Stellaris Dev Diary #215 - Gameplay themes & Balancing considerations

[Alblaka]

Beyond Lem, we are also going to take a look at Empire Sprawl and Unity. The design for Admin Capacity was never really something that I felt worked out, and we never finished the design that was intended for it. Continuing to use Admin Cap as a mechanic also feels a bit like a dead end due to multiple reasons (ranging from design to technical), so we’re instead going to look into another solution.

Kudos to realizing the half-butt-edness of that system. It didn't sound terrible when proposed in a dev diary, but the implementation made Empire size entirely a non-issue, since it simply meant rushing Expansion was still always the best option, except that now you would have to dedicate one in every dozen planets to administration. Curious to see how you will approach that problem.

Mind you, there's still a lot of destroyed goodwill Stellaris will have to recover with me before I'll pay another cent for any DLC,
but at least the direction this and the previous Dev Diary seem to be heading for strikes me as the right one.

 

[jose2534]

Oh yes! If its a worker that goes, its the Culture Worker since its so generic. Bureaucrats would be the Unity producing job. That would mean shifting around some job-swaps (like managers for megacorps) to be swaps of the bureaucrat instead.

But we keep the priest jobs in exchange for the bureaucrats if spiritualists, right?

 

[methegrate]

The current system is flexible, punishing if you go too far but not enough if you don't go too far over the cap. The game right now is a compelling three way tug of war between your expansion desires, your economy, and your capacity. And you have to manage that and it's fun, for me at least.

Fair enough. This hasn't been my experience, personally. I've found that admin cap is a pretty easy mechanic to dispose of. At lower levels it's ignorable. Once I expand enough, I just spam some bureaucrats and (once again) ignore it.

 

[Everstill]

Admin cap has been absolutely terrible since inception. The fact some people actually try and defend it is proof its been allowed to infect the game too long.

You can give going over cap infinite penalties. You could make going over make you lose the game instantly. Beurocrafts make it far too easy to just increase healthily and thus make the whole system pointless.

The old semi-hidden penalties were considerably more intuitive and less drama inducing.

No one is defending the number balance of the system and you are just attacking the number balance of the system.

Everyone, since the inception, said it was too easy to get admin points and that they should nerf production or increase the cost. They did not even tried to scale the admin cost to be higher the bigger the empire.

You couldn't manage pre-2.2 and the player base wasnt making a big deal out of it.

Of course they did. It was one of the most polarized system and there was debate everything of how much things you should grab before the rewards were worse than doing nothing.

My small suggestion:

1. Make old and new Phenotype Traits into a set of exclusive 0 cost traits that can be used with any portrait in empire creation.
2. Make Random empire generation always match traits to the appropriate portrait class (exactly like now).

That way you avoid problems with empire generation creating confusing combinations like almost exclusively furry robots (which would otherwise be guaranteed to occur due to the much larger number of organic portraits than machine portraits). Players can create whatever odd, or ugly combinations they desire like metallic looking Plantoid spider trees... hopefully everyone is happy.

This is a very good suggestion. Make the AI random generations always matching the traits with the approprieate portraits while letting the player do whatever crazy thing he wants.

 

[mammonmachine]

Oh yes! If its a worker that goes, its the Culture Worker since its so generic. Bureaucrats would be the Unity producing job. That would mean shifting around some job-swaps (like managers for megacorps) to be swaps of the bureaucrat instead.

We absolutely need to maintain the idea of Trantor.

Hmm. I like the Culture Worker - I don't think it is generic at all apart from the name. It signifies curators, artists, writers, publishers, of a kind that are more focussed on reflecting a society back at itself than entertaining. One of my empires is very culture focussed, and I'm not sure how I'd go about playing that if all I could build is bureaucrats and entertainers.

My suggestion would be that Bureaucrats are a swap for the Culture Worker for empires with Byzantine Bureaucracy (and maybe Efficient Bureaucracy). Maybe they could lose their society research, but reduce upkeep costs somehow (as amenities is already taken by Priests).

