Stellaris Dev Diary #55 - Unity and Traditions

[TheCosmicKid]

I definitely approve of the goals of differentiating civilizations more and making tall ones more viable. The Civ5 civics model seems like a good way to do that. But I have a couple of concerns about the new "Unity" resource.

Firstly: the symbol looks too much like physics research. If it's going to be a swirly thing at least make it not blue.

Secondly: why not just use Influence instead of a completely new resource? It seems like a natural thematic place for the purple stuff. (For the record, Culture and Faith in Civ5 being completely unconnected drives me up the wall.)

 

[jady]

Is global food coming with 1.5?

 

[migalhone]

-> "Unity is an accumulative resource that increases each month, and is primarily gained through the construction of government buildings such as monuments, mausoleums and temples. Unity is spent on adopting Tradition trees and purchasing individual Traditions. Each Tradition tree has a starter bonus, five unlockable bonuses and a finisher bonus that is gained once the entire tree is filled out."
-> "The cost of unlocking a Tradition depends on the size of your empire, as well as how internally stable it is."

Civ5's social policies concept applied to a Paradox Game? Might be a good idea. Once a tree is filled out can they be swapped? Are some of the trees exclusive?


Also, is Jon Shafer working for Paradox now? If so, say hi to the Civ5 Lead Designer. I'm a bit old to believe in coincidences. I've also heard he stopped developing a game called "At the Gates", stopped communicating with the people who actually backed him on Kickstarter and invested money on his project. Working in another company does justify his silence... But i might be wrong! Happy Holidays folks!

 

[petruxa]

Culture stuff has really good potential. I thought it might also be interesting to implement such thing as degradation of Culture - as Unity drops to a certain level, Culture begins to degrade, resulting in losing of traditions. That would be kind of realistic and also helps to more clearly separate culture from tech development.

 

[117Killer]

I can understand why the devs have added this as its the easiest way to implement tall empires, and i more than encourage implementing tall empires. But i dont see why they needed to implement such a basic system in order to achieve it. I pointed out in another post of mine how a simple expansion of the strategic resources current role in the game could allow the playstyle of a tall empire, and even give a little more depth to the fleet combat, but required genuine work and planning in order for a player to achieve, not just waiting for a ticking number to count up. Why not give tall empire players a system that as oppose to bore them as they wait for next tradition unlock, gives them a sense of purpose, direction and excitement as they work hard to gain that upper hand in the galactic battlefield. And a sense of elated fulfilment as they grab that one key resource from the enemy at the last second, or accepting dread as they realise that they will have to battle even harder in order to survive the oncoming battles ahead. Why they didnt expand on thier current systems, like the strategic resources or giving smaller empires large bonuses to science in order to compete with larger empires, or even large happiness bonuses that are like coming together against outside threats. Why they felt the need to implement a system thats both new and feels like a fairly shallow way to implement tall empires simply confuses me.

Ps: sorry for word wall

 

[Schimmelpfennig]

OK. Never mind. Keep downvoting and Merry Christmas to you too.

 

[Schimmelpfennig]

Growing your empire is very important in any 4X strategy, although late intentions from developers are directed at punishing growing more and more. Which is kinda becoming. "Let's give small loosing empire more bonuses!" is fine when it's moderate, keeping the challenge and stuff. But do it too much - and you are killing game process.

P.S. People today don't like to think. They are spoiled by social networks and think they can make reality what they like just by voting and liking - like they do is social networks.

At least as CIV introduced the options of building tall empires this became a viable option in 4X, and I think it's fine. But even if going tall, you still need to grow internally and work your tiles for making this effective.

Immigration can overcome some of those disadvantages you may have in growth, however immigration is something you can also put on top of a high growth if going fanatic spiritualism (adding your strong ethical conversion on top of that).

If they would add features like cultural victory to stellaris, other approaches may become more viable. I tried them all, but no game is easier than one giving you more planets, more population, more spaceports and hence - more ships.

Kudos if you can outrun a fanatic spiritualist empire on that road. I think if you are competing to a similar skilled human player, this will not be possible.

 

[shadowclasper]

And also, there has to be some give in this. The success in a game is dependent on size, that is not going to change. Big empires, fast growing empires, will always be stronger than small ones as they can draw more resources, store more resources, support larger fleets. A talk empire should never be able to stand against a wide empire on it's own, no more than a single state of the United States should be able to take on China or Russia by itself.

But the ability for alliances to support one another, for political capital to influence wars, would be critical. The ability to buy and sell planets, tipping points mid game giving efficiency bonuses to small, closely knit empires, the ability for alliances to bring their force to a point, to not screw up their federation fleets, to trade planets, star systems, resource stations, and individual technologies (for example, what if you could give people an individual tech from your tree, but had to devote a certain amount of science to them to give them it each month, they have to also research it. This would let protectorates get into the game faster as well)

The issue is not growth itself, or ethics, it's that the effective forms of growth are limited.

And keep in mind, no matter what, there will be suboptimal methods of play. No matter what the devs include. There can be no such thing as perfect balance, only perfect imbalance.

Edit: also keep in mind, high physical growth empires have very volatile politics. They have a hard time keeping folks interested in being friendly with them, and thus, small empires should play that to their advantage. Rather than stripping out systems and rebalancing them entirely, the game should focus on building up systems that are already implied by the existing systems.

