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[EnigmaticHat]

Those all seem like smart balance changes.

None of them seem like they have anything to do with doomstacks.

[Cruxador]

Force disengagement is conceptually reasonable, though, and the other bit, while nonsensical taken on its own, is really just a kludge for their imperfect math. Would it be better to create a logical and organic system where smaller armies still have the potential to inflict non-trivial losses on bigger fleets? Yeah. Do you really trust Paradox to do that successfully though?

That's complete nonsense. They should've [made a better game]

The story of Stellaris.

[Trekkin]

Force disengagement is conceptually reasonable, though, and the other bit, while nonsensical taken on its own, is really just a kludge for their imperfect math. Would it be better to create a logical and organic system where smaller armies still have the potential to inflict non-trivial losses on bigger fleets? Yeah. Do you really trust Paradox to do that successfully though?

Conceptually, perhaps, but this execution is going to look very silly when ships just stop doing anything and hang around being invincible. Why not have the fleet as a whole disengage after a certain percentage of losses, if they don't want individual ships to disengage? That way there could still be some decisive, fleet-ending battles, too.

[USEC_OFFICER]

Conceptually, perhaps, but this execution is going to look very silly when ships just stop doing anything and hang around being invincible. Why not have the fleet as a whole disengage after a certain percentage of losses, if they don't want individual ships to disengage? That way there could still be some decisive, fleet-ending battles, too.

I don't see why it'd look silly. Disengaged ships are pretty much hitting emergency FTL early, right? The only reason they don't separate and move off on their own is because of how tedious and micromanage-y that'd be. _{Also they obviously want individual ships to disengage if they're implementing this.}

Viable hit and run fleet actions, so a small fleet is more capable of attacking and retreating quickly with little damage sustained in retreat.

So... Have Emergency FTL damage scale on fleet size, so that smaller ones rarely take damage while larger fleets take tons more? Maybe have delay in returning adjust on fleet size too, so bigger ones take longer to return? And then have Emergency FTL delay/countdown/whatever scale based on comparative fleetsizes/awareness/whatever? So a small fleet fighting a large fleet can bugger out quickly and take little damage, but a large fleet fighting a smaller one cannot. Then you can have small fleets running around, destroying enemy stations, blockading enemy planets and what not, but are countered by enemy fortresses and defence installations. Doomstacks can't destroy the smaller fleets, only drive them back, but can destroy the fortresses and let your raiders wreck havoc on enemy territory.

Does that actually sound fun and interesting or am I just talking out of my ass here?

[EnigmaticHat]

You know, if they wanted to get rid of doomstacks, they could just add a frontage mechanic.  You have a fleet organization stat, only that many can fight at once in a battle, everyone else is kept in reserve.

It would make absolutely, 100% no sense in space.  But they could do it I guess.

[Trekkin]

Conceptually, perhaps, but this execution is going to look very silly when ships just stop doing anything and hang around being invincible. Why not have the fleet as a whole disengage after a certain percentage of losses, if they don't want individual ships to disengage? That way there could still be some decisive, fleet-ending battles, too.

I don't see why it'd look silly. Disengaged ships are pretty much hitting emergency FTL early, right? The only reason they don't separate and move off on their own is because of how tedious and micromanage-y that'd be. _{Also they obviously want individual ships to disengage if they're implementing this.}

I mean actually disengage (i.e. retreat), not just engage some kind of magic time out that everyone apparently accepts. They don't want individual ships to move off on their own because, yes, it's tedious and micromanagey. I just think it'd look more normal if the entire fleet actually retreated once casualties or damage passed some threshold, rather than the fleet retreating when 100% of the fleet passed an individual threshold and just sat around until the fight was resolved one way or another.

It just seems ridiculous that a ship can escape death by sitting quietly in the middle of the battlefield until everyone else wants to go home too.

