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[TalonisWolf]

Small vs large combat is one thing the 2.0 rules changes are supposed to help with. You won't be able to win against overwhelming odds but might be able to force a peace by driving up their war weariness

This is one of the things I'm waiting on before I try another Stellaris LP.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

I mean, I was pretty outnumbered. Like... with alliances... probably 16k vs 7k in fleet strength and ~70 to ~10 in armies.

[forsaken1111]

I mean, I was pretty outnumbered. Like... with alliances... probably 16k vs 7k in fleet strength and ~70 to ~10 in armies.

Under the new rules, he'd have had to battle through your fortified systems as well and every loss would cause his war weariness to rise. At some point it will be better for him to accept a status quo peace where he keeps what he managed to take and you truce out

[Draignean]

I mean, I was pretty outnumbered. Like... with alliances... probably 16k vs 7k in fleet strength and ~70 to ~10 in armies.

That's great! Under the new rules you'll get a substantial boost to firing speed as well, which, along with a couple fortified border outposts, should let you force disproportionate war exhaustion against a superior force!

... I'm a wee bit salty about the fire-rate one. Sorry.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Alas, if only I had 7k mustered at the start of the war and any fortified systems in which to bleed his fleet.

[Culise]

Alas, if only I had 7k mustered at the start of the war and any fortified systems in which to bleed his fleet.

That's alright; under the existing game rules, you couldn't put together enough of a fortified system to bleed an enemy fleet outside of (a) the very early game and/or (b) mods.   Except for first-war strategies at the point in the game where a dozen corvettes comprise your entire fleet, fortifications are the victim of a positively Pattonian outlook: they don't scale to fleet power well, they cannot be concentrated in sufficient force, and non-hyperlane empires can typically trivially bypass them.  The only real thing you can manage is the strategy that Paul suggested and you already tried. 

I'm a bit ambivalent on how much the new game mechanics will actually work around that.  You probably won't get *that* substantial a boost to firing speed, given that the only evidence we have (one datum) suggests that at the present scaling, you need to be outnumbered a hundred-to-one simply to double your fleet power. Merely being outnumbered two-to-one doesn't necessarily translate to that much of an advantage unless they used a logarithmic growth factor (and why would they?), and it won't count at all if your fortified border outposts already make up the strength difference because it scales by combat power in action rather than number of ships.  Forced hyperlanes, FTL-locks, and planetary fortification changes will prevent enemies from bypassing your planets, but that's a sword that cuts both ways.  If you can't bypass their hardened frontier planets, how can you raid their nougat-filled interior?  It all depends on how powerful those fixed fortifications actually are, and we're very short on actual numbers on that front.  Being able to build X defense platforms is all well and good, but if those defense platforms are as good as corvettes in an era of battleships, that's no better than what we have now.  I fear, hopefully groundlessly, that the net effect of the new changes may actually reduce the hitting power of smaller empires on a strategic level.  Given that my typical approach to dealing with early-awakenings is to cheese the AI as Hanzoku suggested, that doesn't auger well.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

It'd be nice if you could garrison large fleets for a flat value of energy, but when they were in the field, energy cost for upkeep scaled exponentially.

So it would still be beneficial to operate the grand fleet for short periods of time, but for a long war, you would have to separate fleets to be able to operate long enough to see the conclusion of the war.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

The game seems to basically favor being bigger and stronger for every diplomatic interaction... and military action.

[Draignean]

What the fuck is up with this game now?

The AI seems to have the ability to summon ships from the aether. I ANNIHILATED their fleets, went to their planet.

Within a month, they had a fleet about 2/3 the size of mine attacking mine. Then they had a fleet making up the other 1/3. Then ANOTHER fleet making up ANOTHER 1/3. Then that last fleet went from 1.8k strength to 3k strength for NO REASON! (And note, it did this in the middle of the battle. It wasn't two fleets merging, as they were all still present (all the fleets appeared in rapid succession))

How do I win against this? It seems fucking impossible! I can't compete with an AI that seems to be pulling in 400 minerals a month when I'm pulling in 100, and is able to build a fleet containing loads of corvettes, destroyers, and cruisers within 2 months time!

EDIT Oh yeah, and add on top of that the fact that the AI REFUSES to make defensive pacts with me. There were two empires I was hoping for one with. Got an NAP with one of them, the other, in spite of loving me, had no interest in anything (up until the war started, and ofc by that point it's too late to fucking get a pact isn't it?). NAP one was consistently unwilling to get a pact with me, in spite of the fact I was more powerful than them, they had a +10 from hegemonic imperialists, we had 75 trust... They just did NOT want one.

Which difficulty are you on? This might actually drag me back into playing. Used to be that I'd end up in a bunch of silly wars where I was basically an uncontested power, and I'd end up just slogging through a galaxy populated by races utilizing wet cardboard as their premier construction material.

