Stellaris Dev Diary #106: 2.0.2 patch notes and the Road Ahead for Cherryh | Page 40

ToshiroOzuwara · Mar 5, 2018

SuiciSpai said:
The number of bugs is alarming. I starting to think that we are going to need more than a couple of weeks of bugfixing to make the game at least as stable as 1.9.

I am back on 1.9 for a couple months. If Machine Empires are borked, then I can't play anyway because organics are fragile, gooey and weak.

Esurnir · Mar 5, 2018

I don't know if it's the right thread for feedback but i'm a bit unhappy with the current implementation of war exhaustion. Before 2.0.2 War exhaustion was a way for the winner to force the defender to give up.

Now it is a way for the winner to punish the defender, with no recourse on his side.

Here's what happened in a game of mine : My friend was on the defender side of a war between the new khanate (my overlord) and some ai power.

War exhaustion clmbed to 100% and my overlord who was stuck in an endless loop of doing nothing decided not to accept a status quo and continue. Now you got the loser reeling with nothing it can do (it can't demand a status quo because of naval difference), suffering tremendous penalties while the winner doesn't want to press its advantage.

I got another idea: I like the fact the loser isn't forced to status quo but why not do it this way :

Penalties only kicks in if the defender REFUSE a status quo.

And penalties get bigger every time (with a cooldown) a surrender is refused. Start with -10% happiness and progress upward to force a loser in an untenable position. That way if the winner wants to continue the war, the defender isn't penalised by the winner refusing a status quo.

Currently the implementation encourage the winner not to ask a status quo, as a reeling defender is an even juicier target.

Ixal · Mar 5, 2018

Esurnir said:
I don't know if it's the right thread for feedback but i'm a bit unhappy with the current implementation of war exhaustion. Before 2.0.2 War exhaustion was a way for the winner to force the defender to give up.

Now it is a way for the winner to punish the defender, with no recourse on his side.

Here's what happened in a game of mine : My friend was on the defender side of a war between the new khanate (my overlord) and some ai power.

War exhaustion clmbed to 100% and my overlord who was stuck in an endless loop of doing nothing decided not to accept a status quo and continue. Now you got the loser reeling with nothing it can do (it can't demand a status quo because of naval difference), suffering tremendous penalties while the winner doesn't want to press its advantage.

I got another idea: I like the fact the loser isn't forced to status quo but why not do it this way :

Penalties only kicks in if the defender REFUSE a status quo.

And penalties get bigger every time (with a cooldown) a surrender is refused. Start with -10% happiness and progress upward to force a loser in an untenable position. That way if the winner wants to continue the war, the defender isn't penalised by the winner refusing a status quo.

Currently the implementation encourage the winner not to ask a status quo, as a reeling defender is an even juicier target.

More importantly, forced SQ was a way for the loser to force the stronger attacker into an "good enough" peace through guerilla tactics which allowed the weaker faction to survive wars more often and gave them a chance to rebuild and seek alliances. With the 2.02 changes we are back to one single devestating war with War Exhaustion not stopping the attacker until he achieved all goals.

Sapa Inca · Mar 5, 2018

Wheem said:
Are primitive species that spawn on their own planet supposed to be able to have the Servile trait?

In my last game a AI empire (harmonious collective, ocean preference with the halfling/gnome portrait) spawned with their primary specie having servile trait, I found this funny.

Veggiesama · Mar 5, 2018

nilsjeppe said:
- MAJOR: It's possible to set a negative maximum number of titans in a fleet. It's then impossible to recover from this; the game won't let you increase the limit back up to zero. Trying to disband a fleet with negative maximum of titans will crash the game.

I've got this issue too, except it's for Corvettes. When going down to 0 units in the fleet manager, it doesn't automatically remove the entry. It then lets you go down to -1, -2, etc. As soon as you try to disband or merge it with another fleet, it crashes.

I've attached a save game file of the issue. Try disbanding my fleets and you'll see it crash.

Spartan322 · Mar 5, 2018

Ixal said:
More importantly, forced SQ was a way for the loser to force the stronger attacker into an "good enough" peace through guerilla tactics which allowed the weaker faction to survive wars more often and gave them a chance to rebuild and seek alliances. With the 2.02 changes we are back to one single devestating war with War Exhaustion not stopping the attacker until he achieved all goals.

