I have to agree that the blockade system and the single attack per turn for each fleet are at the root of the ship spam problem, as they are what makes the ship spam so truly aggravating. Those aspects definitely need to be improved, and there have been a few good suggestions already, especially CP/MP requirements for blockades and auto-merging of fleets for combat.



I also welcome the idea of increased upkeep costs outside of your own territory, as it would give a slight economic advantage tot he defender (meaning he would not need to gear his economy towards war like the attacker).

A soft cap on ships as WhiteWeasel suggested might also help curb overproduction of ships. Investing more than intended in military would be possible when preparing for war or defending against an enemy with a massive invading fleet. Though it's a vastly different game, such a soft cap seems to work fine in Europa Universalis 4, given how reluctant most players are to go over their force limit.



Finally, I'd like to add that I welcome the goal to keep Food from turning into a "Lost Resource" in the late game, but I am not certain a "food upkeep" on fleets would be the right solution. As others have pointed out, it could severely hurt the early game.

Amplitude <3 <3

You always focus on what bother us and you manage to come up with original ideas, we are very lucky to have you !



Personally I love the idea of an increased upkeep for the fleet that leave our area of influence (it seems logical after all!).

Wasn't using growth as a cost for ship production tested with the harmony? I don't know the stats but it didn't seem to be really significant since ships are not produced constantly. But I am curious to see a "food upkeep". Having a big fleet would be a huge handicap with this so it could solve the problem. But wouldn't it make the high-techs fleet with a bad-♥♥♥♥♥ hero even more op?

To use the economy and not caps which would even with much balance testing always be arbitrary is imho the right thing to do.



Upkeep is a solid limit setter if adjusted correctly.



I like the idea of reduced fleet upkeep in your own area of influence as

1.It makes sense as the logistic costs to supply a fleet at the distant front (with whatsoever) are always higher then at its core worlds. Also it would be intresting if you had to save money before a crusade or adjust your economy first so that it can handle your fixed costs.

2. It would give the faction who has to defend itself an advantage benefiting a pacifistic playstyle which is already one of your goals.

3. Influence becomes a factor for warfaring races asell as for the matter of defending outposts till they become colonies. (assuming it still works that way)



The other idea of adding a food as secondary upkeep I have my doubts though its sounds intresting. Depending on how expensive it is it could imho has a too powerful impact on the early game and mid game for warfaring races which still alot of players like to play. Also lore wise it would only make sense for the normal biological races to use food instead of Industrie or something different.





Thx for your post here Metalynx.

Rly gives us confidence in you and shows us how intrested you are in the community (not that we already knew that ^^)

Metalynx wrote:
This is a very interesting discussion that we've had internally as well! I will highlight a few points related to our discussions.

- We are not fond of 'arbitrary' limits on number of fleets. Though we do want to reduce the number of fleets from ES

- Also the entire aspect of stacking '1 ship' fleets to lock down fleets is something we are aware of and do not wish to repeat

- We also intend to play around with alternatives to locking down fleets in systems - such as removing remaining movement points upon entering a blocked system, but being free to leave the round after (Giving time to attack)



Overall, to address the question of 'Reducing Ship Spam': We will use the economy. Significantly higher upkeep costs and we've talked about combining that with increasing upkeep of fleets that leave your own influence area (though feedback may be an issue here) - to allow for players to build up for attacks, but have a harder time keeping up prolonged wars.

We've also discussed a way of using growth as a part of either ship production or upkeep to further add costs to ships - while also increasing the use of food later in the game - and not have it become a 'lost' resource when a system does not have space for more population.

This entire section is still very much in flux and it's nice to hear your feedback on the topic. It doesn't sound like we're on a completely wrong track from what the general purpose of this thread is ^^

You guys really do rock! Thanks for chiming in and congratulations on making such an amazing game.



I love the ideas that you have brought forward. After all the discussion that has been kicked around in this thread, I too have come around to the conclusion that higher upkeep is a better solution than an arbitrary cap. I absolutely love the idea of increasing the upkeep costs when not in friendly space. Makes it important to prepare for war (a war chest) and have more limited strategic objectives. It also makes it less likely that peaceful factions will get completely steamrolled in early game and will have a chance to establish themselves.



