Stellaris Dev Diary #226 - Custodians & Next Steps

[Nebbie Zebbie]

Aside the fact that just adding unity upkeep to bureaucrats won't appreciably change anything, cause it would still mean the system as a whole is linear in the penalties and required resources.

The system needs to be changed. Full stop. Just tweaking numbers or adding another resource upkeep isn't going to fix anything, because they aren't even touching the problem.

Linearity alone is not what makes bureaucrats a problem. The primary issue is that making more of them doesn't really conflict with your other goals since the extra sprawl from a colony for them is negligible, and their upkeep is rather low. The reason to use unity in particular is that slowing down traditions greatly impacts an empire's ability to become what it wants to become. Having to spend a bunch of it on bureaucrats would be a serious impact to gameplay that would slow the expansion of most empires.
And ultimately, I suspect what they will come up with will still be linear. Superlinear scaling has inherent issues in a game with settings that greatly affect sizes of things.

 

[James Fire]

Linearity alone is not what makes bureaucrats a problem. The primary issue is that making more of them doesn't really conflict with your other goals since the extra sprawl from a colony for them is negligible, and their upkeep is rather low. The reason to use unity in particular is that slowing down traditions greatly impacts an empire's ability to become what it wants to become. Having to spend a bunch of it on bureaucrats would be a serious impact to gameplay that would slow the expansion of most empires.
And ultimately, I suspect what they will come up with will still be linear. Superlinear scaling has inherent issues in a game with settings that greatly affect sizes of things.

If what they come up with is still linear, then the problem will not be fixed.

If tall is to be viable, penalties for going wide cannot be linear. Otherwise you can just offset the penalties with the more resources you get from expanding. That is the fundamental issue here, not the fact that bureaucrats are cheap as hell. It doesn't help, but it's not the primary issue.

 

[Nebbie Zebbie]

If what they come up with is still linear, then the problem will not be fixed.

If tall is to be viable, penalties for going wide cannot be linear. Otherwise you can just offset the penalties with the more resources you get from expanding. That is the fundamental issue here, not the fact that bureaucrats are cheap as hell. It doesn't help, but it's not the primary issue.

Consider the fact that empire sprawl has different sources, one of which is pops, and another colonies. Reduce it for pops, increase it for colonies, and you require a greater share of bureaucrats by number of colonies than previously. If we crank this up sufficiently, it could lead to it being unsustainable to colonize more than a few worlds at once, because you would always need to make, say, 1 out of 3 of them new bureaucratic worlds. The "tall" empire with few high-pop worlds would be getting more resources in the same amount of time.
Yes, over the long long, wide would be better, but at a certain point, your empire's still behind while the crisis shows up.

 

[Ferrus Animus]

The reason to use unity in particular is that slowing down traditions greatly impacts an empire's ability to become what it wants to become.

It really doesn't. It removes changes to gamplay elements via traditions or ascension perks, but the absolute core loop of Stellaris is basically:
Pops -> ### -> Alloys & Research -> ### -> Ungodly amounts of battleships.
You can remove all unity without changing that. Sure it'll be a bit less efficient and a bit slower, but traditions are modifiers. They don't change the game.

And that's why none of these "solutions" will help. All you can do is make the numbers bigger or smaller, punish one style of gameplay or reward another.
At best the impact you could have is to punish one way of playing the game so hard it becomes non-viable or reward one so much it becomes brokenly OP.

But without addressing the fundamental systems below, all this is tinkering with symptoms.

 

[Vortex79]

One of these days I will complete a more than half of aStellaris playthrough without an update breaking it or my add-ons (hopefully without the developers destroying the viability of the add-ons.). How hard can it be to do some internal programming standardization that is maintained between update issuances so that every patch isn't destructive? Imagine if Stellaris were a some major auto, like GE or Toyota or Nissan... and the manufacturer changed the components dimensions with every new version without alerting their supply chains and parts makers. This is what that would feel like. You get a Nissan. You buy a radio for a Nissan.. it doesn't fit the dashboard. But with bonus. Your Nissan is naturally evolving and updating. Normally this would be an amazing feature in the car.. except now every time the car's dimension changes the radios break because someone didn't standardize and they have to be replaced.. over.. and over. and over again...

