Sectors completely ruin immersion

[Kapitalisti]

Sectors utterly fail in the goal of reducing micromanagement because the sector AI cannot optimize planets, it is basically too dumb to play the game. The goal of sectors, however, was not reducing micromanagement - if micromanagement was gone Stellaris would be even less of a game than it is. The goal is artificial difficulty.

This is hardly crippling though since your AI opponents are bound by the same limitations. At least you can use your superior brain to optimize your core worlds. Besides, optimization is pretty damn different from "immersion" which the OP claimed was destroyed by sectors. In my opinion sectors increase immersion since you really can't micromanage a sprawling galactic empire.

 

[grommile]

As it is right now, sectors want independance when pops are unhappy, which only happens when you conquer someone elses planet.

Like I said: tuning problems. Pops in sectors are supposed to experience increased ethos drift, making them more likely to end up with an ethos incompatible with your state ethos and policies (and thus become unhappy).

 

[Morbid Gerbil]

Brings on a few questions
There are special building that affect happiness, and also ethos divergence.

- Are they worth building compared to an extra Lab, Mine or Power (if you are using a blank tile that has 0 native bonus)
- Is the AI supposed to be able to build them on planets in sectors.
- Does it ever build them.

 

[The Founder]

Brings on a few questions
There are special building that affect happiness, and also ethos divergence.

- Are they worth building compared to an extra Lab, Mine or Power (if you are using a blank tile that has 0 native bonus)
- Is the AI supposed to be able to build them on planets in sectors.
- Does it ever build them.

It was mentioned that it can build ethos specific buildings. And yes, the logical place to place those would be fields without any adjacency or native bonus.

Does it build and work them and at what priority?
You can actually formulate it out to some degree wich is better. But with Ethic divergence it is also a mater of longterm planning, something AI never was able too.
I would say the AI's aim should be to at least get down to 0 Ethics divergence/no Faction forming level of happiness. Or however close it can get with those insane empire policies imposed by the player it has to deal with.
Happiness and Ethics divergence evaluation if you actually have to put workers on the fields is far from trivial.

 

[GloatingSwine]

Like I said: tuning problems. Pops in sectors are supposed to experience increased ethos drift, making them more likely to end up with an ethos incompatible with your state ethos and policies (and thus become unhappy).

Even without factional annoyances, negative ethos drift makes pops conform which makes them happier which makes them more productive, so the player always wants to set up negative ethos drift strong enough to override the sector penalty many times over. The sector penalty to ethos drift isn't really doing anything right now, it's certainly never going to move a sector against the vast engine of negative ethos drift the player will inevitably have set up.

 

[PirateJack]

It was mentioned that it can build ethos specific buildings. And yes, the logical place to place those would be fields without any adjacency or native bonus.

Does it build and work them and at what priority?
You can actually formulate it out to some degree wich is better. But with Ethic divergence it is also a mater of longterm planning, something AI never was able too.
I would say the AI's aim should be to at least get down to 0 Ethics divergence/no Faction forming level of happiness. Or however close it can get with those insane empire policies imposed by the player it has to deal with.
Happiness and Ethics divergence evaluation if you actually have to put workers on the fields is far from trivial.

Actually, I think this should be decided by the governor type. I'd have it as the 'best' governors being those that give good bonuses with increased ethics divergence.

 

[Hecaton]

This is hardly crippling though since your AI opponents are bound by the same limitations. At least you can use your superior brain to optimize your core worlds. Besides, optimization is pretty damn different from "immersion" which the OP claimed was destroyed by sectors. In my opinion sectors increase immersion since you really can't micromanage a sprawling galactic empire.

I like the idea - for a civ/species that remotely resembles humans. Hive-mind aliens shouldn't necessarily work the same way, and the fact that each and every species uses the same system is kind of... strange. But, in the end, it removes choice from players, which is the biggest thing. When you know that you could micro that planet better than the AI but the game punishes you for trying... it's pretty disheartening. IMHO they should retain the ability to control build queues on sector worlds but let their resources go to the sector pool like normal (though they do need to do something about the sector governors embezzling the treasury.)