Hopefully the end result is a universe where having a trading empire is just as viable as conquering the universe. War should be fraught with risk and unforeseen economic consequences.



As it is about three or four times a game there is a combat that gets me right on the edge of my seat because there is so much riding on it. Did I design my ships correctly? Was this the right time to attack? Can I foil his victory condition? What a beautiful thing it would be if almost every combat could put you in that place. Make you sit up and pay attention.



By the way, I played Endless Space: Disharmony for over 250 hours before I even had a thought of how it could be better (I was so engrossed). Absolute masterpiece.

Metalynx wrote:
This is a very interesting discussion that we've had internally as well! I will highlight a few points related to our discussions.

- We are not fond of 'arbitrary' limits on number of fleets. Though we do want to reduce the number of fleets from ES

Wow! A dev reply! Also to comment on your your arbitrary fleet limits. Instead of a hard cap as in "you can build only X amount of ships" how about a "soft" limit where say, you will have pay higher upkeep for your military if you build more ships that your current empire allows. For instance in a game I was playing, I had 21 at a cost of 63 so that's 3 dust per CP. With that system. if I were to build more ships that my empires current tech level would allow, I'll have to use more dust (now it's 4 per cp) to maintain my fleets because i'm straining my logistics.



That's just an example, feel free to use a better idea!

Ship spam is sometime only option to wage war with economic advantage and science disadvantage.

ES1 implementation of system blockade was issue, not ship spamming itself.

Also meaningful battle shouldn't be just single fight between two fleets(single max cp fleet each side) with heroes. It would be rather all in war.

'Meaningful battle' and then either you or your oponent say gg and quit... It sound rather horrible.

The person who can pull off the ship spam first auto wins.



gg no re



Even without blockading systems.



Saying that I also want that its still be possible but pls not at the same extend as in ES I and not so overpowered or so easly to pull off.

Sovereign wrote:
The person who can pull off the ship spam first auto wins.



Saying that I also want that its still be possible but pls not at the same extend as in ES I and not so overpowered or so easly to pull off.

I agree, I am still going to want to mass produce ships, but not hundreds at a time like I can get to in Es1. Maybe bringing the unit spam to like endless legend level or maybe somewhat more than that.

I don't know, I'm fine with either crazy upkeep or a synthetic cap being put on ships. Personally, I prefer the former, since it still gives weaker players a chance against someone who dominates half the galaxy already, and could force decisions between fleet power versus galactic coverage. I have faith that regardless of which one Amplitude does, they'll do it right. I just personally don't like when there's a billion fleets everywhere on Huge maps, makes the game a total slog...

High upkeep doesn't stop ship spam. It just cause players to optimize ship lifetime.

What about completely different approach:

Proposition 1(change how attack works):

- fleet have 100 attack points

- each attack consume round_up((100*)/)

- as long fleet have at least 1 attack point then it could launch another attack.

Proposition 2(change how guard works):

- when fleet or group of fleets tries to leave guarded system then guarding player receive notification whether he like to attack fleet(or group of fleets) leaving system. Player guarding system could launch one attack per fleet(or combine this proposition with proposion 1).

Proposition 3:

- balance production costs so small ships loaded with weapons will be more expensive in terms of production.

This is a very interesting discussion that we've had internally as well! I will highlight a few points related to our discussions.

- We are not fond of 'arbitrary' limits on number of fleets. Though we do want to reduce the number of fleets from ES

- Also the entire aspect of stacking '1 ship' fleets to lock down fleets is something we are aware of and do not wish to repeat

- We also intend to play around with alternatives to locking down fleets in systems - such as removing remaining movement points upon entering a blocked system, but being free to leave the round after (Giving time to attack)



Overall, to address the question of 'Reducing Ship Spam': We will use the economy. Significantly higher upkeep costs and we've talked about combining that with increasing upkeep of fleets that leave your own influence area (though feedback may be an issue here) - to allow for players to build up for attacks, but have a harder time keeping up prolonged wars.

We've also discussed a way of using growth as a part of either ship production or upkeep to further add costs to ships - while also increasing the use of food later in the game - and not have it become a 'lost' resource when a system does not have space for more population.

