Stellaris: Paradoxian Space Stategy.

[Cikomyr]

I don't think there's ever been a 4x where tactical combat ever added anything to the game. If you're not relatively evenly matched there's no need to do any tactics, you just steamroll hapless opponents* that never stood a chance and 90% of the point of the rest of a 4x/Grand Strategy game is making sure you have enough strategic advantages that you aren't evenly matched.

Counterpoint: Sword of the Stars

But only because the strategic game was just an excuse to design, build and send star fleets in battles.

[GloatingSwine]

Counterpoint: Sword of the Stars

But only because the strategic game was just an excuse to design, build and send star fleets in battles.

I distinctly remember 90% of fleet combat in SotS being "build five of the biggest hardest things I can with doom lasers, A move them at the enemy and watch the fireworks". (But then SoTS committed the deadly error of having a 3D space map plus range limits, making it a fiddly chore to figure out which systems were actually in range unless you played humans and had space lanes to make it obvious, which is why I think I played The Pit more than the actual game).

Nothing was regularly gained by me being able to A move them myself, if it had been a noninteractive replay that showed how my doom fleet had doomed the enemy it would have done the same job almost always.

[NichG]

I don't think there's ever been a 4x where tactical combat ever added anything to the game. If you're not relatively evenly matched there's no need to do any tactics, you just steamroll hapless opponents* that never stood a chance and 90% of the point of the rest of a 4x/Grand Strategy game is making sure you have enough strategic advantages that you aren't evenly matched.

* Via endless tedious clicking that the AI can't be trusted to automate, probably.

Tactical combat in MOO-I was great, primarily because technologies didn't just adjust raw numbers like damage output or victory chance, but actually created qualitatively distinct effects. Things like how the black hole generator, stasis fields, teleporters, radius effects, etc all interacted made for an interesting dynamic. Basically, if you understood the tactical combat well enough, there were ship designs that you could take advantage of which would be useless in the hands of someone who didn't understand the tactical combat system. Furthermore, there were ways to have pyrrhic victories and secondary objectives - maybe you have more military might, but if you don't stop the enemy from dumping bioweapons on your planet before you manage to take them out then you're still going to suffer a permanent loss of maximum population. Raiding was a good force multiplier too, especially with missiles having a non-zero flight time to target (and having things like asteroid fields provide partial cover from missile salvos).

I think the reason why tactical combat systems have been pretty bad in other 4x games is primarily the uninspired ship systems and technologies. The new tech adds +5% to damage, or +5% hull points, or whatever. It's easier to do theorycraft balance on things like that, but the actual experience of using things that only shift around relative numbers is pretty boring, and so the tactical combat ends up not really rewarding the work it took the player to grab all those techs, make a bunch of shipyards, etc, etc, all to have some crazy behemoth of a warship to swing around. If that warship amounts to just 'the numbers are bigger', then all of that effort didn't really translate into an increased feeling of accessible power. But if the warship has all sorts of ship systems that do different things and combo in ways you couldn't have space for in a smaller, cheaper ship then it can be very rewarding (even if it ends up being suboptimal).

[DigoDragon]

The mildest thing he ascerted was that tactical combat had "no place" in 4X or similar games and that all games that included it sucked by default.

I don't think there's ever been a 4x where tactical combat ever added anything to the game.

Counterpoint: Sword of the Stars

I'd like to throw my hat in for Master of Orion 2.

Spoiler: Gush for MOO2

Show

There was ship initiative, where smaller faster ships shoot first. Combat made your starship facing an important tactical aspect-- Your weapons had limited arcs they fire from and shields only drained on the side where it was being struck. Getting shot at from behind increased the chances of your engines exploding. Tactics also mattered when the enemy fleet has a single specific battleship with shield piercing phasors, energy webs, or massive missile silos that would wreck your fleet if you don't kill it first. I thought combat was one of the best parts of MoO2. The icing on the cake was that you can toggle the tactical combat on and off at any time during the battle, so if you didn't want tactical fights, you could skip them with the push of a button.

I found tactical combat to be one of the defining points of this game.