 

[Asiak]

You will understand if you play some multiplayer. Difficulty sliders are for adjusting the difficulty of AI empires and AI crisis, while origins and civics change your power relative to other players. Playing against 10x crisis strength and playing with some player who set themself to 10x...

Yes the host can have rules against it, but it's not fun to spend as much time writing, discussing, informing about and enforcing rules as you spend actually playing the game. And you won't know that some guy ignored/forgot the rule until you're already well into game and decrypted him.

Yea it's also not fun for the entire player base that things have to get nerfed just because the MP crowd can't enforce a simple no shattered ring rule.

 

[Critical Ethics]

Oh yes! If its a worker that goes, its the Culture Worker since its so generic. Bureaucrats would be the Unity producing job. That would mean shifting around some job-swaps (like managers for megacorps) to be swaps of the bureaucrat instead.

We absolutely need to maintain the idea of Trantor.

Given culture workers are generated by things like statues and government run communications networks, wouldn't they be closer to propagandists than social researchers? Give them +government ethics attraction as an ability, or amplify the effects of faction suppression/promotion.

 

[UniqueNameHere]

What about creating a sort of internal based tech tree that uses unity rather than research? It would take some balancing the numbers, but you could take a lot of things that take research (increase to admin cap, capital building improvements, faction influence increases, certain pop growth modifiers, etc) and put them in a unity based tree (or 2 or 3 trees to match tech if needed). Basically copying the dual science/culture trees of a bunch of other 4X games.

Then governors (or maybe envoys?) could sort of have dual roles the same way scientists do.

The balancing would come in by making the admin sprawl increases or whatever the equivalent is going to be increase by hard numbers instead of percentages so that tall empires get a buff from focusing on unity.

 

[Red Death]

That sounds awful please don't do this.

And that's coming from a not wide player who fully agrees that tall is to hard to do.

I have hated nearly every core worlds / sectors / scheme this game had before the current admin cap.

The current system is flexible, punishing if you go too far but not enough if you don't go too far over the cap. The game right now is a compelling three way tug of war between your expansion desires, your economy, and your capacity. And you have to manage that and it's fun, for me at least.

In my mind I don't understand how admin capacity is unfinished, or a dead end. It does exactly what it was meant to do, and provides an added layer of consideration to your game / plans. And if it is unfinished then why doesn't it get finished instead of presumably scrapping part of bureaucrats and admin cap, and just lumping Unity into this.

Unity which already two uses even if one of them is more endgame.

I'm sorry but, I'm a tall player in nearly every Paradox game but this is just heavy handed.

Finish / improve admin cap.

Or up the penalties for going over across the board and give them more teeth.

But don't just chuck what is a really flexible system, that the player has gotten used to that has a solid foundation, and wholesale replace it with mounting penalties with a unity buy down.

I've always admired this game and its various teams over the years for being willing to reach into the guts of this game see what was wrong and pull out whole systems that weren't working from FTL methods to the tile system. But that's not what this is, you're looking for a solution to a problem that debatably doesn't exist.

Are we really going to do another gut / core system tear out just to continue to chase at making tall more viable?

Nope, sorry. Right now the sprawl and admin cap system in the game has effectively no function, besides busywork to make sure you build enough offices. Pre-admin cap, empire sprawl was there to ensure that smaller empires had some chance to halfway keep up in technology/make sure larger empires had to keep investing in science (simply expanding would not make you tech faster). Same for unity, in fact the system was balanced to be more harsh on Unity, so that smaller empires had an edge in some small aspect.

With the introduction of bureaucrats, sprawl is meaningless, since you can build your way out of it with cheap bureaucrats. I'm not even getting into how sprawl generation was moved from mostly systems to mostly pop number. I've hated this mechanic from the very first dev diary it was announced in, I'll be glad to see it gone.

Or up the penalties for going over across the board and give them more teeth.

