I agree that the fundamental issue is speed of in-system events versus speed of FTL. However, I don’t think in-system stuff can be sped up that much. The basic time tick in Stellaris is days (with hidden ticks of a tenth-day), so being able to conduct raids in hours is not going to happen. Right now it’s months I think. I don’t think I would want to see fleets zipping around the inner system much faster than now.
Also, FTL speed in Stellaris is just really fast, compared to most other space 4x games. Within a few years your initial scouts can visit dozens of new stars. I wouldn’t be surprised if your starting three corvettes with hyperlanes could cover the equivalent of a Moo2 large galaxy in the time it takes for starting Moo2 scouts to reach their first destination.
FTL is a problem area for Stellar is in general, and ties back into doom stacks being optimal and warfare being boring.
I still don’t understand how they could draw inspiration from Sword of the Stars without undersranding what made the FTL types meaningful in that game.
I’m sure other players have tried to destroy enemy warp station networks and quickly realised its futile and the enemy constructors will rebuild them just as quickly?
Its also a shame they don’t seem to have looked at how EU deals with doomstacks or defeat. Did they never try a reinforcement and manpower type of system?
I still firmly believe Stellaris would be a much better game if the foundation had have been EU4 in space, and work on modifications from there!
I think all FTL movement but hyperlane movement should be nuked. Hyperlanes are an old-school, tried-and-true wargame convention that create nice chokepoints and actual things to fight over.
(Unrelated note: wow, some the old Marc Miller Imperium stuff can still be downloaded. I loved Dark Nebula.)
Wiz feels the same way, but there are issues with releasing an expansion that “takes away” features from a game. I’m interested to see what they come up with to deal with it. A refactoring of the entire system is in order, IMO.
I do not like the idea of bottle-necks with hyper-lane only. Now you may be forced to attack your neighbors even if your real objective is elsewhere. I can see that as an option when starting a game, but I would not want to be stuck with that when I can experience invasion from any direction, which seems more realistic.
This x1000. I also think they missed a point on weapons as well. In SOTS, if you research and equip the counter to your enemies weapons, you can beat fleets five times your size. In Stellaris, they have such a little impact you just end up aiming for a bigger stack. A 10k fleet of PD versus a 50k fleet of missiles works in SOTS but not in Stellaris and having good armor rendered ballistics almost pointless until researching armor piercing.
I am not talking about teleporting units anywhere in the universe. Let me make an analogy. On earth, if we were hyperplanes ONLY then that means you could only attack from Bantry Bay (Irish Port) to New York City, because that is where they hyperlane was. Any other port was off limits. No, it is a big ocean, so you should be able to attack anywhere. If you wanted to attack any atlantic port, then that should be fine. In fact, if you wanted to attack hawaii, then that should be fine too. It might be a long trip, but it should be possible to attack hawaii without going through a bunch of other ports on the way.
In space, its just one big ocean and forcing hyperplanes is just dumb.
Stellaris is basically the prime example of how you make a game out of great concepts/ideas in other games without understanding what made them great in the first place.
You’ve just describer Risk the board game, but I totally get your analogy. I actually like forcing only hyperlanes because bottlenecks are a good way to handle the stack of doom problem. Fill a bottleneck system with a flower shape of fortresses and a huge fleet and you stand a chance against a doom-stack.
Except now you are not conquering other systems because your fleet is on defense in a bottle neck system. There has to be another answer. I think slowness of travel has to be the solution. Again, going back to earth, why don’t we have “doom stack” fleets? Because it takes to god-damn long to get anywhere. If our doom stack in middle east, it can’t get to the pacific very quickly. If it could, then why have multiple fleets?
I kind of wonder if they started with things working kind of like SotS, but had the parameters all screwed up, and ended up adjusting and changing things in the wrong direction.
Like if they start out with warp, no restrictions, and can cross the galaxy as quickly a fast HoI fleet can cross the Pacific. Then STL travel to set up Hiver gates seems way too slow, let’s let them project the gates from the start. Since it’s a real-time game, the crucial turn to set up a gate ends (1 year!) turns into a 1-month timeframe, since warp is blasting around the galaxy. If things are going too fast, let’s add warmup and cooldown timers.
That’s all made up, but I could see if they started with a way too high warp speed then nothing would seem to work. Starting warp in SotS was only 2c. In Stellaris if feels like 400c.
