Stellaris Has Too Many Ships

[@MediumRareOpinions]

YES! Make individual ships count more and make their veterancy matter more.

[@TheDSasterX]

ship veterancy is barely a blip rn, 100% agree!

[@CanaldoVoid]

@@TheDSasterX Most people probably don't even know this mechanic even exists.

[@Goldjin13579]

I think this could be an interesting strategic tradeoff. Trained crews are more valuable than the equipment they pilot, but swarms of cheap or automated ships can be churned out faster. Let people choose between making veterancy matter more or churning out an unending tide of robo-ships

[@hodgzer]

Like in real life!) yes

[@jonatanpersson82]

​@@CanaldoVoidyeah i didnt until now

[@SignificantNumberOfBeavers]

When your ship is automatically named "Blossom of Lavender XCVII" you know the number of ships broken.

[@lorinkramerone]

I'm surprised he didn't mention how reducing fleet capacity would make Juggernauts matter. Even if the devs balanced them to the point where they were efficient in combat, their cap limits them to the point where they just don't matter right now. Reducing fleet capacity down to something like 200 in late game, then a Juggernaut would represent over one sixth of your fleet capacity and one of them showing up in a battle would make a huge difference.

[@goldenhate6649]

Juggs are pure novelty at this point. With the changes to ship repair, to ease of getting out of combat repair, the only real use is as a mobile shipyard (but holy hell is the shipyards system still TRASH). Also, give them SOME GOD DAMN SPEED or let them fleet up, micro'ing a jug is annoying AF. In real life, fleet ships are all designed to have the same speed. A carrier is just as fast a frigate because otherwise the whole fleet is bogged down by 1 ship. The whole fleet system from ground up needs to be fixed, its been a buggy mess since they touched it. Fleets desperately need rng based targeting (ie selecting a random ship to go after, priority depending on weapon range and ship size). The fact fleets will all target one ship is annoying.

[@wolfschadow6399]

I'd actually say to keep the naval cap at the current point but instead make ships much more expensive with it, but also more powerful. Basically naval cap use, fleet power through health and damage and maintenance cost should go up to 5 times the original. This would mean each of your initial 4 corvettes would be much more important as it also makes sense that a still developing empire could not field much more and that would just bite the lag in the butt immensely.

[@SharowbladyeGaymerPorate]

I’ve gotten to the point where I just don’t build Juggernauts bc they’re so slow they can’t keep up with anything and die way too fast bc there’s just too many enemies

[@Calozard]

they aren't useless, you just got to find the right use. lately a played a game during wich I put full afterburners on my juggernaut, got attacked by 2 fw at the same time in x25 crisis along with grand admiral, and I stuck their fleet in a system for 50 ingame years as they ran after my jug to kill it. Given that ability to regen and outrun overpowered fleets, it's actually a very good ship.

[@mnm8818]

rant: well pops are in the dozens. so each equals to 500million. it should translate that to ONE spacecraft= 10, 100, 1000 so yeah needs to be less mass swarms though i always thought spacecrafts were mainly AI drones (with the combat computer chips) like Enders Game

[@ByteSizedGamer]

the larger ships almost never get built by AI from my experience, because swarming cruisers is just that good. and you cant utilize Titans without them getting sniped out of your fleet by the swarms. Late Game ends up being Battleships and Cruiser Spam lagging the game, and battles just being "who has the higher number of ships" even on GA. I hope they scale everything down to a reasonable scale.

[@lisaruhm6681]

Wouldnt Corvette spam lag the game even more?

[@letsplaysvonaja1714]

As if AI would understand the meta

[@tsrorst2792]

I noticed this and made a couple big stacks of 50 frigates and 25 corvettes each and set them to steslth into the heart of the AI battleship swarms. Objectively speaking, I only need go kill a quarter of their fleet to make up for a total loss of my own. And I never do lose my fleet while I destroy 70-100% of theirs. My own experience though, I rarely see AI Juggernaughts

[@therealspeedwagon1451]

I think fleets should be balanced and one ship should not be seen as “better” than the other. All ships have their own merits and their own niche, even in a late game navy. Players and AI alike should have valid reasons to use all ships even into the late game. For that I think there should be a minipop system, in that each ship has mini pops that act as the crew of the ship. Bigger ships have more mini pops and the loss of them means those pops are killed. There should also be policies for ship crews as well, those being skeleton crews which use the bare minimum of mini pops to crew ships, but greatly reduces their combat effectiveness, and maximum crews which increases the effectiveness of ships but the loss of a single battleship could mean an enforcer or soldier on a random planet is killed. Same can be said for armies. Actually ground combat as a whole could be reworked, but that’s a can of worms for another time and a very controversial topic.

[@ByteSizedGamer]

@@tsrorst2792 i never see AI Juggs, Collossi, or Titans unless they spawn with them.

[@art-games6230]

I wouldn’t consider changing this a bad thing, as long as they balance it with events. Crises, etc. Also getting nerfed by the same amount of ships

[@GOLANX]

Maybe we don't nerf the crises so x25 crisis is actually impossible and x5 is a challenge.

[@therealspeedwagon1451]

@@GOLANX a 25x crisis should be a challenge. A very masochistic challenge, but a challenge nonetheless. It shouldn’t be downright impossible though.

[@GOLANX]

@@therealspeedwagon1451 nah 100x should be the challenge, much cleaner number, so where do we draw the line exactly?

[@art-games6230]

@@GOLANX the crisis is not meant to be impossible

[@cewla3348]

@@GOLANX if you want x100 to be a challenge, then normal will be 1% the power of that. If x100 is possible, x1 is incredibly easy. x25 is enough to where it's BARELY possible, but x1 is still a challenge for beginners, and a stopping block for intermediate players.

[@draconian_79]

I miss the days when the Fallen Empires felt like a threat. Nowadays the Fallen Empires tend to get eaten by AI empires in the mid-game because they have such overwhelming numbers. Reducing the ship count could go a long way to making mid and late game crisis factions a challenge again.

[@grafeugenius]

did you run on high difficulty? because at normal difficulty (no bonus for me and AI) they are still hilariously puny compared to fallen empire.

[@kv1_t34]

Obly a problem on higher difficulties, you will NEVER see a FE getting bodied by the AI by mid-late game on medium difficulty.

[@cewla3348]

@@kv1_t34 yeah, but every game balance style has to focus on making it fun for either: A. the super-sweaty grand admiral 2500x crisis 2201 still calls it easy B. 'whats a planet' but it still has to keep the other extreme happy. If you focus on B, you have to add challenge for A. If you focus on A, challenge for B. Currently, A gets no challenge due to broken mechanics.

[@kv1_t34]

@@cewla3348 Indeed, its a balance issue, but if A is intentionaly looking out for ways to upset the balance of the game, then maybe, dont do that? Devs should still add new stuff for A to play with (and break), but A shouldnt be complaining about game performance while intentionaly only playing broken/overpowered builds.

[@goldenhate6649]

Your entire complaint could be fixed by a single slider option to scale the FEs. Removing the limiters on awakened FE's to allow them to act as (mostly) normal empires in regards to production and allowing them to be affected by Grand Admiral is a good start as well.

[@vrabeldawg]

More ships, gotcha

[@MontuPlays]

*rages*

[@sr.lontra]

Mooore. MOOOOORE -some angsty emperor idk

[@lisaruhm6681]

@@MontuPlays what about 5k naval cap of only corvettes each from 2 warring players?

[@feifeili1658]

@@MontuPlayslocal reptile malds over ships

[@Yokoto12343]

​@@MontuPlaysALL THE SHIPS

[@aaronwentzel8695]

I always liked this idea of fewer ships. When watching sci-fi like Star Wars or The Expanse, it's always more meaningful when single ships represent a greater portion of a nation's military

[@lolasdm6959]

Star Wars or the Expanse are pretty funny, when governments spanning several solar systems engage in total war, there would be millions of ships. This isn't space opera lmao.

[@ThatGuyNicho]

The United States Navy is the largest Navy in the world. It has, in service: 11 Aircraft Carriers (Equivalent of Stellaris Battleships); 35 Amphibious ships of various kinds (Equivalent of something between Stellaris's Troop Transports, Battleships, and Cruisers); 27 Cruisers (Cruisers), 72 Destroyers (Destroyers); 65 Submarines (probably equivalent to a somewhere between a Frigate and a Destroyer, at least in terms of complexity); 2 Frigates + 22 Littoral Combat Ships + 14 MCNs + 14 Patrol Ships (Equivalent to about 52 Corvettes). Assuming an Amphibious ship uses about 6 worth of 'fleet cap' each, and a Submarine about 1.5, then I make this 699.5 worth of 'fleet cap' for the US Navy.* Your typical Stellaris player would scoff at those numbers and deride them as rookie. My point, however, is that said scoffing is entirely unfair and unreasonable. Nobody could seriously say that ELEVEN aircraft carriers is not staggeringly huge; even one could wipe the floor with most nation's entire air forces! I hope that by doing this math, I can support the argument for a smaller number of ships with some proportionality. (*It would be interesting to compare the Royal Navy and People's Liberation Army Navy to this to see what those scores are, but I don't have the time.

[@lolasdm6959]

@@ThatGuyNicho Yeah you are talking about a country not even controlling 2% of earth's surface resources... Moreover, spending only 6% of economy in peacetime. Mind you most of the earth's resources are not just in the mantle, most is beneath it. Also most of the surface is covered by oceans and we barely exploit much of it's mineral resources. It's not staggering huge compared to fxing space empires, or space empires during total war.

[@ThatGuyNicho]

@@lolasdm6959 That's true, but I was using it as a demonstration of scale. It's reasonable to assume a space Empire, like a contemporary Earth country, wouldn't be able to go absolutely crazy on how much of its GDP it was able to put into its space fleet. The resources required to produce a large fleet of spaceships would probably be roughly proportional to that society as the biggest and most advanced navy is to one of ours.

[@bmpixy]

​@lolasdm6959 yeah, but a spaceship is to a modern naval vessel as that ship is to a canoe. while the space empire has more resources, the ships it produces are proportionally more expensive in turn.

[@drebyte]

this reminded me of star wars imperial star destroyers, they used to be mighty and terrifying ships in episodes 4 & 5, but in episodes 8 & 9 specially in the battle of exeggol there are so many star destroyers that they lose their impactfulness as you showed in your clip with hundreds of battleships making them look dull

[@goldenhate6649]

Ahh, Kathleen Kennedy, the queen of not knowing how the fuck to make anything impactful or meaningful

[@coreymetzker2521]

Episode 8 & 9? There are only 6 episodes of Star Wars mate.

[@aralornwolf3140]

@@coreymetzker2521, 6 and then the three official fan made movies... :D Actually... there were the Ewok movies and the Clone Wars animated movie... do you count them?