If your response is, 'just play vanilla'...

My response is.. 'I will find a company that doesn't suppress human creativity by disallowing contributions to their work from third parties." I will start voting with my dollars if moral does not improve.

Don't say there aren't alternatives. I know of some. Out of courtesy, they will remain unmentioned. Annoy your client base enough and they will start seeing other developers as having superior product. Never take your market leader status for granted.. the one thing that assuredly and always loses it, is hubris. Serve your clients, fix your bugs! And for heck's sake.. test a little before release.. This one could have been found in 5 minutes if someone just tossed a single ui mod up. You should by know have a knowledge base, a history of known past problems to check for.. this should have been one of the problems in that knowledge base as you ran into it at least twice, once in 2019... Fix the Desync!

 

[grommile]

How hard can it be to do some internal programming standardization that is maintained between update issuances so that every patch isn't destructive?

Very, if you actually want to produce updates worthy of being marketed as paid products.

 

[Libertine Angel]

One of these days I will complete a more than half of aStellaris playthrough without an update breaking it or my add-ons (hopefully without the developers destroying the viability of the add-ons.). How hard can it be to do some internal programming standardization that is maintained between update issuances so that every patch isn't destructive? Imagine if Stellaris were a some major auto, like GE or Toyota or Nissan... and the manufacturer changed the components dimensions with every new version without alerting their supply chains and parts makers. This is what that would feel like. You get a Nissan. You buy a radio for a Nissan.. it doesn't fit the dashboard. But with bonus. Your Nissan is naturally evolving and updating. Normally this would be an amazing feature in the car.. except now every time the car's dimension changes the radios break because someone didn't standardize and they have to be replaced.. over.. and over. and over again...

If your response is, 'just play vanilla'...

My response is.. 'I will find a company that doesn't suppress human creativity by disallowing contributions to their work from third parties." I will start voting with my dollars if moral does not improve.

Don't say there aren't alternatives. I know of some. Out of courtesy, they will remain unmentioned. Annoy your client base enough and they will start seeing other developers as having superior product. Never take your market leader status for granted.. the one thing that assuredly and always loses it, is hubris. Serve your clients, fix your bugs! And for heck's sake.. test a little before release.. This one could have been found in 5 minutes if someone just tossed a single ui mod up. You should by know have a knowledge base, a history of known past problems to check for.. this should have been one of the problems in that knowledge base as you ran into it at least twice, once in 2019... Fix the Desync!

Your car manufacturer analogy doesn't work because modders aren't part of the industry, they're hobbyists doing it for fun. If a car manufacturer changed how they make their windows so someone making and giving away cute window stickers couldn't get them to stick anymore it'd be unfortunate but nothing anyone could actually complain about. And to suggest they're "disallowing contributions to their work" is ridiculous when they give us Workshop space and make much of the game transparent and moddable, if you want the game to improve it's a simple truth that that's gonna require third parties adapting to the improvements.

 

[MadCow94]

Random thought: Did anyone else notice that the next patch is November (like 6 weeks if they send it out mid-month) and there STILL has been no announcement of any new DLC?

Caretakers running the show for a while is a definite good thing.

 

[Vortex79]

Your car manufacturer analogy doesn't work because modders aren't part of the industry, they're hobbyists doing it for fun. If a car manufacturer changed how they make their windows so someone making and giving away cute window stickers couldn't get them to stick anymore it'd be unfortunate but nothing anyone could actually complain about. And to suggest they're "disallowing contributions to their work" is ridiculous when they give us Workshop space and make much of the game transparent and moddable, if you want the game to improve it's a simple truth that that's gonna require third parties adapting to the improvements.