This entire section is still very much in flux and it's nice to hear your feedback on the topic. It doesn't sound like we're on a completely wrong track from what the general purpose of this thread is ^^

This entire thread could be compared to the large # of other past threads if it were re-titled as 'LR kinetics are too powerful / make combat boring / routine / dull...'



As OP stated, yes at some point in the game (for some mid game, for some a lot earlier), you have 1 player fleet basically holding off de facto any number of AI spam fleets and also yes it is dull and repetitive because there is no expectation of challenge, just rinse and wash over and over as you blow each fleet to dust - until the next spam wave comes at you.



As a lot of us has discussed in those prior threads though - which I won't rehash but simply super-summarize as LR kinetics values are very strong in terms of damage done + pretty high accuracy = no brainer choice of super-fleet weapon stacking



A lot of people use mods that re-size the damage kinetics do at LR, and for me personally I find that a good option to bring the challenge fun back. Forgot name of the mod I was using but I downloaded someone's personal mod that adjusted the LR kinetic damage number to be much more reasonable. That alone made my fleet combats much more challenging and therefore had to start bringing balanced fleets vs the AI - no more 1 or 2 super fleets of all LR kinetic armed ships blowing the hell out of every AI fleet in the first phase before they could barely fire back.



So my answer to the OP point of the thread would be that the true root of the issue isn't grounded in or solved by CP or command points. The true issue is / was the rather lopsided weapons balance that made LR kinetics such a king of choice by a mile - a huge mile - that any player designed fleet of 100% LR kinetics would slaughter any mixed fleet the AI used.



So my wish for EL2 would be that weapons balancing be really strongly looked at, tested, and bring actual weapons design choice to be a significant factor - with multiple 'top

weapon design choices rather than the 100% no brainer choice of EL1 LR kinetics that made any human fleet so much more stronger than AI fleets there was little to no 'surprise' in any combat scenario.

1. Ship antispam:

Suggest that every fleet must have his admiral (not displayed/standard pictogram generic or hero) and so make fleet cost maintanance a function based on geometric progression and dependent on race and fleet position (less when in your or allied influence zone, more when in neutral zone, and even more in enemy influence zone) - so it would be easy on ships moving to rally point while building large fleets in your empire while cost a lot if you try to spam enemy with few-ship fleets, and also rather logic.



2. Fleets shall pass:

Idea that fleet could be blocked by enemy fleets on star system no more then 1 turn (loose spare movement points) is great.



3. No entire star system blockage by single scout:

Make the star system actually defend themselves by inflicting constant damage (based on system MP) per turn to every enemy fleet (devided between ships and partially blocked by their individual defence (goodbye overloaded with siege modules weaponless defenseless dreadnaughts) and evasion (chance to evade)). Also difference between fleet's MP and system's MP could determine wether the fleet could not threat system (fleet MP << system MP), block system (fleet MP is 30-100% of system MP) or invade (fleet MP > system MP).



4. No swarms of cheap glass cannons:

For the weapons balancing I suggest that every type of weapon could differ in it's weight (must not be installed in dozens in ship, better if about 10 weapon modules per ship, it could be restricted even if ship's weight capacity is not exceeded) and power based on ship class, so destroyer class weapons will be most effective against enemy destroyers and much less effective on dreadnaughts, when heavy battleship class weapons will be a danger to dreadnoughts class ships and could blow in a one shot (and possibly overkill) failed to evade destoyer class ship. This will encourage to build balanced fleets rather than swarms of kinetics loaded glass cannons.



5. Scouts suggestion:

Ships could recieve an evasion bonus if they are underloaded with modules, for example single weaponless scout ship with good drives and single deflector/shield module could be granted high probability to ecsape battle against enemy fleet.



6. Weapons range suggestions & power routing per phase

I am personally do not understand a point to make each type of weapon in 3 variants based on range (LR kinetics, MR inetics, ML kinetics). Instad I suggest idea to allow player just before battle to "route power"/"focus on" specific module (give a slight bonus) per battle phase: rockets, lasers (they look more like a plasma weapons for me), kinetics, flack, shields, deflectors, thrusters (evasion bonus). This bonuses could be race specific (more weapons bonuses for agressive species and more defence bonuses for defensive species). And weapon types could just be in one variant which effeciency is based on proximity to enemy fleet.