[Baffler]

My favorite parts of this were not in the dev diary itself, but in the responses afterward. Specifically:

Larger weapons have had their damage scaling changed so they are more DPS-effective than smaller ones (a medium turret does 2.5x the damage of a small turret for 2x the power cost), but at the cost of low tracking and thus inability to deal with evasive ships.

All empires start with all basic weapons in Cherryh.

Both good changes, though in context I'm wary of how the first will look in practice.

[Sirus]

The way I'd do it:

Ships disengage individually, warping out when damage exceeds a certain threshold or low morale overcomes the ability of the leading admiral(s) to keep them in the fight.
Those ships are "lost in the warp" but are kept track of.
Only after combat ends one way or the other can the escaped ships re-emerge at the nearest safe port, and they are all bunched together in a single new fleet. This way, there's no weird invincibility and there is also less micro-management than having to suddenly organize a dozen new single-ship fleets together.

[Culise]

Conceptually, perhaps, but this execution is going to look very silly when ships just stop doing anything and hang around being invincible. Why not have the fleet as a whole disengage after a certain percentage of losses, if they don't want individual ships to disengage? That way there could still be some decisive, fleet-ending battles, too.

I don't see why it'd look silly. Disengaged ships are pretty much hitting emergency FTL early, right? The only reason they don't separate and move off on their own is because of how tedious and micromanage-y that'd be. _{Also they obviously want individual ships to disengage if they're implementing this.}

I mean actually disengage (i.e. retreat), not just engage some kind of magic time out that everyone apparently accepts. They don't want individual ships to move off on their own because, yes, it's tedious and micromanagey. I just think it'd look more normal if the entire fleet actually retreated once casualties or damage passed some threshold, rather than the fleet retreating when 100% of the fleet passed an individual threshold and just sat around until the fight was resolved one way or another.

It just seems ridiculous that a ship can escape death by sitting quietly in the middle of the battlefield until everyone else wants to go home too.

I'm puzzled; are you just upset over the aesthetics of it, then?  The idea of disengagement is that the individual ship isn't just sitting quietly in the middle of the battlefield; it's gone and retreated.  It's just being counted as part of the fleet that's still in combat organizationally precisely to reduce micromanagement and tedium in having to rope dozens of individual ships back together after each battle. 

[Trekkin]

It's partly the aesthetics and partly that it's not intuitive; there are more sensible ways of getting the same behavior out of fleets. Limiting fleet casualties makes sense to me, at least in principle, as does wanting ships to stay in their fleets until moved or destroyed, and having the fleet retreat as a whole is probably the best way to do that without having to make a fleet an abstract concept with no geographical component. (In other words, it's easier to understand fleets if they stay together.)

What I don't get is why the decision to disengage should be made on a ship-by-ship rather than fleet-by-fleet basis, since the former means you need to put the disengaged ships somewhere until the fleet itself decides to leave and there's no clear way to do that. If you "disengage" them to sit still, players will wonder why their ships aren't fighting; if you remove them to hyperspace or similar, the player will wonder where their not-destroyed ships went.

By contrast, if ships keep fighting to death and the fleet as a whole decides when to leave based on fleet-wide damage (which we can already see), the same casualty-limiting and fleet-integrity-preserving mechanic is maintained but the graphics are less confusing. Ships are either visibly fighting or visibly destroyed, and the thing you'd click on in confusion to see why the fleet is running away has the screen space to clearly say it's retreating because of such-and-such conditional.

[Culise]

Mmm, the problem with a fleet-wide withdrawal is that the entire stated purpose of this feature is to preserve individual ships as well.  Repairs take less time than construction, so a key part of the present situation of decisive battle is the annihilation of the enemy fleet which forces them to rebuild losses from the keel up.  If you simply pool fleet-wide HP and retreat when it drops below half, that damage tends to be focused on a few ships.  The retreat thus means that half the fleet escapes unscathed and half the fleet is annihilated, which doesn't fulfill the design goal; moreover, it can already be done manually in any battle that takes around a month as in the late game.  By forcing individual ships to flee, you leave more individual ships intact and spread that 50% damage across more of the fleet.  This preserves individual ships as well as the fleet as a whole and maintains the fleet as a force in being, making snowballing off of an early victory a bit more difficult unless you can catch the enemy fleet again in the repair docks. 

