Combat Balancing – Game Balance Improvements

This badly needed balancing mod fixes many major flaws which can be considered rather game breaking:

– Technological Progression creates weaker (or not much better) ships rather than stronger ones! – With this mod Its fixed, now you get nice and shiny stronger ships with a noticeable difference with a nice overall balance.

This mod is not compatible with Stellaris 2.x yet!

– Most broken thing:

– Synthetic dawn has its own set of issues – The Weapons are still flawed and are not getting better, with the higher base cost of hulls a corvette spam might be less of an issue, however you still dont really upgrade you more or less…stay the same or get worse… Ask yourself do you want to stay roughly the same or feel an upgrade with new tech? Do you want to have trouble with tech 5 vs tech 1? Or wouldnt you want 50 years of Research to actually show and kick♥♥♥♥♥ That is what this mod is about.

– Vanilla technological progression makes your ships weaker or not really stronger
Whenever you put a new weapon in a ship it needs more minerals to build and more energy to power inside the ship. Each and every component is getting less efficient, costs more and brings less. Each single one. Check the graphs in the screenshots.

Version 2.0 of this mod has majorly overhauled the entire balancing of basically EVERYTHING.

– It was neccessary since my first relatively simple attempt brought too many issues with it and needed a fix itself. Therefore i took the long road and balanced everything against everything so to speak.
– I even wrote a Combat Simulator to see how good my balancing was in order to make playtesting a bit easier.
– Nonetheless i playtested around 2-3k battles in various forms.

– All Equipment, All Weapons, All Shiptypes and Section, everything that is related to combat has been reworked.
– Weapons are much more expensive now and make up for a lot of the basic ship costs.
– Equipment is much cheaper now and you will feel a notable difference using one or the other
– Reactors make a HUGE difference now. They are the key to really efficient Ships. Miss the tech and suffer like never before 😉 Get a new one… and may the joy be with you…at least it was for me in playtesting 😉
– Choices have to be made now, Energy is a limiting factor, all Weapons, Equipment and Battle has been designed around that limit. You can’t have it all, choose wisely.
– All Weapons matter. Even rockets. Trust me you dont want to be caught without PD against rockets….just dont.
– Fighters work. No PD? Kiss your Fleet potentially Good Bye.
– AI kicks♥♥♥♥♥ Why? Well not my fault, sorry, but it was designed by Paradox to go for better Tech and Equipment. Finally that pays off. Instead of weaker, it makes AI stronger. Watch out!
– Wide vs Tall Empires have been adressed. Watch out for your Spaceports. They are the bread and butter of your Naval Capacity, guard them well, you have been warned. PoP Bonus for Fleet has been reduced from 0.25 to 0.1.
Fleet Cap Values are now:
NAVY_SIZE_SPACEPORT_LEVEL= { 3 6 10 15 21 27 }
NAVY_SIZE_HABITAT_ADD = 18 # Per habitat
Meaning:
Spaceport Level 6 = +27 Fleet Cap
Habitat +18 Fleet Cap
– Fully Working Counter System:

– Small Weapons make short work of evasive ships, but dont help much against bigger ships
– Medium Weapons do ok against small ship, but do really well against medium sized ships, lack a bit of punch against battleships and the like
– Heavy Weaponry is really bad against tiny ships, even the most advanced battleships with only heavy guns will have a bad bad time against corvettes…however against cruisers and battleships they are amazing.

– Corvettes are sort of a meat shield and a good counter to battle ships however you cannot rely only on them anymore, there are counters to them now
– Destroyers make usually short work of corvettes depending on weaponry. You can also use them as Glass Cannons.
– Cruisers take out destroyers quite well and with small weaponry even corvettes
– Battleships take out most of the ships well apart from corvettes, depending on weaponry.

It all comes down to weaponry in this mod. Even more now in V2.0

– AUX, Thrusters and FTL Drives i had to split them up into shipsize based entities. Which means a corvette has a better bonus and pays less for a Thruster…but relative to its price its not better then the version for a battleship which is considerably more expensive and wont give a battleship ridiculous amounts of evasion. So all parts have been made ship class relative. Prices increase with shipsize since you do need a bigger Thruster for a battleship or you wont move this behemoth much, how did paradox even think it would make sense to put the same thrusters on all 4 classes, with same price and same effect?

This however makes most Shipmodes incompatible. If you want to play shipmods (why bother with a balance mod in that case, those mods are based on vanilla balancing or 1.6.x balancing and therefore not balanced much or at all. (following the same decreasing tech efficiency logic of paradox) Dont get me wrong they are amazing but in terms of balancing probably not the best idea to use with this mod.

—- Mod still under construction —-
We still need much playtesting and feedback on the balancing. Plz report back. Keep in mind though Stellaris is a Huge Dice in terms of battle. Since the Weapons are so random in their cooldown and firing times, you can have really really bad luck.

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Twinks Playable Fallen Empire Mod
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=891223283&searchtext=twink

Citadel Tier 4 Defense Stations Mod
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=810929902&searchtext=citadel

Soon…
Working on NSC, ESC and SCX

– Improve compatibility
– Get Feedback
– Improve, Improve, Improve
– Test Capek Balancing and adress potential flaws 😉

Automated behaviour Adjustment by folk
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=799999383
It just prevents the suicidal behaviour of corvettes for example. Have a look, it works smoothly. Changes a bit of the vanilla balancing feeling but since paradox wants to change targeting behaviour anyway…this is the best you get until 1.8 changes.

Compatibility Version of Combat Balancing – For Shipmods
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1133027864
This Mod allows you to play Shipmods, it changes the Thruster, Aux and FTL fixes into something more compatible and less balanced. If you dont care for the balance to be impacted (quiet a bit) by this…go ahead, enjoy your shipmods.

AlphaModPlus SpacePort Upgrade fix
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1174420145
Now you can upgrade your spaceports to level 11. It does nothing else.