Stellaris Dev Diary #325 - 3.10.3 "Pyxis" Released [d2aa] + Further Beta Plans

[Abdulijubjub]

Because a far-future society with abundant mental linkages should have better mental health care. In my opinion everyone should have about -1 negative traits based on those tables to start with; this is the future, we're choosing the best out of tens or hundreds of billions of candidates, and it's not nearly as fun dealing with a bunch of gradually disintegrating wackos decided purely by random fiat.

But in a psionic society in particular, the odds of someone going off the deep end and suddenly demanding ten times the energy consumption of a small planet, or otherwise going nuts in ways that affect an entire empire should be far lower, and there should be proper mental health care available to cure such problems in the rare cases they crop up.

Taking a more dystopian approach, in a darker psionic setting it should be possible to forcibly "cure" individuals of bad habits whether they like it or not. (Not the way I'd usually choose to play, but it should be available. Maybe that's a function of the Psi Corps (see Babylon 5)? What if they gave, say, -25% leader experience, to represent overhead, fear, and repressed creativity, but -1 negative trait?)

I'm not sure I agree that taking the chaos gods ascension path means everyone in your empire should be perfectly well adjusted on account of your fantastic mental healthcare.

It makes perfect sense that they have trouble with leaders going nuts. The mind was not built for such knowledge, nor such sensory input.

Though I do wish they would make the massive drawbacks be tied to/implemented through negative traits. That they don't is a missed opportunity. E.g. if all your leaders got a massively increased weight to get the resources upkeep negative traits with Instrument of Desire, or the Substance Abuser trait popped up much more often for Whispers (instead of killing your leaders randomly).

It would be much more controllable: you know the crappy traits they're likely to get, and can prepare for them. But with some clever choices about council traits, they can potentially still have teeth (and feel less arbitrary than "you aren't at war! +200% ship upkeep").

The push to war would be way cooler if the council were packed with warmongering Khorne worshippers who go nuts when you have no war to fight instead of flat penalty.

 

[Millbot]

Additional thoughts on the state of leaders.

-Recruited leaders, aka leaders that are paragons, legendary or that you get via some event, shouldn't have any traits selected. Right now the last round of changes seems to have resulted in the leader trait pool being heavily biased towards councilor traits. I'd argue the insistence that that they have to have established traits just doesn't work and makes having a small recruitment pool overly punitive. "Great, you need a official to run your future ecumenopolis that will being pumping out tons of allows, too bad you had to settle for one that has a bunch of useless traits because your authoritarian empire only had a pool of like two and for the past 20 years, every official wanted to be on the council. If the devs feel it would be too powerful to let people select a leaders first trait or that that takes too much character away from them. I'd strongly suggest the devs put together a pool for each class, that is specifically pulled from at level one, that only has traits that will be universally useful for all subcalsses and assignments. Like, I can work around resilient even if there currently is a way to render it pretty useless, it still has value for all my leaders before I can pull off defacto immortality for them and I'm sure the devs will find ways to make the lifespan stuff useful, even for leaders that are technically immortal (less chance of dying to things that aren't old age or lowers the odds they retire). Right now, it doesn't feel good to hire leaders because they often come with traits that are completely useless.

-In fact, I argue the current way that traits work, makes having a small trait pool overly punitive and it really does feel like the devs are underestimating just how punishing RNG can be and how RNG with a friendly setup can still force players to have to settle for less. I'll just throw out a modified idea I had earlier on. When a leader levels up, we are presented with a choice from each applicable assignment, in fact we could have it so that higher level leaders also get more choices. but again, let's take my example form earlier. I select official with the goal of them being the governor of my future ecumenopolis. Let's say low level officials role three traits and choices: resilient, unifier and politician. Of those three, only one will be guaranteed to be useful and that is resilient. Unifier might be useufl, if I decide to have any level of unity production on that ecumenopolis, I won't say completely useless, since last I checked most non-gestalt do get a benefit from culture workers and you do get some rulers, but that trait is pretty much a wasted slot if the world isn't getting a decnet amount of unity production. Politician is useless, givne that I have no intention of putting that official on the council. One can kind of see how such a setup doens't mean that players will get perfect leaders. I could get that official up to level 10 and more or less have some traits that aren't completely useless, but are far from ideal for having the perfect governor of a forge ecumenopolis. Also stuff that increases the trait pool would still have value. Now when I roll a politician or have one level up, there is a chance that they'll get two traits that are relevant specifically to what I want them to do instead of the current dynamic with RNG can screw me out of having any and it often does. Those additional traits can also be more impacted by where the leader is assigned. So if I have a bonus trait pool to my low level officials, one assigned to be agovernor,is gauranteed to always roll two traits specifically relevant to the governor role (one that is guaranteed as part of the default pool and the other that I get because I have a bonus trait option and the leader is currently acting as a governor).

-It doesn't feel good to have a ruler that is also a scientist. I get the need to reduce research spam, but it reallly, really, really sucks to have a scientst ruler right now because you're guaranteed to roll roll several traits that will have zero value to them. They need to get something out of those traits. It likely shouldn't be the research speed, since I suspect some fo the idea here is to make it so that going for scientist rulers, isn't a no brainer, but maybe they should get the increased weighting to drawing the relevant techs and maybe instead of research speed, when researching the relevant subfield, the empire gets some additional unity. Also going to suggest the idea that when we get anomalies or events that could yield expertise traits, those should always spawn an addiitonal research project and the player given some clue that there is likely an expertise trait that could be rewarded. Try to hit a happy medium where the reward isn't being outright stated, but giving players a chance to get those traits on leaders they want them on. Not exactly thrilled the current implementation makes anomaly dedicated scientists less desired because I have a ton of incentivce to have my head of research or any other scientist that holds a council position do most of the anomalies, so that I can get the expertise traits on them and not have it on a leader that will likely never be on the council. I know this is taking an advantage away from gestalts, since those traits usually get applied to the cognitive node automatically.

