Two issues suffered by most (TBS space) 4x games are the number of ships one hopes to effectively control in battle and the "Doom Stack" As we have not actually had any conflicts in space (yet), I will use naval warfare as an analogy of to illustrate the problems of these two issues in todays games. 2,500 years ago there raged a war in the eastern Mediterranean between Athens and Sparta. This war was fought on land and at sea as that part of the world is dotted with islands and offers tremendous coastlines to defend or attack. Deep into the war the Athenians suffered a catastrophic defeat at the bay of Syracuse and their navy was decimated. Had this been a 4x game the war would have ended shortly thereafter. The war did not end there however as the Athenians fought on for years after this event. Fast forward to roughly 75 years ago where the IJN was soundly defeated at Midway by the USN. Again, had this been a 4x game the war would have ended quickly after that, instead not only did the war continue for years but the IJN actually retained quite a lot of offensive capability as well. For me, it is fairly obvious that the reason real life did not imitate a 4x game is the absence of the "doom stack"! Let's face it, if you are here reading this and participating in this effort you know exactly what I am talking about. Moo2 and my personal favorite IG2, both suffered from AI factions that would lump every single ship they had into a single stack. Defeat the doom stack and the game was pretty much over as all you needed to do was mop up the faction that was suddenly completely and totally without a fleet. In the analogies I use above this did not happen, why? The Athenians had 100 ships in reserve that were released after the defeat at Syracuse, this allowed them to continue the contest and be effective. In other words there was no "doom stack" for the Spartans to defeat at Syracuse bay and end the war, just a sizable portion of the Athenian fleet The Japanese were also able to continue the fight as there was no "doom stack" for the Americans to defeat at midway, just a sizable portion of the IJN with the rest scattered all over the pacific. Personally, I would love to see this game avoid the "doom stacks" as it is a strategy that is usually only employed by a much weaker force attempting to isolate and defeat a portion of a larger force, otherwise no sane commander would amass his nation's entire navy (or army) into a single unit, if they did, then wars could be a single battle affair. (In space 4x games, where one end of your nation is many turns away from the other end, it is strategic madness to concentrate everything you have at one point, barring late game "star gate" technology of course) Perhaps individual fleet command limits should be explored. In other words fleets would consist of set maximum number of ships which could be raised by the introduction of command ships (upgradeable through technology and research) and leader bonuses (upgradeable with experience gained). In any case, I would love some solution that allowed a faction the ability to continue the fight (and possibly even recover) after a serious defeat. With "doom stacks" in play this is highly unlikely. (Birth of the federation attempted something like this but not very well) The second issue is fairly obvious. Unless you auto-resolve all battles the number of total ships under player control cannot be huge. Some gamers would disagree here but I believe that few would wish to spend hours on single battle. While doing so may be ok once or twice in a game, if every battle lasted for hours, the game would be less fun. Moo2 dealt with this through the introduction of command limits, cute but not very realistic. IG2 did it even better. There was no need for command limits as the cost of producing ships was high enough to make the assembling of a 40 (capital) ship fleet quite difficult to reach by mid-game. The effect was similar but not the same. In Moo2, command limits seemed artificial, whereas in IG2 it did not. In Moo2, to boost the limits, I had to either get lucky and get a leader to appear with a command bonus, build more star bases (until of course I ran out of planets to build them around) or sacrifice one bit of technology to research another which would then give me a spurt like growth of command points. In IG2 this was simply a matter of expanding my economy and balancing how fast my production was. (More ship building complexes at a planet meant that you built ships faster but at a faster drain of cash, this made it illogical to build additional ship building complexes before your economy could handle it) While I would gladly play this, even if the command issue is dealt with in the same exact manner as Moo2, I would really prefer something better.
Great topic, thanks a lot for creating a thread for it. This is something that I knew from the start that we had to get right. How to avoid having to control too many ships in battle, while having a solid reason not to and a balanced economy behind it for the whole thing to make sense, and that makes for a fun experience, above all. I think you've described the matter eloquently and we're very interested in knowing what everybody has to say about this. Your point on the single fleet of doom having the power to wipe a player from the game with a single stroke is also sound. So, do you prefer to control more ships in combat, less ships? Do you favor the single unit approach, or stacks? Do you prefer the MoO2 command points approach for limiting the amount of ships you can have, or the IG2 one which relied on more costly ship building as a way to make it harder for ships to come by? Do you have any other ideas for how to limit the amount of ships, both on the strategic layer and combat layer? Please let us know what you think.
