Stellaris Dev Diary #297 - Leaders, The Council, and Agendas

[Abdulijubjub]

No matter how you spin it it does feel like the most "pay to win" (no Jerry, not in a multiplayer sense, now sit down) or "pay to enjoy" DLC so far. The mid-game and end-game crises just to name one thing have to be balanced against some power level, and for obvious reasons they're only gonna be balanced against the power level of a player who has all DLCs. It's not hard to understand that players experiencing the base game for the first time might get very frustrated when they try higher difficulties but don't have access to ascension traits, the "powerful leaders" (I think devs emphasized that enough) from the DLC, and every other paid-for advantage that was added so far.

I find it difficult to believe that this seems more "pay to win" (power creep) than Utopia.

But "pay to enjoy" is kinda the whole the point of DLC in general... Why would you buy it if it wasn't more fun than not-buying-it?

I don't think this is making the base game less fun. It's just going to be better with the DLC. I intend to play one without the DLC first just to see how it goes.

 

[Millbot]

As someone that is highly critical of many business practices within the game industry. I'm just going to point out I completely disagree with classifying the DLCs as pay to win and to say that shows a massive misunderstanding of the concept behind pay to win.

Pay to win means spending extra to either beat the game, which you can do on vanilla or to get an advantage over players that aren't shelling out money, something that isn't possible with the current game design.

It's also worth noting that if they didn't release new DLCs, they'd have to do something else to keep the company alive. That would be releasing new games that don't let you access the old content in previous games. Also new games tend to have a higher cost than a DLC. There are pros or cons to both models, but I get the impression you would still complain about Stellaris 2 being pay to to win and then being upset that it lacks much of the content from Stellaris.

 

[metatoaster]

As someone that is highly critical of many business practices within the game industry. I'm just going to point out I completely disagree with classifying the DLCs as pay to win and to say that shows a massive misunderstanding of the concept behind pay to win.

Pay to win means spending extra to either beat the game, which you can do on vanilla or to get an advantage over players that aren't shelling out money, something that isn't possible with the current game design.

It's also worth noting that if they didn't release new DLCs, they'd have to do something else to keep the company alive. That would be releasing new games that don't let you access the old content in previous games. Also new games tend to have a higher cost than a DLC. There are pros or cons to both models, but I get the impression you would still complain about Stellaris 2 being pay to to win and then being upset that it lacks much of the content from Stellaris.

People also commonly call "pay to win" Ubisoft DLCs that sell you more powerful weapons or just give you currency. Call it "pay to skip the grind" or whatever but you're not gonna change how people talk. And here you can outright buy more powerful leaders, as lovingly emphasized by the devs themselves. And yes, that gives you a better chance at beating the mid-game and end-game crisis, and probably also in other situtations.
Also you say that you can beat the game on vanilla, but when was the last time you watched a complete newbie discover the game? It's not the same vanilla you experienced.

"You get the impression"... I don't know where you're pulling those impressions from, and on second thought I don't wanna know. I'd be down for buying a periodic repackage of the whole game + DLCs where they take the opportunity to harmonize things and merge them together. Whether it's called a deluxe edition or is just an expansion you must purchase to have access to future patches (exactly what Hearts of Iron 3 and anterior Paradox games did), I'm ok even if it costs more than the DLCs as long as the game is better for it in the long run.

At least I must point out that this time, they had the courage to rework the base game mechanics as well and didn't stick their new council in a new extra tab somewhere. But it would've been so much better if they didn't have to waste time on the free/paid DLC split and have to deal with DLC barriers when revisiting other content to match what they're doing with leaders. Not to mention the combinatorial explosion of possible DLC installs to balance where they could only be worrying about polishing one unified design. Those DLCs are just getting in the way of us having a good game.

I find it difficult to believe that this seems more "pay to win" (power creep) than Utopia.

But "pay to enjoy" is kinda the whole the point of DLC in general... Why would you buy it if it wasn't more fun than not-buying-it?

I don't think this is making the base game less fun. It's just going to be better with the DLC. I intend to play one without the DLC first just to see how it goes.

"Pay to enjoy" is commonly understood as meaning that the game is theoretically playable without the paid content but extremely grindy or difficult, so that if you want to enjoy yourself you need to pay. Instead of the game being designed to be enjoyable as-is. And the common criticism is that adding ANY kind of pay-to-enjoy mechanisms provides a vicious incentive for developers to make the base game more and more annoying to push people to spend more. Not saying Paradox has been affected by this yet, but there are precedents of companies slipping into this.
Keep in mind that Paradox retroactively forced people to buy Magicka DLCs just to play with friends that have the same DLCs (before that, DLCs worked more like in Stellaris), so they are not immune to greed even though Stellaris was spared so far.