[Wookieetank]

"In space, no one can hear you cry over your pitiful borders"

Thanks to the wonderful joys of hyperdrives, I find myself trapped in a tiny little corner of the galaxy. To my east I have an enormous Fallen empire, to the north, xenophobic arsehats who even with a full embassy modifier, hate my alien guts and have some sort of grudge against my civilians. At least I'm swimming in resources, so I've managed to build up a full fleet (1/3 of which are destroyers), and have two planets getting rather nicely colonized. Didn't quite have the time to instigate a conquest against the xenophobes to procure a spacelane to the rest of the galaxy, but its on the to do list for today

@Narkis: not sure where earth was at, the Xenophobes kicked me out before I got a chance to survey the system

[Knaight]

I don't think there's ever been a 4x where tactical combat ever added anything to the game. If you're not relatively evenly matched there's no need to do any tactics, you just steamroll hapless opponents* that never stood a chance and 90% of the point of the rest of a 4x/Grand Strategy game is making sure you have enough strategic advantages that you aren't evenly matched.

Age of Wonders 3 counts regardless - part of building those strategic advantages is consistently playing smart tactically, first when beating down the independents who are occupying resource sites, then when fighting other players. Consistent loss minimization is a major part of getting bigger military forces without having to tank long term economic development to do so.

If simple target prioritization and scripting counts, then the Dominions series combat also adds a lot to the game. You don't have direct control, and the AI automates all the battles. However, you control troop positioning, troop targeting, and can script the first five turns for commanders, including mages.

It is worth observing that both of the listed games are low tech fantasy games and not space games, and that neither have unit customization per se (although both have commanders that can be given items, and the Dominions series has entire strategies built around kitting out heavy commanders with magic items and letting them wreck raiding forces all by their lonesome, conquer territory all by their lonesome, and then show up en mass with mage support to blow up actual enemy armies). It's often a lot easier to create more intricate unit interactions with that than with space games, which just gets further emphasized by the existence of defined factions with access to different things. Still, look at something like Starcraft, which has a pretty decent troop variety that enables more interesting tactical combat - and which could have yet more interesting tactical combat were it turn based. It's absolutely doable in a space game, you just need to build the game for a solid tactical layer from the beginning instead of having it as an afterthought for the strategic layer.

[GloatingSwine]

I'd like to throw my hat in for Master of Orion 2.

Spoiler: Gush for MOO2

Show

There was ship initiative, where smaller faster ships shoot first. Combat made your starship facing an important tactical aspect-- Your weapons had limited arcs they fire from and shields only drained on the side where it was being struck. Getting shot at from behind increased the chances of your engines exploding. Tactics also mattered when the enemy fleet has a single specific battleship with shield piercing phasors, energy webs, or massive missile silos that would wreck your fleet if you don't kill it first. I thought combat was one of the best parts of MoO2. The icing on the cake was that you can toggle the tactical combat on and off at any time during the battle, so if you didn't want tactical fights, you could skip them with the push of a button.

I found tactical combat to be one of the defining points of this game.

Ship Initiative broke MoO2. Shield Piercing Rapid Heavy Phasors, stack Hyper X, Achilles Targeting, structural analyser, time warp device.

Congratulations now as long as you move first (because ship initiative) no enemy ship (except antarans who have inherent Hard Shields and a fleet of about three ships) will ever get to take a turn against you. The AI can send max size fleets of doom stars every turn (and will) and you can destroy them all every time with five of your own ships and none of them get a turn ever. None of the combat mechanics matter because tech refinements and sensible builds make them go away.

But you still have to do all the clicking yourself. Which is tedious.

Early game build large numbers of cheap fast rack missile boats with 2 shots each and the AI will always run away as soon as you launch and they see how much damage is on the field.

This is what I'm talking about with tactical combat not adding anything to 4x in the long run. It's always super trivial to break it, either by just having overwhelming numerical or tech advantage. In order for it to add anything to the game you have to have played the 4x part wrong enough that you don't have a massive advantage when the battle starts.

4x/Grand Strategy games are about economic strategy, about being able to out-expand, out-tech, and out-industry your opponents. You win military engagements in these games before you even declare the war, let alone fire the first shot. You don't win them with tactical finesse, you win them with economic, technological, and industrial might.

[Cikomyr]

I distinctly remember 90% of fleet combat in SotS being "build five of the biggest hardest things I can with doom lasers, A move them at the enemy and watch the fireworks". (But then SoTS committed the deadly error of having a 3D space map plus range limits, making it a fiddly chore to figure out which systems were actually in range unless you played humans and had space lanes to make it obvious, which is why I think I played The Pit more than the actual game).

