Stellaris Dev Diary #108 - 2.0 Post-Release Support (part 1)

[MinhowMinhow]

EU4 Warscore System is better to be honest.
A mix of Warscore and War Exhaustion.
Warscore was good to define who is winning/losing a war and War Exhaustion to prevent someone from staying in a War indefinitely or to avoid making pointless battles that will cost a lot for your country.
The War System have lots of problems here in Stellaris:
1 - War Exhaustion doesn't show who is winning, both just loses in a War.
2 - Forcing Players to simply lose a War is frustating, specially if the same is eager to fight.
3 - Claims appear to have no limit time duration, so you can annex an Empire in a Single War if you simply Stack them if you have enough influence and time.
4 - You cannot "change" your wargoal like EU4, you cannot make another demands outside from your initial wargoal unlike EU4.
5 - No White Peace.
6 - Claims have the same cost from a Backwater System to a Fully Developed System.

Not Saying that I want an EU4 in Space, but EU4 was Brilliant in this Aspect, and the Designers of Stellaris had a good History in Development in EU4.

Would be Interesting a Warscore System, to make Wars more Transparent and allowing to demand other things (at Influence cost) different to Initial Wargoal, Bring back White Peace and change costs from Fully Developed Systems and Backwater ones.

Offtopic: Please Fix the Ion Cannon Bug, they have no weapons.

 

[Harle]

I think this is the right call. I think penalties should remain, but I will look out for a mod or something.

I also like the idea of partial subjugation, carving out a chunk of an empire and installing a cooperative leader sounds interesting. Especially if the game 'remembers' and has some levers for reunification.

 

[Matt516]

I'm guessing the AI forum is up in arms about another 'human player cheat' being introduced to the game. "They get TWO YEARS and we get NOTHING! I want a level playing field!!!11!1!11!001011010110".

Not untrue - it is a bit asymmetric. Hopefully they'll adjust the modifiers so an AI player who is actively winning a war will try to run out the clock instead of always peacing out at 100% no matter what.

Why you think the penalties will only hurts the loser? Just make the penalties to the player that not accept Peace. If one side offer Peace, they will not get penalties, simple as that. It will 100% of the time only hurts the side that wants to overxtend the War.

Hey, I'm not against that and in fact suggested it several times during the beta... However, it seems like they aren't planning on coding that functionality in so it's either penalties that apply no matter what at 100%, or no penalties. Given that choice, I pick no penalties.

 

[WhapXI]

What about a peace offering system?

If your enemy is at 100% WE, you can offer Status Quo peace. The empire at 100% WE can refuse this, but will take some kind of influence, unrest, or unity hit, to represent the people’s displeasure at being forced by their government to continue the war. If accepted, give the “losing” empire a bonus to influence or happiness or unity to represent the “defeat with honour” and the people being happy being at peace after a bad war and being pleased about not being utterly crushed or something.

Make the AI offer these peace terms to anyone who isn’t “Pathetic” compared to them. They’ll status quo with comparable empires but not seem like they’re holding back from easy targets.

 

[Coconut_Cookie]

I think these are great changes, but I do agree that WE should penalties. Although, I think it would be better if they scaled, as in EU IV.

Maybe it would be interesting if factions were involved in this. Like when war exhaustion increases support for the pacifist faction increases or at least support for the imperialist party should decline. Maybe in a democracy a end war mandate should exist. I don't think the forced peace is a good thing because they have all these mechanics in place in the game to make it really difficult to persue a war when you are losing. In other paradox games you country falls appart when you try to do the impossible, I don't get why this has to be solved with a hard limitation.

 

[Elric]

Democratic Crusaders (Fanatic Egalitarian and Militarist combo) are more or less broken in 2.0. In order to use liberation wars against authoritarian empires (this is pretty much their whole concept), they have to use Liberation Wars policy, which makes their major militarist faction hate their ruler's guts for not using unrestricted wars policy (a crippling -30 faction happiness).

Are there any plans for addressing this issue?

 

[JohnnyDepressio]

The penalty system was the better solution.

 

[Arizal]

Here are my comments :

Having a 24 months "grace" period won't change anything to the problem that some wars will end prematurely for players. People will just adapt and then say "24 months is too short for me to have complete victory". It also feels like an advantage to the players if the AI doesn't take advantage of it. So it seems to me that we are back to square one.

