Stellaris is a race game, not a war game, and it’s becoming ever more obvious.

[Voidian]

Hum.

You can build tall with ringworlds and ecumenopolises, regular empires can never fill them up thanks to how pop growth works right now, so there isn't that much of a point in over expanding if you're aiming to use many of such worlds, I always end up relocating most/all of my population to those worlds and I rarely fill them all up, while most colonies end up with the most rudimentary infrastructures to assemble more pops, with all jobs closed so pops can relocate to the special worlds on their own.

Except now we can go virtual and forget the wide expansion for pop growth as we can just spawn thousands of pops out of nowhere.

As a small empire you can also lead massive federations and make more friends, go into politics and annex the civilized part of the galaxy through resolutions becoming the emperor too.

WIth the new cosmogenesis perk you can have FE buildings that are so productive you really won't need more lands.

Not to mention Sovereign Guardianship, which boosts tall playstyle, makes you unconquerable, and encourages not going wide.

It's not perfect, but tall is in the best state it has ever been. Of course, there are inherent advantages to having a wide empire and hundreds of planets, and why shouldn't there be? You most likely had to fight for them, while tall empires can just sit there and get powerful for doing nothing.

 

[mrt1212]

Hum.

You can build tall with ringworlds and ecumenopolises, regular empires can never fill them up thanks to how pop growth works right now, so there isn't that much of a point in over expanding if you're aiming to use many of such worlds, I always end up relocating most/all of my population to those worlds and I rarely fill them all up, while most colonies end up with the most rudimentary infrastructures to assemble more pops, with all jobs closed so pops can relocate to the special worlds on their own.

Except now we can go virtual and forget the wide expansion for pop growth as we can just spawn thousands of pops out of nowhere.

As a small empire you can also lead massive federations and make more friends, go into politics and annex the civilized part of the galaxy through resolutions becoming the emperor too.

WIth the new cosmogenesis perk you can have FE buildings that are so productive you really won't need more lands.

Not to mention Sovereign Guardianship, which boosts tall playstyle, makes you unconquerable, and encourages not going wide.

It's not perfect, but tall is in the best state it has ever been. Of course, there are inherent advantages to having a wide empire and hundreds of planets, and why shouldn't there be? You most likely had to fight for them, while tall empires can just sit there and get powerful for doing nothing.

My favorite rub about Virtuality though, is now that we got the enforced Tall tool, some are like 'I don't get what I'm supposed to do now' and even I am like 'I wish there were more ways to interact with it directly as a character'. For all the power accrued in doing nothing, there is the corollary nothing to do with all that power, heh heh heh.

 

[mrt1212]

I think that's what they tried to capture with powerful councilors, delaying tech, giving even machines a lifespan... but because all the leaders died at the same time and the penalty for losing them was so bad, the result was "make sure your rulers never die", rather than to watch your empire (and neighboring empires) wax and wane with the deaths of their influential leaders.

This alone is one of the greatest examples of how weird Stellaris is considered by its own playerbase, where the perfectly normal eventuality of death is not taken in stride and we functionally wind up with strategems that present an empire history of 2-3 oligarchic cohorts that ran show (and mechanically do in so many ways when it comes to applied bonuses, the Naval Cap Commanders especially are just autonomic fixtures after a certain point for wartypes where you don't wanna lose them for the astounding combined effect they have with the Galactic Community passing Naval Cap relief when they develop into beasts) despite empire fluff pretenses in authority, like even the egals with elections and the promise of self governance turnover invariably have The Oracle (or self created knockoffs) as sought fixture and crucial character in the emprie, like WHAT? I want to blame the playerbase for being too touchy about their leaders, but the game sets it up and makes it the thing to do!

 

[Jeyops]

People here imply that building tall is stronger than ever...

Maybe my memory tricks me but I think around apocalypse playing tall was actually the strongest. You had to pay a crippling upkeep for a colony ship till the colonization was actually done. Colonizing too early actually hurt you.
Each colony crippled your science output by a margin resulting in single planets being the first ones to get to megastructures. Where you exploded hard.
A big fleet wasn't necessary in midgame back then because there was no galcom and no exploitable vassals as long as you were able to keep good relations with your neighbours. If you had a bit of luck and played your cards right you could focus solely on economy and science. You needed to go _really_ wide to compensate for that.