Just wanted to adress this specifically: any increase in penalties is utterly meaningless for the same reason the Corporate and Machine Intelligence penalty increase is meaningless: you shouldn't be going over the cap in the first place! It's so darn easy to generate enough admin caps that the penalties for going over are irrelevant.

 

[wtrmute]

It feels like Plantoids should be game-mechanically different somehow, like with Lithoids. Isn't it a little strange that they currently consume food just the same as other pops - wouldn't that be cannibalism for them, or at least becoming animals rather than plants? I hope one of the new traits can address this somehow.

In principle you could say that "food" resources for Plantoids is organic matter which plants do need for growth. Soil is very different from regolith, after all.

My artistic heart is crying! Please create some use for artists, we are important for the well-being of society, being this stellar or not! At least give us some events in exchange, or something like that, I don't know, a sculpture that is so majestic that inspires authoritarianism, a novel so good that inspires egalitarianism, a philosophical treaty that inspires spiritualism, you know, something D:

Hmm. I like the Culture Worker - I don't think it is generic at all apart from the name. It signifies curators, artists, writers, publishers, of a kind that are more focussed on reflecting a society back at itself than entertaining. One of my empires is very culture focussed, and I'm not sure how I'd go about playing that if all I could build is bureaucrats and entertainers.

My suggestion would be that Bureaucrats are a swap for the Culture Worker for empires with Byzantine Bureaucracy (and maybe Efficient Bureaucracy). Maybe they could lose their society research, but reduce upkeep costs somehow (as amenities is already taken by Priests).

The entire point is that culture worker is a generic name and conflates artists, entertainers, social workers, censors, propagandists, and a dozen other specialised roles. If it were just "entertainers" or "artists," I doubt that @grekulf would have called them "generic." In any case, he said "if any needed to be removed," so at this point we're just overreacting. As things stand I understand that no jobs will be removed.

 

[Seisho]

For Shattered Ring we are looking into changing the start from a pure “end-game” Ring World, to be more of an actual “Shattered Ring” that you need to repair before you gain access to the powerful Districts of the Ring World. Putting additional emphasis on the fantasy of restoring this ancient megastructure to its former glory can be a fun addition to the Origin itself. Although we haven’t decided exactly what we’re doing, changing the start to be a Shattered Ring that you can restore with the Mega-Engineering technology is a likely route.

I like the idea but please make it in the long run completely restorable, not just 75% like it is now

 

[Tamwin5]

Honestly, I feel that addressing admin cap might be a little out of scope for the Custodian team. Stellaris needs a full and complete overhaul of the way internal politics works, and that will almost certainly tie in with unity and admin cap as well, and possible overhauls there as well. This is enough work for a full expansion, easily. Another iteration of only some partial changes won't fix the problem.

There are simpler ways of addressing how easy it is to tech, or making it so that empires who are behind on tech can catch up.

 

[Reedstilt]

Humanoids was a bit trickier, because there are no direct fantasies that apply to them in general, so we instead chose to focus on fantasies that align with things like dwarves, elves, orcs or humans. The Civic we showcased last week was an example of how we made something inspired by a traditionally dwarven fantasy.

Let us know about any ideas or thoughts you have regarding those

I've had some ideas for Origins that might fit here.

THWARTED INVASION: Whether by happenstance or tenacious warfare, your society has thrown back an invading alien force. Salvaging the technology of your enemies, you have ascended into the stars. You start with some military oriented technologies and a slightly larger fleet. But you have more blockers on your homeworld representing the devastating war and one of your guaranteed habitable planets has a wormhole leading to an advanced, militaristic empire. Inspired by countless alien invasion narratives. Primitive civilizations that are invaded but not defeated should gain a version of this Origin too, minus the wormhole.

