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Stellaris Dev Diary #177 - Edict Rework

Greetings!

Today we’ll touch upon a subject dear to the hearts of many galactic rulers - namely Edicts!

Background
Edicts are meant to be a way for your empire to focus on certain issues without necessarily taking a permanent stance on them. More permanent stances on issues would be covered by Policies.

Although we felt that Edicts do fit this role pretty well, there were a couple of issues with the system that we think could be improved. The fact that Edicts would always time out felt like a little bit of unnecessary micromanagement at times, and didn’t really emphasize the feeling of “I am choosing to focus on these 2 things right now”. We felt that it would fit better if Edicts had a greater emphasis on making choices that you can go back and change, rather than being things you constantly go in and refresh.

upload_2020-4-23_12-25-43.png

An old friend with a slight makeover. Some Edicts are now toggled on/off instead of being on a timer.​

Edict Capacity
Enter Edict Capacity – a new mechanic that puts a soft limit on how many Edicts of a certain type that you can have active at once. Similar to Starbase Capacity, your empire will suffer penalties if you exceed it, and the penalty in this case being Empire Sprawl. For every toggled and active Edict above the Edict Capacity, your Empire Sprawl will be increased by +25%.

By default, an empire will start with an Edict Capacity of 2, and can be modified by things like Authority, Civics and Ascension Perks. These values are very prone to being changed as more balance feedback comes in.

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Dictatorial and Imperial Authority now increases Edict Capacity by +1.​

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The God-Emperor knows best.​

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You can now vigorously enact more Edicts.​

Not all Edicts will use Edict Capacity, but rather only the ones that last until cancelled will. Edicts that can be toggled will have an Activation Cost and a Deactivation Cost, which is usually Influence. This means that you are paying the Influence when you are making changes, rather than paying to upkeep the Edicts you want.

Edicts that last until cancelled will be marked with a different icon from the edicts (and campaigns) that expire once their duration runs out.

upload_2020-4-23_12-27-15.png

An example of two different Edicts. Red: toggled - lasts until cancelled and uses Edict Capacity. Blue: temporary - lasts for 10 years and does not use Edict Capacity.​

Edicts
Some of the Edicts have changed and we have added a couple of new ones, to better fit with the Edict Capacity. Let’s take a look at a few of them:

upload_2020-4-23_12-27-50.png

Whenever you need to stimulate your economy, subsidies can be the way to go. There are Farming, Mining, Energy and Industrial subsidies.

upload_2020-4-23_12-27-57.png

Neighbors suddenly turned hostile? Need to secure your borders? Pass this Edict to refocus your efforts!

upload_2020-4-23_12-28-4.png

Has the galaxy become more hostile? Do you need to build a powerful fleet to project your power? Focus on Fleet Supremacy for a more powerful and imposing fleet.​

Pop Growth is problematic, so we have made some changes in the upcoming patch that will reduce Pop Growth from different sources across the board (more on that later). Food Policies are no more, and the popular Nutritional Plenitude is now a toggled Edict instead.

upload_2020-4-23_12-28-43.png

No longer a food policy (they don’t exist anymore). There are different versions for Hive Minds and Rogue Servitors.​

Resource Edicts, Campaigns and Unity Ambitions
The model for the new Edict Capacity doesn’t fit very well for all types of Edicts, which is why the rare resource Edicts, Campaigns and Unity Ambitions remain unchanged and keep working like you are used to. This is also better for modding purposes, so that modders have the opportunity to use Edicts however they see best.

Finishing thoughts
Overall we feel like the new system better allows us to structure how the players get the tools they need to focus their empires for certain tasks. As we make more additions to the game in the future, this new system will also allow us to give the players more tools to address certain issues.

----

That is all for this week! We will be back again next week with another dev diary, this time about some federation-related content!
 
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Ah, yes, edicts with upkeep. I remember when this feature was removed in favour of the current one. Good to see it making a comeback, better to see it not just eating up monthly influence as well.
 
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majikero said:
But pop growth is power in every 4x game.

Funny enough, I manage to reach the point of too much growth in a mechanist game I tried wehre I ended up making too much robots and lacked the tech for tier 2 buildings to keep up with such growth.
Click to expand...

Yes, but what is boring is:
2.#: Now [Ascension path] is Op because pops.
2.#.#: Now [Ascension path] is Op because pops.
2.#: Now [Ascension path] is Op because pops.
2.#.#: Now [Ascension path] is Op because pops.
2.#: Now [Ascension path] is Op because pops.
2.#.#: Now [Ascension path] is Op because pops.
2.#: Now [Ascension path] is Op because pops.
2.#.#: Now [Ascension path] is Op because pops.
2.#: Now [Ascension path] is Op because pops.