[EnigmaticHat]

I've encountered this too.

Your fleet is probably smaller than theirs.  The AI treats its fleet limit as more of an optional suggestion.  Which means less money into starbases (after the first level of course) and more money into fleets.  Also since going over your fleet capacity mainly hurts energy income, if you use that strategy I guess you can put less minerals into planetary structures (which take energy) and again more minerals into fleets.  That "new" fleet may well have been already built.  It could have been split off from the main fleet fleet bombing a primitive planet or fighting mining drones somewhere.  The AI really does churn out more starships than you'd expect.

The AI values defensive pacts with you based on your fleet power.  But the AI doesn't know which techs are good when judging you.  It seems to overvalue *number* of techs and undervalue key techs (like strongest weapon for example).  So having 9 weapon researches all in different tracks IME counts for more than 5 researches all in the same track.  Even tho logically one great weapon design should be better than your pick of 3 mediocre ones.  Also from what I can tell skipping techs counts as a full missed tech to the AI, even if the skipped tech is vastly worse than the later one.  Expensive techs do seem to count for more, but not *that* much more. 

[Criptfeind]

The estimates are very wide. It sounds like they had a fleet strength total of something like 150% of yours? That's not enough to make them not equivalent, I'm pretty sure.

In general my experience on normal difficulty is thus: The AI makes a lot of ships early on the game so you can be taken by surprise in the 3-6k fleet size range by how quickly they get there, and if you don't move fast enough yourself you might come under an unpleasant surprise attack, however, doing so tanks it's economy and makes the the AI basically irrelevant for the rest of the game. The early game against AI is a slight balancing act to make sure you hit that point with 3-4k so that they won't attack you until they inevitably crash and burn and you can walk over them.

[EnigmaticHat]

That makes so much sense oh my god.  Whenever I play a militaristic race I try to compete militarily early on.  Under the assumption that if I can't grow via conquest in the short term, the economic and diplomatic nations will grow faster than I do.  So I inevitably get crushed.  When play peaceful races I expand only when its clear I'm going to win and I'm not going to piss off any valuable friends.  Thus I bide my time until, I guess, the AI crashes and burns?

[Wysthric]

That makes so much sense oh my god.  Whenever I play a militaristic race I try to compete militarily early on.  Under the assumption that if I can't grow via conquest in the short term, the economic and diplomatic nations will grow faster than I do.  So I inevitably get crushed.  When play peaceful races I expand only when its clear I'm going to win and I'm not going to piss off any valuable friends.  Thus I bide my time until, I guess, the AI crashes and burns?

Running one game, I did actually manage to eat enough by going FULL WAR and quashing two nearby empires to compete with the other empires in the area. In the end, then only real two empires in the running were myself and the Genocidals of roughly equal size and power.

Until the Xenophobic FE awakened and declared war. GG. Love the game but an AI nation suddenly getting 330k fleet power when you've got 60k and no diplomatic options ruins the challenge of an ironman run. So frustrating.

[Loud Whispers]

Running one game, I did actually manage to eat enough by going FULL WAR and quashing two nearby empires to compete with the other empires in the area. In the end, then only real two empires in the running were myself and the Genocidals of roughly equal size and power.

Until the Xenophobic FE awakened and declared war. GG. Love the game but an AI nation suddenly getting 330k fleet power when you've got 60k and no diplomatic options ruins the challenge of an ironman run. So frustrating.

If your tech is greatly inferior to the FE, refuse thralldom and engage their fleet in battle. You will lose, your fleet destroyed, your leader executed, nation humiliated and subjected to thralldom, but you will win - because you will be able to reverse engineer all of the FE's technology.
If your tech is not so inferior to the FE, just submit to them, just as you would eliminate the Byzantines in CK2: A superior enemy is often easier destroyed from within its borders. As a thrall to the xenophobe FE you can still annex all of its vassals (it is better for you to leave thralls alive with 1 planet to maximize decadence growth). Once decadence growth has hit it peak, the Fallen Empire is fucked.

[ZeroGravitas]

Running one game, I did actually manage to eat enough by going FULL WAR and quashing two nearby empires to compete with the other empires in the area. In the end, then only real two empires in the running were myself and the Genocidals of roughly equal size and power.

Until the Xenophobic FE awakened and declared war. GG. Love the game but an AI nation suddenly getting 330k fleet power when you've got 60k and no diplomatic options ruins the challenge of an ironman run. So frustrating.

it's typical paradox metagame bullshit. oh, you didn't know that passing an arbitrary threshold in fleet power would have devastating consequences for your game? better luck next time.

oh, this round you knew that passing 40 or 50k in fleet size would risk awakening an empire so you gamed it by jumping immediately from 40 to 80k and then chain declaring war on each fallen empire? now it's 2350 and there's nothing left to do for 50 years until a crisis? thanks for playing, the next $20 expansion will be out in 6 months.