 

[grommile]

I like the idea - for a civ/species that remotely resembles humans. Hive-mind aliens shouldn't necessarily work the same way, and the fact that each and every species uses the same system is kind of... strange.

Why is it "strange" that Paradox decided to put boundaries on the difficulty of balancing their game design by deciding that empires would, for the most part, all use the same mechanics?

But, in the end, it removes choice from players, which is the biggest thing. When you know that you could micro that planet better than the AI but the game punishes you for trying... it's pretty disheartening.

I find it quite heartening. There is no such thing as optional micromanagement. If you can, then if you want to play well, you must.

 

[Kapitalisti]

I like the idea - for a civ/species that remotely resembles humans. Hive-mind aliens shouldn't necessarily work the same way, and the fact that each and every species uses the same system is kind of... strange. But, in the end, it removes choice from players, which is the biggest thing. When you know that you could micro that planet better than the AI but the game punishes you for trying... it's pretty disheartening. IMHO they should retain the ability to control build queues on sector worlds but let their resources go to the sector pool like normal (though they do need to do something about the sector governors embezzling the treasury.)

Balancing radically different forms of governments/species etc. would be an absolute nightmare. So ok, hive-mind aliens get to micromanage their entire sprawling empire (never mind how that hive-mind would communicate over countless light years) and presumably wouldn't have any sort of unrest from the drones. How would you prevent that from being OP as hell?

Besides, even the Zerg needed to decentralize into broods...

 

[Madzai]

I think major problem with Sectors, aside from current problems with AI, that be eventually fixed, i hope, is that even if Sectors are a macro-feature to reduce micro-managment, if something go terribly wrong in sectors, you can't solve it using other macro-features (aside from throwing money in it) - you always have to intervene at micro-level and deal with particular planets one by one or basically "let the sector go".

 

[Tibi088]

I think sectors are a good idea however the implementation is pretty bad.
I played a lot of mods that allowed more core planets and found that for me the optimal number of planets to control personally is 20-25. Above that i perefer using sectors. The 5 system limit is far too low.

 

[PirateJack]

Hive minds and other 'alien' government types will likely be included in a future DLC because they're essentially a major overhaul of the already developed systems.

 

[BjornB]

Sector Improvements
Since barely a day goes by without a new thread on the topic of sectors and enslavement, we would of course be remiss not to deal with this particular bugbear. We intend to spend a considerable amount of time on the sector AI for Heinlein, but I'm not going to go into specifics on bug fixing/AI improvements but rather on a series of new toggles that we intend to introduce to give the player more control over their sector. In addition to the current redevelopment/respect tile resource toggles, the following new toggles are planned for Heinlein:

• Whether sector is allowed to enslave/emancipate
• Whether sector is allowed to build spaceports and construction ships
• Whether sector is allowed to build military stations (this will replace the military sector focus)

We're also discussing having a sector toggle for building and maintaining local defense fleets, but we don't think we'll have time for it in Heinlein.


from: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...is-dev-diary-42-heinlein-patch-part-3.964098/ in case you missed it

 

[NarlantWeed]

It's not something I've thought about much, since there are other problems with the sector AI that could do with improving first, but I agree that there should be a limit on how large a sector can get. That said, doing so means leaders have to be looked at again as having a dozen sectors means most of them are not going to have governors, which just strikes me as wrong

I completely agree with this. Since there is a planet cap AND a sector cap, having sectors of unlimited size makes the sector cap basically pointless. The only reason to have more than one sector is to have different foci, but then you probably only need three (one for energy, minerals and research).

If each sector had its own planet limit (maybe equal to the size of your directly-managed worlds, 5 at game start) it would actually mean the sector limit becomes relevant. Also adds more realism because each governer would be responsible for, at most, five planets or so.