[@azvathan]

@@aralornwolf3140 Don't you think it is kind of insulting to call those things FAN made?

[@coreymetzker2521]

@@azvathan extremely! lol only a person that despises the SW Universe would have produced such drivel.

[@ThatDarth]

YES! this would also allow for stealth fleets and small strike forces to really get things done in a game and matter and would also possbly allow for some empires to forgo fleet entirley and focus on defence platforms

[@goat5136]

Stealth fleet at the moment is a huge joke

[@corspeman]

To add to the Defence Platform idea, you could wildly increase the cost of hyper drives, and build reasonable system defence ships. Considering a basic Hyperdrive costs a whopping 5 alloys (for something that allows you to break past the speed of light, thats impressively cheap), or about half a gun, increasing the cost of them might allow for actual defence fleets. Edit: Spelling.

[@nikoloso]

I HAVE BEEN THINKING ABOUT THIS FOR SO LONG. This would be awesome and make individual ships worth more

[@thorzap1374]

I'd like to see more specialized ships, think quality over quantity. Building a ship, especially in the early game, should be a long and resource intensive process but the ships should also be far stronger and have a lot more utility than they currently do. Thinking of Star Trek for a moment, the Enterprise is a ship primarily meant for exploration whereas the Defiant is a Warship equipped with cloaking technology. Both are meant to operate alone for long periods of time in deep space. I'd like to see more of this.

[@Genesis8934]

Another thing on quality vs. quantity, it'd be cool to see something like that show up in traditions too, giving a parallel to EU4's Ideas of the same names. To go with your Star Trek reference, think of the Jem Hadar's/Dominion's ships. They largely mass produced them and outnumbered the AQ species' in terms of ship counts. That said, maybe there should be a restriction for picking Quantity vs. Quality (both mutually exclusive and time-based, like mid-game plus only).

[@Zsinj3]

One thing I think could have a nice niche and necessary place in your navies with such a change like this would be genuine artillery ships. Big hitting, slow firing/moving, but able to hit a starbase from the edges of the system. In open naval combat they'd be rushed down by corvette or destroyer swarms, but for getting through those Maginot systems such a ship would be very interesting.

[@ishill85]

i'd like more generalized ships as well, star trek vessels are warships sure, but also science ships and constructors and traders.

[@lostbutfreesoul]

I still try to build specialized fleets but that made the problem worse: Oh there is a juggernaut here, time to build three fleets of 100 corvette swarmer, as abrasion to those big weapons. This highlights the problem though, that the lack of real specialization leaves us building the same three to five fleets every game. It creates the illusion that you need some sort of specialization, such as point against carries, when the reality is you just need to put the best weapons possible on three different types of ships. Then you produce those ships in the quantities needed to adjust for the opponents ships. Often the same three ship types for me: Artillery - large weapons as possible Carriers - these are good to put point platforms on as well Liners - As many small or medium guns as you can stick on that class With the occasional swarmer fleet built for Titans, World Destroyers, and Juggies, silly enough to go without an escort.

[@MediumRareOpinions]

​@@lostbutfreesoulI had a feeling that more balance could be reached by making each class of ship have its own individual cap limit. So you can't build your entire naval cap as a single hull class

[@miseracle7291]

True. Even more, I prefer to value (from a RP-perspective also) my cruisers and battleships instead of thinking of them as just "expendables". But it's a common issue with lategame in nearly every RTS / TBS - macro completely replaces microcontrol.

[@azevol216]

My idea for space resources is , there are fewer of them in systems, but the systems that have them produce them at greater numbers.

[@therealspeedwagon1451]

Especially research resources, which haven’t changed at all in the past 7 years. Research stations still output the exact same number of research points as they did years ago. Back then it was actually good because scientist jobs only produced one or two research points each, but now it’s an ancient design that is practically useless and needs a massive rework.

[@luka188]

I think there should just be more on average and deposits should be increased by a factor of 4 or 5 as well, where the average of a system would be around 30 minerals/energy and 30 science in the late game (With all the space mining techs). Some outlier systems could have a ton of resources, like hundreds, while others may be scarce and only have a something in the 10's. Not every system should have science resources, but those that have science deposits should have meaningful amounts, like as much as 4-5 or so scientist jobs per deposit (Where a midgame scientist makes around 15~ ish research). Make systems something worth fighting over, make them an important part of the player empire, and make it a meaningful choice whether you want to place a habitat on something to get jobs out of a deposit instead of having the mining station (When fully worked, the districts of a habitat should produce about triple the yields at least of a deposit, so it becomes very worthwhile to build habitats regardless, but not as much of an increase if you cannot yet work those jobs right away, now one scientist job or one miner job are vastly superior to any deposit of space resources, which is a shame as it makes space resources essentially worthless). The best systems you find now are maybe worth a few pops at best, even special precursor systems are maybe worth 3 or so pops, and the Tiyanki system is perhaps 6+ pops worth in the earlier game, which is good value, but it still feels very underwhelming, while late game it is maybe 3 pops worth. I think finishing a precursor chain should give very significant benefits, like a system worth about as much as a regular mid game size 20 planet in space resources alone (Not super optimized late game yields). So like, a few hundred research, minerals and or energy equivalent (Maybe some good amount of alloys from space as well). My late game scientist produces 33 science, not even the most optimized possible, just decent (It is 45 per scientist on my homeworld). 2368 in a current game, I have 18K research, with only 1 science nexus (I could take at least 3 more from the AI, but I deliberately haven't). Less than 250 of that research comes from stations and starbases. The megastructure produces 900 science, and my 520 researches produce the other 17.000 research. A little extreme in my opinion (I could be making a lot more research if I optimized better, since I have 2800 pops, but I can't be bothered to micro the pops anymore). Maybe after further analysis, you might say on average research deposits should be able to produce at least as much as 2 researcher jobs per deposit late game, if not more (Thus bringing the value up to 60-90 per deposit). As for minerals and energy credits, a similar amount (Less per deposit, make deposits more common, and on average have systems produce around a hundred resources each in the late game, which would be the same as 3~ pops).

[@Bill-2203]

I think all stars should have high energy output based on the class of star with largest outputting more perhaps scaling from 10 to 30, black holes have 1 dark matter output, shrouded worlds have 1 zro output, gas giants should have 1 exotic gas output, molten worlds have 1 exotic motes output, frozen have 1 exotic crystal output, barren have 5 mineral output with shattered worlds giving 20 mineral output and then have some juicy science output from special projects and anomalies

[@luka188]

@@Bill-2203 10-30 energy is nothing.. One job produces 40+ energy. A space station around a star for the kind of empire we build in stellaris should be able to produce a lot more. For gameplay purposes not too much, but it wouldn't be overkill to have them produce the same amount as 1-5 jobs each depending on the type. My late game economy has a Dyson sphere, and lots of other energy income, yet I still only have +1100 positive energy flow because of starbases and fleets. Space resources produce 250 energy, less than 10 jobs worth. Even if I didn't have habitats on most of my energy deposits it would at most be around 400~ energy production from all my mining stations, which is just a pitiful amount considering my jobs produce 10000 energy. One habitat with 16 jobs producing energy produces over 500 energy, and an optimized machine world with orbital ring produces over 2000 energy, half a dyson sphere with only 46 pops working it. Space resources are far too low.. Even if all my stars produced 30 energy, that's only equivalent of .7 pops production per star, and would only be around 50 pops worth of production right now, or one extra planet, really not significant at all.

[@cewla3348]

@@Bill-2203 you can crack a barren world though, so that would just be a way to get 20 mineral habitats everywhere

[@DenemeDokio]

So instead of getting upwards of 4-5 titans at end game, we would instead have just the one or MAYBE two? That is more fitting for the ship yeah as they feel like the new 'flagship' of a fleet like how battleships used to be in old stellaris. Make them a huge drain of resources that would make it a great effort to make but worth the rewards in the endgame.

[@therealspeedwagon1451]

I think two would be best. In my playstyle I end up playing large scale galaxy spanning wars just for a secret fealty with one vassal. As galactic emperor this is actually the only way to reasonably gain territory because you can’t wage wars of conquest or even colossus total wars. As a result I tend to have many fleets of varying ship type. Although unfortunately this has the unintentional side effect of spreading my forces way too thin. I could be completely overwhelming in fleet power compared to everyone else but I’m spread so thin across the entire galaxy on multiple fronts that it doesn’t matter.

[@error5202]

This, seriously you end up with about a dozen by the end of a big game

[@StylesEste]

Only way that would genuinely work is if they allowed titans to effect the system, and not the fleet. It would put more emphasis on protecting a Titan "flagship"; One, that has an escort for defense (slave ship class; Titan escort - can only be in the Titan's fleet.) Otherwise, absolutely not. And battleships were never the flagships, even in old stellaris. ;) Considering I'd throw 400+ battleships into a single fleet back then. Then the planet cracker's came out.

[@DenemeDokio]

@@StylesEste Yeah, effecting the system would work well for titans as a flagship class while reducing their numbers and giving them more tankyness in general.

[@MediumRareOpinions]

​@@StylesEsteI'll take that trade off. One titan that buffs a System.

[@danka13200]

The idea reminds me of Battlestar Galactica Univerce where entire planet could afford a single capital ship and few of smaller

[@lolasdm6959]

It would make no sense....

[@mxviii]

@@lolasdm6959 Not really. Capital ships take a lot of resources to produce. In reality the country with the most powerful military on Earth has only 7 capital ships. In Star Wars, an Empire that focused entirely on military strength only had 25,000 capital ships to maintain order across 1.3 million planets.

[@lolasdm6959]

@@mxviii Which is FRANKY RIDICULOUSLY SMALL. The country that can only exploit 2% of the earth's crust , and crust has in total less than 1% of total minerals on earth? Do your own math lmao, just mining moon would be able to make hundreds of thousands of capital ships. Not to mention most of the solar system's minerals which aren't in the sun are in Jupiter. If you can exploit all those resources you can easily field millions of capital ships. And if you can exploit a sun, then holy moly you can have billions of capital ships. The sun is iterally a gaint fusion furnace turing lighter materals into near infinite energy and heavier elements. Realistically space ships are overblown in Stellaris. IRL space empire's most valuable military assets are planets. You realistically need a few hundred thousand ships to out gun pluto colony lmao.