All over the forum time and time again. Pop growth has become for some people the only measure that matters on anything. Barbaric Despoilers give you pops is OP, later, Barbaric Despoilers takes too much to give you pops then is no longer OP. Biological Ascension path give you increased pop growth, then its the only worthwhile path and anything else is garbage. Synthetic Ascension path give you, now, the best pop growth, then its the only worthwhile path and anything else is garbage. Spiritualist ethics and Psionic path don't affect Pop growth? Then they are garbage :rolleyes:

I am pretty sick that pops and the time they take to growth is the only measure of how good/bad something is. I don't even care if it's a good or bad change as long and it make that people shut-up :mad:

Pops shouldn't be the only way to power. People sometimes compare games like Stellaris and CKII and EU to map painters for that is the only thing that matter in them. But apparently for some people Stellaris is a sci-fy version of Stardew Valley. Just that instead of growing crops you grow pops, and instead of romancing Alex they take Xeno-compatibility and romance a Blorg :p
 
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I've never been this person for other paradox games but fix your damn bugs! you released like two patches after federations and just moved on to this stuff already? It's nice but I don't care when I can't even declare a war while in a federation or build up my fleets because of ghost ships from ghost shipyards!
 
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Pancakelord said:
@grekulf when you look at pop growth, would you please consider implementing automatic assembly halts for robotics when the housing cap is reached?
It feels truly awful to manage dozens of planets with assemblers pumpling out robots late game as they will continue to assemble ad infinatum, unless you explicitly shut them off. Unlike bio pops that will automatically scale down and stop breeding at 1.5x housing cap/due to overcrowding.
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...add-auto-suspension-of-robo-assembly.1345848/
Click to expand...

I'd like an Empire-wide policy choice between "Continuous Robot Assembly" and "Capped Robot Assembly." Often, I mass produce more robots than a planet can hold and then sell them on the Slave market for continuous profit--and that option won't work as well if robots stop being automatically pumped out.
 
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Remember back when on release you had edicts that would toggle and have an influence upkeep, like "support engineering research"? I guess that could be the third type of edicts, which would not count towards edict cap, but could be toggled once and forever for some kind of upkeep. I guess at least campaigns could be implemented same way, with upkeep scaling with empire size (possibly with initial cost). Because, we still never want to turn them off and this way we could also see it's cost distributed across time.
 
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I was hoping that it will be the democratic/oligarchic authorities that would get more edicts. As is democracies really feel like a bad choice.
 
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Capacity Overload for 80/100 Influence thats cheap.

Edit2: @grekulf Are these the base costs or reduced by some civics/ethics? 80 somehow looks to me like it is reduced in the screenshot.
 
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there should be more policy too
maybe some policy that determine how much a single researcher artisan or metallurgist cost and produce
a much higher upkeep for a slightly higher base production or much lower upkeep for a slightly lower base production
and please make encourage growth a global edict and not a planetary decision
 
How are these edict costs calculated, is it a fixed amount or does it scale with the empire size.
Second does implenting an edict costs more than revoking it or is it an identical amount.
 
Looks good. Nutritional plenitude makes so much more sense as an edict. I like that you can use excessive administration capacity for additional edicts.

I guess the obvious question here is - if autocracies are getting bonus edict capacities, what are other authorities getting? I guess we will find out in time!
 
Interesting, and I like these changes.

However, in regards to Nutritional Plentitude and similar things - such as Hive Mind's Spawning Drone description - are pretty clunky when it comes to taking Lithoids into case, aren't they? Is there some clever way to word around this, or are we just going to have to accept this and move on?
 
A soft cap and penalty to empire sprawl are both good news, making empires focusing on admin capacity interesting since all that extra cap was just a waste.

And thank you for addressing pop growth even just a little bit. I can’t wait to hear what your plans are for this.
 
So, it seems that most edicts that last until cancelled have some sort of downside as well, I assume as a balancing factor give that one doesn't need to keep sinking influence into them. Still, it makes me wonder if some empires will be simply swimming in influence now, though I suppose that means there's just more available for stuff like megastructures or favors in the galactic community.

Another thought I had on first reading through the dev diary was wondering if the balancing for all that extra influence might be counteracted if the Edicts that could be toggled on and off would simply cost a small amount of influence for each month that they are active (like costs for diplomatic agreements), but that cancelling the edict could be free, since as someone else mentioned, it kind of feels odd to pay a chunk of influence to cancel the edict. Not sure if this is a good idea though.
 
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