Stellaris Dev Diary #30 - Late Game Crises

[Rabbit Burgher]

Can rivalries end if both of them are heavily threatened by the same faction? Perhaps uniting them against intergalactic invaders.

 

[AtomicAllele]

HAK HAK HAK *view screen off*

 

[Deathknight15]

A few people seem to be mistaking pacifism for being a lemming.

Even the most fanatically pacifistic society surely makes an exception for self-defense or they wouldn't exist, having been absorbed by the Klingons or whatever a few decades into the game.

 

[Risisti]

Quick! We must contact our dead(but is really alive) commander and send them to the Bahak system to slow their progress(by ultimately destroying it)

 

[redsimonDE]

I expect a nice number of Endgame Crises in future DLCs. Don't want to see the same ones over and over again.

 

[Vahouth]

Can I be the late game crysis?

Can I replace/upgrade my population with a robotic one and be that scourge?

 

[TheDungen]

What "other means to protect them" do you have in mind? Maybe some kind of force field that seals of sections of space on a galactic scale? Sort of like what was done to the Primes in Pandora's Star, but a larger scale. I think that would assume an unlikely degree of technological superiority. Changing the nature of the apocalyptic threat probably also fall into the 'we don't have the technology' category. Diplomacy doesn't work very well when they eat your diplomats.

I mean stuff like a shields, I mean stuff like cloaking devices, I mean stuff like phasing, I mean stuff like making warp unstable around your borders (good luck reaching me with sublight speeds) stuff like retreating and letting your friends or preferably your enemies get slaughtered while you seek a technoloical solutution. I'm talking opening up a portal to another universe and leaving I'm talking folding space to remove yourself from the conflict. I'm talkign setting up a time dialation field around your planet so you can research a solution for a thousand years the day before they arrive at your homeworld. I'm talking using the same time dialation field to trap these beings in near stasis forever. I'm talking stuff like building big honking ships and leaving for another galaxy. Or freezing the most important members of your society at a hidden location and simply waiting until they leave. Or unleashign another crisis in their wake to delay them. If they are from outside the universe something like the necron pylons may work, if they are nids then perhaps the things they use in starcraft to control the swarm, or just a pheromone thing that keeps them away. Or move your people to space stations around a black hole and wait the enemy out, And all these solutions took me like 5 minutes to come up with. There are plenty more solutions that does not include firing a single shot.

Overall, I don't see why "There should always be alternative solutions to fighting." The game presents situations where fighting is not a solution (see early-game defiance of Fallen Empires), so I don't see a problem with a situation where fighting is the only solution. Even on earth, when facing threats from humans who are a lot more amenable to reason than hell-dimension invaders, it is very occasionally the case that your only options are to fight or die.

Because fighting is far to often a go to solution for everything in games. Also there's a pacifict ethos while the true opposite is not present, some radical pacifists should never view war as a solution (dependign on their personality or what the player wants to roleplay), while even very warlike societies will not always view war as the only solution (Even the imperium of man, even the orks, make use of diplomacy from time to time)

For a pacifist, the alternative isn't not fighting... it's, after making a reasonable good-faith effort to try and reason with the invaders, spending all that goodwill built up over the years to unite the as much of the galaxy as is willing to listen to reason into a single, coordinated powerhouse that, working in unity, can respond to the threat with both power and agility that a singular blob of the same size, even a fanatic militarist one, couldn't possibly hope to match.

That's at best pacifism 1, pacifism 2 should avoid fighting even then. Actually that stuff seems more xenophile than pacifist.
And the crisis toppling warlike empires should be no problem for a pacifist empire, those who live by the sword will die by the sword, it will only affirm what they always knew would happen to warlike beings.

How many of these crises will be in the game at launch? Also, how long on average does it take for the Scourge to show up? Do we always get a couple of centuries to build up, or could they arrive as early as 2300?

Now there's a thought, undead crisis.

i'm wondering if the extragalactic invasion is always "biological". Could be possible something like the Sith Empire from the old republic?. Big nasty empire hiding in the shadows outside the galaxy waiting for a way to invade

I was thinking along the same lines, like how the nations of the new world suddenly had europeans landing on their shores, beings muck like themselves who had crossed what they thought to be an untraverible void to make war upon them.

