Hadn't thought of that, but I can nerf monster damage if necessary to compensate.

 

I used destroyers in battle against the AI at the end. The tech for cruisers popped up, but I didn't think it was worth the time to go for them yet.

 

Having not min-maxed, nor researched into min-maxing, I didn't really know about the current supremacy of Corvettes, personally. As such, I've got a mixed fleet when it comes to ship sizes at the moment...

It feels more appropriate, I suppose.

Anyway, I'm hoping the first main update has noteworthy changes to sector mechanics and I suppose fleet mechanics as well. I generally agree with the idea of:
Corvettes < Destroyers
Destroyers < Attack Cruisers
Attack Cruisers < Attack Battleships
Cruisers/Battleships < Bombers, and to a less exacting degree, Corvettes and even less, Fighters
Bombers < Fighters, and to a lesser degree, Corvettes

Of course, the main reason for the "less exacting degree" comment when it comes to Corvettes vs Cruisers/Battleships would be that I agree with a return to pre-release version of armor having a flat damage reduction aspect on top of the percentage.

As a result, prior to the lowering of shields by the larger weapons of heavier ships(because of armor's damage reduction) or anti-shield weaponry(which aside from one exception is notably not also anti-armor!), the small scale anti-armor weaponry needed by Corvettes to damage such Battleships, and to a lesser degree, Cruisers, would be largely ineffective.
(exception, one could equip anti-shield lasers on the Corvettes, but said weapons would be negligible against the armor after the shields are dropped, and thus an opportunity cost to simply using a mixed navy including larger ships)

Of course, after shields are lowered, they would be extremely cost effective if equipped with anti-armor weaponry. It would just force a more mixed arms approach to combat than now.

Then again, I also believe that like in some older games(like the awesome Space Empires), anti-armor weaponry should have penalties against shields, and generally the opposite is the same(even if it's just a base damage penalty combined with a damage multiplier against shields in most cases), but that's just my personal nostalgia, perhaps.

Another potentially nice idea, and one also used in Space Empires, I believe, would be for increasing armor penetration/anti shield values(aside from Torpedo's shield penetration) to scale with larger mounts. 100% armor piercing on otherwise-comparable dps weapons for small slots is a little silly. Although, I admit that the above concept of armor-piercing weapons being essentially pointless against shields if they don't meet the damage threshold would likely make allowances for 100% armor penetration on small weapons being just fine for the most part.

-----

Ah, I have a sudden urge to play some Space Empires, even if it is a rather old game.

/random rant

 

Looks like "Beautiful Battles" on the workshop has already had some success with fiddling with battle balance - even if PD accuracy can't be changed, cooldown can - so I'm hopeful that will be sorted out.

 

Okay, I've got a few ideas for mods that could be interesting.

First up would be an evasion nerf - Re-balancing so that Corvettes aren't as OP.

Secondly, buffs to static defences - One thing I noticed when I declared on Oment was that he had a fortress (that was a nice surprise by the way; I had no idea what was happening for a moment), but it didn't last anywhere near as long as I thought it would. I might have lost a ship to it, but I'm pretty sure I didn't. Maybe some kind of damage or rate of fire buff would be useful here, since I don't believe they're upgradeable.

 

Actually, Oment had at least two defense station. You invaded one sector and the one I did had one too. Same idea, they barely damage my corvette. I know the fortress are way more damaging with fire power averaging 5k+, but it would be nice if defense platform and fortress actually brought something useful to the game. Stuff that could be interesting:

More hampering the fleet's movement; have them grab fleet that comes within a radius and not only those coming directly into the system you build station on. It's really good against hyperlane, but the other two FTL can just bypass those easily enough and jump straight pass.

 

I think you guys don't understand that the corvette meta doesn't kick in until extreme late game where you can actually get the technology and modules to boost corvette evasion. I mean like after Battleship tech.

Until then, progression works as you would expect.

 

Well that was nice.

Teched up to take on a fallen Empire. Three fleets of fully specced up 'vettes with battleship boosters attached, and managed to lure them all into a big ass battle for one of their home worlds. My 45k of fleets, plus another 40k of alliance mates (though these guys are crap against the fallen empire, I out-teched them massively), against the 55k Fallen Empire fleet.

I'd already had one confrontation at this scale (without my allies) when I managed to warp in right on top of them, and that particular battle was going very well indeed until they emergency warped away.

This time, though, all three of my fleets decided to sit in little balls just inside the Fallen Empire fleets' ranges.

Everything whelped very slowly thanks to my 'Unyielding' admirals and the moronic AI. I pulled out the sections that I could, but even jumping them back in just caused the same thing to happen again. It looks like the ships enter 'combat mode' as soon as anything gets in range (including, for example, tachyon lances on the enemy's ships)? And then defensive ships just stay at that position, wat?

As a result, my attempts to reach the Unbidden on the other side of the galaxy were stymied, and everything went tits up.

It seems a bit of a damned if-you-do and damned-if-you-don't situation. Well balanced fleet? Sorry, AI will pretty much spam corvettes, you lose. Spam corvettes? Your fleet WILL go full retard the moment the AI adds anything bigger than a destroyer to their mix.

 

I've spent a few hours browsing through the mods section to see if there was anything worth sharing. A decent amount of gems, actually. There are 26 pages, though, and a whole lot of duds!