[@cpaul562]

@@mxviiiwhich Empire are you referring to? Legends or Disney? Because legends Empire had over 70 million planets and I haven’t seen an official number for Disney, also that’s just the number of star destroyers you listed not capital ships, the Empire had 1,636,352 warships, if you go with that bit of lore but if you use two other bits suddenly the Empire has a lot more ships. sorry for the incoming wall of text. You know how the empire only has 25,000 star destroyers? Well turns out that number was a mistake from the author, he used a fan estimate that was wrong. The fan estimate used two bits of lore from the role play book, the first bit of lore was there only being 24 star destroyers per sector and the second bit of lore was the ruusan reformations, in this bit of lore it stated that there was 1,024 sectors, which if we do the math equals 24,576 star destroyers. Which if rounded up equals 25,000 star destroyers. That’s what the lore the fan estimate used, problem is the empire didn’t use the ruusan reformations to determine how many sectors they had, this was stated in the same book. Instead the two bits of lore that tell us how many sectors the Empire had actually come from the imperial army. In legends the imperial army is stated to have 10,000,000,000,000 troops with 774,576 troops per sector, now if we use the ruusan reformations to determine how many imperial troops per sector, it comes out to 9,765,625,000 troops per sector. This is how many sectors the empire actually had, 12,910 sectors, with this number we can estimate how many star destroyers, warships, fighters, walkers and shuttles the empire has. The empire is meant to have 309,840 star destroyers, each sector also has 1,574 other warships, This gives us 20,320,340 warships. Now for the star destroyer’s complement. Lets start with crew, we’ll be starting with the minimal number of crew, which puts us at 5000 crew per destroyer. This gives us 1,548,200,000 minimal crew. Now for the maximum number of crew, 37,105 crew per destroyer. This gives us 11,496,613,200 maximum crew. Now troops per destroyer, each one carries 9,700 troops. This equals 3,005,448,000 troops per destroyer. Now fighters, each destroyer carries 72 fighters, this equals 22,308,480 fighters. Each destroyer carries 30 AT STs and 20 AT ATs, this gives us 9,295,200 AT STs and 6,196,800 AT ATS. And please keep in mind that this is ONLY what the star destroyers have, this not counting space stations, ground bases, other warships like Interdictors, Arquitens or carrack cruisers. The empire in Legends is massive with 70,000,000 worlds with populations significant enough for representation in the imperial senate, this makes it at least 70 times the size of the imperium from 40k. Again sorry for the wall of text, I hope you’re doing well and that you have lots of success and joy in the future.

[@mxviii]

@@cpaul562 legends doesn’t matter. Official Disney canon has the republic representing 1.3 million worlds. And the empire inherited that. Not every world in the galaxy is part of the empire or the republic before it. The military is still minuscule compared to the area of space it has to defend. And this is actually fine, because hyperspace is fast as hell. A full planet invading army can move from one system to another in a matter of days. You don’t billions of fleets when just one is strong enough and fast enough to handle a handful of systems by itself

[@herwigdesk5861]

"each ship have its own story" i like that. seeing a ship growing in experience and having an historial of battles. that would be very nice to have and it would be possible with less ships

[@MontuPlays]

Ships have experience, already! We just don't bother when there are literally 500+ ships in an empire to check!

[@art-games6230]

@@MontuPlays yes, it would be really fun if we would have the time and ships so we could put the best in an ‘elite’ fleet. Would also make naming ships more fun and easier

[@therealspeedwagon1451]

@@MontuPlaysI think ships should also show what battles they’ve been in. Like a long list of every single battle it has fought in. Maybe even take this a step further and add in models for ships that have taken damage and show age. Maybe the crew has slapped some alien pinup on the ship.

[@farhanullah7421]

@@therealspeedwagon1451 Bro we want to reduce lag not increase it.

[@Leck400]

@@therealspeedwagon1451 That would be amazing.

[@Aliksander54]

I think one way to handle this is not necessarily to reduce fleet capacity, but to make advanced COMPONENTS use up some capacity. In other words a battle ship with lower tier missiles, plasma, and armor will cost less fleet capacity to its equivalent 50 years later with higher tier weapons and armor. Fleet capacity is, AFAIK, supposed to represent your ability to upkeep ships and keep them operational. More advanced components need more invested time as they are more complex. There would need to still be balancing required, but it would be a natural way to reduce ship numbers in general late game, but still give the options for some people to use larger swarms of ships if they wish, but sacrificing using the best components.

[@delrunplays2903]

Interesting idea

[@KaizerKlash111]

Yeah the balancing would be made so that the ratio of fleetcap/component stats decreases over time, so that it becomes more effecient to have high tech stuff

[@marcelgrabowski5939]

Good idea!

[@Slider93]

That is actually some insane thinking. It makes sense that 10 old battleships would be roughly equivalent in upkeep as 3-4 modern ones as the technology is way more complex, while offense and defense differ by maybe 50% per unit. And you have to make a choice to either make fewer but more tanky and offensive ships or to make just more cheap ships. I like this idea A LOT

[@CharackBane]

Using upkeep is an interesting mechanic. Especially as It would reprioritize the rare elements. You see this in some of the mods.

[@voltorian-minecraft]

8:42 the way you describe the battleships reminds me of titans in eve online. in the bloodbath of b-r5rb, a battle that took 21 hours, 7500 players, and several thousands of ships, only a little over 200 titans were brought into the battle, and less than 100 were lost

[@Exakan]

The game got a huge power creep, many things should be nerfed like the amount of ships.

[@B3RyL]

Especially tech. Like holy cow, producing 10k tech a month or reaching 60+ repeatables should NOT be a thing. And you can tell it wasn't even intended, as your small-to-mid sized vassals will continuously revert to Protectorate status because they just can't keep up with the tech, even with the buffs they're getting. And also just spamming tech buildings cheapens the game in a big way. Instead of empires focusing on the strengths of their individual builds, everyone just pumps out tech and alloys in mind-bending amounts, because they don't want to be left in the dirt. Ideally a tech-focused empire would just about finish all tier-3 tech with a couple of repeatables towards the final decade of the game. And before you say "it's because everyone speeds up tech research in options", no! I always play on default tech research time, and default end-game year, and still get to 20+ repeatables even with my meme strats. There's just too much tech, and too much cost for not pursuing tech at a break-neck pace. And to me that's just a bit boring.

[@MimiKe_]

@@B3RyL At least something like that can be adjustable with tech cost settings.

[@B3RyL]

@@MimiKe_ Still, it doesn't solve the issue, just prolongs it. Tech-focused empires should be the only ones to reach repeatables as a way to offset deficiencies in other areas of their empire. Like a crowning achievement of THEIR playstyle.

[@CC-ru8pi]

Technocracy + materialist + run as many scientist councilors as possible is incredibly cursed as far as game balance goes. How the hell do you balance a game where it's (easily) possible to rack up +150% research on *every single research slot*? Other leaders have kind of gimmicky things but imo this one is so much stronger for game progression than any other strategy it isn't even funny.

[@B3RyL]

@@CC-ru8pi I think Paradox quietly fell into the fallacy that buffing B is always better than nerfing A. As a result we see a massive power creep, as the OP put it, that is essentially like a massive snowball rolling down the hill, endlessly gaining mass and momentum and becoming increasingly uncontrollable. They really need to cut back on buffing, and start nerfing. Sometimes less is more.

[@vga991]

The nerf to ship capacity would only make sense if the scale of the game itself is reduced. It would be ridiculous that an empire that control half the galaxy and has tamed both a star and a black hole, can only field a few fleets of 20 battleships each. Even so, everyone has the right to play the game as they wish, so adding an slider for naval capacity multiplier could be an option.

[@EnriqueAvalos-t7r]

¡That's true!

[@quackhead1661]

I like this the most, i already hate how my empire that is half the galaxy con only have 9 leaders, id hate to see my giant empire not being able to field a massive fleet

[@wolfschadow6399]

I actually disagree. The game obviously is not to scale but the devs could play with that. Each battleship is the size of a continent and should represent a continents worth of ressources the empire puts into maintaining it. Each battleship should be the pride of a naval fleet and possibly its flagship. Make ships matter again.

[@EnriqueAvalos-t7r]

@@wolfschadow6399 I disagree. So you are ghe biggest empire in the galaxy, and you choose building giant battleships only, ok, that would mean Titans, Colossus and Joggernauts will dissapear and that will remove the feeling of having a super massive weapon in the game. You're not free to build the size of the ships you want, so the technological progression building bigger ships bigger with the years also dissapear.

[@mayda4orcebewivu]

This is the change I didn't know I wanted until now. Having more meaningful ships, battles, gains, and losses would be huge for the game. In the current game ships like titans and juggernauts feel somewhat like an afterthought and used only for their aura effects, especially the juggernaut class. But now having that mobile shipyard would mean so much more when there are a lot less ships in the game!

[@phluphie]

I am totally on board w/ reducing the number of ships dramatically, across the board. I've always thought admiral experience would be a good way to put a soft cap on fleet size. Sure, you can have 100s of ships in your fleet but if you got a level one Admiral, the combat ability will be seriously nerfed cause of the inexperience of the leader.

[@DaemonJax]

But half the point is to prevent the AI from building so many ships, not have them build the ships anyways and have them suck.

[@CamilomboNPC]

When a fallen empire gives you problems you send 5000 ships and if that doesn't work you send 10000

[@yurisonovab3892]

Power creep has also led from battleships having fleet auras to having a NEW BIGGER ship that fleet auras instead.

[@Multarix_]

Idk about reducing the naval capacity - the better option would be to change how ship fleets are rendered. Rather than rendering 200 ships in a corvette swarm, just render 10-20 and each ship counts for x amount of the damage based on the total number of ships remaining in the fleet.

[@jonathanphipps9607]

100% agree... I honestly think naval capacity needs to be intrinsically linked to population. Much like manpower in other paradox games. If you Loose ships... you loose populations as they are needed to refill your fleet capacity. It allows the game to manage its growth via warfare... as costly wars end up reducing the calculations. It also makes warfare a serious affair that has to be taken much more seriously. If it were up to me, 10 fleet capacity would cost 1 pop.

[@jonathanphipps9607]

Sidenote... it also reduces lag via population control.

[@MediumRareOpinions]

It has always been a bit ridiculous that a battle involving thousands of ships isn't causing major upheaval to the economy of an empire. Your suggestion would help to reduce the amount of snowballing as empires cannot as quick replace the lost pops as they can the alloys.

[@robertbeier5521]

Absolutely dude. Like in Hoi4, if you're a minor nation with good focus tree modifiers but trash manpower, you can make a hand full of insanely good breakthrough or special force divisions, however if you lose them to an encirclement, it means so much more because you cant easily replenish it. One of my best games was dying as hungary on the eastern front as a handful of my hungarian tanks and shock troops tried to hold my capital off against soviet onslaught. It's the relativity that adds depth, which means drama which means entertainment.

[@KleptomaniacJames]

Bad idea. Pops dont grow in lategame

[@samiamrg7]

+KleptomaniacJames Maybe they would with less lag and more pop turnover from ship losses.

[@Lancor84]

Whew, these are some power meta numbers from multiplayer I guess. I play with 0.25 habitable worlds and 1.5x tech and tradition modificator, so that could be a reason why I only have these numbers 100 years later.