The problem with forced SQ is its arbitrary in a game where the player is suppose to be making the choices for things, the biggest complaint about 2.0 is the arbitrary things it enforces, like the fact you can't even try to subjugate other empires unless their relative power is below you. You should be able to make decisions like that and incur the risk as a player instead of letting the game do it for you. I'd argue that WE should scale a penalty (that can get really bad) for 100%+ WE (and of course scales quicker the more WE you get) and even more penalties if you deny peace at 100% WE or something. In those cases you wouldn't have a arbitrary hard limit that the player questions for annoyance, but a logical, reasonable, and well designed soft limit that you can't ignore.

sejemaset · Mar 5, 2018

Spartan322 said:
The problem with forced SQ is its arbitrary in a game where the player is suppose to be making the choices for things,

What is arbitrary about your enemy forcing you to declare a truce by a war of attrition?

whowhatwhyhow · Mar 5, 2018

2.0.2 (Opt-In) Beta Bugs:

Sometimes when you build a new habitat, instead of building on the planetoid / moon / planet you chose, it gets built instead right over the sun (where a starbase should be instead), and if you build multiple, they stack on top of each other (this bug is also present in 2.0 vanilla). Since you can't choose "build right over the sun" as one of the initial Habitat locations, it is somehow incorrectly getting "moved" there. You notice this when you get the notification the habitat is complete -- it will appear to be building in the correct / original location during build, it only "bug moves" to the center of the system / right over the star when it's finished.
"Habitat Complete" messages, when you click the "go to the finished habitat" (camera?) button, it doesn't take you anywhere / doesn't move the camera to the newly finished Habitat. You always have to manually go to it.
Gateways (not wormholes) are not working at all in my current 2.0.2 game. Ships don't think Gateways (existing, or newly build) exist and will only route through the normal hyperlanes or naturally ocurring Wormholes. Gateways completely non-functioning.

2.02. (Opt-In) Possible Bugs:

AI's constantly spam requests for all the following: non-agression, defense agreement, associate of Federation offer, and Federation offers

2.02. (Opt-In) Design Issues:

In Fleet Manager, you can't copy a fleet.
You can't create a template from scratch (ie, no ships / not starting from an existing fleet), name it and thenfulfill it. You can only manage fleets in Fleet manager you've already built

2.02. (Opt-In) UI Issues:

Fleet Designer fleets has a very narrow window (only two rows tall) to view your fleets. Sometimes this has the side effect of thinking that a fleet you can see in the Outlier doesn't have a way to manage it in the Fleet manager -- but what is happening is there is a bunch of (or at least one) row of useless / one ship templates (with the default name of "New Template") making it look like you simply havn't chosen a template for those slots yet, but the Fleet Manager is filling them with one Destroyer only templates with the default template name. You have to scroll down the tiny little scrollbar just to the right of your templates to actually see / manage the one fleet you thought wasn't in Fleet Manager. Fix: Make the view of existing fleets be at least 4-6 rows, and don't ever make existing fleet templates (even silly auto generated ones with only one destroyer in them) ever use the name "New Template") -- makes them appear unused even when they are, in fact, used / auto generated. Alternatively, don't let the system auto-create a template containing only one destroyer -- perhaps there should be some minimum number of ships / fleet power before a fleet "graduates" to Fleet manger?

Jin_Cardassian · Mar 5, 2018

What is arbitrary about your enemy forcing you to declare a truce by a war of attrition?

What's more narratively interesting: being forced into an auto-peace because the clock ticked down, or being forced into it because rebellions are flaring on half your worlds, the miners are on strike and a third of your fleet has defected to the pirates?

EU4 relies entirely on soft-penalties to force peace and you never have the issues described here. It's just a question of finding the balance points.

Zenicetus · Mar 5, 2018

sejemaset said:
What is arbitrary about your enemy forcing you to declare a truce by a war of attrition?

If I'm at war and suffering attrition, it should be *my * choice to end the war, accept a truce, or whatever. Not some arbitrary game mechanic telling me I need to stop.

In a nutshell, that's my main complaint about the war mechanics in Stellaris, not just this version but pre-2.0. I don't want the game telling me I can't do something that I logically should be able to pursue, even if it ruins my empire. Let the player make those choices and suffer the consequences. Let the penalties for pursuing war past a faction's resources be organic, and tied to systems like an economy that can't support it, not some arbitrary game mechanic.

sejemaset · Mar 5, 2018

Zenicetus said:
If I'm at war and suffering attrition, it should be *my * choice to end the war, accept a truce, or whatever. Not some arbitrary game mechanic telling me I need to stop.

You are the "leader" of the empire, the "arbitrary" game mechanic is the people of your empire. In light of that, here is a suggested alternative to forced status quo: When at 100% war exhaustion make refusal of a peace offer cost 1000 influence.

pezao39 · Mar 5, 2018

2.0.2

I always receive weird requests for immigration treat, sometimes I have an arid planet and the civilization requesting is from a frozen one or ocean planet. I think this is a bug.

Lexgrad · Mar 5, 2018

Really it just needs stacking debuffs. Prob a global war exhaustion system like eu4s would be better as once you finish one war you can hop into another.

Zenicetus · Mar 5, 2018

sejemaset said:
You are the "leader" of the empire, the "arbitrary" game mechanic is the people of your empire. In light of that, here is a suggested alternative to forced status quo: When at 100% war exhaustion make refusal of a peace offer cost 1000 influence.

Yeah, and "the people of your empire" works in a game like EU4.

It's exceedingly difficult to apply that idea to all of the various alien tropes that Stellaris tries to support. My Kzinti empire would be thrilled if Heroes are dying in a war, even if we're losing, because they're a genetically-bound warrior race. My Saberhagen Berserker machine purifiers just don't care.

