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[Criptfeind]

I really don't get this obsession with chokepoints and "terrain". It's a bloody space game ffs.

Because without them, the galaxy is very small and boring.

Like, even with them the galaxy is small and boring. But it's better then it was without them.

[Nelia Hawk]

i think you could just max out hyperlanes connections or something in the start game settings to basically connect everything to everything else around too if you dont like the "terrain/chokes" stuff

[forsaken1111]

i think you could just max out hyperlanes connections or something in the start game settings to basically connect everything to everything else around too if you dont like the "terrain/chokes" stuff

That IS an option. One of the devs gave a screenshot of a setup like that:

https://twitter.com/martin_anward/status/952976043425566720?lang=en

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

I know it's probably not going to happen, but something I'd find interesting is if the whole trade routes system had a secondary effect upon the hyperlanes of increasing speed on travel along ones with said routes, perhaps scaling with trade value moved along it and how long the link has been active.  Basically taking an approach akin to the galactic hyperlanes of Star Wars which become faster than travel outside by virtue that all the anomolies have been mapped and ideal routes through them have been determined thanks to countless thousands of ships having moved along them.  Could prove to be interesting if logistics systems were added in for the ships, as targeted cutting would hinder both economic income, mobilization, and a slight bonus to military supply lines if the logistics comes in the form of one of the mods I saw (ie. ships sent out from a planet that fly out to where the fleet is).

[umiman]

I really don't get this obsession with chokepoints and "terrain". It's a bloody space game ffs.

I think at some point we all have to draw a line as to what immersion level we're willing to accept when it comes to games.

Space games especially.

--------------

A realistic 4X game about space would be... pretty boring. Space is so vast we'd in all likelihood never encounter another species capable of interstellar travel or even cognitive thought let alone life thanks to the Fermi Paradox.

Then there's the thought of interstellar travel in the first place and thanks to relatively we're basically going nowhere ever. And if we did, the travel times and travel speeds would be so insane that it wouldn't be so much of "travelling to another solar system" in so much as it is "sending our history in a time capsule to another solar system".

What about space combat? There's so many ways they could play out but it'd never be like games. There would likely be no close range engagements with massive battleships shooting each other with lasers. How would you even catch anyone ever? We already have so much trouble with it in real life navies as most battles involve trying to track down the target across the open ocean in the first place. How do we do that across light years? Across four massive dimensions?! If anything we wouldn't even bother with navies at all and just bolster planetary defenses and hope for the best. If let's say we had light speed travel. It would still take us around 4 years just to send a navy from Earth to Proxima, our nearest solar system. What the hell is the point of that? It takes so long that if at any point during the 4 years Proxima learned what we were doing, they could just prepare and kill everyone. The military superiority would have to be completely absolute in the first place.

Or maybe it's the complete opposite. Maybe we have a way to fold spacetime and appear anywhere. Then we'd never build defenses at all as anyone can just teleport anywhere. What's the point? We could just warp giant nukes onto a planet surface and blow it to smithereens.

What about planetary invasions? The scale in which such an action would dictate would absolutely boggle the mind. Using the relatively similar societies of Stellaris, imagine one human race trying to invade another human race's home planet. How? Right now we have so much trouble even thinking of invading say... Russia. How many billions of soldiers would we have to muster, feed, coordinate, and transport in order to invade anything? The scale of such an action is completely incomprehensible to our current day minds. And that's just the invasion. How do you keep the peace? Do you just kill everyone? Even then that's an action that would take a long, long, long, long time.

I can go on and on and on. Governments and societies for example would be so completely obscenely complicated no human could understand them. What about currency? Trade? Terraforming? Colonization? The scale of everything would be so large no game could ever represent it.

And everything. EVERYTHING. Boils down to what manner of faster-than-light-speed travel is actually possible. Such a thing doesn't exist right now. We have no possible clue what it could be or if we are capable of achieving such a feat in our species's entire lifetime. It could be really fast engines, it could be warp, it could be hyperlanes, it could be anything. Or the reality could be we are stuck at relativistic speeds forever and we'll never go anywhere. Hell, my money is on us discovering Silver Space Faeries in which we trade peanut butter for power to move the space sailboats.

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What I'm trying to say is... we each have to decide where to draw the line. Maybe you have trouble accepting hyperlanes and that's fair. But trying to say it's "space is empty and you can go anywhere" is not an argument because the entire concept of interstellar travel is complete fantasy. We can't just "go anywhere in space" just as we can't just "walk to the moon". Hyperlanes have just as much right to be viable in the Stellaris universe as it does in ours and until we have any semblance of viable interstellar travel, this will be the case.

It's a game, and concessions have to be made in order for it to be entertaining. As we can see, most people here support the change. I do too.

I would also like to point out that Wormholes and Warp Travel are still in the game and you can very easily make it so everyone has access to it if you want.

[Culise]

I would also like to point out that Wormholes and Warp Travel are still in the game and you can very easily make it so everyone has access to it if you want.

While I don't mind the FTL change, I'm a little curious how you would do this.  With the governing code for the old FTL systems either completely inaccessible or outright gone, it's not easy to reactivate the original FTL travel systems.  You can emulate warp travel by cranking up the hyperlane connections as above, but that has its own limitations in that tech won't increase how far you can "warp" and you still need to path through each system with the resulting dependency on sublight speed that entails.  You could modify jump drives, but I'm not sure how well the AI handles modding jump drives to make them have zero cooldown/penalty and it makes complex pathing painful since you need to click the little jump button every time you go from system to system.  I have no idea how you'd emulate the old wormhole travel system; gateways don't connect disconnected systems, and the wormholes now in game are basically longer hyperlanes.