[@lordzendikar]

I would love it if they introduced something like manpower into the game with ships having an additional manpower upkeep

[@therealspeedwagon1451]

I had an interesting idea for minipops. That being each pop working soldier and enforcer jobs contributes to the military manpower of an empire. A minipop would be a small fraction of a full pop, which is roughly equivalent to anything from a quarter of a million to a quarter of a billion people. There should also be policies for the conscription of minipops as well. With skeleton crews outfitting ships with the bare minimum of crew necessary to function, but also greatly reducing their combat effectiveness, and crewing ships to the nines greatly increase’s effectiveness, but the loss of a single fleet could mean multiple enforcer and soldier pops die. Same could be said for armies. Actually ground combat as a whole could be reworked, but that is a controversial topic and a can of worms for another time.

[@JamesTaylor-on9nz]

@@therealspeedwagon1451 I mean, naval capacity basically already fills most of that function, but you could make it so that the destruction of ships will kill x number of pops in soldier jobs back on random planets. Or perhaps a better system is to split the fortress into two buildings, one which acts as a normal fortress and provides soldiers jobs, and another called a "naval base". Remove the naval academy and anchorages from starbases and combine them into a single building which can be built once on each planet, providing "navy crew" jobs, each of which provide a certain amount of naval capacity. A "naval base" can be upgraded with techs and rare resources to provide more jobs, and thus more naval capacity. If a ship is lost during combat x amount of these "navy crew" pops will be killed, lowering naval capacity. You can just keep reassigning more pops to the jobs, but that will start affecting your ecnomy.

[@YSaturn]

@@JamesTaylor-on9nz Additionaly, a certain percentage of the navel capacity could be blocked for a certain amount of time, after a fleet/ships gets destroyed symbolising the need to rertain new crews. Loosing a few ships in a battle wouldnt be this significant, but loose a most of the fleet, or even loose the battle would have a greater impact on the blocked fleet capacity, as the remaining ships cant search for survivors. This would also prevent getting over the fleet capacity too much, as you always want to have some capacity in reseve, to be able to still build ships, even when a certain amount of fleet capacity is blocked at the moment.

[@vovanbalashov]

@@YSaturn I think it's better than killing pops in such naval bases. When armies are destroyed in a ground battle, pops do not die, only armies die. And then they take time to recover. The fleet limit, in my opinion, should work as well

[@dzikdziki2983]

Manpower... in the age of ai?

[@Spartan12]

I like the idea of singularly more important ships as opposed to the disposable battleship number 286 that I've churned out without a thought after a fight to replace battleship number 175

[@specs.weedle]

I think the ship carpet visual problem could be remedied if ships were arranged in a more 3d formation rather than just a flat mass of steel and guns.

[@inslava]

Stellaris is a 2D game. Galaxy is flat, even if your petty planets are not

[@curious2882]

This would make getting the random ship her and there from anomalies actually pretty big for early game! As someone who likes to play Stellaris multiplayer with friends all the way to year 2500, this would be a welcome change. More often than not we can't get to the endgame let alone the lategame before things come to a standstill and desync.

[@OHYEAH1GOD]

Lietrally covered this point in the vid bud

[@Cevonis]

the amount of naval capacity isn't the issue, it's the number of ships. the simplest fix is to simply combine ships into squads of five whenever you get five of the same ship together. basically you remove four of them and increase the stats (except speed) by x5. now you have effectively reduced the amount of ships to a fifth, and if that's not enough then you combine the squads into platoons so one ship represents 10 instead of five.

[@jordanmontgomery9548]

This would be super easy to balance rather than an overhaul of the resource, star base and capacity system

[@vovanbalashov]

In general, there are many solutions to this problem (reducing the number of ships with an increase in their stats, without increasing their stats, creating larger efficient ships that occupy even more of the fleet limit, and even stupid in the context of stellaris: combining many ships into one supership). The task of the players is to point out the problem, and the developers have to find the best solution to this problem

[@vincecancilla6091]

I really like this idea. They could even take a page out of the small ships model mod, and have those little "squads" of ships operate as functionally one unit. It'd look a lot better visually too

[@hexidecimark]

Naval capacity's punishment and indeed naval capacity itself is odd. It throws too much focus off of ships. The challenge of maintaining an actual ship is in making sure it doesn't fall apart. In stellaris, the challenge is having enough space trucks earmarked for military use to haul some invisible quantity of stuff to a fleet, and it basically works like a discount on upkeep.

[@Sy-jz4eq]

Maybe add ship stacking function? Like 5 battleships can be combined into 1 squadron so that while it functions similarly, it uses an asset of a single ship.

[@WoolTexas]

Another issue this would solve is the weakness of space hazards. Amoebas, drones, the marauders + the khan all feel really weak when you can levy fleets large enough to smite them very early

[@WistfulDread]

I've always felt, that if they want to emphasize the "character narrative" in Stellaris, we need smaller fleets and armies. I Need to care about individual ships and troops. Losing a single battleship should be devastating, armies troops should have meaningful growth. I want my Rico's Roughnecks. I want my Enterprise, my Yamato. I want the Horror of that single Borg Cube

[@art-games6230]

If you want troops with meaningful growth better ground combat is probably the first priority

[@ByteSizedGamer]

as it stands, army combat is "spam best troop count until you get ~5000 Army strength, Indiscriminate bombard until low enough to win, land, wait 2 days, win and move on. Its boring.

[@WhiteFang103]

I want Empire narrative. If I want character then there's CK3 which is literally build around characters.

[@dragatus]

Too many ships is a 1st world problem. If you have issues with it, it's because you're just too damn good at the game. The economy & naval capacity Montu shows in 2230 is what I'd expect around 2300. The lategame economy he shows I've never experienced. And I'm likely not even that bad of a player if you look at the entirety of the player base, which is around 10-12k concurrent players on average and something like a million players in total. Anyone dedicated enough to hang out at the forums or on r/Stellaris and follow a Stellaris KZbinr is likely in the top 1% of the playerbase (1% of a million is 10k people). Reducing naval capacity across the board might fix the problem of too many ships for top players, but would murder the fleet size of the average casual in the crib.

[@hankrearden5460]

Again, I go back to Star Wars Empire at War. I think there's lots of things this game can borrow from that. The space battles were never that large but they were always impactful and the fleets you had really mattered. Going up against capital ships always had a lot of stakes. I also think they should basically clone the ground combat as well.

[@kristijanmadhukar516]

Space Operas having too few ships has always felt stupid to me though. I am a galaxy-spanning empire, logistically I should have thousands of ships from each planet. While this would make gameplay more engaging, the RP aspect will make me not take it seriously.

[@張皓鈞-l6v]

I think the main reason why too many ships happen is with how many pops you had during endgame, still find it hard to believe that after 2-3 generations (by looking at how fast leaders retired), a civilization is able to expand a hundred fold or even more. Definitely not realistic, even with cloning…

[@henryneubert7798]

That's not a generation. You hire a leader at age 30 and after year 100, their chance of dying increases. A generation is about 20 years, maybe 30. If we say that 2 "generations" of leaders take 180 years (2*90), then that's something between 6 and 9 generations. In our own history, the Thirteen Colonies increased their population massively within 180 years. Migration from europe was only a small fraction. The demand for labour in this flourishing colony increased the prize of labour, which made it easier for people to feed a large family. Child labour made children profitable for their parents. In Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations", it is stated that women in the Thirteen Colonies produced ridiculous amounts of children. The more a country is progressing, the higher the demand for labour, the higher the wages and the higher the drive to make more children. That's exactly the scenario for new planetary colonies.

[@fentgawd]

@@henryneubert7798🤓🤓🤓

[@MrVentches]

already human population growth the last century was absolutely insane, add near unlimited space and future tech toit and it would become ludicrous

[@henryneubert7798]

@@MrVentches The society has to make producing children profitable too, which is not the case in today's industrialized countries. But yes, unlimited space and better healthcare would definitely boost fertility, even if the cultural impact on fertility stays equally low.

[@aralornwolf3140]

@@MrVentches, The population growth is primarily caused by... the lack of death. For a large part of history, infant mortality rate was nearly 50%. Child mortality rate was almost as high. Together, it meant that a high birth rate was required to maintain population level... as agriculture and health care improved... infants and children stopped dying. The elderly started to die off later in their life. This meant that the world's population expanded. Eventually, people recognized that it's pretty effing hard to care for 5+ children and stopped having a lot of children. Right now, the average family has less than 3 children in technologically advanced and stable nations. However, it's projected that in 50 to 100 years, the human population is going to contract as fewer and fewer kids are born to replace the older folks who die resulting in a stable population level.

[@BADASSATRONLIVESHERE]

I would prefer that we go the Civilization route and allow the creation of "corps" and "armadas" where we combine fleets together. The game engine could be changed to treat that group as one unit, and we can still have the fleet limit for leaders within that Armada. In these armadas, not ever single individual ship needs to be visually displayed at once. The issue here is a tech limitation and how fleets are displayed. Rebalancing naval capacity invites waaaay too many problems. Just focus on fixes to how the engine processes individual units, and rethink the art expression.

[@nokta7373]

Imma say this: i miss the old planet grid system. A massive size 25 world like that you are showing = 25 pops. You have 6 worlds, even if they were all as massive as the size 25 one, that would be 150 pops, in your entire empire, at endgame year. Today, you barely fill an ecu with that and to run a massive empire you need THOUSANDS o pops. Which in turn generates a massive amount of resources. I believe they need to take another look at the district system + the fleet system and either rework that again into something better or at least MASSIVELY reduce the number of pops and ships needed and provided. A quick and dirty idea could be to just have districts providing way less jobs. Say, 1 district = 1 pop, and also reducing the numbers of districts to make each one matter more strategically. Less pops = less resources = less ships. It all ties together. Right now we have bloated into massive numbers of well... stuff which in turn reduces our ability to play on massive galaxies. Instead of playing with 1000 stars and few resources, we are swamped in resources but crammed into a tiny 400 stars galaxy because it's the best we can handle these days. We just need *less* of everything, so we can have more again.

[@pyrrhus6264]

I’d say just reduce pop growth in half or whatever, and double the amount of resources they produce while scaling up the cost of buildings and districts. The overall balance of the economy should stay intact, but less pops would mean way less lag. Plus then pops, buildings, and districts both feel more meaningful and there’s less to micromanage / queue up at one time

[@clamor95]

Stellaris 1.0 versions look more reasonable

[@Writer-Two]

I opened up this video wholeheartedly disagreeing with you, but now having heard your reasoning i'm inclined to support you.

[@willzulu8844]

Coming from the modding community, I’d say NSC3 and downscale mods covers a lot of the issues here in terms of visual representation (downscale mods), and ship variety and cost (NSC allows you to change how much a ship should initially cost). I’m very biased towards large space battles with a variety of ships serving distinct roles . I’m always close to maxing out the 9999 limit because starnet does not F around but it certainly can take a toll in the late game, so I get it. I think the right balance the devs can do to make the game more bearable for vanilla is allowing players to adjust the costs of the ships, making battleships and titans be better premium platforms worth an immense investment.

