written by Eladrin

Hello again!

This week’s topic is the combat rebalancing planned for the Stellaris 3.6 “Orion” update. We’ll begin with an exploration of the goals and intended scope of the changes, and then go into detail regarding what we’ve done.

We first discussed the combat balancing back in Dev Diary #257, and then provided some more information on our early work at PDXCon. Since then, we’ve done more experimentation and gathered some feedback before making more iterative changes.

When we started thinking about doing the Combat Rebalancing experiment, we had to decide what it was, and perhaps just as importantly, what it was not.

We decided that the primary goals were to:

• Shake up the meta and improve general space combat, while maintaining a limited scope.
• Provide benefits to having mixed fleets rather than unihull.
• Using the 3D Assets that we have, improve counterplay and ship design options.

Containing the scope of these changes was considered critical – this is intended to be tightly focused on fleet composition and balance changes rather than a massive rewrite of how fleet combat works. We’re also not touching ground combat at this time.

Some of the problems that we identified with fleet combat in Stellaris included:

• “Alpha strike” artillery battleships dominate the late game. We added a bit of rock-paper-scissors when we improved Strike Craft, but due to the way repeatable technologies interact with combat, eventually all that matters is who has longer range.
• Disengagement mechanics further encourage overkill.
• Ships like Destroyers and Cruisers fall out of effectiveness almost immediately. The Point Defense niche of Destroyers isn’t very valuable, and almost anything a Cruiser can do, a Battleship can do better.
• Command Limits don’t really do their intended jobs.
• Doomstacks aren’t fun.

The last two were deemed out of scope for this round of changes, and will be explored in future updates. We’re also not really touching repeatable technologies at this time, focusing instead on trying to provide useful roles for more ship sizes.

The biggest changes include:

• Ship Roles can now be selected to auto-design ships that actually fulfill certain roles, such as Artillery, Brawler, Torpedo, and so on. If you do not possess any weapons that fulfill the selected role, it’ll do its best with what you have.
• Torpedoes and select other weapons now gain a multiplicative damage bonus based on the size of the target.
• Missiles have been moved out of the G slot back into S and M.
• Energy Torpedoes such as Proton and Neutron Launchers have been changed into G class weapons with a minimum range. Damage has been adjusted to be balanced as a Torpedo class weapon, and like the new Torpedoes, they deal increased damage to larger targets. Unlike standard torpedoes, they remain instant hit weapons for now.
• A new ship size called the Frigate, an advanced Corvette frame that delivers torpedoes, but is slower and less evasive. It’s unlocked with the Torpedo technology.
• Added a minimum range to all Large weapons except Lasers
• Note: Currently ships do not yet back off if all weapons are unable to fire due to range.
• Strike Craft no longer intercept missiles, but will continue to fight each other.
• Flak Batteries now more strongly counter Strike Craft, while Point Defense now more strongly counter missiles and torpedoes. Strike Craft are more reliant on Shields, Missiles and Torpedoes are more reliant on Armor. Due to their ability to bypass shields, Strike Craft are very effective against other Strike Craft.
• Ship combat computers now ignore certain weapons for desired range purposes, and base their desired distance on the actual loadout of the ship. “Swarm” and “Torpedo” behavior will charge in, “Picket” and “Line” behaviors will attempt to stay at the range of their median range weapons, and “Artillery” and “Carrier” will try to stay at the range of their longest ranged weapons.This generally increases the desire for ships to remain at range if possible.
• Ships now get a limited number of Disengagement Opportunities per combat. All current drives provide 1 disengagement roll (except for Psi Jump Drives, which provide 2) once the ship takes hull damage below its disengagement threshold, and the Hit and Run war doctrine grants all of your ships an additional attempt. Civilian ships set to evasive will continue to try to disengage with each hit.
• Some sources of Evasion have been replaced with other effects.
• Everything else changed. Everything we know is wrong. Panic, and know despair.

View the full patch notes here.

The roles for different ship sizes should become more valuable. The introduction of size based damage make Frigates and Cruisers potentially very dangerous to Battleships and other large ships.

Frigates, however, are very vulnerable without a screen of Corvettes to protect them, Destroyers are the masters of Point Defense in Screen or cutting down those Corvettes and Frigates using the Gunship or Brawler roles.

Artillery ships are vulnerable if something closes under the range of their guns, but with a screen that engages the enemy further away, they are free to blast away.

Every ship role has a counter somewhere in the system, and mixed fleets that cover for deficiencies are thus generally much more difficult to hard-counter.

If you prefer to listen to a good summary, we have MordredViking here explaining everything using sounds made by flapping meat at us.

A Torpedo Frigate​

Neutron Launchers and Missiles Cruiser

Different number of Aux Utility slots on the sterns.

That’s going to hurt if it hits that Titan.

Shield and Armor Hardening counter Shield and Armor Penetration.
​

Good, I was hoping you would.

As of the posting of this dev diary, the Stellaris 3.6 “Orion” Open Beta should be live on Steam, and will run until the end of the month.

As this build is still in “hot” and in development, expect to see many placeholder icons and TODO text here and there. Numbers are not necessarily final, and we’ll be looking at data gathered from the Open Beta to potentially make additional changes.

Known Issues:

• Many placeholder icons and some placeholder text.
• All new text will only be in English for the duration of the Open Beta.
• Ships do not currently back away if they are trapped within the minimum range of their weapons.

We expect to be making more changes and plan to update the beta at least once during the upcoming weeks.

Targeted feedback threads exist for the following topics:

• Fleet Combat Rebalancing
• Ascension Path changes (for those of you that have Utopia)
• Other 3.6 Feedback
• And we have a thread for general discussion of the Open Beta.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy the Stellaris 3.6 “Orion” Open Beta!