I like to use Hissho-affinity combined with max fleet/battle stats. You're ruining it for me.



...kidding. Stop the spam.



Signed.



Iskald: what do you think of a specific battle action for blockade bypass? Similar to the one-turn retreat, the action lets that specific fleet go by in exchange for an entire phase of unreturned fire. Sets up an interesting counter-tactic to someone trying to cut off your expansion.



Basically, well-armored/shielded ships trick the enemy into upping his firepower and lowering his defenses, then you run in and slaughter them with whatever they are weakest to. Kind of meshes well with "no glass cannons."

mklein85 wrote:




Iskald: what do you think of a specific battle action for blockade bypass? Similar to the one-turn retreat, the action lets that specific fleet go by in exchange for an entire phase of unreturned fire. Sets up an interesting counter-tactic to someone trying to cut off your expansion.

Yes, this would be even more interesting. Something like retreat to chosen destination rather than random one. Fleets with big ships with low evasion could get significant damage in such maneuver, while evasive scout could run away almost safely or with a few hits (only in first battle phase - until enemy fighters reach it and smite).

Metalynx wrote:
This is a very interesting discussion that we've had internally as well! I will highlight a few points related to our discussions.

- We are not fond of 'arbitrary' limits on number of fleets. Though we do want to reduce the number of fleets from ES

- Also the entire aspect of stacking '1 ship' fleets to lock down fleets is something we are aware of and do not wish to repeat

- We also intend to play around with alternatives to locking down fleets in systems - such as removing remaining movement points upon entering a blocked system, but being free to leave the round after (Giving time to attack)



Overall, to address the question of 'Reducing Ship Spam': We will use the economy. Significantly higher upkeep costs and we've talked about combining that with increasing upkeep of fleets that leave your own influence area (though feedback may be an issue here) - to allow for players to build up for attacks, but have a harder time keeping up prolonged wars.

We've also discussed a way of using growth as a part of either ship production or upkeep to further add costs to ships - while also increasing the use of food later in the game - and not have it become a 'lost' resource when a system does not have space for more population.

This entire section is still very much in flux and it's nice to hear your feedback on the topic. It doesn't sound like we're on a completely wrong track from what the general purpose of this thread is ^^

I like this idea.



I also think the EL battle system solved this problem of "ship spamming." So fleets = armies, ships = units, blockade = siege etc. basically the same (aside from how battles were fought), but in EL all the different armies could fight in 1 battle therefor eliminating the need for ship/unit spamming. The armies would be combined anyways and the extra armies would spawn in a little bit every turn, so the only way to not be outnumbered every turn is to make large armies to begin with. Also once the battle began you couldn't retreat (unless you said that before it begun) which was also a problem in ES (AI would ship spam and retreat every time you tried to attack so they never lost any units).



Basically I think a lot of these problems were fixed in EL although I doubt ES2 will be exactly the same as far as how the ships/units and fleets/armies will work (obviously).

Another possibility is letting Technologically overpowering take a better peace deal. Perhaps some running score of what the Cp loss ratios are for that war.



If you have lost 100+ ships to their one, a player is going to sue for peace and try to advance your tech to find some sort of counter and rebuild/refit, The AI should at least try to do the same.

What all of you said doesn't mean the AI is bad it's the other way around, it's using every way the game was made to win thats pretty intelligent so the problem only comes from unlimited fleets/ships

Not necessarily.

If it could be proven that the AI indeed does this as a delaying tactic, then yes, I would agree that it is good AI.

However, the way games played out, it seems very unlikely that the AI was employing delaying tactics, and it simply failed to merge its fleets. Many times, they could have inflicted some serious casualties on my fleets by merging to their full fleet cap, and with their industrial advantage could have wiped it out in two or three battles.

What my bothered me that space battles didnt meant anything during a war.



The Ship spam of the AI and myself was just so big that it was just click auto calculate battle 10-20 times a turn. Losses didnt bothered me as i produced dozens of ships every turn even in early game.



All that mattered was just bomb that trash ships away so my invasion ship can conquer this planet. (And by all the defense buildings etc i rly never had any need then more then 2 Elite Soldiers modules per planet ever)





Big Battles should MEAN something.To have an an actuall decision battle which you knew could have just cost your victory are tons of fun imho.



