. Finally, the direct effectiveness of Armor and Shields relative to hull has been increased, and a ship can now have Armor/Shield hit points directly comparable to its hull hit points.Missiles, even with the buffs they were given in Čapek, occupy a bit of an odd spot in Stellaris, with no particular role of their own other than simply being somewhat more efficient weapons that are hard-countered by Point Defense. The one exception to this is Torpedoes, that have their own dedicated slot and purpose (bypassing shields and destroying heavily armored ships), but even that slot has the rather ill-suited Energy Torpedoes that aren't Torpedoes at all but just a regular energy weapon, resulting in even more confusion and diffusion. In Cherryh, we've decided to make all missiles more similar to Torpedoes, making it so that the Torpedo slot is the only slot in which you can put missile weapons, and making it so that. In addition to this, we've also made a change to ships that have taken hull damage: Damaged ships will have their speed and combat ability reduced, all the way down to a ~50% reduction when they are nearly dead. This means that missiles, unless stopped by PD, are now a weapon explicitly for softening up the enemy by damaging and reducing the effectiveness of their ships, slipping through shields and wreaking havoc directly on enemy armor and hull. It also means that empires that want to invest heavily in the power of missiles will need to use designs and ship classes that can pack torpedo slots, instead of simply putting missiles on everything that would normally mount a different weapon. There are still different missiles with different roles: Torpedoes are slow and inaccurate but excellent at punching through armor, while Swarmer Missiles are poor against armor but wreak havoc on hull and (as before) are ideally suited to overwhelming enemy PD. Energy Torpedoes have been removed from the Torpedo slot and now instead a Large slot weapon, the equivalent of Kinetic Artillery for Energy weapons.Another change to ship design in the Cherryh update is the reintroduction of choosing combat computers for your designs. Rather than there being Corvette, Destroyer, Cruiser etc combat computers, there are now four broad categories with their own tactics:Ships with Swarm computers charge at the enemy and make 'attack runs' on the enemy, similar to strike craftShips with Picket computers advance forward and engage the enemy at close rangeShips with Line computers remain at medium range and fire at the enemyShips with Artillery computers hang back and fire at the enemy from maximum possible rangeAs we still do not want one ship class to be able to fill every possible role, we have still restricted which computers are available to which classes (for example, Corvettes can choose Swarm or Picket) but there is always at least two choices available for your design.Lastly for today, I just wanted to mention the introduction of War Doctrines. This is a new policy that becomes available once the Interstellar Fleet Traditions society technology has been researched, and allows you to pick an overall strategic military doctrine for your fleets based on how you intend to fight. For example, the Defense in Depth doctrine gives a bonus to ship combat ability inside friendly territory, ideal for defensive wars, while the Hit and Run doctrine increases the chance of your ships Disengaging from combat and the time you need to be in battle before using Emergency FTL, perfect for players that want to use raiding or skirmishing tactics.That's all for today! Next week we're going to be talking about technology in Cherryh, and how tech tiers and progression is changing. December 7th also happens to be the release date of the Humanoids Species Pack , so you can count on us saying something about that as well. See you then!