 

[Madzai]

No, we don't miss it and we are really grateful for these improvements, but it still don't address the problems of manual intervention (on planets in Sectors) being only way to fix situation if a Sector go wrong. We have to zero macro "Levers" to stabilize political (along with other things) situation in Sectors. Sure, we can deal with faction Leaders, but it's just dealing with consequence of Sector instability instead of original reason. At minimum we need somethings like "Edicts" or similar actions but for Sectors.

 

[Darkath]

Sector Improvements
Since barely a day goes by without a new thread on the topic of sectors and enslavement, we would of course be remiss not to deal with this particular bugbear. We intend to spend a considerable amount of time on the sector AI for Heinlein, but I'm not going to go into specifics on bug fixing/AI improvements but rather on a series of new toggles that we intend to introduce to give the player more control over their sector. In addition to the current redevelopment/respect tile resource toggles, the following new toggles are planned for Heinlein:

• Whether sector is allowed to enslave/emancipate
• Whether sector is allowed to build spaceports and construction ships
• Whether sector is allowed to build military stations (this will replace the military sector focus)

We're also discussing having a sector toggle for building and maintaining local defense fleets, but we don't think we'll have time for it in Heinlein.


from: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...is-dev-diary-42-heinlein-patch-part-3.964098/ in case you missed it

@Wiz @BjornB I think in the near future, you should really reduce the AI's "free reign" on sectors and increasingly give more toggles and actions for the player to finely macro manage their sectors. Planet management is a core mechanic of the game and should NOT be handled by an AI (which by definition take control away from the player) instead give to the player a way to quickly manage sectors and planets.

The sector "ai" if it cannot be scrapped, should then only act on precise player instructions rather than blindly following its scripts without regards to what the player actually wants.

 

[Randwarf]

I completely agree with this. Since there is a planet cap AND a sector cap, having sectors of unlimited size makes the sector cap basically pointless. The only reason to have more than one sector is to have different foci, but then you probably only need three (one for energy, minerals and research).

If each sector had its own planet limit (maybe equal to the size of your directly-managed worlds, 5 at game start) it would actually mean the sector limit becomes relevant. Also adds more realism because each governer would be responsible for, at most, five planets or so.

But couldn't sectors create sectors in themselves? just like a vassal of a vassal in CK2?

 

[napoleon_mayo]

Sector Improvements
Since barely a day goes by without a new thread on the topic of sectors and enslavement, we would of course be remiss not to deal with this particular bugbear. We intend to spend a considerable amount of time on the sector AI for Heinlein, but I'm not going to go into specifics on bug fixing/AI improvements but rather on a series of new toggles that we intend to introduce to give the player more control over their sector. In addition to the current redevelopment/respect tile resource toggles, the following new toggles are planned for Heinlein:

• Whether sector is allowed to enslave/emancipate
• Whether sector is allowed to build spaceports and construction ships
• Whether sector is allowed to build military stations (this will replace the military sector focus)

We're also discussing having a sector toggle for building and maintaining local defense fleets, but we don't think we'll have time for it in Heinlein.


from: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...is-dev-diary-42-heinlein-patch-part-3.964098/ in case you missed it

Thanks for this, but my biggest vice with sectors is them being able to stockpile resources, with me having no way of extracting those resources. Seems kinda silly that when I am facing near death in a galatic blowup with my biggest rival my sectors have tens of thousands of energy and minerals, that I could use to win the war, but I can't get them out of my sectors.

 

[Darkath]

But couldn't sectors create sectors in themselves? just like a vassal of a vassal in CK2?

Apparently we became dumber since CK2 and can't handle this kind of complexity

 

[Lost Northerner]

I think sectors are a good idea however the implementation is pretty bad.
I played a lot of mods that allowed more core planets and found that for me the optimal number of planets to control personally is 20-25. Above that i perefer using sectors. The 5 system limit is far too low.

I noticed this too. I'm currently allowing myself to have control of 150 core systems, modified it from defines.lua. I usually end up controlling something between 20-30 myself, rest I drop to sectors. So practically only keeping to myself ones I colonized and built myself, dropping conquered ones in to sectors.
Would really like if core system cap was at least 15 as base value.