EDIT:
I mean, if nothing else, it would have made things loads easier for the New Horizons team to be able to reproduce Star Trek warp drives completely faithfully.

[umiman]

I would also like to point out that Wormholes and Warp Travel are still in the game and you can very easily make it so everyone has access to it if you want.

While I don't mind the FTL change, I'm a little curious how you would do this.  With the governing code for the old FTL systems either completely inaccessible or outright gone, it's not easy to reactivate the original FTL travel systems.  You can emulate warp travel by cranking up the hyperlane connections as above, but that has its own limitations in that tech won't increase how far you can "warp" and you still need to path through each system with the resulting dependency on sublight speed that entails.  You could modify jump drives, but I'm not sure how well the AI handles modding jump drives to make them have zero cooldown/penalty and it makes complex pathing painful since you need to click the little jump button every time you go from system to system.  I have no idea how you'd emulate the old wormhole travel system; gateways don't connect disconnected systems, and the wormholes now in game are basically longer hyperlanes.

EDIT:
I mean, if nothing else, it would have made things loads easier for the New Horizons team to be able to reproduce Star Trek warp drives completely faithfully.

Nah you can't do the exact old ways. I was referring to warp and wormholes as they are now. Just put them everywhere and give everyone jump tech. Or give every ship that scout tech that lets them basically teleport anywhere. No idea if the AI can use it. The AI does use jump drives right now though. You'd have to do it and see what happens.

I'd imagine you could also mod it so you can "create" wormholes so to speak. Then you end up with the old method. Maybe combine it by slowing down hyperlane movement by a ridiculous amount.

[Telgin]

Speaking of the AI and jumpdrives, does the AI routinely crap its pants when trying to figure out how to use them?  In two games I've been in so far, spiritualist awakened empires went to war with me and had bizarre moments where they'd spend months stuck in a system where they constantly alternated between charging jump drives and drifting slowly toward a hyperlane exit.  Once they finally got to the next system, they'd go back to acting like normal.

I can only imagine how the AI might behave in a mod where everyone starts with or can easily unlock jumpdrives early on in an effort to replicate early Stellaris FTL.

[Broseph Stalin]

Speaking of the AI and jumpdrives, does the AI routinely crap its pants when trying to figure out how to use them?  In two games I've been in so far, spiritualist awakened empires went to war with me and had bizarre moments where they'd spend months stuck in a system where they constantly alternated between charging jump drives and drifting slowly toward a hyperlane exit.  Once they finally got to the next system, they'd go back to acting like normal.

I can only imagine how the AI might behave in a mod where everyone starts with or can easily unlock jumpdrives early on in an effort to replicate early Stellaris FTL.

Yeah that happens all the time.

[umiman]

Speaking of the AI and jumpdrives, does the AI routinely crap its pants when trying to figure out how to use them?  In two games I've been in so far, spiritualist awakened empires went to war with me and had bizarre moments where they'd spend months stuck in a system where they constantly alternated between charging jump drives and drifting slowly toward a hyperlane exit.  Once they finally got to the next system, they'd go back to acting like normal.

I can only imagine how the AI might behave in a mod where everyone starts with or can easily unlock jumpdrives early on in an effort to replicate early Stellaris FTL.

If anything, I would imagine they would actually improve if the jump times were removed and no cooldown period.

But this is Stellaris AI. So it could very likely decide it doesn't want to do anything.

[forsaken1111]

Honestly, in the late-game the hyperlanes are hardly used in my own empires. I just build gateways in strategic locations all over my empire as a sort of highway so that no system is more than 2-3 hops from any other system.

[Loud Whispers]

Speaking of the AI and jumpdrives, does the AI routinely crap its pants when trying to figure out how to use them?  In two games I've been in so far, spiritualist awakened empires went to war with me and had bizarre moments where they'd spend months stuck in a system where they constantly alternated between charging jump drives and drifting slowly toward a hyperlane exit.  Once they finally got to the next system, they'd go back to acting like normal.

I can only imagine how the AI might behave in a mod where everyone starts with or can easily unlock jumpdrives early on in an effort to replicate early Stellaris FTL.

Using the hyplerane generator/deleter mod, I created star empires that existed wholly disconnected from the outside world. Not only did the AI not figure out how to hyperjump into the star systems, but the end game crises refused to move to a single star system unless they had a hyperlane connection to the player capital

[Telgin]

That's pretty amusing, and reminds me of the path finding bugs with flying creatures in DF.  If there's no normal path to something, the game gives up on trying to find a way to get to it.  I understand though.  It would make the path finding algorithm much slower if it had to plan with jump drives in mind, since it creates a sort of exponential increase in the number of possible paths it could take.  That does make me wonder how and when it decides to use them though.  I'm guessing it only uses jump drives to jump to systems on the path it was already planning to travel through.

The fact it breaks the crises isn't too surprising either.  I remember that there was a lot of speculation that a path finding bug like that was at the heart of the "crisis doesn't expand" bug in early versions of 2.1.x.  I can't remember if a Paradox employee confirmed that or not.

[Egan_BW]

Given that hyperlanes are supposed to be left behind by ancient civilizations or some shit, it would indeed be cool if you could eventually be able to create and destroy them.

...Idea for an end game crisis: partially hyperspace beings who find hyperlanes offensive and go around trying to smash every hyperlane in the galaxy.

[Dunamisdeos]

I thought they were natural currents of some kind, similar to the Honorverse.