The gaya world origin wasn't always marked as a challenge btw.

And god do I miss those times. I still struggle wrapping my head around that I have to play wide or just fail.

 

[Methone]

A wide empire should suffer according logistical problems.

There is no such thing as 'wide' and 'tall'. It's a distinction that hasn't existed for years.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

There is no such thing as 'wide' and 'tall'. It's a distinction that hasn't existed for years.

There are distinct strategies and modifiers which are either best for large empires with colonies that aren't full, or best for small empires with large numbers of pops per colony.

The most notable is planetary ascension, which gives wildly disproportionate bonuses to empires that can fully ascend a large portion of their planets (so that further ascensions are cheap).

 

[dawedqafdAD]

A wide empire should suffer according logistical problems. The Empire Size mechanic tries to accomplish this, but doesn't really tackle all the issues.

Empire size is already doing a stellar job of this, what more do you want? Or actually more importantly what exactly do you perceive the "Issues" to be? If its that your 10 system, 4 planet empire cant outproduce some major nation whos been expanding all game, that seems pretty unrealistic.

Have to agree, there is far too much content focused on expansion.

Why wouldn't it be focused on expansion? were playing an empire building game, what is the expectation here? You cant hope to advance you empire by stagnating...

The economy doesn't help either. Everything is gathered immediately, a planet 50 jumps away from the capital produces as efficiently as one neighbouring it. Stability from being a frontier planet on the borders of a hostile empire is the same as one with a Bastion Starbase.

I've always disliked this argument because it seems to straight up ignore the fact that every single empire has FTL travel capabilities, and later on gateways, hyper relays, etc. There's no reason any empire regardless of size should face any sort of issues regarding travel time or distance because those aren't even real issues in stellaris. sure one of your alloy worlds is 50 jumps away but its only 2 jumps away from a gateway, and less then a month travel time in game thanks to the hyper relay network, etc..

Internal politics rework and tying the entire economy to the trade route mechanic would go a long way towards improving this. Make expansion an actual investment so that overextending actually punishes you.

Again working under the assumption that travel time is an issue (it isn't) A connected galactic economy of some kind could help to serve tall empires i guess, since they could profit greatly off large empires from it. And that would be perfectly reasonable and a good addition rather then a senseless nerf to expanding.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

Empire size is already doing a stellar job of this, what more do you want? Or actually more importantly what exactly do you perceive the "Issues" to be? If its that your 10 system, 4 planet empire cant outproduce some major nation whos been expanding all game, that seems pretty unrealistic.

I would like it to not be so easily bypassed. They added it, then slowly eroded it until, this patch, you can take multiple paths to completely eliminate sprawl from pops and/or colonies entirely, or get a global modifier that just reduces empire effect by a total of 80% (making it so that sprawl won't even double your tech costs until 2600 size).

When it was launched, sprawl was unavoidable except with a few builds that were incredibly restrictive because they either limited your colonies (to use ascension to keep size low) or were almost completely locked out of conquest (because you reduced pop sprawl through fanatic pacifism).

 

[Abdulijubjub]

Why wouldn't it be focused on expansion? were playing an empire building game, What is the expectation here? You cant hope to advance you empire by stagnating...

The "wide vs. tall" dichotomy a ton of other games do is a distinction between building up to improve what you have or trying to take what other people have. It isn't "expand or stagnate", it's "expand or build up" (zero/negative sum vs. positive sum advancement).

Civ, for instance, has a build queue so that you're forced to choose: settlers (peaceful expansion), military units (defense or military expansion), or workers/buildings/districts (internal development). You could settle a few cities then "Sim City" for the rest of the game to go for a science/culture/diplomacy victory. This playstyle is common enough that there's even a term for it (and people use it for Stellaris). And city development is expensive; unless you're dedicating empire wide resources like gold or trade routes, you can spend the entire game just building things to make your city more powerful and not be done by the end.

Stellaris currently suffers from a problem with every option but military expansion quickly being exhausted (though orbital rings and now furnaces/dyson swarms have alleviated that, slightly). All the territory gets claimed too quickly, all the colonies can be established too cheaply, all the mining stations can be built so cheaply that you just auto-complete them, all your starbases get upgraded, planetary infrastructure is cheap and quick to build, then... there's nothing but tech.

