I guess I should have emphasized that it was just the basic perks, and not ascension paths and megastructures. More systems in the base game is a good thing I think. If there’s a drawback to the new Paradox DLC approach, it’s the increasing complexity of managing all the possible sets of features. Basic mechanics that don’t make it into the base game are less likely to be expanded and improved in future updates.
Well, that was a pretty boring dev diary compared to the one I thought we were going to be getting. Though yea, I guess it’s nice that map-sharing as a noob trap is out.
Yeah, sounds like they had to throw something small together on short notice due to illness on the team. Definitely a filler episode. :)
Doomstacks isn’t a problem, its just in your head, a forceful fix would probably just ruin the game in so many other ways…I’ve seen it before…so please, forget about that, I don’t understand why its a problem at all really…
Why would anyone forget about it when they’re already limiting doomstacks?
Doomstacks are often an issue in the sense that they’re boring and tend to limit any kind of tactical play / player skill at the operational level.
They present a challenge as much as anything else, EU 4 uses supply and attrition, but that makes little sense in space, enforcing some silly command limit to prevent massing fleets would just make the game tedious like SOTS 2 was.
I say unless they really pull out the genious, leave it, focus on the parts of the game that needs some love and perhaps make fleet combat more intricate in terms of choice of strategies in actual battle, but remember, your the emperor, not the janitor.
Why does supply make little sense in space? You pay maintenance for your fleets. The maintenance has to get from your planets to the fleets somehow.
I don’t really want an arbitrary limit. I would prefer changing the underlying mechanics that make putting all of your ships in one fleet the default solution. Things like limiting FTL speed, making a larger fraction of the economy vulnerable to raiding, and yes a supply mechanism that limits how concentrated your fleet can be and how far from your supply bases you can go.
It does seem like they will indeed have some sort of command limit, but I will wait and see what they have to say.
Forced military ‘restrictions’ like task force size and composition was tried in Moo 3, it was horrible and useless.
However I agree, several things like raiding and perhaps some supply mechanic could be useful, but remember, in EU 4 its food that stops huge stacks, that can’t really apply to a spaceship, they should be able to carry food for months at a time, like modern submarines and carriers.
There is already some stuff involving how far away you can go, as I think warp times increase the further you are from your territory ?
I recommend heavily leaving combat hands off , its is honestly not the most important trait of this game, and in most 4x games I think combat takes WAY too much space compared to the other X’s.
After the entire galaxy is explored, what is left to do besides combat? Combat is the entire mid to end game. They either need to make combat less of a dull grind or give us something else to do.
I guess that’s what victory conditions are for, combat way to often becomes a huge deal in 4x, and actually once you hit endgame can get grindy in any 4x …that’s why I’d like to see 4x with even less hands on combat, I bet they could be just as fun.
Building your empire, gathering bonuses, optimizing how shit runs is actually VERY fun for misers like myself…
Well, I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t take a month or more to travel down a hyperlane. As it is, a voyage deep into enemy territory can take many months. If FTL speeds are toned down, that would be years. Long enough for all sorts of things to run low even on a fairly self-sufficient ship.
Yeah they have some gestures in that direction. It doesn’t seem to have a very big effect so far.
Pretty sure I encountered warp warmup times of almost 60 days, but yeah perhaps space travel could be slower, that would be nice
Doomstack diary is up. They clearly put a lot of thought into it and have a multi-pronged solution they are attempting. One is fleet size limits, so Janster may not like that, but IMO it’s no different than how their other games like EU4 work (just due to attrition and Combat Width). And yes, there’s reasons just having your admirals follow each other isn’t effective.
Here’s the diary:
Actually, it seems like having your admirals follow each other should be MORE effective, since they will now sync up FTL transitions. It seems like the fleet limit is not intended as a solution to doomstacks, but more as a way to get more admirals into the game, with the doomstack solution leaning more on the outnumbered bonus and the disengagement mechanic.
Seems that they also believe the FTL changes do make it harder to cover an entire empire with a single fleet.
Anyway, making each battle have a less binary outcome would be a good thing.
Also, will have to see how the armor and energy changes work out. I still like the idea of subtractive armor, but apparently it’s too difficult to balance.
Sorry, that was really vague of me, but I was referring to the fact that stacking numbers against your foe isn’t the end-all and be-all of winning a battle (and the war) now, so it’s not as effective to just lump all your admirals together as would be in today’s combat system. It’s similar to the stacking penalties you’d see in air combat in the Hearts of Iron series, except it’s a bonus to the small fleet as opposed to a penalty to the larger.
Wiz has been active in the thread and has given a lot of followup answers/clarifications. A reddit user compiled the questions/responses here. Here’s a couple three that stood out to me:
I’m a bit worried that the disengagement mechanic might not play out as they envision. The winning side gets to pull it’s ships out of the battle, usually before they are lost. The losing side gets to push it’s surviving ships through an emergency FTL jump, which IIRC, can kill them, especially when they are going in low on health. At least they presumably won’t have to wait for the timer if the situation is bad enough.
I feel that they should make the emergency FTL penalty a temporary combat debuff, rather than random damage.
That’s more numbers than concept, though. You could tweak the effect to cause less or no damage, for instance. And needing significant repairs is a pretty big combat debuff.
Removing the penalty entirely would work as well I guess.
Starting with more techs, adding more techs to the tree and stretching them across more hidden levels. The most interesting to me are the salvageable Fallen Empire techs and the change to tech/unity penalties. Now instead of each pop and each planet slowing down your research, it’s each controlled star system and each planet. Hopefully every system is worth claiming. I’d hate to leave ugly gaps in my map color.