One idea I had yesterday is that there is currently no ground for penalties in morale or production to exist. Each time we go to war, there could be a "war enthousiasm" boost in production, which would decline until it reverts to 0 when we reach 50 % WE, and then becomes worse and worse, so that at 100 %, we really want to make peace because our empire is falling apart. The bonus period would justify why our people (and even our robots or our collective limbs) are exhausted.

Also, maybe this isn't compatible with the bonus I just talked about, but I feel like WE shouldn't grow automatically. Or maybe you could have a relatively cheap edict which would give the aforementionned "bonus", but which would also enable the ticking warscore, so the bonus would come with the drawback that your people expects a quick victory.

Add to that another little idea : winning battles should decrease WE. And there should be ways (like huge expense in influence or even energy) to decrease WE. Then WE would be more a measure of how an empire is truly "exhausted" of the war and it would feel more justified to end a war which is in a stalemate. Wars with great power imbalance would end with the total victory of the attacker, as should be, but more even fights would function like in 2.0.1.

The return of liberation wars seems very interesting, since those were my preferred way to expand previously. However, how will this be handled? Will all occupied systems turn to the "rebel" empire (vassal) created by the invasion as long as there is an occupied planet? If so, liberation/subjugation would potentially be more powerful than outright conquest since you wouldn't need a CB to conquer provinces. Also, would there be a difference between liberation and subjugation wars?

 

[CNightwing]

I would say that the person who reaches 100% WE first has no choice if asked to surrender to a Status Quo peace.
They also get the option to surrender themselves directly, and if this is refused then the other party gains WE.
If both parties are at 100% WE, the war automatically ends in a Status Quo peace.

 

[Tim_Ward]

We felt that this mechanic was necessary to ensure that limited wars could actually happen and so that the outmatched side in a war still had a reason to fight (pushing the enemy into 100% war exhaustion in order to force peace and reduce their territorial concessions).

Yeah, the problem now is that only limited wars can happen, because they all have this inherent time limit.

If we're going to stick with this rigid and prescriptive system (and I think we probably should, because it works well on paper) then we need more war goals - enough that the player can explicitly declare a war goal that matches their true objective for starting the war, not start a war for unrelated reasons and hope they can somehow engineer claims/war goal system to get the right outcome before the time limit runs out. We need the war exhaustion and forced peace (or lack of) to depend on those war goals, because a nations willingness to fight on is going to be vastly different depending on what they might lose in peace and the current system takes no account of this.

 

[dav77-b]

Hello and welcome to another Stellaris dev diary. As we are still in full post-release support mode, until we are ready to get back to regular feature dev diaries, we're not going to have full-length dev diaries. Instead, we'll use the dev diaries to highlight certain fixes or tweaks that we feel need highlighting. Today, we're going to be covering some changes coming to the 2.0.2 beta in regards to War Exhaustion and forced Status Quo.

In 2.0, with the new war system, we added forced status quo peace as part of the new war exhaustion mechanics. We felt that this mechanic was necessary to ensure that limited wars could actually happen and so that the outmatched side in a war still had a reason to fight (pushing the enemy into 100% war exhaustion in order to force peace and reduce their territorial concessions). There were some problems with this mechanic, however, primarily that people felt surprised by a sudden peace in which they might lose systems the enemy has just occupied days ago, and also that certain wars (such as subjugation wars) were very difficult to fully win before being force-peaced out.

After receiving intial player feedback on these issues, we decided to try out a different model of war exhaustion in the 2.0.2 beta, replacing the forced status quo with a penalty at 100% war exhaustion. We have since been playing, testing, tweaking and collecting further feedback, and coming to the conclusion that our original design was correct - forced peace is necessary for the new war system to not simply become a series of single wars to the death, or powerful empires forcing a weaker empire into 100% war exhaustion and refusing to peace while their enemies were crippled by penalties.

For this reason, we will be reintroducing forced status quo peace, and this time it's here to stay. However, we are not simply going to roll back to exactly the way it is in 2.0, instead it will now work as follows:
- When a side in a war reaches 100% war exhaustion, they are now flagged as being at high war exhaustion, and get the alert as before
- Once at high war exhaustion, a 24 month timer will start to tick down for that side in the war. Once the timer is up, that war side can be forced into a status quo peace
- There will be no penalties for war exhaustion, but we will leave in the functionality for modders, as well as the ability to change the number of months before a forced peace is possible or disable forced peace altogether, so that those who truly hate to the idea of ever being forced to peace can at least change it through modding

These changes should mean that a status quo peace is something that doesn't come as a sudden surprise, and give the player time to start winding down their war and retake occupied systems when that war exhaustion counter ticks over into 100%.