Edit: I’d like to make a mod that had much lower speeds, but at this point the AI and UI is set up around reasonably fast travel. I think have a basic parameter badly wrong at the start can really lead you down the garden path.
Unless they make some kind of EU 4 logistical restrictions on sizes, they won’t cure doomfleets, and please DO NOT repeat Sword of the stars 2 fleets, that was a horrible solution…as for movement, why is this so important, I don’t see it personally.
There are bigger things to be handled, this is not Total war in space, its EU 4, and in that, the battles themselves is something you engage but cannot micro…and thats PERFECTLY fine.
Just want to mention that both SOTS 2 and Moo 3 forced player to use fleet based systems, and it both times sucked…dont’ go there…plx.
I have this impression that Henrik Fåhraeus looked at Sword of the Stars and said “This is fantastic, I love how different modes of FTL greatly affect how the races feel and how you play the game. I want to have this in Stellaris”. So they sketch out a skeleton and decide they want Warp, Hyperlanes, and Wormholes as the core methods. They kind of spitball some numbers in there (warp travels X fast, wormholes can transport Y distance) to get something functional in place.
Then, as time goes on, they tackle all kinds of other design issues. This is the first time they’ve made a non-historical game, after all, let alone one that’s in space! I’m sure it’s a learning process for all of them. But before they know it, release is only a few months away and there’s a raft of “must have” features still waiting to be implemented. The different FTL types don’t offer anything compelling, but they have indefinite post-release development plans so since what they have is at least functional, they can deal with it as-is and will just have to improve on it in the future.
Unfortunately, I think the issues with the FTL modes touch so many other parts of the game that there was no easy/quick fix. It’s not something that you can just play around with numbers without having serious impacts on other parts of the game. And you might get things to feel great for one or maybe two travel methods, but then #3 comes along and completely blows up the balance you’ve created.
I think they realized they had made a mistake (well, Wiz admitted as much, wishing they had stripped everything out except for Hyperlanes) and that it was going to take a lot more work than they initially thought. He’s mentioned before that it’s a major issue they want to tackle, but it requires a ton of (re)design work and hasn’t fit within the scope of a free update or story pack.
If my assumption is correct and that they finally feel like they have a design worked out for this, I’m extremely interested in what they come up with. I know Wiz has been hesitant to take away someone’s favorite FTL mode in an expansion, but it makes me wonder if they’re going to try to tweak the existing system or if they’re coming up with something entirely different.
It seems reasonable. Getting a set of asymmetrical FTL systems to balance out and feel right is definitely tricky. Also, since they don’t have fixed races, they can’t easily balance them out in another dimension (e.g. these guys are slow but tough).
Perhaps there are deeper reasons why porting the SotS numbers directly doesn’t work well.
The command limit mechanism was basically driven by engine limitations. There was just a limit to how many ships, turrets and flying ordinance their engine could handle at a single time. Now computers are faster, so they can afford more, Stellaris ships aren’t as detailed and they aren’t as worried when it lags out since you have no tactical control anyway.
Still, I do agree that logistics-based limit is a better approach overall, if you can get it to work. Basically limit how many ships you can operate in a system by the size and number of nearby friendly fleet bases. I think they were gesturing towards that in the second game, but it wasn’t really finished.
I am not talking about tactical movement or control, but the speed of movement on the galaxy map. If you haven’t noticed, it’s really fast. That has a lot of knock-on effect in terms of what strategies are viable. There are a lot of people who don’t think it makes a difference though. Yet another unbridgeable divide!
Okay ignoring that the game is realtime and you have adjustable speeds, I guess you are talking galactic distances…I somewhat agree, but warp time does increase the longer you are from your worlds…that’s something?
As for speeds themselves maybe, the galaxy on 1000 star isn’t really that big, but I did try a mod with 3000 stars, that was more like it…with a speed hit ofcourse.
It was mentioned a little earlier, but it’s the ratio of how long it takes to travel from star-to-star vs how long combat takes. A raiding force can’t do any significant damage in the time it takes for a doomstack to traverse an entire empire. I don’t think making the combat super fast solves it, either.
Right now there’s not much of a thought in terms of fleet placement. You just roll up everything into a zerg and fly it around wherever you need, because if you split your forces you’re just asking for their own doomstack to rush in from the other end of their space to stomp the hell out of you.
It’s just all kinds of weird that traveling many, many, light years is significantly faster than a skirmish within a gravity well (let alone laying siege to a planet).
