I forget if I've mentioned it here or not, but one thing I have to say in this game's favor: Damn space is pretty, they were right about the bloom.
Very promising indeed - it seems like all very sensible stuff which will help make empire management slightly more interesting whilst at the same time being a bit more natural.
However, they'll need to make sure there are enough supporting mechanisms around it to make it interesting. If it's just 'spend capital to reduce support by x' it'll still be ultimately very shallow.
As I believe Banks might be about espionage, sending a spy in could be an interesting way to guide/disrupt factions
Yeah. Good on paper, but we'll have to see how it manifests.
Notably, I'm concerned about the clustering of various factions/ethos as they relate to various policies. Some are kind of obviously linked, eg Bombardment and War Type on the Mil/Pac axis. But what if those two policies disagree? Are you just stuck in some kind of faction limbo because nobody else likes one but not the other, or are there factions that will appreciate that? And if so, what else do they want/require? Are there going to be "optimal" policy schemes that really make some factions happy, or will any combination have its own benefits?
It's actually surprisingly refreshing that they changed the terminology. And also interesting that now Stalinism is totally oppositional to Communism.
Stalinism was pretty much a totalitarian dictatorship dressed as communism anyway.
Room for interpretation is pretty important here. Presumably not all Materialist empires manifest exactly the same way, so it'd make some sense that you could have a Communist-flavored Stalinist empire even though those are completely mutually exclusive concepts on a larger scale.
A good analogy might be a federation-builder style xenophobic empire.
Internally, they're all about [INSERT_SPECIES_HERE] worth and freedom and happiness, cooperation and working together and reaching for the stars. But then they meet actual aliens and panic because it threatens all they've worked so hard to defend, so they get classified as Fanatic Xenophobe with what could be said to be Xenophile fluff. Similarly, Stalin's USSR was ideologically all about a worker's paradise, but then they get to the implementation and the only way to do that is absolute and utter control by an elite few, so they get classified as Totalitarian Asshole with what could be said to be Communist fluff.
"Change your empire ethics" Yes please.
Indeed!
I do hope it's a complete pain in the ass, though. One of the few things they (I assume accidentally) did right was the possible disconnect between the government and its people, most clearly seen when you "liberate" planets into their own puppet empire whose people don't agree with their overlords
at all. And, ideally, the very, very slow shift to changing their minds, assuming a bunch of conditions that usually aren't true. :x
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Topic: Stellaris: Paradox Interactive IN SPACE (Read 1742420 times)