We are also going to look into the possibility of changing Subjugation and Forced Ideology wars to either provide a clearer path to win such a war when the enemy has allies defending them, or by allowing Status Quo in such a war to achieve a 'limited victory' (liberating/subjugating part of the enemy empire instead of the whole).

These changes will not be in the very next version of 2.0.2 (as that is already being internally tested and will hopefully be with you before the end of the week), but we expect to roll them out sometime next week if all goes well.

That's all for today! See you next week for another 2.0 post-release dev diary.
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Please allow the combination of liberation and subjugation. I want to create vassals of my ideology.

 

[Trakkar]

Initial problem with people raging about Forced peace isn't only about mechanic itself, but because the WE gain was messed up and unclear.
Unless WE gain is a) clear b) reasonable c) abuse-proof d) balanced between ethics\techs\Empires, the situation will repeat itself.

^I have to agree to this.

And also, I totally hate the "forced" part in "forced Peace", especially from "War Exhaustion" that's just an arbitrary number, that pops out of nowhere and happens to every empire.
The system needs to be clear and honestly more complex.
I mean, even the faction system have some parts that are like: Faction XYZ is unhappy because we are not at war.
And if this faction is my ruling faction, why on earth should my empire suffer from something like War Exhaustion? They are unhappy because there is no war, now there is a war and they simply decide "Nah, was a stupid idea, back to peace... and NOW *forced peace*".
And after a couple of years, that faction is pissed off again, because there is no war.
Sounds completely "logical" to me.

Why not turn auto AI control on, and I just watch my game play itself for me?

Guess this is the first time I have to use mods to be satisfied with Stellaris since launch.

 

[Everstill]

Hey, I'm not against that and in fact suggested it several times during the beta... However, it seems like they aren't planning on coding that functionality in so it's either penalties that apply no matter what at 100%, or no penalties. Given that choice, I pick no penalties.

They can do it in a very simple way with just flags. Pseudo code:

every month
if(empire_WE == 100) and (empire_refused_peace == true)
penalty_multiplier ++
else
if(penalty_multipler >0) penalty_multipler --

That's it. If an empire refused any peace in any War, they start to get penalties, if they accept or offer peace in all wars, or is in total peace, the penalty will be reduced every month. They just need to implement the flag of the empire_refused_peace in the peace offers and refusals.

We can make a better and more dynamic system later, while using this more or less simple design that will do it's job well.

 

[anastiel]

Excellent

 

[Scanz]

So. There is no reason to status quo before 2 years past. no penalty
im dissapoint

 

[Terijian]

Terrible move imho. Makes no sense. Why are these determined exterminators giving me a decade to rebuild fleets? they want a challenge or what?

I get what you are trying to do, and agree something should be done, but this just makes zero sens and will likely be only a source of frustration not fun

 

[Razzlie]

My faith and loyalty are restored, thanks PDX.

 

[TheDungen]

We are also going to look into the possibility of changing Subjugation and Forced Ideology wars to either provide a clearer path to win such a war when the enemy has allies defending them, or by allowing Status Quo in such a war to achieve a 'limited victory' (liberating/subjugating part of the enemy empire instead of the whole).

Any chance we'll see the return of the liberation CB? Essentially pick the claims of a no longer existing empire on the enemy (must include at least one habitable world) and wage war to restore to restore those claims to a independent empire.

 

[Kobrakai]

It would be nice if we could have some kind of score showing how well you are doing in a war rather than which side is failing the most as it is now.

 

[Dsingis]

Honestly, with all the changes to accumulating WE in the last few patches, I was alread wondering why you removed force status quo peace.

WE is now gathered so slow, that I barely even reach 100% WE in any war, other than huge galaxy wide wars. So I'm glad to see that forced status quo makes a return, it is really needed. I mean, the times I actually did reach 100% WE, the "penalties" weren't really a problem to me. (but to the AI they were I guess.) Plus, the big red warning is a good addition as well.