Hi Adam Solo and thank you for the kind words. Solutions can always be found, the problem is how those solutions effect gameplay and the fun factor. By reading your reviews over the years I would guess that we can both agree that the solutions need to be simple, effective and (best case scenario) un-noticed by the player. Following this approach I could then extrapolate and offer the following suggestions. I prefer to control enough ships to feel like a galactic emperor but at the same time not be overwhelmed by the task at hand. What does this mean in numbers? In combat, a few dozen ships is the maximum I wish to handle (excluding fighters), more than that will be extremely difficult in a TBS 4x for obvious reasons. On the strategic layer, a couple of hundred ships under my overall command would be fine (again excluding fighters) (Qualification, if the total number of systems available on the map is very high, meaning more than 250, then the number of ships available at the strategic level may need to be increased) I prefer single unit approach as it seems far more realistic to me than ship classes being stacked. (Incidentally, IG2 handled this by combining the two, in battles with fewer ships, each ship was represented individually, when battles featured large numbers of ships, the game would lump similar types into stacks of three). In my opinion, as long as a large fleet is no larger than a few dozen ships there is little reason to stack them. (This would also stay close to Moo2 by the way) For overall command points, I preferred IG2 which did away with them entirely and controlled the theoretical number of ships that could be produced by making them very expensive. Not only did I feel that there was no artificial limit imposed on me by this approach but it better reflected reality. Take a U.S. carrier for example, it is insanely expensive. Now if this vessel had to feature self contained life support systems, launch and recovery systems designed for the vacuum of space, etc. should it not also be super-insanely expensive? The problem however is that you would need to do some serious math and projections on the likely pace of empire development in order to come up with the correct equation to make ships be the "right" amount of expensive. Unfortunately, without knowing the specific mechanics related to economy it is difficult to offer more detail at this point in time. (For example, if I understood the starting rate of resource and industrial output and the likely rate of expansion of the same, I could then offer a more specific cost index on possible ship classes.) Limiting the number of ships in combat is a bit easier. The one thing that needs to be avoided however is an arbitrary limit. While this would be an easy solution it would be frustrating to the player. "you can only bring X number of ships into battle because... that's just the way it is" No, the solution should be realistic and clean (does not require a lot of understanding or management) In real conflicts you could theoretically mass all your forces together until you consider two issues. Logistics (makes me laugh to read some ancient claims stating that the Persians brought 3 million men with them for their conquest of Greece, really? how did they feed them? what about the sanitation required to keep them healthy? did they not need to drink water? etc.) For a space 4x game however, keep logistics light (unless your target audience consists of accountants). Stay in range and you are automatically supplied works fine. Command and control, same example as above, how did the Persians effectively command 3 million men 2,500 years ago? answer, they didn't. The actual number of Persians involved was about a tenth of the number suggested by some historians. For this game, command might be the key. Having done some work in my youth on board what were the most advanced warships at the time, I noticed that even lowly frigates had a combat center (usually the deck below the bridge) which centralized all relevant information for the commander and crew to consider. In instances where these ships were working as part of a flotilla they also served as the command centers. In game terms then, I would not put a limit on how many ships a side can bring into a single battle but I would most certainly penalize the side which brought more ships than the command rating allowed by reducing their effectiveness using a ratio system. Something along these lines No bonus = X amount of ships that can be brought into battle without suffering a command penalty Leader bonus X + Y number of ships that can be brought into battle without suffering a command penalty Dedicated command ship (add to research a command module which scales in cost and size depending on the hull it is built on to and also scales as to the bonus offered). In this manner a player could create a command frigate early in the game for a small bonus as to the number of ships that could effectively be controlled in battle. A command cruiser would offer a larger bonus. ship bonuses would not stack and only the highest bonus would be used. A (single) leader would stack his/her bonus with the command ship bonus (X+Y+Z) The idea would also give a reason for the existence of numerous fleets and task forces. Need a few ships to just dig around? just send a few frigates without a leader or command ship. Gearing up for a major battle? get that leader aboard the largest command ship available and assemble your force. Alternatively, instead of penalties to an over the command limit force, you could remove the excess ships from player control, they would still participate in the battle at full strength but not be subject to player control. This solution would be much harder to implement and present the problem of deciding which ships fall out of player control, I do not recommend this. In any case, this is only my opinion. I am not a pro at this and I understand that for every idea implemented you need to write a bunch of code that does not, will not conflict with existing or added code. (Or in plain English, " I know this isn't as easy as it sounds"). I will however assist this project in anyway possible regardless.