I know this is accounted for, to a certain extent in the current patch depending on your faction ethos. It just always seems arbitrary and ridiculous in a sci-fi game to hit barriers like this. This isn't 16th Century Europe.

Edit to add (further thoughts): The bottom line, for me anyway, is that I don't ever want the game to tell me "Stop, you can't do this!" unless there is a logical reason that I can understand. I don't want to hit an arbitrary limit just because the game developer decided that I'm expanding too fast. Make it seem logical, and contingent on the current situation.

eraevous · Mar 5, 2018

I'm getting never-ending "Stop Colossus" casus-belli in my game, as well as an inability to return to the game window if I cntrl-tab out, that persists from 2.0. Thanks for the quick beta, though! Greatly appreciated

Spartan322 · Mar 5, 2018

sejemaset said:
What is arbitrary about your enemy forcing you to declare a truce by a war of attrition?

Except that's not how it works, maybe if they capture everything and defeat all your leftover military then yes, I'd say sure, (at that point you should probably be forcing war goals anyway) it wouldn't be arbitrary, but when they've not knocked down your door and pushed you to accept it via force, then there is no representation of a forced peace, then its an arbitrary game design limit that isn't communicated anything beyond "for the game" which provides inferior design because the game is limiting tactics, strategy, and logistics that are legitimate in real life. (and would appear to work in game) In the end you should be able to make this choice and even if denying SQ impeded some type of say temporary penalty (and I mean a one time penalty that has to time out before it can be applied again, the fact you can get negative opinion modifiers to stack on things like denying war are stupid and probably should apply to way less things) every time it was denied you'd be incentivizing an acceptance, but it needs to be something that isn't debilitating but isn't insubstantial. In the same regard it just makes sense for WE to be a scaling factor, the balancing act would be determining how far that goes but I'd much prefer that to a static penalty or a forced arbitration of peace. It just gives the player more options to play, and that should be the objective of the design if we can allow it, should it not. After all, is it not the job of the player to develop their path in games like this?

sejemaset · Mar 5, 2018

Spartan322 said:
but when they've not knocked down your door and pushed you to accept it via force,

So if your fleet is destroyed attacking some pacifist empire who has no reason to attack you they should just be caught in a forever war while you continually rebuild and attack again?

Spartan322 · Mar 5, 2018

sejemaset said:
So if your fleet is destroyed attacking some pacifist empire who has no reason to attack you they should just be caught in a forever war while you continually rebuild and attack again?

If you want to, I don't see a reason why the game shouldn't let you do it, your the one being stupid, it shouldn't be up to the designers or the game to determine what's smart or dumb and control you for it. This isn't a linear or story based game, nothing you do is entirely scripted enough to justify locking the player out of decisions like this if they want to kill themselves, and its not something you can't balance for both singleplayer and multiplayer. Especially if you simply spread unhappiness and it turns to unrest, rebellions will take you out themselves and you will have no ability to fight them. And at that point its on your head that you destroyed your own empire. And in the small case you'd have a malicious player (beyond the game itself, the AI never does that) who is stronger and merely wants to wreck your crap, well they already can do this in a multitude of ways anyhow, any game with a slight bit of player volition always allows players to play maliciously, that's kinda the point of giving the player volition. (Personally I'm so anti-arbitrary design that I'd even have the truce mechanics a soft semi-manipulable limit instead of a hard one as well, but I'd at least like war itself to not be arbitrarily designed in any regard especially in the warfare update)

sejemaset · Mar 5, 2018

Spartan322 said:
If you want to, I don't see a reason why the game shouldn't let you do it -snip- the AI never does that

To be clear in my argument I'm the pacifist player, and the AI is the stupid aggressor who keeps destroying his fleet against a superior force. With forced status quo I can just wait it out and force status quo on them when their war exhaustion maxes out, without forced status quo I guess it's just "screw you, play militarist instead"

Spartan322 · Mar 5, 2018

sejemaset said:
To be clear in my argument I'm the pacifist player, and the AI is the stupid aggressor who keeps destroying his fleet against a superior force. With forced status quo I can just wait it out and force status quo on them when their war exhaustion maxes out, without forced status quo I guess it's just "screw you, play militarist instead"

I've yet to see a point where the AI chooses to continue fighting over 100% WE, if it does then its not the design of the game or even the players fault especially when the AI can't think enough in advance to ever even get back to 0 in a case like that its just being a waste, (without some massive help anyway, I can't think of any case where the AI wouldn't be willing to SQ before or at 100% WE anyway, I suppose if the AI was scripted better maybe some marginally stronger AIs that get tricked maybe could do it but even that I find hard to believe) but that's faulty AI and holding the design at fault for poor AI scripting or weighting is a strawman of this argument because the AI is to be scripted around the design not the other way around. A better argument would've used players instead of AI but at that point its up to the player being stupid on their own still.

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