[@jimbothefuzzy]

I played Stellaris on launch. And then dropped it when they decided to completely rebalance ships to make them more specialized, which I think was 1.3. So instead of them being "Ship classes are determined by total size and players get to decide how to use that size," it was "Ship classes are limited to doing specific things." And while that got rid of Tachyon Lance Destroyers (since Tachyon Lances used to be a Large weapon), it also restricted flexibility. And I think that's what led to the fleet cap going up so much. Since each ship type is so restricted in what it can do, you need different ship types to respond to different threats. So having your entire navy be a dozen battleships is suddenly impossible. Because battleships can no longer fulfill every role they used to fulfill. So if you're going to do this, you're also going to need to take a look at the parts you use to build ships, and what slots are available. And the only reason I'm back in Stellaris is because KZbin insisted I watch Montu's videos around the time Nemesis came out and he made it look too cool to stay away...

[@aralornwolf3140]

They made changes to the game to prevent the players from making mono-ship fleets, lol. The issue is, they don't really _understand_ their game. As such they can't figure out how to balance it. All ships need to have a purpose... and most don't. This is because technology only changes two things, damage and reload times. A fission missile and a marauder missile both have a range of 100 units and both travel at the same speed. The only difference is the marauder missile deals ~6 times the damage than the fission missile. Of course, that's just the beginning of the problems... if we assume a corvette is about the same size as the largest aircraft carriers... what would a low yield tactical nuke do to it? That's right, annihilate it. Yet... those fission missile barely do anything to corvettes. On top of that, the large sized mass driver has the exact same range as the fission missiles... and they are able to fire twice at a target 100 units away, before the first missile even arrives. The kinetic artillery/battery has more damage and is longer range still! Then, they made torpedoes/neutron launchers have a maximum range of 30 units and do scaling damage... the damage going _up_ the larger the target is... this was an attempt to force the players to diversify their fleets. It just made titans become a liability. *Shakes Head* They failed to understand that advances in technology means previous strategies/tactics become obsolete. As the players go from barely using fusion energy to using dark matter/energy ship design will change to reflect the advances... yet, they still want us to use the exact same weapon mixes that we started the game with. If they looked at the technology tree and allowed the players the freedom to experiment.. and made technology reflect reality... the players will advance from a phase I tech, when kinetic weapons and missiles are the norm... to phase II tech when energy weapons and fighters are part of the weapon mix... to phase III tech when kinetic energy weapons are gone as they are obsolete... to phase IV tech when fighters are gone as they are obsolete... to phase V tech when small warships are gone as they can't survive battle... Phase I = The humans of The Expanse Phase II = The humans of Battlestar Galatica Phase III = The Republic/Empire/Rebellion of Star Wars Phase IV = The Federation of Star Trek Phase V = The Shadow and the Vorlon of Babylon 5

[@jimbothefuzzy]

@@aralornwolf3140 Okay, to say "The devs don't understand their own game" is a bit of a simplification. How many people have worked on Stellaris? How many people have held the role of Director? And that's not to count all the different teams they've had all over the place. And I gave up on the game back then because it felt like the people in charge were telling me what I would find fun instead of letting me discover my own fun. Thankfully we have NSC2 and Gigastructures to give me the fun I like. Though I'm almost entirely playing single-player with mods. So I rely on Montu's videos to understand what things are like without all that. I do agree with you on ships needing a purpose. But remember we're fundamentally using the Clausewitz engine. Which means the conbat going on is going to be similar in complexity to their other games. At least in terms of calculations. Probably doing something like naval combat in HoI4. At least I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case. I haven't played around with that in a while, but I just never felt like that worked right. Also, the redesign of ship classes to what we have now was done when Wiz was still in charge, IIRC. Torpedo damage stops scaling at Battleships, IIRC. It doesn't matter how much bigger you get, the damage doesn't increase. But I understand your point. It's not something I personally experience, but I can see why it would be an issue. One of the things missiles are supposed to be able to do is retarget while in flight. So if there are four waves of missiles headed for one target, and the first wave wipes it out, the other three waves should find new targets. Does that offset them ariving more slowly than kinetic weapons? I don't know. That kind of calculation and testing (assuming that feature works properly) is beyond my skillset. There's a lot of problems with the combat in Stellaris. But it feels like the devs we have now are trying to fix up the systems that exist without breaking everything else. If we're going to get a major overhaul to how ships work, it's going to have to come alongside a DLC. It just feels like too much of a major change to happen otherwise. Though I'd love to be wrong. And your technological progression path assumes "KE weapons are eventually rendered useless." The advantage of KE weapons is that they provide a LOT of combat power for CHEAP. Maybe not cheap to move around, but there's likely never going to be a better orbital bombardment system than just lobbing asteroids. At least if you don't mind a little time. There are lots of reasons that KE would stick around, at least to some degree. Including the fact that the simple mechanisms of modern firearms are very reliable, especially given all the different environmental and battlefield conditions you'll run into. And I also seem to recall the Federation deploying fighters in the Dominion War and them having a decent effect. I suspect space warfare is going to wind up a lot more along the lines of "Small command ship with large swarm of drones" than "Single big ship with lots of big guns." And the reason is that space combat will happen at such ranges and speeds that your only hope of survival is not getting hit. Sure, you might be able to shrug off one or two hits, but bigger ships mean bigger resource expenses. And you're basically building nothing but Titans (and, yes, that's an oversimplification). Warfare changes as new technology evolves. But principles of warfare don't become obsolete overnight. And the transition period would take a long time. And none of the Paradox games are designed to show that evolution. (I probably missed some stuff, but this reply just felt far too massive already.)

[@aralornwolf3140]

@@jimbothefuzzy, As for what the Federation called a "fighter" they were not fighters. As per Memory Alpha: "Although not originally designed for combat, the ship that became known as the attack fighter was capable of being modified to carry an impressive arsenal. Designed for a civilian role, and sized similarly to the Starfleet runabout, the original design was only lightly armed, primarily intended for personnel and cargo transport." In a wet-navy, they would be called Torpedo/Gun Boats. In another IP (the Honorverse by David Weber) they would be called Light Assault Craft. These vessels are nearly the size of a Corvette... As you dislike long comments... I think it's safe to say I don't like how they balance the game. As for kinetic energy weapons, yes, sure, great against immobile targets, which is the very opposite of what they are used for, ships. Energy weapons travel at _light speed_ and thus are extremely accurate at long range especially compared to kinetic energy weapons and in Stellaris they aren't. "One of the things missiles are supposed to be able to do is retarget while in flight. So if there are four waves of missiles headed for one target, and the first wave wipes it out, the other three waves should find new targets. Does that offset them ariving more slowly than kinetic weapons? I don't know. That kind of calculation and testing (assuming that feature works properly) is beyond my skillset." And missiles are countered by Point-Defense turrets, which is completely reasonable. Most missiles fired at extreme range (and they should be the only weapons _with_ that range) wouldn't hit their targets (either losing lock due to enemy ECM, missing due to enemy maneuvers, or getting blown the hell up by PD)... but those that do should result in a massive amount of damage to their targets, destroying smaller ships easily... which means _players_ would need ships to be dedicated to the anti-missile role (and the AI required for this also needs to be changed.. picket ships should be staying within close proximity to the battle-line that they protecting instead of rushing off and getting destroyed attempting to intercept ships they shouldn't be fighting). I've done a little bit of the math... and Stellaris even has done it, a bit, with "average damage per day" that each weapon has. Although, it doesn't take into account travel time... even then... Kinetic weapons, when I did the math, were superior to missiles. *Shrugs* It's been over a year so things might have changed. *Presses F to Doubt* Anyways... I would prefer if Stellaris' fleets were organized like Illwinter's Dominion 4 armies... Dominion 4 combat provides the player a crap ton of strategy/tactics their squads can utilize... including formation, primary targets to attack, and method of attacking said targets.

[@jimbothefuzzy]