All that talk about SG-1.... I hope there will be stargates at some point, to shove pops instantly from one planet to another...

Yeah I was kind of hoping wormhole tech would be this but I guess not.
Stargates space gates (and puddle jumpers) and supergates would be really cool late game techs.

I agree, but only, and I say this very vehemently, only if there are endgame crises that cannot be solved through force. Handling the Fallen Empires doesn't count in my opinion, because it only applies to the early game, since they've made it pretty clear you can eventually be as strong, if not stronger, than them. They're basically just normal empires that have had a few hundred years head start. Crisis empires, on the other hand, like these Prethoryn or the Unbidden the mentioned a while back, are intended to be much stronger, and can only be handled in specific ways.

I really hope you'll never really be stronger than fallen empires, fight them of perhaps but not defeat them. Their help should pretty much be mandatory if you want to take on a crisis on the battlefield.

What if there was some sort of invading empire - something they've already mentioned - that would keep coming and coming with no sign of stopping until the entire galaxy was conquered and destroyed, with a seemingly infinite number of ship at their disposal. The trick is that, while a Militaristic empire would be invaluable when it came to keeping them at bay, the only long term solution would be for a Pacifist, Xenophile, or Spiritualist empire to talk some sense into the invaders and convince them to stop. Similarly, there could a galactic plague only solvable through science (for the Materialists out there), or some kind of ritual that had to be performed on several, far flung planets to prevent reality from ending (for the Spiritualists and Xenophiles; or Militarists if you want to take the planets by force).

Or they could reatreat deeped into their territory and let these warlike beings fight it out while they developed the technological means to remove themselves from being dragged into the conflict. At the absolutly worst they could do their own version of the manhattan project and create a weapon so utterly OP that it forces an end the the conflict after only having been used once. And then hate themselves for the rest of eternity for not sticking to their convictions.

There shouldn't always be an alternative solution to fighting, but that doesn't mean it has to be the only option, or that there can't be times when it's not a viable option. What's the point of playing a Pacifistic empire if you're always getting the short end of the stick?

There will be many cases when pacifists will get the short end of the stick that's why I am so strongly pushing the idea that there should always be alternatives to fighting. These may be really bad option that leaves half you empire in ashes or 90% of you population dead (or having left when it's clear that you don't defected to save them) before you manage to achieve them but still they should be there.

Fair enough; one does not meet a storm with an army, and I generally avoid war in any strategy game where that's a reasonable option, so I appreciate where you're coming from. But at the same token, every playstyle should, in theory, have a resolution to every possible crisis. Not necessarily the optimal one, but a solution. This may not be entirely realistic; one can easily come up with a situation where blasting things is a terrible idea. But there's nothing fun about the RNG is randomly smiting you any time its chosen crisis and your particular playstyle don't match unless you're lucky enough that another empire does the work for you before it tears you apart.

While yes one can do that they are thus far very rarely represented in paradox GSGs and even less so in 4x games.

Pacifism will only ever get you so far. Try surrendering to a hungry tiger and see how far you get.

Or you could build a fence, or some sort of noise or smell that keeps it away. The likelyhood that you will be the tigers first victim is pretty small, and even then you could fight it of without killing it giving you time to do one of the other things.

...that was my point. By "the same tools," I mean taking advantage of their industrial capacity, not eroded by the unnecessary war and conflict warmongers partake in, and web of alliances to prepare a military response with which to stuff the aliens' prattle about the glory of war down their throats. (General Sherman, suffice it to say, is a personal hero of mine.)

I'm sorry again at best a level 1 pacifist, a level 2 pacifist should have the option of seeking other solutions even as the enemy is at their gates.

Sentient AI: the first Paradoxian AI that is a legitimate threat to the player.

This one made me chuckle.

A few people seem to be mistaking pacifism for being a lemming.

Even the most fanatically pacifistic society surely makes an exception for self-defense or they wouldn't exist, having been absorbed by the Klingons or whatever a few decades into the game.

