Dealing with War Exhaustion

[Zuul]

Due to the massive number of posts about war exhaustion, I thought I'd put together this quick post.

War exhaustion increases in 3 ways.

1. Passively over time while at war.
2. Any time a ground unit is lost.
3. Any time a ship is lost.

The increases for 1 and 2 are a static amount. 3 is based off the fleet value of the ship and your ship capacity. Losing a destroyer creates twice as much as a corvette, a cruiser 4x, etc. The greater your fleet capacity (not your current fleet size) the smaller the gain in WE is from ship loss. In other words, if you plan on having 60 fleet capacity in the field, keep building anchorages long past 60 capacity, it will let you fight for longer.

Meanwhile, war exhaustion, when it reaches 100%, allows the OTHER side to force you to accept a status quo peace. This means that any systems of yours that they hold and claim, they keep. Any systems of their's that you hold and claim, you keep.

The key take away is, when on the offensive, you want to avoid ship losses like the plague (and when you have very low ship capacity, like game start, war exhaustion hits 100% FAST). The more ships you lose, the faster your opponent can force your offensive to end. Conversely, if you are on the defense vs a stronger foe, you don't give a damn if your WE hits 100% so long as you are not giving up territory. The worst they can do is force a peace where you keep everything, and once you get them to 100%, you can force the war to end.

With this in mind, these are the strategies I've used to great effect.

When on the defense, admirals with unyielding are your friend. You want your ships to stay in the fight to the bitter end, inflict as much damage as possible and give up no ground. The unyielding admiral reduces the chance your ships disengage, and increases the amount of damage they can take and dish out. This will cause your own WE to rapidly increase, but will allow you to hold ground against a somewhat more powerful foe. If you have unlocked war traditions, no retreat is amazing for defense of a tall empire where giving up ground is not an option, while defense in depth will do if you don't have the ethics for no retreat. If you don't have a secure border fort network, rapid deployment can help you run down fleets in your space. Communications jammers are your best friend on your own border forts, they'll force more of the enemies ships to stay in the fight until death, driving up their war exhaustion faster.

While on the offense, things become much more nuanced as you need to reduce your fleet losses to the absolute minimum. I find that the absolute minimum needed admirals is 4.

First, you need an admiral with trickster, if you can pair it with gale-speed, so much the better. This admiral will lead your screening force. It should consist of close range vessels with high evasion. Mainly corvettes, seasoned with destroyers to taste. The high evasion will minimize incoming damage, while the admiral's trickster trait will cause more of your ships to disengage instead of being destroyed. This will minimize your ship losses and so minimize war exhaustion gain in fleet battle.

Second, you need an admiral with unyielding. This is the admiral you'll attach your line ships, your main hitters that will be engaging behind the screening force. If your screening force has disengaged in full, it's likely time to hit the emergency FTL button. Meanwhile the unyielding trait allows these vessels to do extra damage, and allows them to soak a bit more damage from longer ranged weapons targetting your line ships instead of the vette swarm.

Third, you need an admiral with cautious. To this admiral you will attach your artillery force. Early game, destroyers with an artillery bow and picket stern should fill this role. Equip them with a large railgun, and with the admirals range boost and the basic artillery module, the weapon has a range of 125. This handily outranges anything an outpost/starbase/defense station can throw at you, with the exception of the central base with missiles and a target uplink computer (hence the picket stern). This force exists to pound the snot out of defensive outposts without risking any ship losses at all.

Finally, you will need an admiral with scout. To this admiral you will attach a small number of corvettes...enough to deal with unupgraded outposts, with no or maybe 1 defensive platform. This force you will station deeper in enemy territory then your combat fleet. It will provide you with real time data on enemy fleet movements. If something big and scary is on its way, it will provide you with adequate time to withdraw your primary fleet elements to a fortified location. Either your own border forts or a captured starbase that you have fully equipped with platforms. Engage the enemy from these advantageous positions to inflict maximum damage with minimal losses...do not ever let yourself be caught in open space unaware, or allow your border forts to be engaged by a superior force without a fleet presence of your own.

For your own border forts when planning an offensive, put a hyperlane registrar on them. This gives a significant boost to the chance for your forces to disengage once they get under 50% hull. If your scout sees a significant enemy force approaching, fall back to your registrar equipped base and engage them there. This will minimize/eliminate your WE gain when combined with a trickster admiral, and especially hit & run war doctrine.

Using these tactics I have succesfully persecuted wars against multiple simultaneous empires, while capturing significant territorial gains, without being forced to the peace table.

I hope it's helped some people.

P.S. If you got to this, good on you for reading the wall-o-text.

[tempest.of.emptiness]

That is an interesting and thought-provoking post. We need more of thinking the problem out like this. I don't like the current war system and I hope it changes, but either way this sort of productive response is much more helpful than all the rants.

[Zuul]

Originally posted by tempest.of.emptiness:

That is an interesting and thought-provoking post. We need more of thinking the problem out like this. I don't like the current war system and I hope it changes, but either way this sort of productive response is much more helpful than all the rants.

Incidentally, after figuring this all out, it's why I hate hate hate Paradox's suggested "fix". Attaching a penalty to 100% WE instead of giving the other party in the war the option to exercise a forced peace really screws a lot of the things they added to the game.

Just as a single example, right now "No Retreat" has a very specific, and EXTREMELY useful effect when you're defending. If Paradox implements their suggested fix, "No Retreat" ceases to have any meaningful use, and anyone utilizing it is a total bonehead. You'll simply race to your horrible penalties faster, and your increased mineral burn rate from replacing the increased losses means you'll eventually die from attrition since you can't force peace.

That's just 1 of many "d'oh" moments in design I'm looking at if they bandaid fix WE forced peace.

[tempest.of.emptiness]

I suspect that their first attempt is doomed to failure, since as others have pointed out it does not penalize empires symmetrically (such as certain types of empires being immune to happiness modifiers, for example).

[HellsBain]

the problem is that is you win every battle with little or no loss you still gain an unreasonable amount of WE. The way it is now the might as well change subjugation and tributary into Brawl. because it is impossible to take every single system they hold with out maxing out WE. and they wont surrender if you don't have them all.

[L37]

Nice post and nice ideas about admiral traits... i still like to make each fleet self-sufficient with all the ships so that it can act independently, but in massive battles some of this ideas should definitely be used.

Also, one less intelligent way to deal with WE is doomstacking. Attack enemy fleet with all you have, even if you have big advantage and can defeat his forces with one fleet you should still doomstack, as it greatly reduces losses. It seems like exactly the opposite of what they were trying to achieve, but this is how it works...

Originally posted by HellsBain:

the problem is that is you win every battle with little or no loss you still gain an unreasonable amount of WE. The way it is now the might as well change subjugation and tributary into Brawl. because it is impossible to take every single system they hold with out maxing out WE. and they wont surrender if you don't have them all.

It is possible, requires massive advantage and a lot of time, but it is possible. Still have to wreck everything they have though, which is "a bit" wrong IMO...