One of the more frequent concerns that I hear is that the ships in New Horizons are too slow. Of course, most of this is by design – a lot of the design decisions we’ve made is meant to encourage a more strategic, slow-paced game, as fits more into the lore and feel of Star Trek. However, this still introduces problems of perception to players coming off vanilla. It is also not always easy to adjust our event schedules to take accurate account of the travel times required.
A lot of the issue has to do with vanilla, going all the way back to the (in)famous 2.0 update to the base game. While eventually the hyperlane change was well received by the Stellaris community as a whole and was motivated by correct design decisions and thinking by Paradox, it was, unsurprisingly, a difficult transition for New Horizons. Star Trek is about warp. While our workaround to the issue works reasonably well, I feel, it’s no secret that this is one vanilla feature we could do without.
However, it’s not possible to bring back ‘proper’ warp and ships are now forced to travel the entire range of a solar system in sublight speed.
From the outside, the answer seems simple. Just increase sublight speed and reduce warp speed, to make it feel more ‘trek’ and make warp travel more meaningful (and thus, increase in warp speed more important).
But here comes the issue of speed vs combat speed. Around 1.7, Paradox merged the two old variables of ‘combat speed’ and ‘sublight speed’ into one. The result is that ships travel at the same speed in-system. Drastically increasing the sublight speed of ships means they will also travel much faster in combat. That will make a lot of carefully considered calculations simply moot. What is the point of long-range artillery if ships can close the distance to the enemy in seconds? What is the point of having slow, hulking cubes if they can move into formation around a flock of light frigates with ease? The feel of combat, the balance of weapon ranges, the different ship behaviors, would all have to be drastically changed and simplified. This is certainly not something I want to do.
A few players suggested that I consider simply slowing down warp without an increase in sublight speed. A survey on the subject yielded the expected result – most players won’t want to slow down the game even further. But a suggestion arose from one of our newest team members (thanks Newt!) brought an interesting idea. Why don’t we simply fake combat speed?
The idea started a flurry of discussions and brainstorming and came through several iterations and developments. The final notion is simple: every combat ship in the game will have an aura that will slow down enemy combatants in range. The trick was to get it works well, without adding a significant performance impact to the game and without crowding the already dense ship designer UI. I was personally most concerned with performance since it results in every ship in the game having an area of effect. After all, there was a reason why Paradox dropped the battleship auras all those years ago.
In principle, from our tests, across several years, auras ARE responsible to a measurable few percents of all our processing cycles, near the end game. That is significant by itself, but the addition of the slowdown aura on top of the already existing aura cost (from all our destroyers, cruisers and other ships that have aura) apparently is virtually negligible. The idea works and can be easily implemented.
So, what does this all actually means?
In the next major patch, all ships in the game will produce an invisible aura (at a range of 150, henceforth called ‘the combat range’) that will slow down all enemy ships by -50% flat (this is a reduction of the base speed by 50%, before taking into consideration any benefits from thrusters, etc). Long range weapons will get buffed and some of them will even be longer than 150, allowing artillery ships to be effective outside the combat area, hopefully making them a bit more effective.
This aura will not stack with itself, but it will be in a different ‘channel’, meaning it can’t be negated (with potentially hero ships being able to ignore it. Its something we will consider post-launch). It will also cancel out any benefits like traffic command, so ships in combat in a friendly system won’t have this weird speed advantage in combat. There STILL will be auras like tractor beams that will reduce ship speeds even further, and those will be on a different channel (so they will stack up with the ‘in-combat’ slowdown aura).
The base sublight speed of all ships will be doubled, and the effect of traffic command will be increased from 35% to 50%. Traffic command will also be a tier 1 tech and cheaper to build – the goal is that players will be able to travel across their own system, when not under combat, very quickly.
“Warp speed” (or hyperlane travel speed) will be slowed by about 35% of its original level. would have decreased it further, but it seems we have rediscovered the same old bug in the Stellaris engine that existed prior to 2.0 – it is possible to move so slow the engine breaks.
Still, overall warp speed benefit has been increased from a maximum of about +200% to a maximum of about +1000%, giving every new warp engine a noticeable increase in speed and actual travel time.
The result is that in the early game, travel time is still faster (due to the faster sublight travel), even with the reduction of warp speed, and by end game, travel time can end up being about half of what they are now… but without drastically changing the gameplay overall tempo and game balance.
This is of course, not a magic bullet. Travel across systems will still be, in essence, simulated hyperlanes travel, with ships having to physically move from warp point to warp point. Sublight will still dictate the majority of travel time.
However, hopefully, these changes will:
A. Reduce the uninteresting ‘down time’ ships spend traveling across their own empire.
B. Make high-range weapons more viable.
C. Make warp tech, and utilities and components that increase warp speed, more meaningful and impactful.
D. Make interception of enemy fleets a more meaningful strategy.
This change, along with hero ships and the economic overhaul, is all scheduled for our next major update, planned somewhere toward the middle of next month.
That’s it! I hope you found this interesting.
They say gossip travel faster than warp. – The Doctor