I'll probably share the cosmetic mods as a collection to peruse(supposedly multiplayer compatible without the other players even needing them...?), with a mix of icon, color, and even a nice little Ethic selection tooltip mod(lists Ethic-specific tech unlocks during Faction creation).

There are a few actual mechanic-changing mods, but those would need to be agreed upon and used by everybody to work, so... Also, I'm rather curious to see what the upcoming Dev patch does first. In regards to a mix of requested community input and their own ideas and implementation of both.

 

Since everyone is talking about balance, I feel I should point out the devs are talking about the game in the future.

In the post, he is mostly talking about the future of the game and said that the first patch will be out towards the end of May. He also says they are planning to add more to the mid-game at some point and more.

 

Oh, that was a nice post you linked to. Thanks, Belra!

 

One thing I've noticed about the game which does bug me a bit, It seems like the empire placement is a little wonky. I mean, it often seems like you get half a dozen empires clustered right on top of each other, then one Empire with a quarter of the galaxy empty and wide open for the taking.

 

My only real gripe so far is that when you make sectors, you can't even check on the planets anymore, you can click on the spaceport but Im willing to let the AI take over the governance of these worlds, but occasionally i want to pop in and do stuff, like maybe force migrate a pop to make that new Gaia world multiethinic.

 

I found this write-up to be pretty spot on. Some of the ideas are things Paradox did in previous games that could be used here to great extent, or new ideas to capitalize on the space format, and other things to just improve gameplay function.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellaris/comments/4jgwf4/just_what_is_stellaris_missing_exactly_a_full/

 

I think part of this is by design - during their blorg stream they talked about empires being "spawned" in clusters as being a feature.

 

That's not exactly how it works. There is a parameter for "preferred distance", so the game setup will try to spawn all empires close to that distance away from someone. So if you have 5 empires on a giant map, they will all spawn in a little cluster on one side of the map.

Steelbadger, this is an issue I've noticed, and may have found a cause for (though no solution). Were your corvettes behind your battleships? i.e. if you look at the triangle, were the battleships in front? The game has some obscure method for deciding which ships get put in the front and which in the back when you merge fleets or add new ones to a fleet (has something to do with the alphabetical order of the fleet names, best I can tell), an if you have your slower ships in front your corvettes will sit in the back and go full retard because collision avoidance doesn't let them slip past the slow ships in the front.

 

Yeah, Lazy Ship Syndrome is probably the most frustrating thing I've encountered. I've found that if you actually make multiple fleets and attack from multiple angles, it will help the AI a lot. Of course, this means you need multiple Admirals...


The second most frustrating thing is the Sector Management AI. As a player, we can make the desert bloom with very little effort. We know to prioritize farms that can later be redeveloped until we have a high population count. Simple stuff.

The AI does not do this, and I've narrowed down why to a few quirks:

1. Stay In the Black
   
   • Sectors will always attempt to remain resource neutral. Minerals and Energy are not supposed to go bellow zero.
   • They will prioritize this over Growth. Super frustrating.

   ​
2. Slaves Are Scientists Too!
   
   • Slaves are handled very poorly. I've enslaved entire planets, only to have the AI start slapping down Power Plants immediately.
   • This is likely related to #1, though it doesn't explain the Labs...
   • I have yet to see the AI build a Slave Processing Plant.

   ​
3. Slaves In the Capitol Are Prohibited
   
   • As it says. Despite being really efficient, the AI will work tirelessly to remove slaves from the Capitol.
   • This causes all kinds of population shuffling quirks.

   ​

All in all, I feel like this sort of thing is why people don't trust the Sector AI. I think we'd all be fine telling Sector A to produce nothing but energy, then Sector B to produce nothing but minerals and trusting the Core Sector to make sure that the budget is balanced in the end. Sectors were created to reduce late game micro, not macro.

I also feel that Sectors really need some sort of Growth Target in the management screen. Basically allowing you to have a set Food surplus target until the planet is full, then redeveloping Food tiles once Pop cap is reached (if the appropriate option is chosen.)

This is the most tempted I've been to work on a simple mod in a long time...

 

I have a modfix for combat AI ready to go based on this. You have to do a little more work in ship design, but it should be worth it. You could also just download that one, but I haven't seen the code so I don't know exactly how that version works or how well it works.

I'm also making some changes to overall combat balance. The one thing I'm not totally sure of yet is what to do with the PD vs. Missile balance. Right now I'm leaning towards moving PD to be Large mount only and removing the Small missile mounts from the game.

I'm trying to give the different weapon types their own distinct feel, and I think pushing missiles into a larger, long-range artillery category helps there. I'm also going to reduce firing speed on the PD a bit so you can actually overwhelm them despite the 100% accuracy. Thoughts?


Incidentally, what the fuck were they thinking when they made the initial weapons balance? Mass Drivers are identical to lasers, except they are less accurate, don't get obscene amounts of armor pen, and the tradeoff is that you get a small damage boost and 5 extra range... The most egregious case is looking at Tachyon Lances vs the Kinetic equivalent. 20% accuracy difference, and the lances have 100% armor pen...

 

As a player, I don't like the idea that I wouldn't be able to use Missiles as a starting weapon, so no Small mounts doesn't sit well with me.

Have you considered lowering the Tech level of Swarm Missiles? They really are effective at overwhelming PD, but the tech is so late and gated behind Missiles IV that they rarely get utilized. You could balance Swarmer I to Torpedo I tier, remove the Missile IV requirement and add a medium mount.