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Thats all I play anymore as I dont like the war system either. You dont need to waste influence on making claims. You are more powerful in battle and can have bigger fleets.
DOwnside is you cant trade. Oh no.
Your wargoals is basically you stating your objectives - note that in defensive wars you are free to hold off declaring until you see how it is going.
You can add claims during a war, but it is more expensive and makes the eenemy less likely to surrender (which makes sense - if you're fighting over a worthless pile of rocks on your mutual backwater border the enemy may give up once you've proven your point, but if you want their capitol they'll fight harder, and I you suddenly during the war say you also want their Capitol....)
The CB is all about why you go to war - if you're a state going to war just because you likely end up being a diplomatic pariah (.... Like fanatic purifiers.) Because nobody can predict whether you'll go to war with them next.
It COULD be interesting to have a civic that let any empire switch in to a fanatic purifier (light), and be able to declare war freely at the cost of everybody hating you until you get rid of the old regime and spend a couple of generations apologizing... Or you could just build a Collossus.
Stellaris is designed with many features that attempt to diminish this effect, and the Casus Belli system is one of those features. By limiting the number of potential opponents that any given empire can attack, the game also effectively limits how many enemies can potentially rip into a weak empire simultaneously. This means that a weak empire may be able to survive by appeasing two or three powerful neighbors. Without a Casus Belli system there would be no point to trying to survive a bad situation, because even if all of your neighbors liked you there'd be some hostile empire on the other side of the galaxy sending their fleet on the long trek to crush you. The other side of this is that if you pull ahead of the field you can't just pick off any weak empire anywhere, but instead have to work within the limits of the Casus Belli system, which limits your ability to steamroll the entire galaxy (to one degree or another, depending on circumstances).
An interstellar empire does not turn on a dime. It is easy to think that you might start a war to go conquer your neighbor, but then change your mind and demand tribute from them instead. The Stellaris war goals system effectively says that those two types of war are completely different, in ways that are not apparent to the player because the differences lie beneath the layer of abstraction that the game applies to reduce micromanagement. Why go to all this effort to distinguish between types of war? This is an attempt to limit how much a human player can abuse an AI opponent.
In other games with AI opponents and war between empires/factions/whatever, a good tactic to use is to attack an enemy and take from them all that you can - but if the tide ever starts to turn you bail out of the war and get the AI to give up as much as you can as part of the peace deal. Effectively you get extra rewards without extra effort; first use force to get as much as you can (paying a price for it in terms of what was required to field your military might and in terms of any losses you suffer), and then you demand more rewards (taking advantage of the AI's inability to sense that your offensive might is spent) for which you did not pay any price. (In fact, since you were ready for peace, you've effectively tricked the AI into paying you for the right to give you what you wanted anyway.) By limiting what you can gain from a war, Stellaris also limits the player to getting from the war what they pay for militarily.
Claims are a necessary consequence of limiting player expansion through influence costs. If building a starbase to gain initial control of a system cost influence, but then control of that system could be taken by another empire without any influence cost, then building starbases to expand your empire would be a very bad deal. It would be better to let others pay the influence cost and then take the system by force, effectively giving yourself that much influence for "free". (Of course there are certain types of empires that can do exactly this, because they do not need to claim systems to take them, however those empires also have the disadvantage that other empires can take systems from them without claims in the same way - so it evens out.) By introducing claims, Stellaris ensures taking systems by force is limited in the same way that peaceful expansion is limited - by influence supply. This is another effort to control how much of an advantage an early military lead can become.
There are been a lot of complaints about status quo on this forum. Many of them are from new players, who, like you, were surprised when the outcome of the war was different than they expected. An important tip is that before you end a war by any method, mouse over the option and read the tooltip that appears. This will detail the outcome of the war if that method is used to end the war; for example, what systems each side will capture. In your case you would have seen that your opponent was going to gain systems and you were not, and could have reconsidered making peace at that time.
Another frequent reason for complaints against status quo is that it does not mean that everyone keeps everything that they control at that specific moment. This is essentially players either objecting to the claims system or failing to understand the claims system. Either way, it is important that unclaimed war gains return to their original controller, for the reasons stated above in my response to the claims system. Note that in most situations you will have ample opportunity to make a claim before the war ends, and so a gain that you really needed to keep will only be lost if you cannot afford to make the claim - in which case the game is simulating a situation where your empire doesn't have the (abstracted) resources necessary to hold that objective after hostilities cease.
