Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[LoSboccacc]

ah yes a 4x where you have exactly one optimal way to build up, how interesting 

[E. Albright]

It feels very familiar - Stellaris has been on a long arc of giving us a lot of options and then whittling them down to one solution rather than trying to make everything you could do viable.

[Telgin]

The point of the empire pop penalty balance seems to be you have three choices come the mid-game: Conquest, Co-operation or Stagnation. You need to find external sources of pops or resources, rather than sitting in your corner and breeding pops. You can't just ignore the rest of the galaxy and expect to thrive.

This is what it ended up becoming but I don't think that was intentional.  Making determined assimilators AAA tier while demoting fanatic pacifists to F tier probably wasn't deliberate, even if those determined assimilators were already very good and fanatic pacifists were arguably bad before.  That said, I always liked to play turtling / inward perfectionist empires, so this essentially nerfed the way I liked to play the game very heavily.  I can just play egalitarian federation builders until they change the system again, I guess.

In short, I think the change is overall a good one but it does require you to completely relearn how to play with the new pop system. Old strategies simply will not work, and I think that there is a bit of people:
a) Trying the old ways of growth and being annoyed they don't work.
b) Being off-put by the AI doing a better job of keeping up with the player, making people feel like they're doing relatively worse than they actually are.

I will say that after playing more, I realize the problem isn't the massive burning dumpster fire I thought it was, and is instead only a moderately large dumpster fire.

I've definitely had to relearn pop growth and job mechanics, and after doing so I'm less upset.  Seeing the little red unemployment icon is no longer the giant red flag it used to be, since those pops will move to a planet with jobs and space now.  In theory it lets new colonies grow by absorbing pops from other planets.

However, it still feels pretty bad with the tuning right now.  I'd prefer to be able to continue to build up all of my planets and take advantage of their resources instead of using them as pop breeders for new colonies.  And with the current tuning, ecumenopoleis and ring worlds are pretty terrible with this system.  I have one ecumenopolis that I restored from a relic world that has 54 pops after 50 years or so, and a ring world segment that has 10 after 20 or so years.

And let's not forget that robot assembly plants are arguably actively detrimental after mid game, since they tie up a pop working the job and eat alloys every month.  Right now it literally takes my empire over 10 years to make a robot pop for each planet, so the alloy cost to produce them has gotten kind of hilariously out of whack.

So, bets on the next DLC? I'm betting something to do with Primitive Civilizations. They're due a rework, and the current Enlightenment/Infiltration was already a proto-Archeology system so I can see it being updated to use that instead.

DLC focused around primitives could be pretty cool and I wouldn't mind it.  I'll jump on the bandwagon from Paradox's forums and ask for internal politics again though.  I'd really like to see mechanics for managing internal stability as a way to avoid blobbing instead of the somewhat hamfisted approaches they've used so far.

[forsaken1111]

Well, I did it. I destroyed the galaxy. In ironman.

And I didn't get the achievement.

It was fun, you need so much darkmatter

[MorleyDev]

Admittedly one of the big goals of the change was to reduce the total pops in a galaxy, as each pop in-game is it's own entity that needs calculation. Too many pops was the biggest cause of late-game slowdown and multiplayer desync issues. So any solution to the current balance can't include "I want more pops" without bringing back the "I want the game to run faster"

Personally I think they may have to eventually completely rebuild the pop system from scratch so pops don't actually 'exist' as anything but a counter, and previously associated 'happiness/ethics' values go to being per-planet rather than per-pop (since people don't tend to pay much attention to the per-pop values). But try pitching that to a manager, "You want us to take a year rewriting the core of the game engine...without any more work being able to be done because of how big a change it is...and without the ability to sell it as a DLC or even base a DLC on it?".

Instead, I think improving the current balance should be more about buffing the different tactics to be equal:
* Aggressive/Xenophobic empires that steal pops from other nations and depopulate the galaxy to fuel their industry are nerf'd by other nations wanting them dead and building up to alliances to fight them.
* Imperial empires that want to expand and cover the galaxy scale better if they do so via vassalage rather than direct rule.
* Robots strength is in their per-pop efficiency, countered by generally getting less pops.
* Xenophiles need to attract external immigration and to make trade deals and research deals to grow their resources.

Of course there's always going to be an optimal way to min-max-sweaty it, but I've never played a game where that wasn't true and Stellaris isn't meant to be competitive but roleplayed. It doesn't matter if there's an optimal way so long as the suboptimal ways are still fun.

