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[ZeroGravitas]

I'm curious if they actually fixed the problems with federations or just added new mechanics.  I'm specifically thinking of things like the 1,000 empty fleets that show up in the fleet manager because the AI keeps building corvettes, one at a time, to reinforce the federation fleet.  I know they made some changes to fleet reinforcements, so maybe they did.

I'm guessing that they've added more mechanics with very little to no regard for how these mechanics actually interact with already existing mechanics, as that seems to have been the M.O. since around 2.0 I guess

that's Paradox in a nutshell for you. every DLC will stand on its own with very little interaction with any other DLC. years later, they might realize that fact and try and merge them together in some way, or make a DLC part of the base game.

[Damiac]

So if you bought stellaris and each DLC at full retail, what would the price be to this point?

$200? And the game isn't finished. They're still trying to figure out basic mechanics like economy and population stuff. The entire war system was scrapped and redone and still is horrible.  The game was marketed as having 3 different FTL methods (remember that?)

There's no version where everything works right.  You like the warp stuff, well sorry, you gotta take all the bugs. You want the bugs fixed? Ok, but no warp options and you have to take the new shitty war system.

They should offer all the DLC for free to whoever bought this.  As an apology for lying about the game being a finished game, rather than an expensive early access title to boost some random devs' resumes.

Angry face emoji!!!

[Il Palazzo]

I liked the game when it first released and I like it now. I even like the business model, since I keep having fun with the product in its many iterations long after normally I'd be done with it.
The only thing that makes me (very mildly) angry is hearing the same broken record complaining how Paradox should be ashamed of themselves, ashamed I say!, again and again. It's not as bad as the Cataclysm threads, but sometimes getting through to a post that actually talks about the game in the thread about the game can be a pain. It's like having to push through Westboro Baptists protestors to get to a cinema.
Meh emoji. Slightly annoyed emoji.

[Chiefwaffles]

Sheesh. I gotta agree with Palazzo.

They didn't lie at any point. At the beginning, they sold just Stellaris. People know what they're getting. If you knew about Paradox's DLC models then you accepted that as well, and if you didn't then clearly you were fine without the prospect of major DLC.
When they sell DLC, you know exactly what you are getting. If you pay this much money for this DLC, you get the features of this DLC. Everyone gets this update. Terrific! Then they continued to change things and improve the game. Some people don't like this change. That's okay. Regardless, they can still easily revert back to the version which they spent their money based on.
At no point did they lie about their game. They never misrepresented it in marketing. They haven't made any promises to never ever change any features just in case it hurts someone's feelings and that person is mad they can't get any more free content for their game since apparently they bought Stellaris exclusively as Warp Drive Simulator 2016.

I personally am pretty disappointed in Stellaris lately (namely: this update/DLC is a bit underwhelming, there's pretty much no QA, and jesus christ the AI) but that's veerry different from demanding they refund DLC for... reasons?

[Iceblaster]

Honestly I'm just kinda...

Unsure if I like Stellaris as it exists. It's changed so much from what I bought in on. The systems changed may be better than it was before, but I feel like Stellaris lost some of the charm for me. The change from the what I dub the amoeba-like borders with constant change as planets grow and frontier outposts are placed, and the tiles + just outright removing the multiple FTL is what's kinda killed my enthusiasm for Stellaris as a game and not just using it as a story generator. Because atm, I don't play Stellaris like I play something like Civ where I play it to play and have fun, I play Stellaris nowadays to get stories and the like.
Which isn't bad, but it feels like the Stellaris I used to like has been changed so much.

AM I the only one who has this kinda relationship with Stellaris?

EDIT: Also, forgot to mention that I kinda miss the tile system, always felt like the total scrapping of it was just shortsighted.

[Telgin]

I didn't really start playing until 2.0, so I don't have nostalgia for the multiple FTL types and even now I wonder how some of them even worked in practice.  Trying to pin down and fight an empire with warp tech when you have hyperdrives sounds miserable.  Did the ships even exit warp in systems they weren't stopping in?

And while I'm a little torn on the tile system, I think it's vastly better overall now than it was.  Maybe they could do some other kind of surface visualization, since I do miss seeing the pop portraits on a planet at a glance (and since it's so tucked away now I don't even care about happiness anymore), but limiting pops and development to the tiles was always, well, limiting.

[forsaken1111]

You can always go play the launch version, or any other major version, if you're nostalgic for it. For me the tile system was way too limiting so I was glad to see the end of it. The old style borders were too hard to predict what the result of a new outpost or colony would give you, and the multiple FTL modes aren't actually gone, just changed which I don't mind too much.

[Trolldefender99]

Personally like the newer stellaris, but something for everyone I guess. A lot of people don't like the new cataclysm DDA, but I find it better. Or like people who only like classic WoW and won't ever touch current WoW and vice versa. Really same with any game that evolves over time.

In any case, personally find a lot of the changes in Stellaris to be a positive overall. With the caveat I like the story/RP aspect the best, which does seem to be where its focus went to.

[Kanil]

I didn't really start playing until 2.0, so I don't have nostalgia for the multiple FTL types and even now I wonder how some of them even worked in practice.  Trying to pin down and fight an empire with warp tech when you have hyperdrives sounds miserable.