@@aralornwolf3140 It's not that I dislike long comments. It's just that if I let myself go, I wind up writing comments that could be the script for a video essay. And the comment section isn't the right place for that. It's been too long since I looked at Star Trek stuff, but the LACs in Honor Harrington were still very small on crew size. Something like a modern tank, maybe double that. I'd say that would be significantly smaller than a corvette. Corvettes may be small, but I'd at LEAST expect double-digit crew sizes. While a LAC is still single-digit, IIRC (it's been a while since I dug into the exact numbers there, though they're probably in book six). But even with that, the LACs didn't have hyperdrives, and a corvette at least needs room for one of those. And a generator that can power it. And then you need enough engineering crew to maintain those. And things scale up from there. They don't go too far, but I'd still say that you'd expect something around 20 crew at a minimum. Especially given you need to stand multiple watches. So you would need at least three shifts. Fighters/LACs don't need those, because they're not meant to deploy like that. There are two problems with lasers and other light-speed weapons: The first is that they require a significant amount of power. The second is that they aren't as great at super-long-range combat. Think about the engagement ranges in Stellaris. The distance from Earth to the Sun is 8 light-minutes. That means your light-speed weapon takes 8 minutes to hit. If the invading fleet is traveling at a constant velocity, that's one thing. But if they expect any kind of resistance, they're going to be constantly shifting their vectors. Which means you're not going to get hits until you get within a few light-seconds. And if you're accelerating KE stuff to high enough velocities (like .8c or so), then at a combat range of 2 light-seconds, it takes 2.5 seconds for that kinetic artillery to hit. While that is longer, it's not so different if KE weapons have some benefits to them. And you'll also note that this is kinda-sorta accounted for with the lasers being more accurate than the railguns. Also, most of the "energy weapons" in Stellaris are firing some kind of particles. So they're not going to be traveling at light-speed anyway. The other reason for KE weapons is that the default type of shields in sci-fi tends to be some kind of energy field suspending a number of particles in it. Basically acting like a form of recharging ablative armor. That seems to be what's in Star Trek (remembering from a TNG episode which strongly suggested that). You actually also see that kind of shield in Armored Core 4, as Primal Armor. In those circumstances, it's plausible that KE weapons would be much more effective at knocking those particles out of their suspension. That would also explain why shields recharge more slowly in combat: You can't just arbitrarily move particles around to add new ones. That would be tantamount to disabling your shields in order to regenerate them faster. Definitely not a good idea. You want as much protection as you can have at any given time. And stronger shields just mean you can fit more particles in there. Or different kinds of particles. Or both. As to why lasers and energy weapons are better against armor? The simple answer is thermal transfer. Vacuum is an insulator. If you don't have a way to shed heat quickly enough, your armor starts to melt. Or vaporize. And given that the nearby star is already adding lots of heat, that threshold gets even lower. Would you design to prevent that? Yes. But there's only so far you can design. Especially since you also need to keep KE weapons from punching through. And if your shields are weaker to KE weapons than energy weapons, you'd want to prioritize your armor to stop KE weapons, since you already have a weakness to those that you need to mitigate. Also, with KE weapons, they're inherently less accurate than laser weapons. While that sounds like a disadvantage, it also makes them harder to dodge, as you don't know where they're going until it's too late to fully get out of the way. At least at any effective combat range. I'd love to see the KE weapons get a touch more tracking (maybe 5%?) to offset their lower accuracy, just to say "These are harder to hit with, but their inaccuracy also makes them harder to dodge." As to tactics like Dominion 4, I'm afraid you're not going to get that. At least not any time soon. And that's down to engine limitations. Stellaris is fundamentally running on the same engine as all the other Paradox games, even if it has had a lot of tweaks. If that feature doesn't exist in another Paradox game, then it's likely not going to make its way into Stellaris. And that's not because it wouldn't be interesting, but just because of the requisite work. Though you might be able to mod something like that with a combination of combat computers, doctrines, and leader traits. But it will never be as good, and the AI will still do stupid stuff. I remember your point-defense not shooting at incoming missiles because there was a single squadron of strike craft in the battle. Which made PD utterly useless early on in the game's lifespan. I think they fixed that by adding the damage modifiers that make the AI consider normal PD weapons to be utterly useless against strike craft, and flak to be utterly useless against missiles. It might not have fixed the underlying problem, but it got the end results. And given that the problem had existed for 6 years and nobody had a better solution, I'll accept it for the moment. The last thing is that you need to remember that Stellaris is a hybrid of a 4X and a traditional Paradox Grand Strategy game. Which means combat isn't as high of a priority as some other things. There's a certain level of "Good enough" with every feature. And combat has hit that point, at least for the moment. Thankfully we got the combat rework that at least improved the situation. For which I give Montu a lot of the credit, because he quantified the problem. And once you have the problem defined and quantified, it's a lot easier to start coming up with a solution. On the one hand, that means we're probably not seeing another major overhaul on combat for a while. On the other, it means there's lots of time to identify potential issues and suggest ways to fix them. Which Montu did in this video. But balance is a tricky problem, and fundamentally overhauling things introduces a lot of new problems. So I think it's a good idea for the devs to keep an eye on combat for now, and possibly look at other ways to fix it later. They seem to have had a number of interactions with the Hearts of Iron team, and that feels like a better spot to start introducing that level of combat improvement. Then maybe it will filter over to Stellaris, as that's the other major Paradox game that would have use for that level of detailed combat. But HoI could justify work on it more than Stellaris can. And I need to stop myself now, as this is already twice as long as my previous post. And I could easily double it again. I'll be glad to continue the conversation on any topics you want, though.

[@aralornwolf3140]

@@jimbothefuzzy, Oh. Um. I suppose I'm the wrong person for you to chat with on KZbin. I _have_ made a few 30k character long responses before... one was about how bad Starkiller Base was from a lore perspective. (No need to revisit that topic, right?) I winced at this bad comparison: "the LACs in Honor Harrington were still very small on crew size. Something like a modern tank, maybe double that. I'd say that would be significantly smaller than a corvette." I winced because LACs in the Honorverse are capable of temporary "endurance" missions (being on deployment for days at a time), which isn't something a tank can do -- do you know of any tank which the crew willing sleep, cook, and poop in for days at a time without exiting? I compared them to WWI/WWII era Torpedo/Gun Boats which also had a small crew, just like the modern LACs of the Honorvese, and not tanks for that very reason. As for the crew size, the Modern Honorverse LACs had 10+ people (only achieved through massive amounts of automation). The "Federation Fighters", sure they only had a crew of 2 and that's because their much more advanced computers made it possible for them to skip an "engineer" -- at least that's the reason I can come up with as they should have much larger crews than that because they have a warp core. Crew size is not brought up in Stellaris, so we can skip it. Speaking of FTL capability, the Honorverse LACs lack it, and so do the fighters in Stellaris. Looking at armaments, the "Federation Fighters" had up to 6 _ship_ grade weapons which were phasers, disruptors, torpedoes, and/or other types of weapons. The Honoverse LACs had at 4+ ships grade weapons. Stellaris fighters, don't even have 1 ship grade weapon (based on their damage output). Now, we get to size... In the Honorverse, the smallest modern anti-ship LAC is the Ferret-class which had the dimensions of 72m x 20m x 20m with a mass of 20,750 tons. The smallest ship that I know of, would be the Nat Turner-class, which is a frigate based off the Shrike-class LAC. It has between double to triple the mass of the Shrike-class LAC in order to add a hyperdrive, alpha-nodes, bunkerage for months-long deployments, storage for parts (to repair battle damage), increased crew space from 10 to over 40 people (includes 24 person marine boarding party), a pinnace, 20 extra missiles (40 total), and 1 aft facing graser. The smallest destroyer used by the RMN was the Noblesse-class. It had the dimensions of 351m x 41m x 24m with a mass of 68,250 tons (a crew of ~350 people). Note: the Wolfhound-class destroyers have the dimension of 428m x 51m x 29m with a mass of 123,500 tons and they have a crew compliment of 87 (no marines). I only add this for crew size comparison between “man-power” intensive designs and those which attempt to automate everything possible (like the modern LACs). As for Star Trek... issues are abound. Star Trek is inconsistent in scale _and_ inconsistent in presentation. The “Federation Fighter’s” interior were shot with preexisting sets (specifically the canonically much smaller runabouts), which mess up their scale. However, their listed dimensions are 30.2m x 28.5m x 12.7m. In comparison, the Nova-class ships (classified as frigates) are 180m x 43m x 34m with a mass of 277,000 tons. The “federation fighters” are around 5% of the size of a frigate -- (it’s hard to tell exactly due to the amount of negative space in most Federation designs) -- probably closer to 6% or 7%. Then... we get to Stellaris where “scale” is not only inconsistent, it doesn’t make sense. You mentioned ships engaging at light minute ranges... well... a small system can have its outpost be engaged by a 250-unit range titan spinal weapon, just after it enters the system. Sol system is considered a “medium” sized system, and the titan engages while still near Saturn (~80 light minutes) or Uranus (~160 light minutes) Somewhere around there. Which means, 1 unit is 0.32 to 0.64 light minutes or 19 to 39 light seconds or 5.7 million kilometres to 11.7 million kilometres. The maximum range of some weapons is 30 units... which means the range Stellaris ships have starting on day one exceed the capabilities of Apollo missiles used by the RMN! Fortunately... there is a video by TETRINO (Title: Stellaris Ships to Scale) which shows the scale of the ships, including the fighters, in comparison to each other. From the scale provided fighters are around 12m x 8m x 3m to 15m x 10m x 4m. It’s a bit hard to tell, unfortunately. Looking at the corvette, it’s at least 10 times the length of the fighter, probably closer to 15 times the length. So, it’s anywhere from 120 meters to 225 meters long. Its width is 6 or 7 times that of the fighter, making it between 48 meters to 70 meters wide (excluding fins/wings) and it’s height is closer to that of it’s maximum width making it be 48 to 70 meters high (the medium gun adds ~12 to ~30 more meters of height). Making it’s dimension be 120m x 48m x 60m to 225m x 70m x 100m. So, the size comparisons... The “Federation Fighters” are ~40% of the size (volume) of the LACs of the Honorverse. The Stellaris fighters are 3% to 5% of the size (volume) of the “Federation Fighters” from Star Trek. The Federation Nova-class ship is ~76% of the size (volume) of a Noblesse-class destroyer (most likely much less as Honorverse ships are much more compact than Star Trek ships). The Stellaris corvette (using the smallest estimate) is exactly the same size (volume) as the Noblesse-class destroyer. The Stellaris corvette (using the largest estimate) is 90% of the size (volume) of a Star Knight-class heavy cruiser from the Honorverse. Now that we got that out of the way... Phase V technology includes ships protected by neutronium armour (nuetronium is the same stuff the core of the second most massive stars in the galaxy are made off, only black holes are more massive). This means, the weapons the _fighters_ will be using, must penetrate that material to do any damage. The weapons they must use will have a huge energy budget to do so... a small fighter that’s only a few meters on a side just can’t carry a large enough power plant to supply the energy required to actually harm ships (even when they ignore the dark energy/matter shields). This makes fighters unfeasible to use, making them a waste resources... which means they are either not used, or larger craft step in to fulfill their role (like the LACs in the Honorverse or the Gunships in Star Trek). This is why “fighters,” in Phase V technology star nations, _need_ to be close in size of the corvettes/frigates that already exist in Stellaris... they need to be that size due to the star ship sized power plants they need for shields, engines, and weapons they need to be equipped with to be a threat to the ships they are supposed to be fighting. Keep in mind, the Shrike B-class and Ferret-class LACs are ~11% of the _mass_ of a Roland-class destroyer (which is more massive than every light cruiser in the RMN/GSN).

[@Nognamogo]

I agree with this. This would also make those unique ships you can sometimes find through events (including bubbles) more meaningful.

[@apexfenix9623]

If you send bubbles to combat I will eat you

[@unnamedshadow1866]

Has Paradox addressed this? Because i feel the Naval Capacity hasn't really changed.

[@Ep3o]

Glad our conversation made a whole video ;)

[@MontuPlays]

I decided to televise my rant! Great success!

[@HalIOfFamer]

Jokes on you, I don't play meta and I don't play with significant AI bonuses as to my knowledge it only gives them stuff and not inteligence. So by 2350 I have 500 cap tops and so does the AI and I can comfortably play on 800 stars which is imo a nice size with enough space to really paint the map. You don't have to play giga meta builds every game. And it's still fun and challenging on lower difficulty when you restrict yourself to a non meta build.

[@Tim_Sviridov]

My idea would be to do away with "fleet capacity" altogether and have each ship cost resources (food, alloys, consumer goods) in maintenance. This way, you actually have to balance between military and your economy; and you don't have the case of a huge empire with huge naval capacity just replacing any losses almost instantly anyway, with naval capacity being such an artificial ceiling.

[@russman3787]

Ships already cost energy and alloy in maintenance though

[@Tim_Sviridov]

@@russman3787, is that (relatively) new? I haven't played Stellaris in a while. Maybe even a few years by now.

[@russman3787]

@@Tim_Sviridov They have had upkeep since before the game even launched.

[@Tim_Sviridov]

@@russman3787, but only in energy (money), right? Either that or it was a tiny inconsequential amount. Or have I gone completely senile?

[@russman3787]

@@Tim_Sviridov I honestly don't know if they had mineral upkeep back then.

