Hello all, i'm swizzlewizzle, one of the core scripters on the team. I'll be working a lot on upcoming balance and new systems for the mod. Nice to meet you all.

This thread will include updates to the mod's balancing whenever we add something big. Feel free to post here if you have specific balance-related comments. If you have questions or suggestions on the balance, please create a new thread... it will be much easier to keep things organized this way! :)


Asymmetrical, Prescripted Starting Empires

Overview: As we all know, in vanilla stellaris, you generally create your own species and then drop it into a randomly generated galaxy. However, in ST: Horizons, you will generally want to play on the pre-made galaxy. In the future (or now, depending on when you are reading this and if I remembered to edit this), it will be supported for you to create your own custom race using Star trek traits/ethos/race portratis/species/etc... For now.. the support for that is very limited (and you probably won't even spawn in correctly.. maybe ^^). However, keep in mind that if you choose to bring in a custom race, you will start the game with average minerals/etc..

Now, in ST:H, one of the biggest differences to vanilla Stellaris is that all pre-made/canon races have different starting positions in terms of the # of pops, planets, and technologies they begin with. For example, starting as the human "unified earth" race, you start with a great planet, but not so many pops and starting tech. However, starting as the romulans, you will find that you start with lots of pops, buildings, multiple planets, and improved tech. This is to reflect the status of the galaxy in the ENT era, where humanity really wasn't all that strong compared to other major races.

Of course, out in the gamma and delta quadrants, you have some very advanced and strong races, though in some cases they may need to contend with some pretty significant challenges (namely, the borg coming in and steamrolling you).

However, and most importantly, the overall galaxy is balanced towards there being THREE MAJOR POWER 'BLOCS'. When I say 'Bloc' I mean races that are able to join a federation/alliance together, and actually share win conditions. This isn't exactly in yet, but eventually the ability for players to ally with other races/etc.. will be much harder to do, and will be impossible to do outside of a race's bloc (sometimes).

For example, as humanity, you will not be able to *ever* (aka.. impossible.. almost) join the dominion in a federation that can share actual win goals. This will be done for balance and to keep the game fair for all players. Currently in vanilla stellaris, a bunch of friends can ally with eachother before a game has even been started.. how is that fair to random players joining? Answer: it's not.

So, the end goal and result is that we have three major Blocs of power in the galaxy that *will be forced to either fight or compete with each other* to win the game.

Goal: The primary goal of this system is to create late-game forced balance between three factions allowing two to gang up on the winning faction and (hopefully) give all players a chance to win the game all the way to the end. Really, why play the game when you have no possibility of winning?


Additional "win" goals

This is the ability to win the game (with your 'bloc', or solo) via technology or society related powers. This is still in a rough stage, but it includes things like... your population transcending humanity and becoming q-like beings... developing strong temporal technology before anyone else allowing you to effectively, and absolutely, control the course of history... etc...

Goal: We want to avoid the problem of forcing players to kill off everyone else to win the game. We want to give people a variety of ways to win to allow the non-war related parts of the game to grow and be developed with purpose.



Hull Improvement / Hull Variant Components (v1.0)

Overview:

In 0.6, you will be seeing an "H" slot, that used to be used for strike craft, but is now being used to allow players/ai to further customize the role of the ship they are building.

Components that fit in the H slot are general buffs that usually fit with a specific canon star trek flavor. Initially, there will only be a few choices, but eventually, at each era, you should have multiple choices on what sort of parts of your ship that you want to buff.

The primary goal of these hull improvement / variant components is to allow specific race's ships to more closely resemble the sort of capabilities they had in canon Star trek. For example, the federation generally has a higher focus on shielding, warp speed, that sort of thing, while the Klingons have a much stronger focus on weaponry, combat speed, etc..

With hull improvement components and slots, we can do this. :)

Current Implementation:
- The "H" slot on all ships represents a (very valuable) general ship buff slot. Components put in this slot are called Hull Improvements or Variants - As of 0.6, there is only a single component you can put in... this will be broadened in future patches
- Hull improvements/variants are used to add specific flavor and buffs to the entire ship (for additional upkeep cost)
- Hull improvements are tied to specific weapon technologies for now, and in the future, will be tied to general lines of research reflecting each of the major races in Star trek (for the most part). Ex. Phasers allow access to hull improvements that give "UFP" flavor.... better shields, that sort of thing. Disruptor technology opens up access to hull improvements with Klingon flavor
- Hull improvements dramatically change the ability of borg ships, allowing them to truly reflect the immense size and technology of Canon borg. Players playing borg also have access to this tech (though keep in mind, borg tech is also balanced with everyone else's tech, so borg doesn't actually get any sort of advantage for *being borg*)







Distance-Based Attrition System (Currently Disabled)

Overview: In vanilla Stellaris, ships can easily fly across the entire galaxy with starting FTL technology. In ST: Horizons, we start in the ENT era when humans generally work with Warp 4 ships that would take many hundreds of years to fly across the galaxy.

