Stellaris Dev Diary #177 - Edict Rework

[RainThorns]

It's easier to have a permanent bonus and cost associated and balance your economy around it than to change said bonus and affect your economy in various ways. And that means people will rarely if at all change edicts, barring some cost of opportunity situations, expired usefulness or one in a game emergency.

 

[fodazd]

Will the other authorities (democratic, oligarchic, corporate) also get some bonus associated with them?

 

[Andy_Dandy]

Will the other authorities (democratic, oligarchic, corporate) also get some bonus associated with them?

Maybe those governments needed a soft nerf. They have access to some of the best civics already.

 

[DrNukeLear]

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

I give three orders and my empire produces 25% more paperwork...

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.

I give an order and spend domestic political capital to get it to happen and then I have to spend more political capital to convince the government to stop doing what it didn’t want to do in the first place...

In the words of Han Solo “I’ve got a bad feeling about this”.

 

[BrokenSky]

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.

I feel like this suggests a complete failure to understand the problem with pop growth. If anything, flat nerfs to pop-growth bonuses alone is only going to make the problem worse.
As far as I've seen, the problems are that pop growth is tied too hard to the +3%pops/month/planet and the +2%pops/month/robot assembly plant.
The bonuses from things like nutritional plenitude and other flat growth speed +X% bonuses is basically a complete non-issue. (well technically they could be buffed to bring them in line with things like the robot plant, for example if the gene clinic gave +50% growth speed or +1 base pop growth / month or something similar, but at that point it's become obvious how silly the system was).

 

[Ancillary]

Maybe those governments needed a soft nerf. They have access to some of the best civics already.

The words "democratic" and "nerf" shouldn't exist in the same sentence. Or even the same paragraph.

 

[Methone]

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?

 

[MilkInBags]

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.

 

[Arithmetician]

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.

 

[LockdownX7]

Never had an issue with edicts in their current form, what gets annoying is having to keep reapplying decisions like Encourage Planetary Growth when you have a sizeable empire. Hope there's something in store for those.

 

[Aethuse]

Edicts that can be toggled will have an Activation Cost and a Deactivation Cost, which is usually Influence.

I don't understand the Deactivation Cost. At all. From what I see here, there's little incentive to actually deactivate edicts especially considering how powerful some of them are compared to others; and on top of that you want to make it costly to deactivate them ? How much of a cost are we talking about here ? Because if its 80 influence its WAY too much !

Overall those are interesting changes, but considering the state of the game currently they feel unnecessary, and most importantly, very delicate to balance...and as we know, the game is already severly unbalanced already, how much do you wanna bet these will be as well ?

 

[Olterin]

This makes me wonder what the difference will be between policies and edicts. I've had that question on my mind ever since the teaser, actually: with this change, I see almost nothing to differentiate policies from edicts whatsoever - both can be swapped virtually on demand, both are empire modifiers. Unless there are significant changes to what policies are supposed to do and represent, I feel like there's an unnecessary blurring of the systems happening here.

... With that said, it's an obvious thing to come to mind, so I hope there's indeed a bigger plan for policies in the future and how they interact with internal/external politics.

As for pop growth, @grekulf I'm very curious to hear about the changes planned for it - the current model of 3 fixed growth everywhere and then small percentage modifiers to it doesn't sit right... and by the sound of it you're not going to significantly change it just yet (at least that's what "so we have made some changes in the upcoming patch that will reduce Pop Growth from different sources across the board" seems to imply). Is that going to be the sole focus of the next dev diary?

 

[Blurb]

Stellaris originally had toggleable empire edicts, but eventually discarded that idea.
For that reason, I think it is worth reading dev diary #102 again, as it covers that change.

 

[Pancakelord]

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.

Maybe I'm looking at this backwards... but the gavel makes me think of a court judgment - i.e. a one-time event whilst the clock face makes me think of an on-going process... so backwards from how it actually works lol.
An Infinity symbol [∞] would be more useful than a gavel in showing that edict is perpetual IMO.

 

[tobias.mb]

Campaigns and Unity Ambitions remain unchanged and keep working like you are used to.

While you're working on these mechanics anyway, please consider changing the rest as well. Especially for unity ambitions I would very much prefer these were also active until cancelled with a monthly unity cost instead of an upfront cost. That would be much easier to budget and avoid the problem of having just spent unity on a tradition, when you have to renew the ambition.
It would also make the unity overflow issue less problematic, since you wouldn't need stored unity anyway.

 

[ArchibaldAufHall]

Now that some of the edicts are able to be toggled, have you maybe considered to have the effects of those edicts scale the longer they are in effect, it would mean they build up from a small bonus to the whole bonus over time.

 

[Tim_Ward]

I think continuous edicts should cost influence upkeep rather than up front, otherwise the game is sort of encouraging you to never really switch them. You can put something powerful like research subsidies on that the start and just leave it on for the whole game and just get tremendous value out of it.

 

[Pornek]

Yeah, but it might have a downside to it as well now.

It very likely will if we use the screenshot as reference, but realistically a basic resource edict wont have a downside attached to it which would make it unusable.

 

[Ancillary]

While you're working on these mechanics anyway, please consider changing the rest as well. Especially for unity ambitions I would very much prefer these were also active until cancelled with a monthly unity cost instead of an upfront cost. That would be much easier to budget and avoid the problem of having just spent unity on a tradition, when you have to renew the ambition.
It would also make the unity overflow issue less problematic, since you wouldn't need stored unity anyway.

I'm pretty sure the overflow issue is fixed with 2.6. I've gotten past 3 million unity in my latest games.

 

[DrNukeLear]

While you're working on these mechanics anyway, please consider changing the rest as well. Especially for unity ambitions I would very much prefer these were also active until cancelled with a monthly unity cost instead of an upfront cost. That would be much easier to budget and avoid the problem of having just spent unity on a tradition, when you have to renew the ambition.
It would also make the unity overflow issue less problematic, since you wouldn't need stored unity anyway.

I’d say a tradition/unity overhaul was more important than edicts myself.