But saying that I am not a fan of strict caps. If you can do it then do it you are supossed to be a space emperor to do as he likes.

But it shouldnt be easy at all. And in ES I it is pretty easy.

Yeah, ship spam is an issue that I hope is addressed in ES2. I'll leave these two posts I made when discussing in the ES2 speculation threads:

WhiteWeasel wrote:
I'd like to see a CP cap (that can be upgraded with research of course) on fleets where you can only have a certain amount of ships deployed at once, to stop endless spamming and make individual battles more important. As when you reach the cp cap (say 100) you physically can't build any more ships. So if you were to lose a couple fleets, you have queue up more ships-which will take a few turns.



I also want to see more strategic uses for hangars:

Put a CP cap on your hangar-so you can only put a limited number ships in it. Say it starts with a 4 CP capacity by default and by endgame it can be around 35 (about 1 1/2 fleets worth of ships). However this CP cap for the hangar does not count towards the main one. So if you're at the cap, you can still build ships; provided you have room in that planets respective hangar. Also have a repair module type improvement(s) you can build on your star system, so the hangar provides more use than parking space for your reserve ships. I know you can repair your ships with , but that is expensive and this will provide an alternative way of repair your fleets. Cheap, but slow.



Also I want heros to be a bit less influential. I feel combat is way too lopsided.

WhiteWeasel wrote:
Also the current blockade mechanics have got to get a revamp. They are to exploity/unfair depending on which end you are on.



For undefended systems:



1) The systems normal defenses will provide it with it's own ower: (albeit not a ton) . This system MP factor into if it can be blockaded. If the blockading fleet has less MP than the system, it cannot be blockaded. It's silly how a scout can shut down a whole systems trade lanes (when that system has anti-ship measures as part of it's defenses mind you). The system MP won't stop a full fleet, but will alleviate the scout blockade exploit.



2) Be it upgrades to existing structures (like cloud rippers) or a standalone, add structure that can damage an enemy fleet in orbit. These anti-ship measures will deal damage divided evenly amongst all enemy ships in the fleet. The damage is applied on a per fleet basis. The damage will have the enemies defensive modules factored in. Because of this a single ship fleet could be ripped apart in a turn or two, while a full fleet could take very little to no damage at all as a sorts of herd resistance. So say your system defense does 600 damage per turn. You have a 450 corvette that has a total defensive value of 100. A single ship fleet (or a dozen since the damage is reapplied per fleet) will get destroyed. But a single fleet of 6+ of those corvettes will take no damage at all. This will discourage blockading with a bunch of singular weak ships and stalling massive fleets with a bunch of throwaway ships and encourage the condensing of fleets.





For defended systems



1) Your fleet must have at least >=75% of the total enemy ower: (system(if any) + fleet in orbit) in order to blockade it. As I find it silly a hilariously outclassed scout or unarmed invasion fleet can stop your trade routes AND stall your heavily armed forces.



2) A fleet can battle again based on it's CP value. In essence a 12 CP fleet can fight a same sized or larger fleet once, or can fight twelve 1 fleets, four 3 fleets etc... Maybe I'm bashing this over the head now that I don't like fleet spam.

I like your hangar idea, a lot!

Its very disappointing to me that a game with as many patches and add-ons as this still has this issue.

Generalkly the problem is that while people 'say' they dont like ship spam, the moment you put in restrictions on the # of ship people complain about that restriction.

satoru wrote:
Generalkly the problem is that while people 'say' they dont like ship spam, the moment you put in restrictions on the # of ship people complain about that restriction.

I don't think that is true. MOO2 had an Empire Command point set up and you never hear complaints about that. This is close to a game breaking issue late game. If you have three fleets on guard mode on important systems, you can easily fight over two dozen pointless battles a turn just on those systems! Battles that don't have a prayer of putting even a dent in your admiral led fleet. That is not fun. More combat does not = fun. Meaningful combat = fun.

Xtiaan wrote:
I don't think that is true. MOO2 had an Empire Command point set up and you never hear complaints about that. This is close to a game breaking issue late game. If you have three fleets on guard mode on important systems, you can easily fight over two dozen pointless battles a turn just on those systems! Battles that don't have a prayer of putting even a dent in your admiral led fleet. That is not fun. More combat does not = fun. Meaningful combat = fun.