Orbital rings were a step forward: they competed with conquest for use of "mana" (influence), but they came too late. And influence became too easy to get with vassals at the same, which sorta undid that progress. Habitats were similar, but they conflicted (for a while) with the "only a few colonies which you heavily build up" mechanics that were supposed to favor non-conqueror empires, though now that's been slightly alleviated by making them fairly big colonies instead of tons of tiny ones.

Arc Furnaces and Dyson Swarms will (maybe) alleviate this somewhat, by providing a early/mid-game sink. Tech could also alleviate this if there were tons of (easily avoided) mediocre techs that help a bit, and they had kept e.g. breakthroughs in so that that there were avenues for investment other than racing to the end of the tree (which would let then re-open spamming tech without building slots being so restrictive, or tech rush running away with the game so quickly by getting lots of transformative techs like cruisers too early).

I've always disliked this argument because it seems to straight up ignore the fact that every single empire has FTL travel capabilities, and later on gateways, hyper relays, etc. There's no reason any empire regardless of size should face any sort of issues regarding travel time or distance because those aren't even real issues in stellaris. sure one of your alloy worlds is 50 jumps away but its only 2 jumps away from a gateway, and less then a month travel time in game thanks to the hyper relay network, etc..

Again working under the assumption that travel time is an issue (which it isn't) A connected galactic economy of some kind could help to serve tall empires i guess, since they could profit greatly off large empires from it. And that would be perfectly reasonable and a good addition rather then a senseless nerf to expanding.

Gateways would alleviate it, but before gateways and hyperrelays, crossing the empire takes multiple months.

The transit time from Great Britain to the colonies during the American revolutionary war was only 2 months.

 

[yarpus]

Honestly? Tall has never been better. But there is a catch.
You have to either pick Sovereign Guardianship or Pacifist ethic. Both offer you the most important bonus for tall empires which is empire size from pops. Stacking it allows you to keep your Empire Size small. Be sure to pick up Harmony tradition, hunt for Psionic Theory (even when not going for Psionics).
In addition Pacifists silently became a really good ethic due to their agenda We Come In Peace which grants you +25 Trust with other empires on launch.
Between Mercenaries, superior tech & economy and ability to constantly increase my Trust I quickly started to get requests from others to become my vassals.
There are also kilo-structures which are great for tall empires. Hard limit on their amount makes sure that wide boys can’t abuse them far more than I can during early game.
This playstyle was always strong except it had no endgame aside from becoming Emperor (which is clunky and cringe). But now you have Cosmogenesis. Using the already mentioned strategy I have managed to leave the galaxy at year 2370 on Grand Admiral difficulty while using just my pops for Synaptic Lathe. Just remeber to focus Research over Advanced Logic as I collected far too much of it AND NEVER ROLLED MEGASTRUCTURES.
Cosmogenesis was the last missing piece Tall lacked and now we have it and it’s glorious. Don’t even get me started on Virtual as I have not played it yet.

TLDR: Tall is better than ever. Just play Pacifist.

 

[yarpus]

I nearly forgot. There is another, hidden „tall” empire that you can play if you miss the conquest. Terravores.
Ability to delete planets for actual gains is incredibly usefull and fun - I wish more empires to have an access to this playstyle.
I still need to finish my GA playtrough with it. Early economy is rough because you are Lithoid hive mind but after you kick things off you get access to very unique TALL CONQUEST. Make sure to find your 3-5 cool planets and eat the rest. Your empire has a lot of systems but not too many planets which is easier to manage.

 

[Methone]

which are either best for large empires with colonies that aren't full, or best for small empires with large numbers of pops per colony.

What modifier exists for empires with unfull colonies???

 

[mrt1212]

Gateways would alleviate it, but before gateways and hyperrelays, crossing the empire takes multiple months.

The transit time from Great Britain to the colonies during the American revolutionary war was only 2 months.

my brain is breaking at that 2 month figure only because something like military logistics is decoupled entirely from pop/leader logistics, such that the Brits woulda been better off not traversing any ocean and resettling the egal materialist unruly ruler merchant pops instantly off their colonies in 1775 and make London more Tall...

absurdist lampoon aside, it feels like most situations where a 2 month back and forth or even a one way once and for all to handle colonial rebellion would need to be anywhere from a year to 3 years to have the same meaning and effect it did for the Red Coats. it currently doesnt feel like those pesky occasional rebels in newly conquered or settled gains are 1 to 3 years away to make it so a human player could lose to the upstarts by logistical burden in huge amount.