[@zrize101]

Not related to fleet capacity, but I just wish the ships would move less sporadically, and engage at longer distances. Especially the corvettes that are just dogfighting each other like jet aircraft... I want more cinematic battles like what we see in Star Wars, The Expanse, etc.

[@lordshenhai5321]

Well your definitely not getting that in a game like stellaris, but it definitely could be better.

[@Xymor]

I solved the leader problem with too many fleets by using a mod to increase fleet command limit to 2000. This means that late game instead of having 40 fleets, I now have 5. Its really helped in that aspect, but I like the idea of having less ships but each being more powerful.

[@countcampula]

Ships should be manned by pops, battleships requiring 2. If they get unhappy they go AWOL to another empire.

[@qazixgames7920]

I think there is a curve that needs to be taken into account. I've played Stellaris casually for about 4-5 years, and rarely am i able to get fleet strengths above 40k to 50k. But even then i have to pool my strength and can rarely cover more than 2 fronts. You mentioned early in the video that meta builds get to be very strong but for players like me who aren't following metas i feel like i'm constantly struggling to keep up militarily with AI neighbors.

[@NervXT]

I'm in the same boat. I'm a somewhat casual player myself and I feel I can really only muster 1 or 2 fleets powerful enough to defend my borders and if I need to go on the offensive, I pretty much have to merge them together, leaving me almost completely defenseless. If I didn't have to focus on building doom-stacks all the time and instead manager smaller but more impactful fleets, I'd have a far more enjoyment engaging with this mechanic. Right now, it just feels so tedious.

[@sosig6445]

@@NervXT IRL you don't merge all of your armies and navies because of several restrictive factors such as, communication and organisation, ease of command, logistics and upkeep, multiple treaths etc... While in strategy games you are often not only not penalised by the various factors for committing to doomstacks you are even encouraged. Costs of upkeep SHOULD skyrocket when you merge large fleets into a single system, yet the game operates as if you could just instantenously teleport, food, fuel and ammo instantenously from any corner of your empire to that one system where you keep your entire fleet. Not only that your commanders should be fuckin' mentally crippled when you throw fleets together like that because no one will EVER make sense of a battle when you saturate the entire night sky with ships, let alone effectively command and form battle lines. Only hearts of iron "sort of" manages to stop doomstacking, you have a wide front you need to defend, you need to keep logistic lines up and running, and your generals will (understandably) have a stroke if you give them more than 400 thousand man to manage at once. it's a shame that the navy part of the game still plays out your avarage shitty doomstackfest like every other Grand Strategy game...

[@NervXT]

@@sosig6445 That's the thing, I wouldn't mind a bit more micromanagement of keeping more fleets active in various parts of my territory and feel it would actually make it more interesting. As it is now though, I have to compile my naval resources together because the aggressors often send in doom-stacks too, so I feel I have no choice but to do the same. There are a few comments here that recommend some good ideas to at least get the ball rolling, but it's a big undertaking to revamp the whole system, so I'm not holding my breath for this change to happen.

[@sosig6445]

@@NervXT Literally just 2 things needs to happen -Localise logistics/supplies -commander skill penalty when fleet is too large

[@robertalaverdov8147]

I have an idea that some would hate. Each ship built takes away a certain portion of your pops. And if you lose said ships you also lose those pops. Would diminish a lot of late game lag on both ends. Plus maybe in addition. having to pay life insurance benefits to the deceased family for a period of time after said loss. Coming out from your energy credits. Would make players far less likely to kamikaze their fleets. And force players to make better long lasting ships instead of just cost effective, aka corvette spam. The end result being that any huge loss in a war would make you economically crippled for a short period of time. To compensate slightly maybe add a similar mechanic to revanchism that's in EU4.

[@paradachshund]

I hadn't thought about this before, but I think you're right. Ignoring the performance benefits, I think each ship being more meaningful and combat potentially slowing down a little sounds like an excellent change.

[@Lancor84]

ST: New Horizons rebalances this quite well. It's entirely feasible to use single ships for some encounters there.

[@Ragatokk]

On this topic, to control your groups of fleets, you should be able to assign an admiral. Think field commander in heart of iron 4. Also think there is too many ship types, or not enough reason to make all of them.

[@Nikola_M]

The mod "half number of ships for less lag" by Question does exactly what it says. It does it by doubling everything in ships (base stats + component slots + fleet size), which makes it compatible with almost every mod that adds new ships, as those aren't affected. The only thing that isn't compatible is core components that add power, as those get outclassed by the vanilla core components which have their power output doubled

[@simonfrohlich7766]

Well, I like big fleets and I cannot lie so maybe instead of decreasing the numbers, change the representations. Basically similar to Civs Army/Corp/Fleet/Amarda system, instead of a fleet consisting of ships, make it consist of battle groups that in turn represent ships. To improve performance, battle groups act as one entity and are of one ship type (i.e. corvette swarm group, hangar group etc). To make it scalable, the number and size of battle groups could be improvable by technologies etc so you start of with one fleet with one battle group consisting of 3 corvettes and end up with fleets of 10s of battle groups consisting of 10s of ships which could keep the overall number of leaders needed lower and headcannon battle groups as being lead by sub-commanders

[@kyltredragmire4939]

I completely dissagree. I think the ship pathing should be fixed to avoid the carpet effect, and they devs should continue to work on reducing lag. One of the best parts of the game are when immense waves of ships collide into each other. My favorite playstyle before the combat rework was to only ever build corvettes. Absolutely ludicrous amounts of corvettes.

[@Nooctae]

i'd be curious to see a mod doing this. Seems like a doable idea with just modding. Doing a bit of research, I found a few older mods doing this. Haven't been able to find one recently updated. Closest to Montu's idea is a mod called " Tiny battles v2", sadly, dating from feb 2020

[@jesuissebastien]

I totally agree with you! Make less ships, make them count more, it would be much easier to manage especially on the console version. There should be a point in the game where you’d only need less but bigger ships that can play many roles.

[@Aci_yt]

I actually like seeing massive fleets in the game, but I do agree there should be viable alternatives

[@KoloXD]

everybody does, but end game performance honestly turns me of off of playing the game

[@ZainDever]

How about a slider similar to TTWR for the number of ships. There will be some people who wants a large armada, so they could turn up the slider for more ships with less firepower but increased naval cap. Then for those who want meaningful and lower number of ships, slide down to increase firepower and decrease naval cap.

[@TheDSasterX]

I like this idea of reducing the ship counts. Late game having like 20+ maxed out fleets is just overwhelming from a management perspective. I might also posit, however, that we go the route of maximizing the value of individual ships e.g. condensing all that same firepower into fewer ships (or maybe reducing it by a lesser degree than we do ship count). It would be a great opportunity to really overhaul the ship design system (the previous overhaul didn't have many resources and was moreso a clever usage of summer experimentation time iirc). potentially make corvette loadouts more like destroyers, destroyers more like cruisers, etc., you know, really differentiate the ship classes to let them shine even more for their intended roles

[@little_lord_tam]

I think if the fleets where the size of the amount of fleets we have now, while the actual amount of fleets quarters, we get a good amount of ships thats manageable, but also strategicaly viable, meaning splitting forces. At the moment its impossible to make any strategy because the numbers are so overwhelming, you just resort to big head on battles and who wins, wins. Thats no war

[@SteveBlewett]

I remember when tiles went away, I thought the rare and other resources would be part of the upkeep. I still think that would be good.

[@jemal999]

I do not like Blob warfare. I've long wished we could do some sort of ship-crunch. Fewer ships, each being dramatically more important. Reduce Naval cap by 5x, increase cost & Power by 5x, and make Ship Experience Actually Matter! Loosing a battleship should be NOTICABLE, not just 'oh click reinforce, spend a couple alloys, move on'

[@lunasea4841]

Man this reminds me back when I was playing Sins of a Solar Empire, I would put the game in slow and follow a fighter craft through the combat. I loved that sense of scale.

[@ferguskeating8698]

Totally Agree- it should be centred on capital ships with small fleets growing gradually. Fleets aren't satisfying as they stand now, they should be a political and powerful force not meaningless stacks. If they could get a rework that would be amazing. necessary if they move to Stellaris 2.

[@anteodiego4197]

As much as I agree with the points made regarding lag and artistic issues, I personally really love the chaotic massive late game battles, they have a certain 40k-like charm to them. That said I do think a compromise could be reached (especially if there was some actual attempts to optimize pathfinding and rendering issues)

[@therealspeedwagon1451]

I think a compromise should be made. I see people advocating for single ship battles like those out of Star Trek where you have one ship representing your entire navy. I think that’s a little bit too far. I also like the chaos of late game 40k style battles with only tens to a hundred ships at the very least. But having a carpet of ships is also too far.

[@MRDRK1]

Fleets have indeed gotten ridiculous. What's also confusing is that even at the very beginning of a new game in an empty galaxy, my game suddenly starts chugging if I open the leaders list. That is, the list of all the leaders (governors, admirals and scientists all together). Once I select an individual groups (like the scientists), it helps a little, but I don't know what's wrong with my computer to cause the slow down for seemingly no reason.

[@marcelgrabowski5939]

It was repaired in newest update I think, they reduced ammount of pixels in this view because it was causing a problem.

[@MRDRK1]

@@marcelgrabowski5939 - Ok, I'll check it out. Thanks.

[@WildWolf31]

I like the idea and reducing the lag. But i dont want to go from one extreme to the other either. It would be cool if they could find a way to make it a map setting 😅. Barring that maybe find a way to cut it down 50% to start and go from there, see where the audience sits.

[@Dalek_Caan_Sharksofsliver]

I like this, half the ships half the lag? Lol

[@WildWolf31]

@Dalek_Caan_Sharksofsliver I feel like it's that or do something to make it more interesting. If I only get ~20 battleships let me micro them if I want or something. Ground combat is already so uninteresting, if we go all the way back down to small fleets, give me something to do in the ground combat. Make it so fleets can't necessarily hang around to bombard but maybe some sort of way you can influence the ground fighting to make up for that fact. Let me choose like a guerilla warfare or siege warfare or something. Different ones could make it faster or slower and affect the casualties you take and the cost or something. Bit of a tangent at the end but the idea is more ships at least gives me a feeling of a bigger more effective military.

[@Nomo-sapiens]

Just a band aid but they could make small ships get in bigger ships like in Homeworld or even land on stations/planets that will reduce lag when their are not fighting.

[@owenparris7490]

Idk, I love having massive fleets and space battles.

[@krubereats8877]

bro it is literally impossible for you to have watched the video at this point

[@johnroach9026]

I too love watching a slideshow

[@here_bedragons]

I like having them as a special thing. As something that when you get there it's a moment you remember vs spamming out these huge fleets pretty quickly. As it stands it feels more like we're picking up hand fulls of sand and throwing them at the baddies. We just have sooo many ships. 100 ships get crushed? No mater, rebuild them in no time and throw them back at the enemy!