Thank you for your fascinating, well thought-out analysis. I am inclined to agree that the command point structure (MoO2, Endless Space) feels artificial and somewhat arbitrary. I understand the reasoning behind it, but I agree that there is a better way to do it that feels more natural to the player. On the other hand, limiting in-combat ships via how much it costs to build each ship would work better, but I still fear that this could lead to the 'doom stack' in late game when an empire's economy is rampant enough to support that many ships. Perhaps this isn't a bad thing--if an empire succeeds in achieving an economy that is significantly superior to that of every other empire, it would make sense that they would not be prevented from building a much larger fleet.
Thanks TericDragon, What I am basically saying is remove command points at the strategic level and introduce them at the tactical, done correctly this would cure the "doom stack". I partially agree with you that perhaps it is not bad thing to have the "doom stack" If the AI gets it first, I am OK with it as it lets me see what I can do against this by wrecking and blockading vulnerable AI systems with multiple smaller fleets, done right, this has the same effect as cutting supply in real life and can be potent. If however, I get the "doom stack" the game is over for me and it does not feel satisfying as a game experience. Of course, this is just my view.
I am not as abject to Command Points at the strategic layer, as I understand what it is suppose to represent, though it doesn't do a good job at doing so or conveying what it is suppose to represent. The concept of "command" pool as actually command ability is more suited on the tactical level to represent the ability of how much you can coordinate effectively and also to consider things like frontage (there is only so much you can throw in one spot before you start shooting yourself in the foot). Sure many argue in space you got a lot of room and thus the concept of combat frontage is not an issue. However, we don't know what space combat will really look like. Frontage has an impact on naval and even air battles (people at first thought it wouldn't in air battles, they were proved wrong). Also, we have to admit some elements in a game are there for gameplay or even thematic reasons (we all know the arguments for and against space-fighters). I mean, one can argue space battles would be fought at great ranges with extreme range weapons yet every game makes them close range with ships flying by each other (making them more like dogfights than even naval battles). So it's not far to assume other concepts such as command limitations and frontage can also be used to focus combat to be interesting for a player. Either case, I didn't mean to speak about tactical command pools but strategic ones. As I said, I get where they were going with it. The problem it may not be the most elegant way to handle it. It's manpower, or more specifically, an officer pool. Probably officer pool more because a ship's crew will be relatively small to the overall recruit-able population and then add in system automation and the like and you probably never need to worry about able body "space sailors" to fill your ships. However, this doesn't mean any Joe and Jane can be a crew member, I imagine there is a certain level of training needed, especially when dealing with more important positions. Qualified engineers, navigators, weapon officers, tactical and operation officers, and the actual command crew. So even if you have 100 planets (huge population to recruit), high-tech (a lot of automation and high skill labourer that can learn), a booming economy (paying the salaries and supporting the maintence of such ships), and forge worlds (build a tonne of ships easily), you will still need to man those ships. Even if the manning part is not the hardest part, you will still need to have enough competent individuals to command them. If you recall, MOO2 gave CP for orbital stations. This pretty much hints that this represents where crews are trained, officers are prepared, and command staff coordinates. Obviously it is not elegant as this is more of a pool that gets used up and replenishes, not some hard cap that moves up and down based on how many command infrastructure you have. So in the end, I think it represents your manpower and officer pool, but instead of using a more realistic or complex mechanic, it uses a simple and abstract command point limit. As a side note, even in MOO2 it was a soft cap, you can go over it. It was prohibitively expensive but honestly, if you had a strong economy you can easily go over it by a lot. A lot of war-game strategy games tend to have these manpower/officer limiter above production capacity and maintence, the question how to introduce this in a 4X game satisfyingly. Also, can such mechanics be used to help improve the pace of wars so it doesn't come down to a single battle between two doom stacks which then determines the fate of the rest of the war as the OP pointed out. Critical war shaping battles should happen, but that's the key word, battles with an S.
Certainly there would be numerous factors that would restrict the size of forces available such as economics, trained staff, logistics etc. It is not only expected, but desired that a 4x game abstracts all these factors. Microprose used command points in Moo2 and shortly after released Birth of the Federation which did not use them but the effect on the player was the same. The issue with doom stacks you described well, a war should consist of battles not a battle. As such it is not just the late game doom stack that is the problem but rather the propensity of AI factions to stack in a single fleet throughout a game. Defeat this single fleet, even before it qualifies as a doom stack, and that faction is done. Similarly, exploit a neighbor when they go to war as you know their single fleet will be elsewhere and just walk over some systems. For me, this is not very appealing.
