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

[Kavok]

Fanatical Purifiers, Devouring Swarms, and Determined Exterminators shouldn't be subject to war exhaustion thematically.

 

[Lordban]

I was in an end-game war, with 4 different armies of 30+ troops each sweeping the galaxy, when suddenly i jumped to max exhaustion because of troops lost in invasions. Every invasion was a victory, but apparently my people didnt see those troops to be as expendable as I did.

Ruler: "We only lost 35 million soldiers in the last wave of attack, everything's fine."
Families: "Say that to our face."

 

[Twimak]

Sweet, pretty much exactly all the problems i had with subjugation wars and the fixed i would like are in this diary.

but.... "we are going to look into"... i guess that means it wont be in this weeks update?

 

[Arcos]

How about fix the multiplayer first instead of all the small stuf?

 

[Druski]

I'm okay with a 24 month timer but there should ABSOLUTELY be some penalties during that period.

Honestly I think the penalty they tried (-influence, unity and happiness) would be a decent enough penalty during the 24 months leading up to the forced peace.

But what about this: If they want to REALLY make it feel like it's forced because of exhaustion, they could use the same penalties, but have it ramp up each month until the full amount. So say, month 1 is a 5% penalty to unity/influence & 1 % to happiness. 20 months in, you'd be at the full value of the 2.02 penalty, -100% influence/unity and -20% happiness. Then a few months of that and the empire has had enough: bam! peace. (though personally i'd go much further with the happiness. more like max it at -50%)

 

[Twimak]

How about fix the multiplayer first instead of all the small stuf?

typically only like 5-10% of players play multiplayer in these kinds of games... so wouldn't that make multiplayer small stuff too?

 

[cwg9]

Can we please also make it so claims expire after, say, 50 years? So they don't permanently damage relations (especially for vassals) for the rest of eternity? Some diplomatic options to negotiate (or force, in the case of war settlements) the AI to relinquish claims would also be helpful. A claims map mode is also really needed so we can actually tell what claims the AI is pursuing.

 

[Zer0k]

Can't say I am happy about the forced peace, but the rationale for the semi-revert is solid and the compromise is good. When should we expect to see this change in the beta?

 

[Lordban]

Fanatical Purifiers, Devouring Swarms, and Determined Exterminators shouldn't be subject to war exhaustion thematically.

If my friends, my children and my siblings all died to the xenos, I'm possibly not going to want to die next. If I feel personally the pain of half of my drones dying instead of eating, I'm possibly going to want the pain to stop. If my algorithms say I'm wasting horrendous amounts of resources in a fruitless attempt to eliminate organics, I'm going to kill the waste, not the organics.

 

[Slynx]

I still don't know why forced peace should be needed, penalties are in my opinion the superior system.

I have one theory...
if you're in war against someone with unrestricted war and you'll loose(I mean your fleet gets destroyed, you have no allies or something similar, and there is no forced peace)...that'll mean all your buildings on every planet will be ruined, all stations destroyed, all your population on every planet reduced to 4.... unless you'll surrender.
if you're in a total war against someone (with Armageddon or colossus) and you'll loose... that'll mean game over.

and apparently people don't like it. not sure why. because most of the times of you lost a war... it'll mean that in 10 years they'll just return to finish the job.

that's why I like penalties on 2.0.2beta more then forced "peace" in 2.0.1-. though I think the penalties are too soft. it contradicts the idea that you suffer a bit of 100% WE to do the last push and turn the tide of war. instead if you reached 100WE you either don't really care, or at the mercy of the winner(cuz you can't do anything until he decides he is done with you..

 

[Druski]

Can we please also make it so claims expire after, say, 50 years? So they don't permanently damage relations (especially for vassals) for the rest of eternity? Some diplomatic options to negotiate (or force, in the case of war settlements) the AI to relinquish claims would also be helpful. A claims map mode is also really needed so we can actually tell what claims the AI is pursuing.

Cant emphasize this enough

 

[NemoRow]

I'm sorry to admit, but I'm on the opposition side here. As many comments here show this up - the 100% war exhaustion on defenders side should not and can not stop the attacking side just as it is. The most beautiful way, in my opinion, is to marginally add penalties with ongoing war, so the empire gets tired of it and its becomes better to agree to the attacking side terms than to continue. But definitely not defenders saying 'I'm tired stop it'.

As those terms can be very high (purification) the war can go longer, with defenders reaching higher penalties. So in the end their hope is in attackers starting to have to high costs themselves. But if defenders fail - they either agree on getting purified or fight on.
To give defenders more possibilities to survive it will be better to introduce a diplomatic option 'Come to our aid' or something, so defenders ask someone to fight with them. In such a case attackers (exterminators) at some point would be facing the whole galaxy and would become exhausted fast by the war. May be 'Stop wars' casus belly can be introduced too.

I really like the idea of coming out of the war exhaustion penalties to take those 2 years (better empire size/exhaustion related then constant though). And gradually decrease within this time. So it wont make sense to start another war just after finishing the previous one at 100% exhaustion.

 

[Slynx]

Ruler: "We only lost 35 million soldiers in the last wave of attack, everything's fine."
Families: "Say that to our face."

with such rudeness they'll either end up in eternal slavery after these words...or just dead.
not everyone playing shiny and peaceful democracies that spread only love and happiness.

 

[Twimak]

also from an RP perspective:

for democratic/xenophile/pacifist/egalitarian/etc government types, i feel like forced peace makes perfect sense, since these governments would actually listen to their citizens opinions to a lesser or greater degree.

But for some of the more hardcore warlike government types, i feel a exponentially increasing penalty to their empire would be more fitting. it would make it feel like these empires were truly limited by their logistical ability to wage war, instead of the political winds in their empire. the penalty could start 12-24 months after the high war exhaustion alert, and then at 24 months instead of being forced into peace, the penalty starts to ramp up harder and harder. (this could be a "fight to the death" kinda civic even if it's to much for regular empires)

 

[Lordban]

with such rudeness they'll either end up in eternal slavery after these words...or just dead.
not everyone playing shiny and peaceful democracies that spread only love and happiness.

Nevertheless, that's exactly what you do to incite revolt. Unless you're a hive mind or a machine collective, these people think.

 

[James Fire]

How about fix the multiplayer first instead of all the small stuf?

Everything here affects multiplayer. They are fixing multiplayer.

 

[Arris]

I really hope that final patch fixes the pop_modifier and planet_modifier OOS.

 

[Slynx]

Nevertheless, that's exactly what you do to incite revolt. Unless you're a hive mind or a machine collective, these people think.

I rarely play as organic empires after Utopia. because they've removed the most appealing feature for me: ability to purge my own pops (mostly unhappy ones, no matter the reason of their unhappiness).
but me and my friends likes playing with a mod that start generating unrest the higher WE goes up. imho it's awesome and logical. and give use to buildings and civics that reduce the unrest on your own planets too.

 

[CocoCincinnati]

To be honest, I would very rarely if ever choose to go a full 24 months with 0 unity or influence income anyway, so this 24 month hard cap actually gives me more time than I would have otherwise taken in the "soft cap" system, but this is just talking about wars to take territory. I am still not convinced other types of wars will fare well in this system......and for that reason, I am glad the devs decided to make it moddable. Thank you for that at least.

 

[Jean-Luc]

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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