Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. This is the second in a multi-part dev diary about the 'Heinlein' 1.3 patch that we are currently working on. This week's dev diary will be focusing on a series of changes made to ship design and fleets that we call the Fleet Combat Overhaul.
Dedicated Roles
One frequent critique of the ship types in Stellaris is that they don't really have roles - besides corvettes being unable to mount large weapons, there is basically no difference in what type of weapons can be mounted on what type of hull, meaning that there is no actual reason to use a proper mix of ship types - often the best strategy is just to find a single effective design (such as all-corvette fleets on release version or the currently popular destroyer tachyon lance fleet.). To address this we sat down and thought about what the roles of each type of ship should be, and came out with the following:
- Corvettes are fast, agile ships that excel in taking out capital ships at close range.
- Destroyers are screens for your capital ships that excel in taking down corvettes and countering missiles and strike craft.
- Cruisers are close-range capital ship brawlers that tank enemy fire and engage enemy destroyers and capital ships.
- Battleships are artillery and carrier ships that provide long-range fire support.
- Torpedo slots mount Torpedo and Energy Torpedo weapons, which are short range extreme damage weapons meant to take down capital ships. They can only be used by corvettes and cruisers.
- Point Defense slots mount point defense cannons, which is the primary defense against missiles, torpedoes and fighter craft. Destroyers can be designed to field large amounts of point defense weapons.
- Extra Large slots mount massive long-range weapons that can only fire in a fixed arc ahead, such as Tachyon Lances, Arc Emitters and Mega Cannons. These can only be mounted on battleships and take up the whole bow section.
- The amount of damage reduction provided by armor now depends on the size of the ship, so a single piece of armor will do more for a corvette than for a battleship. This should make armor useful even for smaller ships.
- The 'special' utilities (crystalline hull plating, shield capacitor, etc) will use their own slot type that is limited by hull size, and so will only have to be balanced against each other instead of having to also be balanced against shields and armor.
- A new utility type, afterburners, provides additional combat speed, allowing you to design ships that can closely quickly with your opponents.
- As part of these changes we're looking over the balance of every weapon in the game, especially strike craft, point defense and creature weapons.
- Combat computers will be changed from being universal to being based on ship type, so corvettes have specific corvette computers that focus on boosting evasion, while destroyers have computers that impove targeting, allowing them to keep up with corvette evasion better than other ship types.
- We're changing emergency FTL so that it sets the fleet as MIA, meaning that fleets that successfully escape combat will always be able to flee to friendly space rather than getting stuck and ping-ponged to death. To compensate, we're making it so every ship (no matter how undamaged) has a chance to be lost when you use emergency FTL, so it's always a risky maneuver.
- We're looking into creating a special class of flagships that are limited in number by your fleet size, and are the only ones able to use auras, instead of all-aura battleship fleets.
- We're looking at balancing the different FTL types and making it less hard to catch enemy fleets. Some of our current ideas is having fleet speed depend on how far away you are from friendly space (and thus resupply) and boosting the speed of warp.
- We're looking into fleet formations and some basic orders during combat (priority targeting, etc). At minimum the basic fleet formation will be changed to be more sensible (no more suicide corvette leading the charge).
That's all for this week! Next week we'll talking about yet more features and changes coming in Heinlein. Read the original post [quote]Useful links Official Website Stellaris Wiki Stellaris Development Diary Archive
Stellaris
Paradox Development Studio
Paradox Interactive
2016-05-09
Strategy Simulation Singleplayer Multiplayer
GameBillet
8.91 /
€
Game News Posts 537
🎹🖱️Keyboard + Mouse
Very Positive
(119848 reviews)
https://www.stellaris.com/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/281990 
The Game includes VR Support
Linux [153.28 M]
Stellaris: Infinite Frontiers eBook
Stellaris: Plantoids Species Pack
Stellaris: Leviathans Story Pack
Stellaris: Utopia
Stellaris: Nova Edition Upgrade Pack
Stellaris: Galaxy Edition Upgrade Pack
Stellaris: Anniversary Portraits
Stellaris: Synthetic Dawn
Stellaris: Apocalypse
Stellaris: Humanoids Species Pack
Stellaris: Distant Stars Story Pack
Stellaris: MegaCorp
Stellaris: Ancient Relics Story Pack
Stellaris: Lithoids Species Pack
Stellaris: Federations
Stellaris: Necroids Species Pack
Stellaris: Nemesis
Stellaris: Aquatics Species Pack
Stellaris: Overlord
Stellaris: Toxoids Species Pack
Stellaris: First Contact Story Pack
Stellaris: Galactic Paragons
Stellaris: Astral Planes
Stellaris: Expansion Subscription
Stellaris: The Machine Age
Stellaris: Cosmic Storms
Stellaris: Grand Archive
Stellaris: Rick the Cube Species Portrait
Stellaris: Season 08 - Expansion Pass
Featuring deep strategic gameplay, a rich and enormously diverse selection of alien races and emergent storytelling, Stellaris has engaging challenging gameplay that rewards interstellar exploration as you traverse, discover, interact and learn more about the multitude of species you will encounter during your travels.
Etch your name across the cosmos by forging a galactic empire; colonizing remote planets and integrating alien civilizations. Will you expand through war alone or walk the path of diplomacy to achieve your goals?
Main Feature
- Deep & Varied Exploration.
- Enormous procedural galaxies, containing thousands of planets.
- Explore Anomalies with your heroic Scientist leaders.
- Infinitely varied races through customization and procedural generation.
- Advanced Diplomacy system worthy of a Grand Strategy Game.
- Ship Designer based on a vast array of technologies.
- Stunning space visuals.
- OS: Ubuntu 20.04 x64
- Processor: Intel iCore i3-530 or AMD FX-6350Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 or AMD ATI Radeon HD 5870 (1GB VRAM). or AMD Radeon RX Vega 11 or Intel HD Graphics 4600Network: Broadband Internet connection
- Storage: 12 GB available space
- OS: Ubuntu 20.04 x64
- Processor: Intel iCore i5-3570K or AMD Ryzen 5 2400GMemory: 4 GB RAM
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti (1GB VRAM) or AMD Radeon R7 370 (2 GB VRAM)Network: Broadband Internet connection
- Storage: 12 GB available space
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