Plus, I'm not so sure that the ships still appear when they've disengaged.  That single lone screenshot we have shows two ships which I assume (without any proof, but I think it's reasonable) are the two ships listed in the status screen, but one of them seems to be flaring up.  Depending on *when* they took that screenshot, it might be that disengagement is communicating visually at on the map by ships jumping out using the same method as Emergency FTL, and they simply took the screenshot at the moment this was happening because it was visually distinctive rather than simply taking a shot of one lone ship.  Plus, both of the ships are still taking fire when we know from the DD that disengaged ships aren't targeted for fire in the first place, which suggests someone either screwed up big writing the DD (known to occur before) or they intentionally timed that screenshot pretty much right when the ship flipped to "engaged" to "disengaged". 

[USEC_OFFICER]

The way I'd do it:

Ships disengage individually, warping out when damage exceeds a certain threshold or low morale overcomes the ability of the leading admiral(s) to keep them in the fight.
Those ships are "lost in the warp" but are kept track of.
Only after combat ends one way or the other can the escaped ships re-emerge at the nearest safe port, and they are all bunched together in a single new fleet. This way, there's no weird invincibility and there is also less micro-management than having to suddenly organize a dozen new single-ship fleets together.

Except with the new fleet cap system, you can end up with a massive fleet of wounded ships and a ton of smaller fleets at varying levels of capacity. Unless you use only a single type of ship, you now have to go through all fleets individually and shuffle ships around as needed. Hardly the most ideal implementation. Mind you, if the fleet cap wasn't going to exist then I'd probably agree with this. It works fine with doomstacks since the wounded ships can simply repair up and rejoin the main fleet. But when you have battlegroups composed out of many different fleets then it's not as ideal because of how much micromanagement is required.

[Trekkin]

Mmm, the problem with a fleet-wide withdrawal is that the entire stated purpose of this feature is to preserve individual ships as well.  Repairs take less time than construction, so a key part of the present situation of decisive battle is the annihilation of the enemy fleet which forces them to rebuild losses from the keel up.  If you simply pool fleet-wide HP and retreat when it drops below half, that damage tends to be focused on a few ships.  The retreat thus means that half the fleet escapes unscathed and half the fleet is annihilated, which doesn't fulfill the design goal; moreover, it can already be done manually in any battle that takes around a month as in the late game.  By forcing individual ships to flee, you leave more individual ships intact and spread that 50% damage across more of the fleet.  This preserves individual ships as well as the fleet as a whole and maintains the fleet as a force in being, making snowballing off of an early victory a bit more difficult unless you can catch the enemy fleet again in the repair docks. 

Plus, I'm not so sure that the ships still appear when they've disengaged.  That single lone screenshot we have shows two ships which I assume (without any proof, but I think it's reasonable) are the two ships listed in the status screen, but one of them seems to be flaring up.  Depending on *when* they took that screenshot, it might be that disengagement is communicating visually at on the map by ships jumping out using the same method as Emergency FTL, and they simply took the screenshot at the moment this was happening because it was visually distinctive rather than simply taking a shot of one lone ship.  Plus, both of the ships are still taking fire when we know from the DD that disengaged ships aren't targeted for fire in the first place, which suggests someone either screwed up big writing the DD (known to occur before) or they intentionally timed that screenshot pretty much right when the ship flipped to "engaged" to "disengaged".

That's true; it is kind of a clunky patch for how damage is distributed, but actually fixing that would mean implementing a better combat AI and that's almost certainly never going to happen.
Then again, you could always have two withdrawal conditions, one for total damage and one for casualties, but I suspect the casualty one would always be the one to trip.