But you see thats a DIFFERENT problem. Its not about a command point cap that you're having issues with. Its more the management of multiple combat fronts. That could be addressed via a UI/UX change. Not necessarily via a cap.

I think they are connected. Moo1 has a spam problem and the empire cap in Moo2 largely fixed it. Still, any solution that would keep the focus on empire building and quality, meaningful combats would be welcome. Maybe a maximum number of fleets... based on species, empire size and logistics tech would do the trick. That worked pretty well to streamline the number of battles in ROME2:TW and also made the battles themselves have more impact.



How to tame the late game combat beast? Maybe that's the more relevant question because there's more than one way to skin a cat.

I am looking forward to seeing what the devs come up with to solve the fleet spamming problems in ES1. Whether it be through an empire-wide cap on ships or number of fleets, something needs to be done. Ideally, the AI could be improved enough to learn when its swarm tactics of small fleets aren't working, but if some kind of restrictions or controls are needed to fix the problem then so be it.

Let me say first that I've been playing the hell out of this game. Best 4 x Space game since Master of Orion 2., hands down. I do have a suggestion though that I think will help mid to late game play for the sequel. Currently A.I ship spam is out of control. I find myself fending off seven or eight fleets of inferior fleets with one good fleet turn after turn. It becomes a little repetitive and takes a lot of the drama out of combat. Having your best fleet 'pinned' in a system by 10 interior fleets turn after turn because you can only fight them one at a time also can become really aggravating.



It's not that it's impossible to combat this computer tactic but it does mean creating a huge amount of fleet spam yourself. I hope I'm not the only one who thinks there should be a better solution.



My suggestion is that along with the maximum fleet CP cap we currently have... that each empire has a maximum 'empire' CP Cap as well (Maximum amount of CP allowed across the entire empire).



The maximum universal CP would be based on your species, the number of systems owned, total population, tech level...ect.



I'm thinking that the universal CP would cap out at about 20x the maximum fleet CP your empire had.



There would still be plenty of fleets, plenty of combat... but each battle would be more important.



This set-up would also streamline multi-player and make some of the cheap strategies currently used in multi-player irrelevant... 30 cheap missile ships hidden in every hanger, anybody?



Sorry if this topic has been brought up before... I really do think it deserves some discussion. It would be really interesting to hear what the Dev Team's take is on this issue.

A large war is always going to be more about the logistics then the heroics of a single battle.

I haven't play game long but even at newbie levels when I'm still learning last thing you need its the game tied in endless battles so boring after a few battles when AI just spam ships with no hope of victory or plan other that to bore me to death and notice AI appears be able to slip out of system to avoid battle and my ships refuse to move and just get locked in endless combats before AI sends ships to battle or after a battle

If if remember correctly the Total War games had the same issue and solved it by reducing the number of army you can create: in Rome 2 you cannot have an army without a general to command it and the number of general you can have at the same time is limited by the width of you empire.

Maybe we could apply the same solution with the heroes? It could be tricky since heroes are used to command system too and some faction from ES1 would be advantaged (like the Horatio). Moreover I cannot find a way to apply it to the Harmony.



But, in the end, each empire would have a limited number of army and would solve conflict trough great battle since lonely ships would be a waste of generals. The limit could be 2 at the beginning and could evolve with technology or the number of system.



What do you think of it?

Igncom1 wrote:
A large war is always going to be more about the logistics then the heroics of a single battle.

Yet all wars had their battles which went down in history.



When I hear Napoleon i hear: Austerlitz, Marengo, Dresden, the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig,Waterloo etc

When I hear WWI I hear: Battle of the Somme, of Verdun and Tannenberg

same with WWII: Dunkerque, Stalingrad, Kursk , Battle of Midway etc etc



you get the point.





besides that its just no fun to destroy hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of AI ships (especially on higher difficultys) till you almost get your science victory solely trough the knowledge gathering trait.

And there is no real logistic at all. The only logistic is annoying micromanagement and as you can build another 100 ships next turn you just set a waypoint and dont even care about merging them all to fleets because its just annoying and killing any fun of a full scale war. Its so annoying i dont even care to select battle cards on endless difficulty anymore cause i would have to do it like 20 times every turn.