The fresh conquering ones certainly dont go from discontent to revolt fast enough or without comical jukes to end them that 1 to 3 years to respond with absolute force is a problem.

Holy crap, its informational awareness, natch, omg, acting like 1775 Brits had instsnt 4x awareness at wtf was cooking over here, lmao

 

[Abdulijubjub]

Sovereign Guardianship is a... compact civic, not a tall civic. You can conquer as much as you want and have as many planets as you want, so long as you keep your planets full of pops by carefully abandoning, trading away, or releasing the empty husks of your conquests (or at least, the ones that aren't consolidated).

% sprawl reductions are tools for wide empires, not tall ones (though they're useful to everyone). They only have a substantial effect if you would otherwise have high empire size: going from 200 sprawl to 100 sprawl only makes your techs 17% cheaper, but going from 1200 to 600 reduces tech costs by around 37%.

Pacifist sorta dodges this contradiction by simultaneously lowering sprawl and limiting expansion.

Edit: 17%, not 9%. Initially did the calculation as if tech doubled for every 1000 sprawl past 100, then only fixed one of the numbers.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

What modifier exists for empires with unfull colonies???

Flat assembly per planet without requiring pops (Synth ruler and Identity Designers). Or just pop-free growth in general (like base organic growth).
Colony uniques that give substantial bonuses that don't scale with number of pops or very efficient jobs/building slot usage (like the base production per monument, Auth/Mil/Mat Culture Workers, Ancient Refineries, Astral Siphons, or Spawning Pools).
Buildings that produce without pops, in general.
Flat crime reductions or amenity bonuses per-colony (like Feedback Loop, or the gestalt domination tradition).
Colony sprawl reductions (like Imperial Prerogative).

Anything that gives a flat bonus per colony or makes the first couple of pops more efficient than others. All of these are substantially more valuable for large collections of small or medium sized colonies than a small number of colonies with lots of pops.

All that combined can be the functional equivalent of +5 sprawl-free pops per colony (and Imperial Prerogative can be 10 pops). If you have 100 pops per colony, you don't care. If your colonies average around 10-20 pops each, it's a 50% sprawl reduction (ish).

 

[Thiend]

Sovereign Guardianship is a... compact civic, not a tall civic. You can conquer as much as you want and have as many planets as you want, so long as you keep your planets full of pops by carefully abandoning, trading away, or releasing the empty husks of your conquests (or at least, the ones that aren't consolidated).

% sprawl reductions are tools for wide empires, not tall ones (though they're useful to everyone). They only have a substantial effect if you would otherwise have high empire size: going from 200 sprawl to 100 sprawl only makes your techs 9% cheaper, but going from 1200 to 600 reduces tech costs by around 37%.

Pacifist sorta dodges this contradiction by simultaneously lowering sprawl and limiting expansion.

It would be complicated to balance, but I think the only way to make Sovereign Guardianship the tall civic it's clearly supposed to be (or implement another, actually tall civic instead of a "really absurdly good" civic like SG actually is) would be mechanics that flatly reduce sprawl by some large amount, but increase your sprawl penalty by a similarly large amount.

So, as a thrown together example, say you get -500 sprawl, but +1000% sprawl penalty. That actually incentivizes going tall, because now your benefit turns into a penalty if you go past 650 sprawl but is a very strong benefit before that, rather than SG being a benefit at any empire size as long as you have more than 20 pops per colony (a shockingly low threshold, by the way) plus some extra for systems.

It would need to scale appropriately for settings such as planet density, however, to neither exceed nor fall behind just going wide without it by an excessive amount. In a galaxy where 650 sprawl is huge, that's OP. In a galaxy where 1300 is tiny, your actual resource incomes just aren't going to cut it to keep up.

Plus, it would be OP with vassal taxes. But, to be honest, a LOT of things are OP with vassal taxes, so I think the solution there is... fix vassals.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

It would be complicated to balance, but I think the only way to make Sovereign Guardianship the tall civic it's clearly supposed to be (or implement another, actually tall civic instead of a "really absurdly good" civic like SG actually is) would be mechanics that flatly reduce sprawl by some large amount, but increase your sprawl penalty by a similarly large amount.

