Stellaris Dev Diary #97 - Tech Progression in Cherryh

[SelorKiith]

The system penalty isn't there to slow down tech progress but to compensate for lower penalties incurred by planets (none by pops) and, as a side note, make expansion decisions more meaningful.

You miss the point...
It's the same stuff just backwards... they get rid of the Pop Penalty just to incure a new and even more restrictive penalty and try to sell it as something good and "Helping" in Tech Issues... while essentially completely ignoring the Elephant in the Room (mainly that Tech acquisition is one huge pain-in-the-backside Lottery).
Expansion will already be expensive, tedious and annoying enough with the new Border and Station System, it doesn't need yet another roadblock.

All in all I get the feeling that they just try to slow down the game considerably by making anything as annoying and tedious as possible without going out and saying exactly that.

 

[Me_]

The Voor were a perfect opportunity to add a new ruthless scientists-typ civic. Maybe next time.

 

[Adventurer32]

I know it's slightly unrelated and it's a really minor feature, but in 2.0 could we just have a little UI element or something that tells us how far we have advanced on the
Kardashev scale? I just think it would be awesome to be able to compare it to that, although I know it's probably not going to be added.

 

[Elfwind]

Can you please make it so you cannot salvage debris from an empire you are at peace with? If someone was reverse engineering the one or two ships they might have destroyed from my empire after a war I'd take offense to that. They were my ships the salvage rights belong to me.

 

[pryr]

I don't like the idea of normally unobtainable fallen technologies. Once they were normal empires, right? So, how they got this technologies in first place?
There must be a way to research them without scavenging. Even if they will be available only in unreasonably late game.

 

[Nitrousoxide]

Wiz, to clarify, only the systems you have upgraded starbases in raise tech cost correct?

 

[ExNihil]

Kilrathi

 

[m3n78se]

At least one new reason to wage war against fallens appears by that techs...

 

[Summin Cool]

Good to see that after asking @Wiz about the depreciated ship sections AND the STILL EXISTING PD BUG, MULTIPLE times, by PM, Tweet, Reddit PM, Mentions, a comment here, and even an email, that Ive gotten 0 response on the depreciated ship sections, and now it has to blow up on the forum post for the dev diary. Was i meant to contact you on AOL or IRC or something? Or was i meant to book a flight from Perth, Australia to Sweden?

The principal of being more mod friendly and open to communication relies on the principle that we can communicate with PDX in the first place, and im surprised that the NSC devs are willing to be this patient in regards to the depreciated ship sections.

To be fair, it's about 8pm over in Sweden at the time of your posting, they might just not be at the phone atm. You might get a response tomorrow.

 

[SolarGuy]

Wiz, to clarify, only the systems you have upgraded starbases in raise tech cost correct?

Not Wiz, but from what I understood it's all systems you own, not just those with upgraded starbases.
Phrase I'm referring to:

we have changed the Tech and Unity penalties to no longer be based on pops, but rather purely on the number of owned planets and systems, with each owned system and colonized planet adding to your tech and unity costs

 

[Drowe]

Additionally, we have changed the general progression of ship components so that each upgrade is now more significant. For example, blue lasers now offer approximately 30% higher damage than red lasers, rather than a mere 10-15% as in the current live build. This should mean that focusing on technology is now an actual valid alternative to simply massing ships, though we still want to avoid the tech-as-only-viable-path-to-victory problem that many 4x games suffer from.

That's a tight balancing act, technology should be meaningful, but not overpowered. Make it not powerful enough and Lanchester's Square Law rules regardless of technology, make it too powerful and technology becomes the only path to victory. A form of exponential scaling of technology might work, so the larger the technological difference is, the more pronounced it becomes. Currently the damage follows a linear progression, each tier adds the same amount of damage as the previous did, since Lanchester's Square Law is not linear it will always win out and quickly too. If instead the damage also had an exponential progression, but with an exponent lower than that of Lanchester's Law, then technology becomes more important, and hopefully without falling into the "tech is the only viable route" trap.

For this reason, we have changed the Tech and Unity penalties to no longer be based on pops, but rather purely on the number of owned planets and systems, with each owned system and colonized planet adding to your tech and unity costs, and planets overall having less on an impact on tech costs than before.

I have never understood why the penalty was per planet anyway, in my opinion you could do away with the penalty for planets (or colonies as it is) entirely and have it based on systems alone.

 

[Crusader Vanguard]

To be fair, it's about 8pm over in Sweden at the time of your posting, they might just not be at the phone atm. You might get a response tomorrow.

This. It is very easy to forget about time differences in this type of community. You want to "push" for an answer, but not barrage him to the point where he gets annoyed and "doesn't" answer. We'll have to see how Paradox and Wiz react to this tomorrow.

 

[Deadcommand]

Another thing that is changing in 2.0 'Cherryh' is tech costs and the tech penalty. Because of the new Starbase system and the fact that planets are no longer needed to control space, we felt that the old tech penalty based entirely on planets and pops was overly punitive and strongly encouraged having as few planets as possible and relying on space-based resources instead. For this reason, we have changed the Tech and Unity penalties to no longer be based on pops, but rather purely on the number of owned planets and systems, with each owned system and colonized planet adding to your tech and unity costs, and planets overall having less on an impact on tech costs than before. We have also raised the base cost of techs, particularly high tier techs, to compensate for the lowered penalties and slow down late-game tech progression so an empire doesn't have all technologies unlocked within the first century. This should not be taken as playing 'tall' now being unfeasible, just that it is no longer strictly about keeping few planets, but rather limiting the number of systems you expand to in order to benefit from lower tech/unity penalties and the ability to maintain a high ratio of upgraded starbases.