Third parties adapting to improvements is exactly how many linux builds actually function, but for those third parties to remain sane relative to the core product.. in this case an operating system, standards can, should, and must be maintained. In doing so you reduce incoherence and increase systemic sanity, not just of the core product, but the community around it.

A product change will or will not take into account the users. If it does, it's community friendly.. which is to my understanding is what Paradox is attempting to be. It can be done. Many others have done it with their products, software or not, fluidly. It's just a matter of solid quality control and an intent on providing solid standards of care and customer service.

In the IT world we refer to this as systemic sanity. In the product quality control world you call it quality management and metrics standardization... both are applicable here. The car analogy was used to address the layman and is entirely applicable if context is maintained.

A 5-10 minute test with just a couple of sampled community mods with a UI would have identified this problem pre-release. It did not get identified pre-release. Do mind math. So this is the magnitude of destruction it has wrought on the paradox player base:

# of Multiplayer game Players * % modders using custom uis * average hour of campaign time invested = user hours in destroyed human creativity and enjoyment from broken campaigns.

And it is because of this I really wish devs would take an update approach policy of "first do no harm" and "standardize the everything" if they genuinely wish to be community friendly. Especially in the grand strategy genre where these games are capable of running weeks or months.

I don't think Paradox wants Stellaris to be the game that gets a reputation for never being finish able unless you only play straight-up vanilla. Especially since vanilla campaigns also have in the past broken between updates.

I don't think many will say they avidly enjoy having to race through any campaign in order to attempt to beat the next potentially game-breaking patch. Paradox has been good on allowing us to use multiple versions, but that hasn't prevented steam from breaking our playthroughs by forcing updates on all workshop content either with no ability to shield our data from those changes. So it's just a general nightmare all around.. trying to retain campaign sanity right now.

You can't play the old version because some modders force march onward over-writing old content... and you can't use the new stuff because patches make them incompatible with a vast array of existing content. In essence, the mod play community is being hit from two sides by large mallets they have no ability to avoid.

I am about to the point where I 'd prefer Paradox declare one last round of bug-fixing.. declare their product done, and start working on a Stellaris 2 so that we actually have something stable to play because modders won't be rushing to issue for new patches.. and obviously the developer has finally.. after years, finalized its product. When you start to struggle to retain sanity between versions on such a key thing as interface.. that may be the time to start pondering it.

 

[grommile]

I don't think many will say they avidly enjoy having to race through any campaign in order to attempt to beat the next potentially game-breaking patch.

Sure, which is why it's good that the typical interval between x.y final hotfix and x.(y+1) is 4-5 months.

 

[Vortex79]

Sure, which is why it's good that the typical interval between x.y final hotfix and x.(y+1) is 4-5 months.

Believe it or not for some casual players that may still be too short an interval. And if you standardize sufficiently and the community does its homework.. game breaking patches shouldn't even be a term that really exists for the vast majority of content. It wouldn't have been in this case either had that 5-10 minutes simple research been conducted. Could have been caught / addressed before it ever hit our systems.

My sole hope is that Paradox's new content creation team refines its best practices based on this flub so we have some smoother patches moving forward. Any change to a product which breaks or reduces its features unintentionally is an error. They happen, and usually better things come of it. I doubt we can say it was the dev's intent to break a massive amount of ui mod dependencies with an error they've seen before. I want to re-iterate, I love Paradox's products.. as the bar on my left clearly shows, so when I criticize it means I sincerely feel something avoidable went awry.

 

[MadCow94]

Two nice things that Custodians could do:

Make it so the "ignore duplicate portrait" setting actually works (specifically, so it DOESN'T when left off). I hate having two (unrelated) empires using the same picture in my game.

Add Yes/No/Force option to all pre-scripted empires so players can select which Paradox empires can/won't/always show up in runs. (This already appears in the code, and seems to work, just needs a UI setting).