Whitecold wrote:Stellaris is wonderful on the eXplore and eXpand part. Combat is really one of the weaker points. I personally boosted defensive station HP and Shields, as well as decrease their exclusion radius, to make together with all hyperlanes fixed defenses somewhat viable.
Still, your ships aborting a jump at 98% to turn around and engage a superior enemy is incredibly annoying and makes raiding essentially impossible.
Still, I love the game.
To a large degree this is understandable if you've played Paradox's other games. They're called grand strategy for a reason IE you rarely concern yourself with how the actual battles play out. While this works even for WW2 battles (where it's a matter of positioning and numbers as much as it is tech), Stellaris gives you far more control over your force composition, and so it really feels frustrating that you don't get more control.
The way I've found it best dealt with is using a couple mods, specifically the one that adds more ships (gives you frigates, light cruisers, battlecruisers, carriers and dreadnoughts) and a few that add additional combat computer settings. The former lets you better build tailor made fleet units, the latter lets you very precisely define how you want your ships to fight (specifically, the ones that let you tell specific classes to hold the range at certian distances, always try to keep the range as open as possible, and to hold formation with the rest of the fleet are all VERY useful. That lets you dictate long range bombardment ships and dedicated PD escorts as you see fit).