Once you understand how war works it actually isn't that complicated. Let's take a straightforward example of a war of conquest.
1) You decide that it is necessary to go to war with one of your neighbors in order to gain control of one or more of their systems.
2) You build a navy that you believe is adequate to the task of defeating the enemy navy and the space stations in the systems you want to capture. If any of those systems have habitable planets that your opponent has colonized, you build enough ground troops to capture all of those planets.
3) You place claims on the systems you want to capture.
4) You declare war, and select the conquest casus belli.
5) You fight the enemy until - ideally - you control all of the systems you have claimed and the enemy controls none of your systems that it has claimed. This is obviously the most complicated step, and depending on circumstances you may need to adjust your expectations or even accept certain losses. In any event, you want to remain in this step as long as you are making progress to your goals, but want to leave it as soon as you can if the enemy has the upper hand.
6) You may need to continue to fight, depending on circumstances, if the enemy will not agree to the type of peace you want. This step is essentially to drive up the enemy's war weariness until they are willing to make peace. You will want to do as much damage to the enemy's fleet as possible, while suffereing a little damage to your fleet as possible and without giving up any objectives if you can.
7) Make peace. This will usually be a status quo peace, in which each side keeps their occupied claims. Ideally you will have occupied all of your claims and prevented the enemy from occupying any of theirs. If not, then hopefully you have gained as much as you could and given up as little as possible.
Other types of war are similar, except that often they will require more effort than a status quo peace to achieve. For example, to vassalize an enemy you will need to get them to accept your vassalization war goal, and to do that you may need to occupy every system and planet they control, instead of just a few that you have placed claims on. Until you get the hang of wars of conquest it is probably best to avoid more complicated wars. Once you've mastered wars of conquest the other wars will make much more sense.
Edit: Many typos corrected.
Further edit: Corrected unintentional "heads I win, tails you lose" wording.
Offer protectorate or vassal status first, even if and especially if they will decline it, then declare war with the vassalship cause for war.
If you put one claim on any piece of their land, you can easily declare war for that too.
They fix the nebulous border system of 1.0 and then give us at times nonsensical war/diplomacy controls and army rules making border defense or expansion an royal pain in the backside.
On the upside, every patch kills my save games so I can just start all over again.
No trade? The horror! hat is definately how I play now. Xenophobe of some sort at least, war with all. Cleanse, purge, kill.
1. It's closely tied to Paradox other games, which makes it easy for them to implement. They know their way around it.
2. It allows them to differentiate different empire types and diplomacy a bit more. If you need a casus belli, you can't just win the game by being a total space douche to everyone (unless you make an empire for specifically that reason, which comes with distinct advantages and drawbacks).
Allowing you different reasons to go to war depending on what type of ethics and government type your empire has also allows each empire to play at least a little bit different.
3. It gives diplomacy and eventually espionage a spotlight to shine regardless of your size and strength. In most 4x games, diplomacy is either a tool you use to keep someone away that you can't beat (yet) or to keep one empire off you while you subjugate another.
As soon as you gain a certain amount of momentum, diplomacy becomes almost entirely irrelevant, as does espionage.
By making certain that you can't just say "eff it" and start bombing everything, they created a space for diplomacy to exist.
4. Alliances. Casus belli and different type of warfare allow you to wage war or change a foreign empire without offending who you don't want to offend or without losing allies. In many games, warmongers will only love warmongers and peaceful empires will only love peaceful empires, but there's almost no way for you to change from one to the other without losing a lot of face with your allies.
Casus belli mean you can actually have a legitimate reason to fight someone that will either please your allies or at least cause them to say "yeah, they declared war on someone, but they had a good reason!".
Granted, some of that functionality isn't in yet. I fully expect them to eventually add an espionage system and diplomatic options to generate different types of casus belli or break alliances and so on.
Both a rework/upgrade of diplomacy and the addition of espionage had already been announced for some point in the future (a diplomacy rework was one of the choices of a poll that eventually brought us Apocalypse, for example, as the community voted for a war themed update instead).
I fully agree that the war system so far is very confusing for a newcomer (ideology, claims, who gets what, what happens when an ally claims systems you claimed and you take it or they take it, etc. tt.), but once you know your way around it you'll find that it makes for a rather versatile tool to make a lot of cool stuff possible.