So, as a thrown together example, say you get -500 sprawl, but +1000% sprawl penalty. That actually incentivizes going tall, because now your benefit turns into a penalty if you go past 650 sprawl but is a very strong benefit before that, rather than SG being a benefit at any empire size as long as you have more than 20 pops per colony (a shockingly low threshold, by the way) plus some extra for systems.

It would need to scale appropriately for settings such as planet density, however, to neither exceed nor fall behind just going wide without it by an excessive amount. In a galaxy where 650 sprawl is huge, that's OP. In a galaxy where 1300 is tiny, your actual resource incomes just aren't going to cut it to keep up.

Plus, it would be OP with vassal taxes. But, to be honest, a LOT of things are OP with vassal taxes, so I think the solution there is... fix vassals.

Agreed wholeheartedly; that's what it needs. Another alternative would be a hefty research/unity bonus and an empire size effect penalty. Same story, but without the same "grow till you hit 500 size" incentive. Or some combination of both so you have a little bit of room to build up still, and you don't get the full bonus for free.

 

[ZomgK3tchup]

True, I think we can all agree that Luxembourg and Monaco are among the most powerful nations in the real world. Certainly comparable to the US and China.

No? Then maybe "tall" play is a ridiculous meme that shouldn't be coddled with more distortions to the rules and contrived mechanics to hammer down the leader. The rich get richer in most games because that's how it works in reality.

Why wouldn't it be focused on expansion? were playing an empire building game, what is the expectation here? You cant hope to advance you empire by stagnating...

The comparison to real world nations doesn't work here.

A real world nation has a finite amount of land and and accessible resources. While that's technically true for space civilizations, star systems are so large that anyone who can fly around their home system effectively has infinite space and accessible resources.

The fact that stars only produce 2-4 energy, for example, is a gameplay conceit. If Stellaris were realistic in this regard, a space civilization that numbers in the billions would effectively never need anything other than their home star for energy production.

That is, this isn't just an empire building game. It's a space empire building game and space empires (presumably) don't translate 1:1 with how real world empires function, in this case because of the mind boggling amount of resources a space empire would have in its own home system alone.

We already got arc furnaces and Dyson swarms, which are excellent steps in the right direction, but it absolutely should be possible to build "tall" in Stellaris. Expanding outward should realistically be the choice to exploit as much territory as possible versus making use of the effectively infinite amount of resources you're already sitting on in your home system.

 

[Thiend]

Agreed wholeheartedly; that's what it needs. Another alternative would be a hefty research/unity bonus and an empire size effect penalty. Same story, but without the same "grow till you hit 500 size" incentive. Or some combination of both so you have a little bit of room to build up still, and you don't get the full bonus for free.

You could simply take the -500 sprawl, +1000% penalty version and also give it a minor anti-sprawl effect the less of the -500 is actually needing to apply. That would, appropriately balanced, make the range between 0-500 varyingly good at raw production numbers and after-modifier tech and unity, so that you would have incentives depending on what you wanted to stop anywhere in that range rather than specifically at 500.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

You could simply take the -500 sprawl, +1000% penalty version and also give it a minor anti-sprawl effect the less of the -500 is actually needing to apply. That would, appropriately balanced, make the range between 0-500 varyingly good at raw production numbers and after-modifier tech and unity, so that you would have incentives depending on what you wanted to stop anywhere in that range rather than specifically at 500.

I think that would require new modifiers.

Maybe just keep the civic exactly the same, but replace -50% size from pops and districts (the only truly problematic part) with -20% planetary ascension/tradition cost and +20% Voidcraft research speed (and starbase techs as guaranteed options, as soon as you finish the previous one).

As long as that's not enough ascension cost reduction (when combined with other things) to bring it dangerously close to zero: your sprawl will be higher, but as long as it's not that much higher, you'll still come out ahead on unity and the not-dying tech. And after you do some ascending, you'll be ahead on all tech. It does sorta shoehorn you into unity and defense but... that's what the civic is supposed to be about already (unity from soldiers, crazy defensive buffs, etc.).

It may be too synergistic with Ascensionists, but all tall things will be anyway.