Brutal Honesty from a game developer, this is whats wrong with stellaris.

[methegrate]

Sure.... but it makes choices very straight forward and boring... there are often only ONE optimal way to do stuff

Before we tried logistics and transportation, this is where I would start.

I think a logistics system is still absolutely critical in warfare (and wildly overdue), but I'm not as excited about one for the economy. I think the bigger issue is that everything is still built around an optimization game with one clear, best solution for pretty much every mechanic.

I'd like to see far more tradeoffs. I'd like every player choice to come with real consequences beyond just "X costs Y." It's actually why I really, really like the planet building system they introduced. Population grows so slowly that each building choice you make is a real decision. If the rest of the economy worked that way I think it would be a huge improvement.

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

Before we tried logistics and transportation, this is where I would start.

I think a logistics system is still absolutely critical in warfare (and wildly overdue), but I'm not as excited about one for the economy. I think the bigger issue is that everything is still built around an optimization game with one clear, best solution for pretty much every mechanic.

I'd like to see far more tradeoffs. I'd like every player choice to come with real consequences beyond just "X costs Y." It's actually why I really, really like the planet building system they introduced. Population grows so slowly that each building choice you make is a real decision. If the rest of the economy worked that way I think it would be a huge improvement.

I think logistics for war and economy is intertwined and can't really be separated as mechanics... that would be a mistake in my opinion. As i said... it does not have t be super detailed like in Distant Worlds.

I also agree that the new planet system is interesting to play with, but only to a certain degree. Once your economy grows beyond a few developed worlds then buildings on individual planets no longer matter since your economy is always global not local, that is my problem with how it works and why I refer to Mana as one of the problems.

 

[BlackUmbrellas]

Paradox games are all about power asymmetry being defined at gamestart. You wouldn't like to play an EUIV where there was a flat difficulty curve and an Ulm World Conquest was just as easy as a French World Conquest.

The problem with Stellaris is not that the power differential between starting civics is too large. The problem with Stellaris is that the power differential is too small. So once you get past the very-early-game difficulties, everything plays the same.

They need to INCREASE machine's OP-ness so that there is a game-changing power difference, not try and nerf them down to being on the level with Fanatic Pacifism.

Here's the big problem with that idea: other Paradox games are, as far as I'm aware, based on a pre-set starting configuration that doesn't change.

Due to being historical games, the "game board" is always set up the same way. The vast power disparities between playable factions in those games arises from differences of scale/scope- playing a barony gives you very different priorities than playing as an imperial successor-state or something.

Stellaris doesn't do that. Stellaris creates a fresh game board with heavily randomized elements, every time, based on the idea that a lot of empires are emerging at the same time. You can't "zoom in" to play as one planet within a larger empire like you can play as a minor subservient family in a CK game. All empires are fundamentally using the same tools and scope.

Balance matters a LOT more in this context, because you have no ability to predict or plan ahead for the existence of other empires and their capabilities. Or, well, you do, but that's a result of the game's lack of tech variety more than anything.

If Stellaris was built along a design philosophy like other Paradox games, or, say, New Horizons uses- where the empires are all pre-defined, with clearly established strengths, weaknesses, and timelines of activity- then "machines should be super OP!" would be fine, because you could argue they should be like the Borg- some distant, extremely powerful empire that you need time and distance to overcome. But they're not. They can appear right next to you, start with the same stuff you do, and drastically outpace you in a way you can't avoid or meaningfully counter.

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

Here's the big problem with that idea: other Paradox games are, as far as I'm aware, based on a pre-set starting configuration that doesn't change.

Due to being historical games, the "game board" is always set up the same way. The vast power disparities between playable factions in those games arises from differences of scale/scope- playing a barony gives you very different priorities than playing as an imperial successor-state or something.

Stellaris doesn't do that. Stellaris creates a fresh game board with heavily randomized elements, every time, based on the idea that a lot of empires are emerging at the same time. You can't "zoom in" to play as one planet within a larger empire like you can play as a minor subservient family in a CK game. All empires are fundamentally using the same tools and scope.

Balance matters a LOT more in this context, because you have no ability to predict or plan ahead for the existence of other empires and their capabilities. Or, well, you do, but that's a result of the game's lack of tech variety more than anything.

If Stellaris was built along a design philosophy like other Paradox games, or, say, New Horizons uses- where the empires are all pre-defined, with clearly established strengths, weaknesses, and timelines of activity- then "machines should be super OP!" would be fine, because you could argue they should be like the Borg- some distant, extremely powerful empire that you need time and distance to overcome. But they're not. They can appear right next to you, start with the same stuff you do, and drastically outpace you in a way you can't avoid or meaningfully counter.

Balance is a relative thing in my opinion. First of all it is only important for multi-player where the goal is beating the other human players. In single player internal balance means almost nothing. It just means certain starting combinations are more or less challenging to play with.

I also think a game can be designed around the concept of asymmetry even if it is like Stellaris. The fact that empires can rise and fall during the game should be much more frequent. Empires should reasonably fall and fracture even on their own without outside influence in many cases. This would then produce an inherently asymmetric gaming experience from start to finish.

But Paradox probably build their games around too much focus on multi-player for this to ever occur, that is my bet. Even if they don't really support competitive multi-player they still need to balance the game for some multi-player capacity.