[E. Albright]

* Robots strength is in their per-pop efficiency, countered by generally getting less pops.

You could also do this with robots getting fewer pops but each pop representing more entities, which would imply efficiency at the cost of flexibility. Each one would have a higher impact, but you'd have fewer to spread around and they'd take more time to shift b/tw jobs.

[LoSboccacc]

Stellaris isn't meant to be competitive but roleplayed

That's, like, your opinion

There's a buttload 4x space games that allow same or better roleplay, but like one that has proper multiplayer in it.

[MorleyDev]

What I meant is that, from a core design approach, there are things in Stellaris that are designed to be unbalanced. A Fanatic Purifier, with the exact same pops, ship numbers and designs, planets etc as a regular empire will be flat-out stronger than the regular empire.

The design of Stellaris isn't for every empire to be equally competitive with every other empire. There are choices in events that are just mechanically superior, there are combinations of traits that just work better. Complaining that there's an "optimal" way to play alone is like complaining that it's more optimal to play as the Holy Roman Empire than as Iceland in Crusader Kings. That's the school of design that Stellaris comes from: That of setting up systems, balance for fun, and let it generate stories.

That's not opinion, that's the confessed design philosophy of the developers.

[MrRoboto75]

What I meant is that, from a core design approach, there are things in Stellaris that are designed to be unbalanced. A Fanatic Purifier, with the exact same pops, ship numbers and designs, planets etc as a regular empire will be flat-out stronger than the regular empire.

The FP also basically has the entire diplomacy system disabled, though.  It has to be stronger, because it can't have friends, share tech, or trade.

Speaking of the pop growth changes, FPs can't really make use of conquered pops, either.  It has to kill them, or turn them into food I guess.  And then somehow grow its own pops to replace them.

[Telgin]

On a slightly different note, I'm disappointed in the automatic research QoL feature they added.  I assumed its main purpose was to be turned on when you hit repeatables, so you wouldn't have to bounce back to the tech screen every month to pick Flash Coolant XXIII or whatever, but... it honestly really sucks for that purpose.

Supposedly it uses the same algorithm as the AI to pick techs, which I assumed would mean it picked the cheapest or lowest level repeatable available to it, but it seems to either follow some algorithm I don't understand, or just picks randomly once it hits repeatables.  I watched it pick Flash Coolant 4 times and ignore all of the other physics repeatables.  I'd really prefer that it equally balance them out, or if it were particularly smart, ignore Applied Superconductivity if I had a positive energy balance.

Of course, I knew it was going to be less than satisfactory for engineering research since I don't use missiles and don't normally waste time researching those techs, where I expected it to pick them from the pool despite that.  Guess I'll either have to supervise it anyway or just not use the feature.

[MorleyDev]

I think that the way the AI works is each tech is given a weighting, and the odds of the AI picking that tech are based on the weighting + some rng. So it's not completely random, but repeatables at the same level probably have similar ratings so it would be.

[Telgin]

That's reasonable, but I would have expected it to prefer to pick lower level repeatables more often due to the lower cost.  Maybe if I let it run for a while longer I'll see if it does follow some specific weighting.  Or I could just read the configs, but don't know where to find the weights exactly.

Right now, it seems to prefer offensive fire rate techs over everything else, as it's picked Flash Coolant and Synapse Interceptors 4 times each and the others once or twice at most.  Not a large sample size yet though.

[MrRoboto75]

I mean, you've seen how the AI empires manage... well anything really.

[Telgin]

Oh, sure.  3.0 seems to have made the AI dumber too, somehow.

I tried playing on ensign with my first 3.0 game so I could get used to it and I expect the AI handles things better on higher difficulties, but all of my neighbors have had at least 4 rebellions each by 2350 and all more or less fell apart and stopped being a threat around 2275.  The militarists to my north also declared war on me twice despite me having several times their fleet power in defensive stations at each choke point, so they literally just sat there and did nothing.  That may be working as intended with the new fog of war though, which is nice if the AI will actually try to pick fights with incomplete information since I might get some mid game entertainment now.

[Iceblaster]

they keep trying to fix lag caused by pops and never once consider why performance was so much better when they had tiles

Like sure call it a problem of complexity doing it, but I swear I never once had to worry about lag by pops whenever the planetary tile system existed, yet nowadays its the most common issues.