This seems counter-intuitive. You saw that the system encouraged as few planets as possible with priority to 20+ tile ones, and so made a system that discourages us actually expanding by making each system arbitrarily add to tech costs? That, uh, doesn't make sense, either logically nor from a RP perspective. This'll just encourage turtling and gerrymandering.

For unity, I get it, because the amount of unity buildings is limited without certain ethics and civics, which was a bonus for tall empires. But wide empires properly managed could easily keep up on research due to being able to build enough labs to compensate on each planet.

I agree something needed to be done (per pop only perhaps, so colonizing small planets isn't so bad?), but this feels arbitrary, forced and frankly, short-sighted due to it's punishing of expansionist empires with increased tech cost per system. Not every wide empire in sci-fi is 40k's Imperium of Man with their schizo tech.

 

[Shaftoe]

In my humble opinion, different weapon types (energy, kinetics, torpedoes, large missiles, small missiles) should have different appearance. Something more distinctive. So, kinetics turrets should look like railgins or coilguns and lasers should look like stereotype space laser guns. Small missiles may be installed in VLS pods mounted inside the hull and larger missiles should remain as they are. Torpedoes could use actual launch tubes in a turret, not just an oversized default gun mount.

 

[Thorin]

I know it's slightly unrelated and it's a really minor feature, but in 2.0 could we just have a little UI element or something that tells us how far we have advanced on the
Kardashev scale? I just think it would be awesome to be able to compare it to that, although I know it's probably not going to be added.

Your energy generation will tell you this. At the start you are around 1 (more or less.) When you reach 2 is tricky, since in theory the dyson sphere generates 2,0 scale energy, so 1000 energy generation is 2, but the RL scale has a difference of 10 magnitude, while the stellaris rescaled scale shoud have a difference of 3 magnitude (instead the diff of 2 magnitude from starting 10 and dayson sphere 1000 energy generation.)

 

[Jean-Luc]

This'll just encourage turtling and gerrymandering.

It'll encourage turtling as much as a planet/pop based system encourages not colonizing. As always it'll be a balance between the need for resources and tech/tradition costs. Obviously you'll want to be careful where you expand to which is a good thing imo.

Wiz said before they'll implement measures to prevent or alleviate "border gore" but I'm not sure how's that gonna work without dynamic borders.

 

[Had a dad]

If you're going to say you support modders and we can ask but then we get shut down for asking, do you support modders? All I'm doing is asking. It's ultimately Paradox's call, but since modders are suppose to be supported, here is what we ask for, and now I will let Paradox decide how to handle it.

stop pushing modding issues in dev diarys. post a thread in suggestions or usermods, but stop derailing other threads

 

[terrycloth]

Can you please make it so you cannot salvage debris from an empire you are at peace with? If someone was reverse engineering the one or two ships they might have destroyed from my empire after a war I'd take offense to that. They were my ships the salvage rights belong to me.

Not if they're in my territory.

I don't get what the point of this would be? I mean, everyone would ask for it and everyone would deny it, so there's no point even having it as a diplomatic option.

 

[methegrate]

I don't like the idea of normally unobtainable fallen technologies. Once they were normal empires, right? So, how they got this technologies in first place?
There must be a way to research them without scavenging. Even if they will be available only in unreasonably late game.

Where by contrast, I'd actually like more un-researchable technologies. ; )

I feel like more diversity in tech would help the galaxy feel more mysterious and alive. Personally, I'd like more "how the hell did they do that??" moments, and balanced by more moments of "they'll never see this coming!" Not just bonuses, but differences of kind, things one empire can do that another empire just can't.

Idk... maybe techs that preclude other research paths, or techs unique to ethos, empire type and even species phenotype. Perhaps fungi just see the universe in a way that humanoids don't, and vice versa.

It might create more mystery about meeting a new empire, and would also make for more interesting decisions about trade, war and peace. Do I avoid war with that empire because their strike craft can launch from the opposite side of a system, or do I specifically seek out war because salvaging that tech from their broken ships is the only way to get it for myself?

But all that said, this tech dd looks great. Research in Stellaris has always (imho) had strong fundamentals but needed some attention. This looks like it'll be fun.

 

[Axe99]

Cheers for the DD Wiz . Looking forward to getting some Humanoids action on before too long (just have to finish a HoI4 and EU4 game first) and like the sound of extending the tech tiers and adding more techs . I'm not as sold on the way tech scaling occurs, and suspect this will be a step on the path rather than the final approach, but I could be off the mark there. On tech scaling, have you thought about trying a 'diminishing marginal impact' of expansion - so expansion definitely and noticeably increases tech costs, but in a non-linear fashion. It may even make sense to have different functions for tech and unity (as expansion could even have an increasing marginal impact on unity in a way that made sense)? Just random thoughts, please ignore if not useful. Cherryh is sounding very exciting indeed. I'm honestly not sure it's fair for one studio to have so many games in so good a shape at one time .