Nothing was regularly gained by me being able to A move them myself, if it had been a noninteractive replay that showed how my doom fleet had doomed the enemy it would have done the same job almost always.

Well, apologies for being blunt, but i think you just hadnt grasped the tactical layers of SotS ;) i understand why, because its easy to have everything fall into a massive chaotic mess

[GloatingSwine]

Well, apologies for being blunt, but i think you just hadnt grasped the tactical layers of SotS ;) i understand why, because its easy to have everything fall into a massive chaotic mess

Well yes, but it was a chaotic mess that I won with trivial ease every single time because I had bigger and better stuff and "warfare" was just grinding through all the enemy's planets as they became less and less capable of resisting as their economy broke down.

[DigoDragon]

Ship Initiative broke MoO2. Shield Piercing Rapid Heavy Phasors, stack Hyper X, Achilles Targeting, structural analyser, time warp device.

To be fair, much of that tech is found in the late-game where most fights are pretty much a battle of "rocket tag" anyway. That's a common thing with top-tier tech in all the space strategy/4X games I've played. But Tactical combat is fun for the early game, where you can do rush battles to crush opponents without loads of tech supporting you. Tactics make up for a lack of numbers when played well.

4x/Grand Strategy games are about economic strategy, about being able to out-expand, out-tech, and out-industry your opponents. You win military engagements in these games before you even declare the war, let alone fire the first shot. You don't win them with tactical finesse, you win them with economic, technological, and industrial might.

As the great Tony Stark once said-- "Is it too much to ask for both?"

It's not that a lack of tactical combat would deal-break Stellaris for me, however. I'm still interested. I just like to ask the industry why not make a game that's both strategy and tactics. I like having it all.

[Knaight]

This is what I'm talking about with tactical combat not adding anything to 4x in the long run. It's always super trivial to break it, either by just having overwhelming numerical or tech advantage. In order for it to add anything to the game you have to have played the 4x part wrong enough that you don't have a massive advantage when the battle starts.

Again, Age of Wonders 3 and the Dominions series stand out here. Age of Wonders 3 has a few units that can punch way above their weight in the right circumstances, along with an army size cap. I've seen cheapo spider and spearman armies beat the snot out of expensive fliers multiple times; along with clever spell casting and fortification use squish really expensive armies. As for the Dominions series, the best counters to a really expensive supercombatant are a much cheaper one designed to kill the specific one that's causing you problem, or a handful of much cheaper mages with the right spells.

In both cases, economic strategy counts for a lot, but efficient military strategy is at least as important, largely because a lot of the economic side gets tied up in either permanent infrastructure that can get taken or destroyed, or in extremely expensive militaries which will suffer attrition. It's also something that shows up a lot more in PvP in both cases, as the AI in AoW3 is mediocre at best, and the AI in Dominions while probably a lot better is dealing with an extremely complex system and is unable to mount effective mid-end game strategies at all.

[GloatingSwine]

As the great Tony Stark once said-- "Is it too much to ask for both?"

You're still missing the point that being sucessful at the 4x part of the game makes the tactical combat irrelevant because you engineered in such a massive advantage that it doesn't matter what the enemy does, you win because you had tanks and he only has pikemen.

[NichG]

I find the kind of scripting tactics of Dominions to be pretty unsatisfying, personally. I want to be able to say things like 'crap, those archers are more powerful than I thought and I'm losing units, stop casting offensive spells and switch to armor buffs to slow down the attrition'. Scripting is too impersonal for me to feel like the units are actually an extension of my will.

[Cikomyr]

Well yes, but it was a chaotic mess that I won with trivial ease every single time because I had bigger and better stuff and "warfare" was just grinding through all the enemy's planets as they became less and less capable of resisting as their economy broke down.

Yes. Bigger, better warships will often make the difference. With better techs.

Still, i loved the game's use of weapon firing arcs, miss chances, stray shots, etc.. Had i been allowed to properly command these vessels, it would have been better.

Just FYI: i myself usually used a two-layer tactic of tank melee vessels and a number of Spinal-mounted supercanons or torpedoes that stood back from the fight and took pot shots. Usually managed to hold off powerful fleets.

But battles usually devolved into one big mess where the better built ships won the day. True.