Bobledanois wrote:
If if remember correctly the Total War games had the same issue and solved it by reducing the number of army you can create: in Rome 2 you cannot have an army without a general to command it and the number of general you can have at the same time is limited by the width of you empire.

Maybe we could apply the same solution with the heroes? It could be tricky since heroes are used to command system too and some faction from ES1 would be advantaged (like the Horatio). Moreover I cannot find a way to apply it to the Harmony.



But, in the end, each empire would have a limited number of army and would solve conflict trough great battle since lonely ships would be a waste of generals. The limit could be 2 at the beginning and could evolve with technology or the number of system.



What do you think of it?

Yeah but Total War did an overkill with that. Even in all the prior Total War games i found that a few single major battles could have had a major impact for an entire war. They even marked the spots of that "heroic" battles with some little swords on the strategic map as an memorial.



Dont know why they did that in Rome 2. In all the other series the upkeep costs were totaly enough to regulate the army size of an empire appropriate to its scale and prosperty.











And just be honest upkeep in ES was never rly an issue. (Execpt maybe for a Sophon who had to keep his taxes down)



Every race was like the Harmony because you never realy felt the upkeep costs at all!

So the problem here is: the IA (and some funny guys in mp) build hundreds of useless ships to exploit the fact your own fleet can only fight one per turn. This way, your fleet is "pined" in one system while all your systems are under blockade. And we don't mention the fact that, if you ever split your fleet yourself, the IA (or the funny guy) can gather his ships and fight yours. For what I see, the main points of the problem here are:



- A fleet can fight just one enemy fleet per turn.

- A ship can blockade a whole system by himself.

- There is no cap lock.

- Any ship can block every fleet (with no open frontier treaty) in a system.





The solutions proposed here are:



Xtiaan

- Creating a cap lock for the global .



WhiteWeasel

- Making the system able to defend himself against the little fleets.

- Creating more condition to blockade (in particular : the fleet should have a minimum ower: ).

- Changing the amount of attack a fleet can do each turn. A fleet of n can attack n , all together or one after the other.



Sovereign

- Changing the upkeep?



Bobledanois

- Creating a cap lock for the number of fleet.

and I'll add:

- Forcing the ship to fight all together in a system. So, if 10 ships in different fleet but in the same system get attacked, they will fight as one fleet of 10 ships. It looks like the solution proposed by WhiteWeasel but the is left aside in this case: every force go with his full strength every time.

- Changing the blocking option: how can possibly a scoot block an entire fleet? Maybe a fleet can be blocked only by fleet with more ower: or .



By looking at these we can see there are 2 different spirits here:

1. Forcing the player to have less ship or fleet, so every one count. We expect it will make the players gather their ships instead of spreading them. It should solve the "pinning" and the blockade problem. This can be made naturally (upkeep) or forced (CP).

2. Changing the way fights and blockade are managed by the game. Making huge fleet able to fight multiple time a turn or forcing the little fleet to assemble for the fighting part. Making systems able to handle little fleet by themselves for the blockade part.



Am I right?



If it is that simple maybe we can settle this with a vote, we have to choose if we want to solve this problem and which way to go.

To some extend its in the game: Ships are forced to fight together to match the CP of the attacking fleet.

This was a heavly needed nerf for the OP glass cannons back then.



But this only occurs if those 1 CP fleets are defending not when they attack you.







I think and hope the whole blocade system is also something which is hopefully reworked in ES 2.

You notice that Endless Legend doesn't really have this problem because spamming armies would be economically unfeasible. Perhaps increasing fleet upkeep costs is the logical first step. Of course, who knows how that would effect A.I behavior in general.

Endless legend doesn't have this problem because some issues of endless space are not in EL.

The major issues are :

your army cannot be pinned down by a single unit.

your cannot separate your army in many different units this easily (it takes more place) and if an enemy attack one of your separated units, they will gather to fight (no more "one turn per unit to kick them out").

and, as you said, the upkeep is more important.



Still, to blockade all the city of your enemy is still possible. But since your main army can move freely, you just have to go from one city to another to "free" them. It is more a strategical choice than a real trick.



Maybe focusing on these points would solve the problem and could even bring closer the gameplay of the 2 games.