[@robertbeier5521]

The thing is, they are always massive now, a giant swarm and hodge podge of models clipping through each other and effects. NOW imagine what it would really mean if for most of the game fleet battles looked more smaller, matched up and planned, only for you and your friends having to unite in a single system as a galaxy wide effort to defeat a huge crisis fleet and watching all your unique ships that you care about produce a wonderful symphony of chaotic space battle. The scale and relativity is what adds depth...

[@luka188]

Yeah it's nice to send ships in against 25x crisis and then promptly zoom out to galaxy view so the game doesn't run at 1 frame every 3 seconds for the next 30 minutes :)

[@spacemansquid]

Honestly, this particular issue is why I don't even care about ships and battles in this game. You're not building fleets, you're building boring blobs with stats based on how many of a type of ship you have Space combat doesn't really matter anymore, in the sense that it's all about numbers and units don't matter in this game of leaders and legendary figures and player narrative choices.

[@leohal456]

I feel like to add onto this, fleet command limit should be based on admiral level, and not technologies or ascension perks. This way, an admiral actually has to be leveled up to field a large fleet, and a level 1 doesn't just handle 500 corvettes or 50 battleships. Also, this helps for the admiral destiny trait that is meant for larger fleets, the armada one. increase to command limit by 50% would make sense in this case. Edit: Making all these changes to fleets and starbases would mean the devs would have to revamp the fleets of the crisis events too

[@davidshepherd8917]

Ok so what happens when my admiral dies and my fleet is over limit

[@ValenNoxFallenscythe]

Absolutely not. If anything, the amount of ships should be a few times higher, not lower. Its a space sim, not a spreadsheet sim. Let's not try to change it into something it is not supposed to be. The point is to build a galactic empire, not a football team. You should have thousands of ships, not 10.

[@CanaldoVoid]

Yes, I agree with your point, but I believe the problem is quite substantial, and a simple solution might not suffice. In the later stages of the game, you often find yourself managing 30 or more full fleets, which can become chaotic. They tend to rearrange themselves in the fleet list, making it challenging to keep your control groups well-organized. Additionally, a significant portion of these fleets doesn't even have admirals, rendering the presence of admirals less impactful. I'm skeptical that merely increasing penalties for exceeding the fleet cap or raising the control points cap would significantly improve the situation. Frankly, I think it might be time to consider abandoning the fleet cap mechanic altogether. Originally, it was introduced to discourage players from massing their fleets and moving them as one, but this concept hasn't effectively deterred players from using that strategy. Instead, it has cluttered the UI unnecessarily with multiple fleet entries. Furthermore, when it comes to balancing changes, such as increasing the cap cost for larger ships, these adjustments may not have a substantial impact because the AI still struggles to build coherent fleets. The AI fails to create specialized fleets like long-range artillery or torpedo fleets and often assembles fleets with a haphazard mix of ship types and weaponry. Consequently, engagements with AI fleets in Stellaris tend to feel monotonous, regardless of any balance changes.

[@AndreaGiumetti]

You know, i'd say the naval combat of HOI4 could actually be viable in Stellaris: so you assembly a fleet, have to be careful in balancing, and then you dispatch it to a sector with a mission

[@clashthegamer4873]

To be fair I don't think it's a problem because the game frankly gets very stale after 200+ years in. The victor is 9 times out of 10 extremely clear and it feels more like going through the motions. If the problem is RP related then rules can be set to make it so that you *must* stay under say 50% of your naval cap during peace and all ships left over must be retired. This would make wars a lot more costly but if you want to go to year 2700 then there's a solution for you, besides war is declared with far too little consideration in Stellaris, despite being leaders of billions if not trillions of lives, we ravage fleets and planets as if it were just another box to check off, if there were serious year long preparations required to simply be fit to fight a war I believe that would be a slightly healthier way for the game to work. If some people would game the "at war" mechanic then make war exhaustion something that you have to pay down like in EU4, else it has serious problems for your economy.

[@onionman8160]

I'm not really bothered by the numbers really. Realistically, a multiplanetary empire should and would produce hundreds of warships. The game would be running star wars logic if every fleet was only a few dozen ships. I'd enjoy it more if they could somehow dumb down individual ships so that they take far fewer computing resources. They did it with pops after all.

[@therealspeedwagon1451]

I like this idea, but I think there needs to be a bit of a compromise. While ships especially in the late game can get insane, I kind of like having large scale 40k style battles. I also like having the idea of each ship having mini pops, with larger ships having more mini pops. Each ship lost can have a massive impact on pop loss. However the less ships you have the more your pop growth can be. This means recovery can be faster after a large war in which you lost half of your fleet. Ships should also have more meaning to them. A Titan needs to be a formidable opponent and the flagship of an armada, the loss of which would cripple an empire. At most there should be two or three allowed for a late game empire. I think wars in general need a rework too. I hate large drawn out galaxy spanning wars because my forces get spread too thin and it’s very tedious to have to fight across an entire galaxy. I think there should be a random surrender system, in that there is a chance to surrender at any point and it gets higher and higher as war exhaustion increases. Gestalt consciousness empires and fanatic purifier empires however will never surrender and it can be mediated by the never surrender unyielding tradition. If an empire is being entirely claimed it will also never surrender as surrender would mean the complete destruction of their empire. Otherwise it depends on ethics and civics, with pacifist empires more likely to randomly surrender and militarist empires less likely to randomly surrender. The war itself also increases or decreases the chance to randomly surrender, with secret fealties, vassalization, Or independence wars having a higher likelihood for surrendering and wars of conquest and liberation wars having a lower likelihood of randomly surrendering.

[@BK-yj7vg]

Or maybe fleet scale slider of sorts. The smaller scale, the less ships and naval cap but more powerful and more expensive ect. With this you can make everyone happy.

[@robertjohn6585]

This is the correct answer

[@Barghaest]

Yes. Player choice not sweeping change. Like pop growth slider was implemented for those of us who didn’t experience horrible lag and preferred the old system.

[@ishill85]

one of the sci fi concepts i always wish stellaris leaned into more was civs that don't prioritize military ships, but instead have armed science ships like the federation or maybe repurpose engines into weapons using constructor or some kinda trade ships for war like the first human-kzin war.

[@miguelrodriguez-pineroriva6713]

I want logistics fleets, like commercial, transport and military logistic ships that are key to the empire's survival

[@OceanSpirit881]

Leaving aside the lag, which would be reason enough for me, I do agree its pretty weird you often have more fleets than admirals to field. You'd think making the ships would be harder than than training a guy to direct them.

[@maartenbaas8513]

I think it's a matter of upkeep. Right now it's a onetime investment and thats it. While in reality running cost of these things both from resource and manpower perspective would be huge, wspecially during wartime. Also, in reality the cost of purchasing something that big would not be a one-time lump sum but a multi year writeoff. So I would be in favour of a low purchasing but high upkeep price in alloys etc. Also, loosing ships should impact manpower somehow. Maybe have something like a situation counter where you loose a random soldier pop if an x amount if ships or armies are lost.

[@vi6ddarkking]

Honestly massive fleets are better and more realistic. Once we become a true space faring civilization. We'll be pumping out kilometer long battleships with the same effort we produce a Toyota now a days. It truly adds to the RP of the game.

[@cybren3003]

No?

[@WistfulDread]

Not really? As an example, the are only 50 carriers IN THE WORLD, right now. and the US has 20 of them. I had to use carriers instead, because Battleships are so expensive that NOBODY still uses them. The US stopped in 2014.

[@vi6ddarkking]

@@WistfulDread You truly have no concept of the idiotic amount of resources just in our solar system. And the sheer industrial output We'll be able to have even before we become a true K2 civilization.

[@TheRyuSword]

Or you can do the opposite, and add bigger ships that require more resources and take up hundreds of points worth of naval capacity. Because at this point Stellaris is a mess and there is no going back.

[@lostbutfreesoul]

Another thing to consider: When your *mid*-game needs so many ships, that an entire branch of technology is crippled to the point of being unplayable... something needs to be adjusted. One of my play throughs was a race that developed on an ancient piece of technology, outfitting themselves with ancient weapons and shields as the gimmick. At first this wasn't so much of a problem, those starts often have a way to gather artifacts a month but they still cap at a value far lower then any other resource bar influence. When the newer ships became somewhere in the cost of 100-200 artifacts to replace. It took just one bad battle and I was reduced to defending my territory for the rest of the game, just waiting for artifacts to generate.

[@mjboots4926]

Should have a slider that can determine how much Naval Capacity we can have

[@lakdav]

Every time I see these carpets of ships blanketing my capital star, I'm reminded of that one event in game where a scientist has a vision of massive structures in dark space pulling entire galaxies with their mass. :D It is interesting indeed how space mining values never changed and still we have such a powercreep over the years. So many variables apply to pops, so few to space mining. Fewer ships in a fleet would be nice visually, yes. Also it would be great if ships wouldn't just move on a very flat 2D plane within a gravity well. I remember Sins of a Solar Empire having such beautiful space battles because ships actually flew all around the place, you could follow a strike craft with your camera and it was cinematic as hell, whereas in Stellaris ships just form a big pile of metal that is drowned in particle effects...

[@bartreisender6765]

I agree. It’s not only about the game engine but also managing so much fleets / ships often feels like work

[@antoineroca1690]

Also imagine adding a physics rule : "if ships collide graphiccally, they take damage".

[@delrunplays2903]

That would solve the end game lag issue... though I don't think the crisis will be too bothered by massive debris fields.

[@antoineroca1690]

@@delrunplays2903 I never said it was only between two empires. So the crisis would crash on eachother at spawn basically.

[@delrunplays2903]

@@antoineroca1690 Ah, didn't think about that. Excellent! The galaxy is free from war... except if there's a Here Be Dragon's origin somewhere.

[@antoineroca1690]

Well technically, I think everyone would get stuck someone in their systems. I mean to get in the hyperlane it's one point.

[@KrypticStudiosCorp]

Players "The game laggs so badly during the mid-game, pls fix!" Game Devs "Lets add more ships for the game to render!"

[@alphacentauri3069]

Coming up against a battleship in early Stellaris. Laughs in Tachyon Lance Destroyers

[@ErnestIsGaming]

God dang paradox do this already!

[@texasscience6580]

i had an idea for a mod to include population in ship building. 0.1 pop for corvette, 1 pop per battleship, and 1.5 pop for titan type of thing on top of the normal costs. have research to reduce this by 10% and have five of these techs to reduce the costs by 50%. Reason for this is to have another negative for those who go to war often. also to help with the end game lag for so many pops in the galaxy. From a role play perspective going to war you are sending out your fit, young adult population away from the home country/planet/economy/ect. so there should be a population hit if one makes a large military.