[Knaight]

You're still missing the point that being sucessful at the 4x part of the game makes the tactical combat irrelevant because you engineered in such a massive advantage that it doesn't matter what the enemy does, you win because you had tanks and he only has pikemen.

A lot of the time it's more about engineering incremental advantages, and repeatedly capitalizing on slight edges, particularly when up against other capable players, and in that context tactics matter a great deal more. Tactics aren't going to get around a pike-tank disadvantage, they might get around a 1.3 tanks/turn vs. 1.7 tanks/turn advantage. If you can reliably blow up 7 tanks per 3 lost, you can hold parity, and force them to keep a tank production advantage while you boost your economy to take the economic lead. If you're skilled at defensive tactics, you can expand and hold more territory cheaply, which is really useful in games where territory is the biggest economic source, and where you have to build wide because tall and narrow doesn't cut it.

Essentially, military activity in a 4x is just another form of focusing on efficiency, and winning by being incrementally more efficient. How much can you minimize military spending in favor of permanent economic bonuses? How well can you translate a military budget to acquisition of economic resources? How much more efficiently can you drain an opponents economic standing with a military that drains yours? It ties into the economic victory, and remains relevant at all times. On top of that, it provides interesting game play in its own right, while also preventing the competitive solitaire phenomenon.

It's similar to diplomacy in that way.

I find the kind of scripting tactics of Dominions to be pretty unsatisfying, personally. I want to be able to say things like 'crap, those archers are more powerful than I thought and I'm losing units, stop casting offensive spells and switch to armor buffs to slow down the attrition'. Scripting is too impersonal for me to feel like the units are actually an extension of my will.

There's a reason I listed it as a maybe. I think it does a fairly good job at representing giving orders to your commanders to relay, while leaving them their personal field duties, but the level of control over the pretender themselves does seem odd at times. Still, the tactical combat matters, even if the implementation is a bit impersonal.

[factotum]

As the great Tony Stark once said-- "Is it too much to ask for both?"

It very well might be. Game development is generally a zero-sum process--there's a limited amount of time and resources to produce the game, and time spent building the tactical side will necessarily impact on the time available for the strategic side of things. There are games that attempt both--I'm thinking of the Heroes of Might and Magic series, mainly, where you have a strategic world map element and then tactical battles when you fight stuff, but both aspects of that game are far simpler than the full-on versions you get in dedicated strategy or tactics games.

I would personally rather have a game that does one thing really well than a game that does two things in a mediocre fashion, so I'm happy with Paradox not attempting to insert a tactical element to things.

[Knaight]

It very well might be. Game development is generally a zero-sum process--there's a limited amount of time and resources to produce the game, and time spent building the tactical side will necessarily impact on the time available for the strategic side of things. There are games that attempt both--I'm thinking of the Heroes of Might and Magic series, mainly, where you have a strategic world map element and then tactical battles when you fight stuff, but both aspects of that game are far simpler than the full-on versions you get in dedicated strategy or tactics games.

Them being simpler is a good thing though - it's very possible for a game to be overcomplicated*, and simplifying both ends works well, as neither has to support the game on their own.

*Yes, I realize I'm saying this after singing the praises of the Dominions series, but seeing as this is a Paradox thread I suspect everyone here high a high complexity tolerance.

[Ronnoc]

Would Rome Total War count as a good example of a strategy/tactics game?

[Darth Mario]

So I've been playing as the Google Megacorporation after their domination of the world. :D

I've run into a couple of strange glitches, one annoying and one hilarious. Despite having enslaved entire alien races, low happiness in places and putting no effort into curtailing Ethics divergence, I've never seen a single faction arise in any situation. Is anyone else seeing this issue, or am I just exceedingly (un)lucky? The game feels kind of really easy when I'm not facing slave uprisings on a constant basis.

The fun one: I started in the Sol system, but not 10 planets away from me was an identical system with an Earth destroyed by nuclear warfare, which leads me to suspect that somewhere out there in the universe, the Magretheans realized we blew them up before they could find the Question and started again. Google Megacorp has since completely flipped into exploration mode to find the people who have been manipulating Humanity's fate and perform a hostile takeover.

[Wookieetank]

So I've been playing as the Google Megacorporation after their domination of the world. :D

I've run into a couple of strange glitches, one annoying and one hilarious. Despite having enslaved entire alien races, low happiness in places and putting no effort into curtailing Ethics divergence, I've never seen a single faction arise in any situation. Is anyone else seeing this issue, or am I just exceedingly (un)lucky? The game feels kind of really easy when I'm not facing slave uprisings on a constant basis.