 

[Fawks]

Kudos if you can outrun a fanatic spiritualist empire on that road. I think if you are competing to a similar skilled human player, this will not be possible.

You can. It is possible.

Go Fanatic Militarist, rush spaceports, dominate early. Never give them the chance to build up that powerhouse in the first place.

 

[shadowclasper]

First of all, thanks for replying on topic. I consider your points as very valuable, in fact I share most of them.

- Regarding becoming volatile, you can do a lot about this when going xenophile or when using federation politics, but of course it will cost you to offset increasing border frictions - which is a mechanic working very well, in fact.

- Regarding your remarks about losing a debate: there was non. You have been the first downvoting person posting on topic. This actually is why I made that remark and this is why a lot of interaction on reddit just produces useless results. Simply up- and downvoting stuff may lead to completely erratic results.

On your first point, yes, which is the system I feel they should expand upon, not simply remove all growth related mechanics from ethics at all.

On your second, there didn't need to be, you made a conclusion I felt was invalid, as did others, and thus we put in a polite disagreement mark. You responded to this, almost immediately, I might add, with a complaint about people down voting you, and then tried to compare me to a flat earther. All I did afterwards was outline for you the invalidity of your remarks, and you still seem blind to the fact that it's just poor sportsmanship to complain about people adding a little red X to your post without feeling the need to comment further. It's childish. If you're still not getting it after reading this, I'll just drop it. There's no more reason to clutter up the thread with a discussion on semantics and debate etiquette.

Now, onto your final point, which is using a system that is about to be completely overhauled since ethics divergence is being removed. Complaining about it being a facet still is like complaining about the fact there's a pot hole in the road while you're watching the construction crew fill it in. It cannot reasonably be used as a stick to measure any more since we have no idea what the changes are going to impart. Since ethics divergence is being removed entirely and replaced with Unity, which is an additive resource rather than something that is constantly grown overtime by outside factors, it very drastically changes how annexation and conversion of populations is going to play out. My guess is that Spiritualist Empires will likely gain a bonus to unity growth similar to other factions small percentile bonuses, thus making it more dependent upon how many unity producing structures you actually have, which grow weaker over time just as science does (their buying power decreasing as the number of pops increase), meaning that any such bonuses will be very likely to run into the same issues that science ethics bonuses gain, where they become negligible by the mid-game without serious dedication to science production structures.

All of which, of course, is conjecture based around how the current resource systems function, and the mechanics of unity as they were explained. I also suspect that unity will feedback loop much less powerfully than ethics divergence reduction did with happiness boosters (since high happiness already decreased ethics divergence considerably), since happiness has to go through a two fold filter before it starts effecting unity production. First it has to be generated by policies and a very few structures (many of which have been stated to be being switched to straight unity production rather than happiness production), which then checks the happiness of all pops of the same ethics to figure out how satisfied that entire faction is, and THEN checking to see how that checks against the average happiness of all the other factions. The more happy factions you have in balance with one another, the faster your unity production. You can't just focus fire on one faction, you gotta keep as many of them happy as possible, even one majorly unhappy faction is going to screw your unity production due to being an outlier if it follows what they're talking about. So sure, have a base line unity buff, that +5% isn't going to be doing you much good if you don't balance it against various other feedback loops and alternate policies, which will be tricky to pull off while building wide.

My one worry is actually that tri-normal ethics factions will have a harder time building wide than fanatic/normal ethics factions.

 

[Alexthe666]

This post in one video.

 

[jose2534]

What? When was this said? Excellent!!

Go to Martin Anward twitter, you will found the screenshots there, and other things. Have fun.

 

[Ex Mudder]

I still find the idea of using space ships to move millions tons of potato between planets every day bloody ridiculous, but it's going to be that way soon regardless. So complaining about something which already got green light is kinda pointless.

I agree. While I would like to see food supluses do something (other than being wasted / food tiles built over), I'm not going to be thrilled by a food export / global food system until I hear how the War in the Atlantic in HOI IV exciting / a real nail biter / a close run thing for the players.

 

[Czaristan]

As much as I like this mechanic, I think it should be more "dynamic" in that, you get perks based on what you actually do, rather than a buy system. For example, conquering planets and engaging in space battles bumps you up the supremacy tree. It should be difficult, if not impossible, to advance down a path that buffs abilities that your empire hasn't even engaged in.

 

[hironolind]

One of my concerns about traditions, based mostly on how Social Policies in Civ 5 played, is that, if you stayed small your nation would develop it's own unique flavour at a reasonable pace, but if you expanded you mostly stayed just another bland conqueror.

Ideally you don't want expanding to result in faster unity gain, it already does that for other resources, but I'm hoping that they get the balance right and that I don't have to worry about reaching a point where I'm gaining 1 tradition every century.

 

[Kharnan]

This is really cool!

 

[Gabool]

Is this going to be part of the DLC or the free update?

 

[Krein81]

how moddable is this feature? could we add more than 7 traditions?

that I want to know too

 

[Buladelu]

Unless explicitly said otherwise, free update. Everything detailed in this DD is free.

You've got an interesting update philosophy here, Wiz.

 

[Red Death]

I suppose the text instead of a tree for most traditions is placeholder?

Also, I don't suppose we can get some more examples of traditions?