-Negative traits need a rework. If the plan is to ultimately give us an option to remove them, then we need a stop gap. I'd argue the the negative traits on paragon leaders work well enough because as far as I remember, those traits don't come at th expense of a positive trait. Though I'll concede I might be misremembering things. So either negative traits should have a positive and negative effect or when a leader gets a negative trait, they should get a positive trait that might be somewhat related to what they might have gotten the negative trait. Right now negative traits seem to crop up way too often and some of the traits do need a rebalance because they are bad enough where autofiring might be the only choice for the player.

-On the note of really bad negative traits. I'd suggest that the ones that increase empire size either get reworked or scrapped because they can be too punitive. I say this as someone that does believe that wide empires need to be reigned in more. The 5% to empire size just doesn't feel good and it's pretty inconsistent based on how large an empire is and what allt hey have to reduce sprawl. It can be pretty punitive for some builds and go help you if your ruler gets it and you have like a 400 size empire and have done little to invest in perks or traditions to cut that size down. If it's going to be a councilor trait, it feels like it should either be a static +X to empire size or maybe have some slow scaling with empire size. So it starts out at +5 for empires at or below 100 sprawl and then slowly ramps up for so that the 800 size empire is getting mor ethan +5 sprawl but not geting hit with a +40 sprawl increase. Honestly, i'd argue that maybe we shoudln't even have positive leader traits that reduce empire size outside of things that are either tied to an event or an ascenion paath because the positive ones can be too good at times as well, when they actually work and aren't bugged. RNG has a place, but given how empire size impacts a number of systems, it doens't feel healthy for the game to let RNG decide if someone is going to cut their empire size by a significant chunk because they get the empire size reducing traits and non o fthe negative ones that increase it, while someone else gets hosed because they don't get any traits that reduce their empire size, while getting the negative traits that do increase empire size.

 

[Peter Ebbesen]

I'm not sure I agree that taking the chaos gods ascension path means everyone in your empire should be perfectly well adjusted on account of your fantastic mental healthcare.

That's materialist propaganda!

The Chaos Gods of WH40k are corrupters, the embodiment of, dependent on, and sustained by, the emotions of living beings. Ever eager to meddle with the destiny of the galaxy, always looking out for the opportunity to spread their own singular emotion or concept, whatever the cost.

The Shroud Patron Entities of Stellaris mostly don't care. They don't rely on the inhabitants of the "normal" galaxy for their existence or sustenance, and you have to actively seek them out to get any of them interested in diverting a bit of their power or attention your way.

The Composer of Strands just wants to help you evolve, the Whisperers wants you to help you discover the secrets of the universe, the Instrument of Desire just wants to help you gain all you desire, and the Eater of Worlds just wants to... well, eat, but who doesn't? In return, all they ask is being allowed a look, to see what your people do with the power they are granted. If your people can't handle the power, that is regrettable but hardly the Shroud's fault.

This advertisement brought to you courtesy of the Instrument of Desire.

Though granted, if you form a covenant with the whisperers in the void, you need good mental health care; That stuff will drive you mad.

----

I do like your idea for replacing some of the negative effects of the covenants with tailored leader traits, but I think the WH40k immaterium/chaos god analogy with the Stellaris shroud/patron entities is overdone as while it is obviously part of the inspiration, the way they are described in-game as well as the way they impact the game is quite different.

 

[prismaticmarcus]

3,10.4 is out... without patch notes.

Yeah, what's up with thst?

 

[Samandri]

The tech rebalance is going to feel good so my hyper optimized build isn't getting mega engineering in 70 years, but I'm unsure that the ship build cost change appropriately addresses the problems we see with warfare.

We've already made appropriate adjustments to combat to avoid doomstacked Neutron Launchers (where now it seems that the meta is having more mixed fleets, even if those mixed fleets are still primarily cruisers and battleships), but one specific problem remains: we need too many ships to be relevant late game. This is also a pretty big problem from a performance standpoint, if we need literally thousands of corvettes (or hundreds of battleships/cruisers), then performance will drop, and more importantly, balance is effected.

It would make more sense for a more drastic combat overhaul, where the power levels of most components are increased, leading to higher overall power from a single ship, but reducing naval capacity outputs (maybe one naval capacity from soldier jobs, and anchorages only provide two capacity per and one extra for logi offices, and change the relevant GC and technology bonuses as well. At the same time, increase the cost of ships to match their power increase so the power to alloy ratio is still balanced.

 

[NotAYakk]

I wonder if we can make reactors take fleet capacity.

So, imagine if ship naval costs are 10/20/40/80 (10x current) and all sources also scale 10x. This is a non-change.

Second, reactors (or some other core component) makes ships 30% bigger per tier.

So corvettes are 10/13/17/23/30.

These larger corvettes also have more components - shields, weapons, etc - and hull points in proportion.

Right now # of ships is proportional to naval cap: this provides a divided by 3 at higher tech levels, dropping fleet sizes.

The 10x isn't needed: in fact, x3 might be cleaner. 3/4/6/8/10 corvette naval costs could be used.

We could even make it work with no naval cap multiplier: just the first step (to 2x) becomes a doozy.

...

I don't think this solves the "corvettes economically suck" problem. To solve that I'd drop ship costs in half, and massively boost ship upkeep. Then corvettes tendency to pop even in an overwealming victory becomes less crippling.