BENEFICIENT UPLIFTERS: Your society has dedicated itself to the purpose of bringing enlightenment to the stars, so that all species may reach their full potential. You are more likely to discover presapient species on worlds you survey. All Uplifted pops in your Empire provide Unity in addition to their other jobs. Enlightening primitive species requires less upkeep cost, and each protectorate or vassal you have with the Enlightened Origin provides +0.25 Monthly Influence. You also gain a Policy option to allow these civilizations to expand. Must be some level of Xenophile. Inspired by the Uplift series and the Overlords of Childhood's End (which the Satyr humanoid species reminds me of). This one may actually be a Civic rather than an Origin.

CONTESTED SYSTEM: Generations ago, your species colonized another world in your system. Now your two societies stand on the brink of war. A planet in your system is settled by your species but is not under your control. If using the Sol system, this would be a partially terraformed Arid Mars. This planet fears invasion from the homeworld is heavily fortified and militarized. At the beginning of the game, an event chain will start that will allow the player to unify the two societies, or spark an all-out war for domination. Inspired by the Expanse.

If you're going for more Fantasy-inspired Civics, I'll recommend something like this:

CYCLOPEAN ARCHITECTURE: Your society builds on a massive scale, dwarfing the designs employed by others. All Districts gain +1 Housing.

One last recommendations for Humanoid upgrades: New versions of Primitive Earth, once the bug gets fixed that inhibits it from spawning in the game currently.

• PRIMORDIAL EARTH: This represents the Sol system long before the Cambrian period. Venus is a Tropical planet; Earth is Arctic. Mars might still be a terraformable Barren world or a dying Arid world.
• CRETACEOUS EARTH: A Tropical Earth inhabited by presapient Dinosaurs (perhaps represented by Avian Massive #13 or Avian Normal #09?). Soon after you colonize the planet, an Asteroid will threaten it.
• STONE AGE EARTH: A Tundra version of Earth, inhabited by both humans and neanderthals (represented by the Space Dwarf portrait). Attempting to Enlighten them could spark an Event chain where you settle whether the two species will be co-equal citizens of Earth or whether one will become a Servile subject of the other.
• IRON AGE EARTH: Regular Continental Earth, but featuring the Roman Empire and its contemporaries as inspiration for its armies. If you enlighten them, you get a unique Space Roman empire utilizing the SPQR namelist.
• DYING EARTH: Sol is a Red Giant. Mercury and Venus are gone. Earth is a sterile molten world. Life persists in the outer planets, however, with Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto as 3 small Ocean worlds, while Io is a Arid world with numerous Volcano blockers. Further out, Titan is a small Arctic world. Archaeological sites in this system reveal the presence of the long departed human species and perhaps provide a unique Relic. In fact, this could even be the end of a Human Precursor chain if you felt like going all-in on it.

 

[Rodahtnov]

This is my personal view, but i feel some decisions done with admincap and unity are... questionable. Here are my points:

1) First of all, admincap is necessary with the current system, but not as designed; If admincap worked in harmony with the sector system, with it more effective for CONTROLLING your systems and sectors, and the further from the capital the harsher the penalties/need of administration or increased risk of piracy, decreased production, crime, etc, it would be way better; scrapping it isn't a good movement, the approach should had been changed.

2) More uses to unity are well received, but needing to produce unity in order to have your empire under control or maintained is a bad movement, also increases the neverending dichotomy between empires that focuses on research and empires who focuses on traditions; while researchs are "limitless" traditions have a limit, and even with the advantage of having more unity or control at the start, in the end empires who get more techs are the empires who advance further, so the problem gets repeated.

3) Punishing players for playing well is not a good design; you need to nerf or rework the tools that allow things to be extremely imbalanced or too easy for techrush. Giving "something you can never mitigate" is bad from a player and design perspective, as it's not even a challenge, but a issue.
Don't sacrifice agency for balance, when you can balance without having to gut it.

4) The problem with techrush currently lays on the new building system, that allows really early research/industrial worlds, not just on habitats/ringworlds, and whoever do them first is way more rewarded; thats it; And this will continue with the new unity system.