Yeah, I played exactly one game of Stellaris with mixed FTL types, then ticked the "hyperlane only" feature for all subsequent games. Not sure they needed to remove it for the people who liked it, but it's not a change I noticed in the slightest.

As for tiles, well... I think they're a worse design than the current system, but the current system is so broken that the game has actually been less fun since they added it -- performance has been terrible and balance isn't any better. If they actually fix and balance it, I'll consider it an improvement... but after one year, two DLC, and three patches I'm starting to wonder "if" it'll happen rather than "when".

[Cruxador]

I didn't really start playing until 2.0, so I don't have nostalgia for the multiple FTL types and even now I wonder how some of them even worked in practice.  Trying to pin down and fight an empire with warp tech when you have hyperdrives sounds miserable.  Did the ships even exit warp in systems they weren't stopping in?

Warp was generally slower, so catching a warper with hyperlanes wasn't really difficult unless you had a big gap between your group of worlds and nearby planets with enemies who somehow knew about this, which didn't really happen in practice and the AI certainly wouldn't have been able to exploit it if it had. Warp ships didn't stop in systems that they didn't stop in, but they did have to make plenty of stops when traveling long distances. Warp jumps weren't further than most hyperdrives at the lowest tech level and only increased by like 50% or something each upgrade.

Not sure they needed to remove it for the people who liked it,

Part of their justification was that it let them do stuff like the gateway system and the new version of warp engines without it being too confusing. The real reason is just that they can't be bothered to support multiple methods.

[Iceblaster]

Tbh Gateways never seemed incompatible with even wormhole FTL -being the most OP by far imo, as if we were to assume all FTL types were to exist, they're still instant FTL between two points. Sure, wormhole may not benefit as much, but a warp or hyperdriver empire would most definitely benefit from it.

Also reminds me taht I am sad weapont ype choice isn't a thing. Realistic? no, but it contributed to the differentiation between empires and how they developed.

[Telgin]

Warp ships didn't stop in systems that they didn't stop in, but they did have to make plenty of stops when traveling long distances. Warp jumps weren't further than most hyperdrives at the lowest tech level and only increased by like 50% or something each upgrade.

Oh, warp had limited range per jump?  That makes a lot more sense then, since I assumed they just went from point A to point B directly, regardless of distance.  I played just one 1.9 game so I didn't remember anything about how it worked.

Anyway, on a different subject, it looks like the AI is getting some legitimate improvements: dev diary

[forsaken1111]

Yeah warp worked a bit like FTL in Elite Dangerous does. You had a max range depending on tech and could hop from star to star within that range, which made some areas challenging to navigate early on if the distance between stars was too great. In fact some starts in large maps would leave you stranded as the nearest stars might be too far and you'd be restricted to 2-3 systems until you got warp 2 tech

[Chiefwaffles]

Anyway, on a different subject, it looks like the AI is getting some legitimate improvements: dev diary

Oh thank god. That dev diary is actually pretty uplifting to read. One of the AI's biggest problems (in addition to it just, y'know, fundamentally not working) was stuff like building weighting. Some buildings just not ever being given an AI weighting so they're never built by the AI or considered as an option.
Reading it suggests they're actually addressing the AI's core issues. Better yet, they're doing this without (it seems, at least) band-aid fixes. Like just doing away with buildings weights entirely and have the AI dynamically evaluate building options on an empire-wide basis rather than a planet-wide one. It's amazing they've let it get this bad, but this is actually very hope-inducing.


Different FTL types was a nice feature but I definitely agree with their choice to remove it. Sure, it is easier to maintain, but things like that destroy so many would-be options for development. It's easier to make interesting and fun content when your baseline is just one thing -- the hyperdrive in this case. Stuff like making the jump drive a much more noticeable change to the game. Hyperdrive-only makes the "terrain" of the map much more important since now you can have actual chokepoints and bring in more tactics with defense and attack.
It's pretty unfair to say that they only removed other FTL methods because "they can't be bothered to support multiple methods." Even if there were no noticeable benefits to the change to players, cutting down requirements in maintaining other systems is extremely legitimate. If developers have to spend less time going "wait how will balance be affected by this new feature and warp/wormhole drives?" and less time making sure the systems play nice, that's more time spent on developing other parts of the game.

It's extraordinarily tiring to hear the narrative that "developers of [game] did(n't) do [this] because they're incompetent and LAZY!!" It represents such a core misunderstanding of game development behind the scenes.

[Telgin]

I'm honestly pretty impressed that they're redoing as much about the AI as they are.  Doubly so for rewriting the crises to use the same AI as everything else, since that's bound to fix some of its issues.

The building weighting thing almost makes sense, but the thing that really puzzled me about the existing AI is how job selection worked with weighting.  That, admittedly, may not be getting fixed, but if I remember right every job had to have modifiers manually added for pop traits, which seems backward to me and led to mistakes that had to be patched.  A job about generating minerals should get modifiers from mineral output, which should be calculated on the pop first, not by manually checking traits on the pop instead.

I'm sure they had their reasons for doing it like this, but I don't know what they are.  Saving a few floating point calculations per pop per update may be the reason, and it may well be significant.