A lot of people seem to mistake pacifist for not being warlike too, pacifism is being anti war. Seeing it as an unimaginative and stupid solution to complex problems. You're dealing with a sentient force? Then arguing with them is better since killing them will eventually lead to more bad blood. Not sentient? then understand what drives them and seek to use that to affect of even controll their behaviour.
And no I don't thing that a pacisfist empire needs to make an exception for self defnece that should be the players choice forcing him to do that or lose the game is removing player agency. A pacifist empire should have the option to be completly pacifist.
It should be a risky strategy you may lose before you manage your alternative solution, but it should be an option to take the chance.

 

[Teije]

Very cool. And this is a fertile area for future DLCs (and mods hopefully). Lots more late game crises to come and keep things interesting.

It seems like one of the best things about Stellaris will be the avoidance of that late game tedium that sets in for most 4x/Civ type games once you're on a winning trajectory.

 

[Rock Lord]

So then, it's confirmed that Skynet will not rebel if the Tyranids are attacking and vice versa?

 

[Zhranzagul]

"You think what you do has meaning? You think you slay me, and I am dead? It is just dream and waking over and over, one appearance after another, nothing real. What you do here means nothing. Why do we waste our breath on you?"

It would be interesting if were hints to some gnostic truth or nature in about the universe' metaphysics, that could result in (possibly just for spiritualistic civs) some sort of LGC à la Dagoth Ur and the Corprus Blessing/"Disease" both spouting and operating by principles only found in the deepest monkey texts of darkest kirkbridean elder scrolls. Possibly in the shape that some hinduisms bid moksha from samsara.

I would personally have a game focused on a goal akin to Vivec's Loveletter, (which I misinterpret as) everything going CHIM, then Amaranth. Sorta like Galactic "Ascension"

 

[13Foxtrot]

I know why the devs put in a guaranteed late game threat. In my opinion, however, it will get a bit tiresome that you know every game will end in invasion x coming your way. I would rather just have certain triggers cause it, but a chance it doesn't happen if you can prevent it. If the triggers don't happen then invasion x doesn't happen. It seems like an inevitability no matter what you do.

If there was a chance to prevent an invasion I'd like the player to have an option to stop it, not just eliminating options until it happens.

For the first few times it'll be interesting and then it will be just something that always happens and will start to feel a bit contrived.

Since it will be an inevitability, I hope they have a large amount to choose from.

 

[austrianemporer]

Are sentient robots guaranteed to rise up if they're a lot of them? Or is a situation like "The Culture" series also possible?

 

[TheDungen]

So then, it's confirmed that Skynet will not rebel if the Tyranids are attacking and vice versa?

Is it that seems boring

I know why the devs put in a guaranteed late game threat. In my opinion, however, it will get a bit tiresome that you know every game will end in invasion x coming your way. I would rather just have certain triggers cause it, but a chance it doesn't happen if you can prevent it. If the triggers don't happen then invasion x doesn't happen. It seems like an inevitability no matter what you do.

If there was a chance to prevent an invasion I'd like the player to have an option to stop it, not just eliminating options until it happens.

For the first few times it'll be interesting and then it will be just something that always happens and will start to feel a bit contrived.

Since it will be an inevitability, I hope they have a large amount to choose from.

Well it might not be a invasion it could be a world war or a disease outbreak. And I guess there could be more than one and the combinatio of diffrent ones and how they affect each other leads to unique combinations.

 

[13Foxtrot]

Is it that seems boring


Well it might not be a invasion it could be a world war or a disease outbreak. And I guess there could be more than one and the combinatio of diffrent ones and how they affect each other leads to unique combinations.

They really didn't go too much into what they endgame crises could be, so I am hoping for a wide swath of possibilities.

 

[Mitchz95]

I certainly hope it's possible to encounter more than one at a time. Especially if they start fighting each other as well as me.

 

[Primo Teonori]

Surely Robotic Trade Union can get what it fights for...

 

[henzington]

By your command

 

[Ifreann]

I certainly hope it's possible to encounter more than one at a time. Especially if they start fighting each other as well as me.

There's an extra-galactic threat, quick, everyone start spamming jump drives!

 

[geofftillman]

Yuuzhan Vong?

Tyranids

 

[Lennart Stek]

Hakkapellitta!