As we cannot increase the size of the galaxy past it's current maximum, and as we cannot slow ship speeds down without significantly affecting the early and mid game, we decided to implement an attrition system that damages (and eventually destroys) ships that go out into unknown space.

Current Implementation:
- Every year, ships that are far from their capital system take a random amount of damage.
- This damage occurs approx ~120 units from the capital (so about 30% of a quadrant)
- Damage gets much harsher past 340 units from the capital (About 70% the length of a galaxy quadrant)
- Spaceport tech 3 removes the first tier of damage, tech 5 removes *all* attrition damage

Future stuff:
- A basic map view so you can see things
- Events tied into long-range scouting (you risk your ship being lost or heavily damaged by unknown aliens and the like, but the events you get when doing it will be powerful)
- More of a damage gradient instead of just two tiers



Fleet Stacking Penalties

Overview: In vanilla Stellaris, you can stack an unlimited amount of fleets on a single system, and superior firepower results in a snowballing death spiral for the losing fleet. This is bad, because it leads to one-battle-wins-the-war gameplay.. which is seriously not fun

To start fixing this huge issue, i've implemented a fleet stacking system that looks at both how many fleets are in a system, and how many ships are in those fleets. There are a few goals we have with this specific system:

1. Create a significant strategic decision to either throw more ships into an already massive battle, or to use those ships to get around the front line and raid / engage smaller enemy fleets

2. To extend the amount of time it takes for a massive battle to be fought, hopefully allowing all empires to put more of their economy into actively reinforcing battles. We want to strike a balance between making battles last long enough that a significant economic advantage will win wars, but to also maintain the first-strike/strategic advantage that whoever has the larger initial fleet gets.

Note: This system represents the chaos of battle and inability to use weapons at perfect efficiency in all situations. In the future, technology such as AI, precognition, etc.. will reduce this penalty for your fleets specifically, however.


Current Implementation:
- Fleet sizes/ #s are calculated base on per-system. This means that even if your fleet only have 5 ships in it, if the enemy fleet has 100, both of you get the stacking penalty.
- After fleet sizes of 5 ships or more, a debuff to both weapon damage and fire rate is applied across *all* combatants in a battle
- This malus increases at ~25 ships (Around 30% damage debuff, -20% fire rate), and then again at 60 ships (45% damage debuff, -30% fire rate)
- Maluses increase much quicker based on # of fleets in a system, so if you want to create strike groups that do maximum damage, put everything into a single fleet.
- Due to the lack of a exited_combat onaction event, fleet maluses will *update* when a new fleet joins a battle OR when your fleet enters a new system. If you win a battle and wonder why you still have the penalties, just move your fleet to another system and things will refresh.

Future stuff:
- Maluses refreshing/updating after fleets win a battle...
- More granular and expanded levels of stacking penalty
- Technology of each fleet's owner strongly affecting the size of maluses





Gameplay
Note: Check the sth_defines.lua file for detailed changes and reasoning
- FTL speed heavily reduced in early game (jumpdrives/psi drives untouched when you get to them).. once we have star trek technology in this will change more
- Emergency FTL does less damage to fleets... don't be afraid to retreat from battle :)
- Ships move faster in systems
- Leader pools and research choice # expanded to reduce randomness of the system
- Borders shrunk across the board
- Lots of changes to warscore to encourage taking planets to get the most warscore (capital takeover gives *tons* of warscore)
- Maintenance of all ships across the board increased by ~50% however, effect of being docked also doubled - so.. keep your ships docked if you want to save your minerals
Note: the reasoning here is to make taking your fleets out of dock to fight a big decision... when you get into wars or start using your full fleet cap, it's a significant economic investment.. so be careful with your wars....
- Tech cost is a little bit less affected by # of planets an empire has
- Research agreements are more effective (allies are good)
- It's harder to colonize planets far away from your space
- Colony ships cost less to maintain (colonies still cost the same to develop though)
- Fleets upgrade much faster, and it's cheaper to upgrade them


Galaxy/Planets & Resources
- Planets that spawn are much more likely to be large planets, though less spawn in general (0.6)
- Resources that spawn and are minable by mining stations are generally larger, with very large deposits being *much* stronger (0.6)

AI
- AI takes threat from large empires WAY more seriously
- AI is much more inclined to share threat and work with their alliance/federation mates to fight large aggressors
- AI reacts to large empires that threaten their way of life much more strongly... suggest you be careful with taking vassals/planets..
- AI will more favorably consider being vassalized peacefully by a much superior empire with similar values



Alright that's most of it... should bring us mostly up to date with 0.5. I'll post additions here as we continue forward! :)