The fun one: I started in the Sol system, but not 10 planets away from me was an identical system with an Earth destroyed by nuclear warfare, which leads me to suspect that somewhere out there in the universe, the Magretheans realized we blew them up before they could find the Question and started again. Google Megacorp has since completely flipped into exploration mode to find the people who have been manipulating Humanity's fate and perform a hostile takeover.

You should definitely keep a keen eye on any spacefaring rodent species you come across

[Siosilvar]

Ship Initiative broke MoO2. Shield Piercing Rapid Heavy Phasors, stack Hyper X, Achilles Targeting, structural analyser, time warp device.

Congratulations now as long as you move first (because ship initiative) no enemy ship (except antarans who have inherent Hard Shields and a fleet of about three ships) will ever get to take a turn against you. The AI can send max size fleets of doom stars every turn (and will) and you can destroy them all every time with five of your own ships and none of them get a turn ever. None of the combat mechanics matter because tech refinements and sensible builds make them go away.

The fact that the system can be broken via specific combinations of options (time warp + phase cloak is another one) doesn't mean the system isn't good. See also: nearly every RPG ever. Last I checked, people are still playing MoO2 over 15 years later with some balance mods.

I fundamentally disagree that 4X is all about winning wars before starting them. There is enjoyment, but very little replayability, in a game where your biggest challenge is optimizing an economic engine. You also lose player agency if war gets declared by a bigger AI - loss mitigation is an important part of making a game that doesn't feel frustrating if you get slightly behind. This is why I no longer play Risk; whoever gets big enough is nigh-guaranteed to win unless they get incredibly unlucky, and there's not usually anything to do about it.

It doesn't take tactical combat to make a game replayable and less snowbally - EU4 does a good job at the diplomatic and strategic level - but it is one of the most obvious ways to give a player a direct hand in their own fate (as opposed to an indirect hand via the stat check of economies).

Without something to reign back the deathball in this game, I'm probably going to cap out on fun at a couple hundred hours (since there is limited diplomacy and the armor/shield/weapon intricacy). But that's what Paradox uses DLC for.

So I've been playing as the Google Megacorporation after their domination of the world. :D

I've run into a couple of strange glitches, one annoying and one hilarious. Despite having enslaved entire alien races, low happiness in places and putting no effort into curtailing Ethics divergence, I've never seen a single faction arise in any situation. Is anyone else seeing this issue, or am I just exceedingly (un)lucky? The game feels kind of really easy when I'm not facing slave uprisings on a constant basis.

Slaves can't revolt at the moment. Factions can, but if you slap chains on everybody they stop being able to do anything about your evil enlightening ways. Hopefully they can decide how to implement that and patch it in soon, it's honestly gamebreaking to be missing that feature.

[AgentPaper]

As the great Tony Stark once said-- "Is it too much to ask for both?"

It's not that a lack of tactical combat would deal-break Stellaris for me, however. I'm still interested. I just like to ask the industry why not make a game that's both strategy and tactics. I like having it all.

There are games that try this. Total War is probably one of the biggest. They all run into a big problem though, in that this kind of game is self-defeating. In a strategy game, your aim as the player is to maximize your local superiority in any battle as much as possible to ensure victory with the least casualties possible. For tactical battles to be interesting, though, you need your forces to be relatively evenly matched. Obviously, this creates problems, since anything you do to try and cause battles to be fought more evenly most of the time, will pull away from the strategic game because the player isn't able to gain as much advantage from playing it well. And vice versa, trying to improve the strategic game by adding more ways for the player to play well and gain an advantage, hurts the tactical battle side because now there are less even fights.

[NichG]

One thing I'm really enjoying so far is the early-game feel of science and exploration. Not the specific mechanics of sending around science ships, per se, but the way that the things you encounter create new projects for you to pursue as you go, and that they're not entirely standalone but can actually create things that stick around for a bit as goals or cross-references to keep an eye out for or bits of technology you can scavenge together the pieces for. I also love the fact that you don't just get to know who an alien ship is when you run into one, but you actually have to go and research the aliens; its a nice touch.