I think all of these should come into play, along with resources having caps( no bottomless pits) yes those resources could be rejuvenated with newly discovered tech but at least game play or battle plans would then be far more critical, I also think planet based defences should be very powerful, having to bring in spying to destroy planet based structures before ship deployment around planet can take place( at least in late game) should also come into play
Caps on resources similar to SEV? Truth be told I never activated this feature as I knew that my play style would be affected. I would need to take a serious long thought approach to a good portion of my strategy and that is something I wont do unless I know I have the time and can focus enough on the game to do so. Still, I love having the option to switch this on when I am ready. Like the idea of sabotage to soften a target as needed but feel the planetary defenses in Moo2 were pretty good as is. (Attack a planet with a star base, missile base, ground batteries, shielding, etc, as well as a few ships in orbit and you have your work cut out for you)
In addition to command points, another way to avoid massive single battles deciding wars would be to not destroy all of the ships that fight in the battle. EU IV does this very well with both fleet and land battles - at some point, the morale is broken and the stack runs away, in most cases without losing more than half of the units r soldiers. In a space battle, once the commander decides that the battle is lost, maybe the remaining ships hit the emergency jumpdrive, or have some ships screen while the others retreat. That way they can be repaired and fight again. One thing that always struck me about 4X games is that almost every battle is to the death. Sometimes ships can have an emergency jumpdrive to get out once damaged, but most of the time it's all or nothing. Also, I'd like to suggest the opposite of one of the suggestions above - reduce the time required to build ships, don't increase it. The infrastructure to build ships can be big and slow to build, but, once a species is on a war economy (especially a war for survival!), it should be able to replenish its entire force of ships in 5-10 turns. Rapid replenishment will allow an empire to get smashed in the opening battle of a war but then shift and keep the war going until they lose the production facilities that allow them to replenish the forces. Those should be the slow-to-build items, not the ships. Other mechanics like ship maintenance or command and control limits, as discussed above, can limit the size of fleets. This shift will make ships and even fleets disposable, so it's not a huge 40-turn loss of production to lose a single battle.
Not sure about this. The war economy as you describe, worked in a conflict such as WW2 where the U.S. was able to construct a Destroyer in one months time. A conflict in space however would require a different crew with much higher requirements in training and expertise. Even today, the USN would not be able to mass produce as it did back then regardless if it was war time or not. (I worked as a former contractor for them) I also think the cost of these ships would be very high. Think about the retired space shuttle and its cost to capability, now extrapolate from there, very unlikely that you will have the levels of production seen in WW2. Similarly, If the defender goes on war economy why not the attacker? and if both go on war economy what is really gained? Seems like the player would just have to do extra work to achieve the same result. If this is fun work, great but if its just extra work... Might not a reserve fleet, that is automatically generated slowly over the course of the game, available to all factions but released to player control only if certain parameters are met (major defeat, home world attacked) work the same? This would give a boost when needed without requiring the need to create two different build scales (normal versus wartime). Picture it similar to the mothball fleet kept by the USN at Norfolk. These are older retired ships that could be upgraded and reactivated far quicker than any new ships could be built. Anyway we agree that a solution would be a plus, my feeling is that it should entail the least amount of additional management for the player, especially when it comes to ship related issues in a TBS.