[Loud Whispers]

So... Have Emergency FTL damage scale on fleet size, so that smaller ones rarely take damage while larger fleets take tons more? Maybe have delay in returning adjust on fleet size too, so bigger ones take longer to return? And then have Emergency FTL delay/countdown/whatever scale based on comparative fleetsizes/awareness/whatever? So a small fleet fighting a large fleet can bugger out quickly and take little damage, but a large fleet fighting a smaller one cannot. Then you can have small fleets running around, destroying enemy stations, blockading enemy planets and what not, but are countered by enemy fortresses and defence installations. Doomstacks can't destroy the smaller fleets, only drive them back, but can destroy the fortresses and let your raiders wreck havoc on enemy territory.
Does that actually sound fun and interesting or am I just talking out of my ass here?

That sounds fun and interesting, but I'd tie it into the force disengagement thing here. That way a smaller player with ships which have better warp drives could send out 5 smaller fleets to attack and destroy the enemy's ship-building stations, and once they're targeted by the enemy's superior fleet they automatically do their best to minimize ship casualties. Instead of having the ship disengagement policy be an Empire-wide thing, have it be a fleet specific setting similar to how EU4 allows fleets to toggle between hunting enemies, intercepting enemies or going to safe ports at war. Only in this case have fleets whose settings are fight to the death, for your main battle fleets which seek decisive battles, and the more sneaky breeki settings where you want your ships to retreat when faced with a superior foe. This would achieve the objective of PI's people to balance out the David vs Goliath scenario organically, allowing the David to win by playing smart and cutting Goliath's jugular. Giving David a +100% strength bonus against Goliath just because he's smaller does not make sense. I just can't get over how they managed to rationalize military doctrines this janky... Oh yes, the larger fleet is not as maneuverable as the smaller one in the endless expanse of the void. It should be simple enough: You get greedy for economic tech, you run the risk of losing to a more powerful foe. You overspend on military, you fall behind in economic tech. Now it's you get greedy for economic tech and anyone else is a fool? y para y

Force disengagement is conceptually reasonable, though, and the other bit, while nonsensical taken on its own, is really just a kludge for their imperfect math. Would it be better to create a logical and organic system where smaller armies still have the potential to inflict non-trivial losses on bigger fleets? Yeah. Do you really trust Paradox to do that successfully though?

That and an overhaul of planets to be more than forts. Have each tile of a planet be something that has to be taken, so the capturing of a planet capital or planetary shield would do more for winning the planet than capturing a tile full of a whole lot of nothing. Have planets be able to deploy weapons from the planet at the cost of resources against enemy fleets. And of course, allow small fleets to strike the enemy and disengage without the nonsense of losing 25% of their HP. It's like they're fixing a problem they created on purpose, making it so fleets can't viably retreat and then fixing the problem with artificial buffs :/

That's complete nonsense. They should've [made a better game]

The story of Stellaris.

brutal

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

...in the endless expanse of the void.

This is a really bad counterpoint, in my opinion.  Space may be endless, but the area a battle is waged within is not.  Seriously, think about the battles in Stellaris, you have tons of ships snaking around each other in a fairly confined area, and in those situations, the larger fleet has to worry more about losing their own ships to friendly-fire compared to the smaller fleet.  That's probably what is being simulated with the bonus.

I have to wonder where people seem to be getting the impression that the bonus means that the smaller fleets will be the ones winning the battles.  Far as I can tell, the bonus is going to be scaled depending upon comparative fleet sizes.  And taking the example they gave, the fleet that has 50% the strength of the other will be getting only a bonus of half their own strength (not the enemy's strength), meaning they are acting closer to a 75% rather than the original 50%.  That's still quite a bit weaker than the enemy fleet, so the smaller would still be likely to lose.  It's just now they'd be inflicting some casualties upon the greater force rather than nothing/basically nothing.

Edit: Oh, forgot to mention, got a discord set up for this and other paradox games that can be used to organize multiplayer games/in-game voice chat.