Right now combat still revolves arround space corridors with fortresses and as many fleets as you can stack on top of those. Part of winning against an opponent must be to find were you are actually going to strike or defend. I think most of the combat problems could have been solved by making combat less deadly and obscure much more of the map/starsystems.

The economy of Stellaris is also not very forgiving to let people recover from a losing position. I think the main problem about the combat is that it is too deadly even after all the changes. People also didn't like the wack a mole game with fleeing ai fleets. It makes the game more dynamic, it makes movement a much bigger part of the combat. Only after they made the game hyperlane only I fully realised what the value of free movement. I can't remember exactly what all the reasons were but not being able to teach the ai to use or counteract different movements was definitely one of them. It makes you build them on top of things that are worth defending. No free movement doesn't make defences pointless. There's nothing stopping anyone from not using FTL and spending their entire lives flying to another system They exist specifically because of hyperlanes.

I don't seethe I'm just stating facts, your 'flight paths' in space are massive and come from every other direction at you and this is not accounting for the ability to slip into subspace where you can't be observed before you arrive in a target system. Of all the things you have to suspend disbelief for in Stellaris, this one isn't so bad. This means it does, in fact, make sense to concentrate defenses in a chokepoint system. I say they do, given that there are 'flight paths' between systems, which are meant to represent the most efficient or viable transits given the limitations of warp tech at the start of the game. It's also immaterial to the discussion we're having, which is whether or not choke points make sense in Stellaris. They got humilliated by serbia so they had to quickly bomb their civillians to save their face.Īll air forces are insignificant compared to the US air arsenal.

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