5) It's pretty hard to balance so many things, and everyone should understand that, but you need to address the illness and not the symptoms; the pop system is flawed, and while the new 3.0X update provided a good change towards "individual" power rather than amassing enormous amount of pops, the system will keep giving problems until pops are converted into integers and not individuals.

Thanks for reading and sorry for any spelling mistake.

 

[Juboboman]

I'm not a big fan of being unavoidably permanently punished for expanding. I'm all for making it harder to manage, because it's pretty easy to dedicate a planet to negating atm, no matter how big you get. But I do think there needs to be a way, somehow, to mitigate it to a reasonable degree, if you're willing to invest the resources.

If controlling 50% of the galaxy is going to make me weaker than when I controlled 40%, why bother?

Although I guess it does depend on the type of punishment. If civil wars actually become a thing and far flung regions tend to want to break away, I'm good with that. Hell it sounds fun trying to hold things together.

 

[bzflater]

Is there any real chance of Psionics getting reworked in Lem? Currently, Psionics is objectively the worst of the Big 3 Ascensions, and even if it's just straight up buffed, it still suffers from its main gameplay mechanic being a slot machine that can punish you instead of rewarding you, while both of the other Ascension Paths give reliable benefits. Psionics is also overly reliant on the Zroni, to the point that I'd consider it nearly unplayable without getting the Zroni, which feels terrible for one of the major Ascension Paths.

 

[Blackadder23]

Suggestion: just do away with Empire Sprawl and everything related to it. It's ridiculous to have a mechanic in a 4X game that punishes people for playing well, particularly in service of propping up something as artificial as the so-called "tall" play style.

 

[Tetragrade]

Slightly worried by the decision to remove admin cap. It's a step away from the start of some cool economic complexity. While it's an odd mechanic with unclear goals it does currently unintentionally work to limit a player's ability to rapidly restructure their economy, due its demand for consumer goods. Straight up removing bureaucrats is going to have knock-on effects on the rest of the economy. It'll likely inflate fleet strengths, weakening fallen empires & spaceborne entities when imo they're too weak already.

 

[Serenity84]

One example that I want to talk about is the issue with Research Booming, where power players can essentially outpace other empires due to focusing a lot on research. What enables this is usually Districts that provide Researcher Jobs, which is relatively easy to gain access to early on through Origins such as Shattered Ring or Void Dwellers (the latter not being nearly as strong).

It's not tied to those special origins. The problem is what you mentioned next: the complete negation of sprawl. It used to be that you had increasing tech costs with increased empire size. But not you can just expand the bureaucracy at will with no downsides whatsoever. There need to be some drawbacks and/or diminished returns for ever more administrators.

It also doesn't really require any specific strategies. You'll run through tech way too fast without even trying. You need to balance tech in a way that doesn't lead to repeatables after just 100-150 years.
And one reason the AI lags so far behind is that it just doesn't value research enough. If they built more labs they'd be more competitive.

 

[Gorehuchi]

Oh yes! If its a worker that goes, its the Culture Worker since its so generic. Bureaucrats would be the Unity producing job. That would mean shifting around some job-swaps (like managers for megacorps) to be swaps of the bureaucrat instead.

If culture workers are removed what job would represent unity through culture and art theme-wise? The only thing close would be entertainers (which would be kind of reductive to art in general, since they supply amenity instead of society progress, though that's a whole other kettle of fish) While a bureaucrat might help an empire function (and therefore fit the potential new use for unity), they don't feel like a job that keeps a nation whole, only running.
Bear in mind I think the rework is a great idea, and unity being able to alleviate sprawl as a kind of internal influence would make it much more useful. But admin capacity kind of coming under the wing of unity feels odd thematically.
As an example - an empire whose unity comes only from bureaucrats; a beautiful endless dystopian office-planet, and you're telling me that they are the ones driving the "socio-cultural evolution" that are the tradition trees? Feels a bit off