I guess this will go away when I've become familiar with all the various anomalies and events you can have, but for the time being it makes it feel like you don't necessarily know what will be possible until you get out there. I think that's something that a lot of space 4x games haven't really tried to capture at all; maybe Ascendancy was the last one in which I had that feeling, though there's bits of it with Star Drive 2. Fantasy 4x games kind of do this with quests, to varying levels of quality, but often the fantasy quests don't really feel like 'discovery' or 'exploration' per se.

I guess the thing that will determine if it has staying power is whether or not you get significantly different event exploration when you play with different ethics - so you could think about exploring the Militant storyline or the Spiritual storyline or whatever. Also, mods and DLCs could do a lot here. I could imagine a community anomaly pack or things like that as being really helpful in making subsequent plays feel fresh.

Makes me want to try to figure out how to gamify more aspects of actually doing science...

Now, for the tactical battle thing: for making the tactics interesting, I think you can help the problem of overwhelming force by having a large grey zone where the winner may be a given but the cost of victory can vary. Basically, design the tactics to still be interesting in a highly asymmetric battle, rather than try to force everything to be symmetric. An example that comes up a lot in 4x games is, my big fleet is 5 turns away but the enemy is here at my planet now - can I hold out for 5 turns? Some games the answer is just going to be yes or no, with no ability to influence it. But if the game lets you do things like gain a large power advantage against a foe who tries to be hasty, it means you can use tactics to draw out losing fights until they can become winning fights. Sort of like army-dance in EU - you know that huge stack is going to crush the forces you have right now, but if you split up your armies and kite it around in high attrition territories a bit, maybe the big stack you've got marching from across the continent will be able to do something about it when it gets there.

[Leecros]

One thing I'm really enjoying so far is the early-game feel of science and exploration. Not the specific mechanics of sending around science ships, per se, but the way that the things you encounter create new projects for you to pursue as you go, and that they're not entirely standalone but can actually create things that stick around for a bit as goals or cross-references to keep an eye out for or bits of technology you can scavenge together the pieces for. I also love the fact that you don't just get to know who an alien ship is when you run into one, but you actually have to go and research the aliens; its a nice touch.

I enjoy the early exploration bit, but one thing that i have noticed in the two games that i've played....well one and a half-ish. On the default settings, the universe feels a bit too...crowded.

Just as an example. In my current game, There are five empires wedged between a Fallen Empire and a powerful nation that have just stagnated They're about the same strength and none of them are powerful enough to feel confident in attacking the others. They're in almost a perfect equilibrium and they're all very close together. This is very much what happened to me in my first game.

Of course you also get situations like what I ended up being in now where there's only two empires. You and another in the near vicinity and you just gobble them up and blob out of control, but this i feel is sort of an anomaly. In the future, I'm certain that I'm going to tone down the number of space empires around, because the default just feels like too many and to get more variable-sized empires.

[DigoDragon]

For tactical battles to be interesting, though, you need your forces to be relatively evenly matched.

This is not necessarily true. You could have interesting battles facing a superior foe if you develop a tactic that exploits an Achilles heel in their fleet. Maybe your enemy has large shiny battleships with big capital weapons, but they have poor maneuverability or difficulty hitting very small targets. If your fleet is comprised of smaller 'obsolete' ships compared to your enemy, perhaps you find yourself with a new advantage by getting up close to their fleet.

What makes tactical combat interesting is having tactical options. Is a fleet's formation important? Can tractor beams be employed in combat to hinder ship speed? Does fighting in a nebula render my superior shields useless?

[Cikomyr]

One of IGN's criticism is the lack of.. low-scale warfare. There's no simple border skirmish over a single mining star system. there's no mere forcing right of passage on your neighbor. There's no way to exchange colonising rights between Empires..

[Silfir]

I'm a bit puzzled - did anyone expect anything out of Stellaris but automated combat? That's what I expected and went in for. I played the crap out of Sword of the Stars and automated every battle. For that matter, I did the same in Medieval: Total War. (The first one, in times before Autoresolve became basically an "Bend over and take it" button.) I think AgentPaper hits the nail on the head about the contradictory priorities of strategy layer vs. tactical combat layer.

To me Sword of the Stars is the only game so far that made me feel like I was actually exploring, navigating, colonizing and fighting in space. It's fiendishly hard to get 3D right and SotS did. Not perfectly - yes, it was a bit hard to navigate without nodelines - but well enough. What Stellaris gets right is what my favorite unplayable game ever provides: A thrill of exploration. In SotS, every time you found something with your scout ships other than another planet (colonizable or not) you cursed your terrible luck, since it would almost inevitably murder your ship and halt exploration until you've painstakingly directed a replacement to the region. Surveying planets in Stellaris can result in anything. It's awesome.