I think it's different than the space shuttle mainly because the space shuttle was a brand new capability, where a space-faring empire would just be spitting out another dozen ships of a class it has already created. Like Boeing taking an order for another dozen 787's. The 787 took over a decade to get the first one out (synonymous to researching a new hull type and, in Stellaris at least, upgrading the shipyard to build the hull type) but, since then, they've churned out a 100 a year. It's not instant, but it won't take the entire duration of the war to re-create. I went and looked up the WW2 production and it astounded me. It takes years these days to get an aircraft carrier up and running, and they built over a hundred during the war. I totally understand that it's much harder now because the technology is so much more advanced, but I think that's a function of our economic investment in military infrastructure, not an inescapable fact. From a game-play perspective, I think we're both trying to solve the same problem. One battle wiping the losing side's main stack and the war effectively being over after that as the newly built reinforcements are all too small to do anything. I like the idea of a reserve fleet, it's almost parallel to EU IV's manpower reserve. The longer you've gone without losing a war, the more capable you are. But that could turn wars into a 2-battle fight - wipe their main fleet then their reserves, then mop up. I guess, really, the question to answer is what kind of war is fun? It seems like we're in agreement that a one-big-battle then mop up war isn't fun all the time. Against a "peer" threat on an average+ difficulty level, I'd want them to be a threat. I'd want to bring one of my main fleets to a planet, defeat its defenders, and then set to work on the planetary defenses while they rebuilt their fleet, and, ideally, reacted to what my fleet did so that the next battle might not go my way. In the GalCiv world, that would mean adjusting the defenses of their fleet to better counter my offense, and adjusting their offense to go around my defense. Or maybe if I beat them with fighters, they put more point defense on their counter-fleet. But, to do that, they need to be able to rebuild / refit their fleet in a reasonable time frame. That's why I think ship creation should be fast (all the time, not just in a war economy). It allows both the AI and the player to pivot and respond faster. [Edit - I went way off the original thread's purpose, so I started a new thread for a new idea]
I agree here, we are trying to solve the same puzzle and it is always better to have multiple perspectives. One day, you will see a solution instantly where I would need years to come up with it and vice a versa. 2 battles are better than one, plus it gives the losing side additional time, granted, multiple battles would be better than two but at this point we have so many instances in these type of games where it is a one battle affair, that any solution would be welcome provided it does not become a chore. See you on your new thread.
I think I prefer "ships with character" - so a few of them, but powerful ones, which can take multiple roles or which can be adapted to many different situations. On the other hand, if at war, the system should also allow to crank out smaller ships at a higher pace. Perhaps it could be handled by a "crew" resource: bigger, complex ships need a lot of crew, whereas smaller, simpler ones need less. So the player could decide how s/he wants to allocate crew (ships do not work if they do not have their minimum compliment), perhaps even mothballing some ships in an orbit (or hide them in asteroid belt?) if the time is not right for them. The crew resource would be a function of population, and starflight/starfleet academies, and there could be different experience levels given to each crew unit, which would in turn modify the performance of the ships they are serving on. Leaders could modify crew experience and behavior as well. To make sure you do not end up with enormous numbers of ships as the game advances (and the population and your ability to "grow" new crew units grows), there should be an incentive for the player to create ever larger, ever more magnificient ships which need ever more crew. Perhaps some complex tasks (like terraforming a world) can only be accomplished by the most gargantuan ships (think the Culture novels...).
The solution needs to be clean and as non-intrusive as possible so that it does not become a chore. In light of that, I want to revise my proposal. Retain the command points as in Moo2 but with the following twist. Going over the command limit will still incur the same penalty as in Moo2 but the player should have the option of deactivating ships (mothball). Ships that are mothballed would not suffer a penalty. In this manner a player can create a reserve fleet only if he/she wishes and these reserves could be used to replace losses quicker than new construction by simply activating reserve units after a one turn delay. Mothballed units would be stationed at home worlds only. For non-player factions, some tweaks to the AI behaviour could insure that we no longer have single battle wars by ensuring that these factions spend a percentage of their efforts in constructing reserves and mothballing them.
If mothballing becomes a thing, then updating ships to the newest weapons, shields, armors etc. should be relatively cheap - otherwise the "opportunity cost" of all that stored production (i.e., what could you have built otherwise with all these production points) will lose against building the ships from scratch. It could also offer the opportunity for the exploration phase, where the player could - occasionally - find a cache of mothballed ships...
Sword of the stars had a simple way of controlling deployed ships. One can create only so many fleets as there are admirals. number of admirals is controlled by size of empire. Larger empire, more admirals. Each admiral can command only a certain number of ship depending on your tech level. In the beginning, with basic tech, you can command lesser number than later in game when certain techs are researched. Of course that means there's greater number of characters, but it would also provide a bit of roleplaying. For example, Darlok admiral would have stealth or infiltraion bonus, meaning he could get closer to the enemy undetected, Bulrathi admiral could boost your marines and allow spectacular boardings... Mrshans would have greater accuracy.... you get the idea.
As an aside, should this game follow Moo2 as regards command points, it might be a good idea to remove non-combatants from the requirements. In other words, transports, colony ships, base ships, etc. should not eat up any command points. At the very least their cost should be considerably reduced. The benefits would be felt more in the early game where it is difficult to field an effective force and gather a decent sized number of transports at the same time.