 

[Panzerslothen]

TLDR: Its absolutely reasonable to want a way to steer research, but the current system is a relic of former design decisions (and is just bad). People should be focused on new ways to achieve the same outcome rather than reflexively defending the bad.

Making decisions on what research to prioritise is actually an important strategic decision that even Governments today grapple with, but there needs to be a better way to do this than just rerolling scientists until you hit the one you want and swapping it in.

Neither President Biden nor President Jinping are conducting job interviews to find the right person to lead their research programs. They're signing a directive stating their priorities which is then flowed through to agencies in the form of new policy settings and revised budgets which may then lead to job interviews and expanded research teams. Beyond that, there's also broader thinking about education within your population: If you want your population to be more focused on military theory, engineering and material science, your society might be different to one focused on social sciences, art and culture. These are actual strategic considerations that more clearly influence research than 'did I get the right leader out of leader roulette'.

Granted, this would require reworking of a few core systems so its not ideal, but certainly the current approach to minmaxing science could only be 'desirable behavior' or 'fun and engaging gameplay' if the Game Director was Franz Kafka, so I'm asking the people reflexively defending a system that could be charitably be described as a relic of a former era to consider how the actually meaningful decision you want to make (steering technology outcomes) could be implemented in a better way.

I entirely agree with you, and I even know of one such better option.

The Space Empires games - quite possibly a distant genetic ancestor of Stellaris - had a system in which you allocated shares of your overall Research capability into a whole slew of different fields, such as Shields, Propulsion, Weapons, you name it. You didn't just work on a broad category, like Stellaris has - you said to your science industry "Hey, look you guys, I like some of these ideas in particular - work on them the most.". But you could also put a tiny bit into absolutely everything if you wanted to make SOME progress across the board, just at an absolute snails pace compared to some particular stuff.

Something like that in Stellaris would be sweet. It would let you set off along a specific path of techs you wanted. AIs could be weighted to be more likely to go after specific tech trees based on their Origin, Civics, and Ethics.

 

[Uburian]

TLDR: Its absolutely reasonable to want a way to steer research, but the current system is a relic of former design decisions (and is just bad). People should be focused on new ways to achieve the same outcome rather than reflexively defending the bad.

Making decisions on what research to prioritise is actually an important strategic decision that even Governments today grapple with, but there needs to be a better way to do this than just rerolling scientists until you hit the one you want and swapping it in.

Neither President Biden nor President Jinping are conducting job interviews to find the right person to lead their research programs. They're signing a directive stating their priorities which is then flowed through to agencies in the form of new policy settings and revised budgets which may then lead to job interviews and expanded research teams. Beyond that, there's also broader thinking about education within your population: If you want your population to be more focused on military theory, engineering and material science, your society might be different to one focused on social sciences, art and culture. These are actual strategic considerations that more clearly influence research than 'did I get the right leader out of leader roulette'.

Granted, this would require reworking of a few core systems so its not ideal, but certainly the current approach to minmaxing science could only be 'desirable behavior' or 'fun and engaging gameplay' if the Game Director was Franz Kafka, so I'm asking the people reflexively defending a system that could be charitably be described as a relic of a former era to consider how the actually meaningful decision you want to make (steering technology outcomes) could be implemented in a better way.

Pretty much agree with this.

Research is, alongside internal politics, logistics (in regards to economy, industry and warfare) and ideology (culture and religion/spiritualism), the aspect of the game that could use a significant rework the most. Unlike politics, logistics and ideology however, which have already been (or are about to be) expanded to a lesser or larger degree, research is still largely stuck with its 1.0 version.

Yes, archaeology heavily expanded the exploration aspect of the game (I personally love Ancient Relics), but there is definitely room to improve and expand how we conduct R&D and academia, and more significantly how different alien cultures adapt to technological development.

Nevertheless, I still believe that internal politics should be the aspect of the game that should be expanded first, but research and academia should come shortly afterwards, with logistics, and finally ideology, becoming the focus only when the rest of the game is fleshed out.

 

[GoGoDuck]

If you introduce a soft leader cap, players won't have enough science ships to explore and survey the Galaxy or find more anomalies!

What's the meaning of restraining players from exploring the Galaxy?

Maybe we can introduce a “Head of Exploration” Council position and let one scientist in charge of all the science ships!

Thus we can build more science ships to explore the Galaxy!

 

[SirBlackAxe]

We need more science ships! The ships should be able to explore the Galaxy without leaders !

That's what army transports are for.

 

[Cosmic Fishering Fleet]

That's what army transports are for.

Counterpoint: galactic nebulas.

 

[SunCrafterHP]

Interesting

 

[andredz]

> Now I won’t have to restart the game every time I get a trait I don’t want to have on my ruler

:O