I wouldn't be that surprised if the game does get weaker the less exploration is a part of it, just because it's done so well.

[Knaight]

I'm a bit puzzled - did anyone expect anything out of Stellaris but automated combat? That's what I expected and went in for. I played the crap out of Sword of the Stars and automated every battle. For that matter, I did the same in Medieval: Total War. (The first one, in times before Autoresolve became basically an "Bend over and take it" button.) I think AgentPaper hits the nail on the head about the contradictory priorities of strategy layer vs. tactical combat layer.

Not really, but whether tactical combat belongs in the entire 4x genre is a much broader argument, as is whether Stellaris could have used tactical combat. As for these contradictory priorities:

The priorities of the tactical level change when there's a bigger strategic context. If it's a one and done tactical battle, then evenly matched armies are generally a good thing, and much bigger or much smaller armies throw that off. With the strategic backdrop though, there are suddenly different goals. Sometimes you have a tiny army that you know is going to be obliterated, and your goal is just to do as much damage as you can first, to make sure that replacing casualties costs them more than it does you, or to trim the army down enough that city/planet defense can take it later. Sometimes you have a big army, and you're trying to win without taking too much attrition that would leave you vulnerable in the future. Sometimes you're deliberately throwing troops away at a superior enemy just to take out a single unit that could cause problems against your bigger main force. You don't need the evenly matched forces, and thus the tactical side doesn't get in the way of the strategic side. It just gets more interesting because of it.

[factotum]

I'm about halfway through absorbing a vassal state into my empire, and still not sure if it's actually a good idea to be doing that or not...I just really want the nice juicy continental world in their home system, alright, and I ain't getting it any other way! (It's not like they need it, their preferred world type is Arid so it'll be a long, long time before they think about settling a continental).

[Aotrs Commander]

SotS and SotS 2 are currently the gold standard for 4x games in my opinion, with a runner up prise to Empire at War for "best attempt to integrate ground combat" and to Space Empires 5 for trying - and it's BECAUSE of the tactical combat. Nohing else has thus come close. (Not started on Stellaris yet, not until I finish EUIV, but working late I don't have time to play that today...)



To critism that tactical battles aren't doing anything other than stretching out the numbers game, it would also be easy to change combat increase the vlaue of good tactics: for a kick-off, stop setting up the traditional wargames/computer game paradigm for two fleets/armies/etc moving relatively slowly towards each other relative to battleand shooting each other, because that offer advantages to "biggest numbers." Instead, make the maps large relative to how many ships can be deployed at once (and cap that via supply limits), and make movement speed much higher (and have speed affect accuracy (both ways), so that stationary targets are automatic hits, for example) and drastically chop turning ability with regard to time. The battles would then become all about manuver, a series of quick, brutal passing exchanges of fire interspersed with with periods of jockying for prime position for the next attack. Aim for Jack Campbell's Lost Fleet, rather than Star Wars. (Or, and I'm totally not biased here, my own tabletop starships rules Acclerate & Attack¹.) A well-flown fleet culd take apart a larger one flown poorly by picking the right spots to attack from.



As to the curb-stomping, always fight we=ou-will-win thing: regardess of 4X, either at at some point all you'll be doing is curb-stomping people on a strategic/economic/tactical level (so the lack or presense of tactical combat makes no odds); or you haven't reached that point yet, so you'll be fighting on more even terms anyway. A late-game 4X where you're winning is generally duck-shoot regardless of whetehr you click the shooting as skip button or play through it; but so is a late-game RTS, really. By that sort of point you've basically won, and the presense or absense of tactical combat merely determines how much you want to drag it out. (I am all in favour for having an auto-resolve if tactical combat is present, because even I can sometimes get board of crushing something trivial.)

But that's not where you're aiming for the interest for - it's for the pre-end-game phase where the player has not yet achieved the point of "basically, we've won and the rest of the game is mopping up." (Very few 4X have interesting end-phases; Stellaris seems to be making some attempt at it, what with what I've heard mentioned.)



¹Which I would totally make into a computer game if I had any kind of programming ability, which I do not.