 

[LWE]

Infrastructure doesn’t have much to do with choices and optimization. Civ4 is a fairly deep game without having much of the it, and I doubt adding transportation costs is necessarily going to make Stellaris economy more interesting. For instance, Stellaris trade is far less interesting to me than planet management. Having to manage the collection of such an elementary production resource as minerals doesn't sound that appealing to me, tbh. I don't think "if only I could dedicate resources to transporting minerals from this system!" when I play the game.

Ultimately, everything is an optimization problem in 4x strategy games.

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

Infrastructure doesn’t have much to do with choices and optimization. Civ4 is a fairly deep game without having much of the it, and I doubt adding transportation costs is necessarily going to make Stellaris economy more interesting. For instance, Stellaris trade is far less interesting to me than planet management. Having to manage the collection of such an elementary production resource as minerals doesn't sound that appealing to me, tbh. I don't think "if only I could dedicate resources to transporting minerals from this system!" when I play the game.

Ultimately, everything is an optimization problem in 4x strategy games.

I don't rate Civ frachise to be much better in this regard either... it is rather simpleminded in my opinion as well. There are no rise and fall of empires, no real internal politics or interesting diplomacy. It is all about optimization and ultimately I get bored with that game after an hour or two as well...

So in my opinion should not be used as a good reference... I'n not interested in the bod standard boring 4x concept... to me it is outdated. I want something deeper that you can't just play through min/max. Everything you do should have consequences, some you might not see until much later depending on other choice or choices by agents which you do not directly control. That in my opinion would be awesome.

I want true Grand Strategy not this simple 4x stuff, that is boring...

 

[LWE]

Sounds like you want a game of another genre. Stellaris is, after all, a 4x - it's even described as being less of a "Grand Strategy" than other Paradox titles. Maybe something like a "World Simulator" genre, where the simulation - abstraction dichotomy is pushed hard towards simulation, and strategical aspects are really downplayed. Out of Paradox games, Victoria 2 is definitely the closest to it, but even it doesn't quite meet your demands.

I've read Songs of the Eons developer diary. Sounds intriguing.

 

[KingAlamar]

Finding things to do mid [or late game] that isn't just busy-work is the problem. For example in 2.2.0 the new economics system was VASTLY more engaging. However a lot of things seemed like busy-work to me at least [micro heavy] so while a nice attempt it wasn't anywhere near polished.

2.3.X seems to be headed in the right direction but time will tell. If we still have "micro problems" in a couple of years then maybe it wasn't as good a move as I would have thought.

Seeing as how "rescanning" could be largely automated that might be something that balances adding more stuff to do without it seeming like busy work ... at least no so much like busy work


EDIT: I see a lot more potential in push-pull diplomacy as many others have pointed out. That could be really interesting if a lot of care / thought went into the implementation.

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

Sounds like you want a game of another genre. Stellaris is, after all, a 4x - it's even described as being less of a "Grand Strategy" than other Paradox titles. Maybe something like a "World Simulator" genre, where the simulation - abstraction dichotomy is pushed hard towards simulation, and strategical aspects are really downplayed. Out of Paradox games, Victoria 2 is definitely the closest to it, but even it doesn't quite meet your demands.

I've read Songs of the Eons developer diary. Sounds intriguing.

I don't expect Paradox to make a game similar to Songs of the Eons... just that they made Stellaris more like their older Grand Strategy products where war was not the only way to go forward... or at least not the major thing you needed to be powerful and enjoy the game.

The current game offer very little reward for allot of mental work (minutia, repeating tasks) unless you want to stomp the relatively weak AI in wars.

 

[LWE]

I don't expect Paradox to make a game similar to Songs of the Eons... just that they made Stellaris more like their older Grand Strategy products where war was not the only way to go forward... or at least not the major thing you needed to be powerful and enjoy the game.

Which older Grand Strategy products are these? EU4? EU3? EU2? These are far worse in these regard. Internal development is almost completely lacking in EU2/3 and is barebones in EU4. I enjoyed my Celestial Empire game in Stellaris, I absolutely couldn't do the same thing in any of the EUs.

Vicky2? It's quite similar to Stellaris in war/peace balance, in my experience.

I haven't played CK2, unfortunately.

 

[Zoolimar]

Espionage is mostly in the Society tree. Intel points are the currency to spend on actions. Your empire capital by default earns intel points; rates are wholly up in the air. However the big rule requirement is borders and distance are meaningful. You must be able to get a "spy ship" or "diplomatic courier" to the space you wish to work in. These ships are produced similar to science ships - equipped with the best you have to offer. They are hard to detect but there will be a base module and perhaps ship module to aid in finding them.

We already have unity, influence and perhaps minor artefacts to deal with as just counters that allow to buy "things". Stellaris needs less of them not more.

You want spies then make them. Build a building and get the spy job. Thus you now have a spy that protects his own sector or just a single planet if the planet is not in the sector. You also can send the spies on missions that would need more or less depending on your tech level and how far you are sending the spy - how many jumps, how deep into target empire and so on. After mission is done spy must also spend the time to go back to the planet. So you can naturally get more missions done against border planets of the neighbouring empires.

The UI could be just an overlay with spy figures on top of systems of galaxy map and maybe protection number on sectors if sector overlay is up. You select the spy and then right click on the target selecting the mission.

 

[scaper12123]

Quite a few interesting ideas here!

 

[KingAlamar]

In Paradox's defense I like [on paper] how they want to handle Stellaris. Specifically I believe they wanted to make a space-based strategy game that embraces a lot of the SCIFI [and SCI Fantasy] tropes. The game isn't necessarily hard-science based but more of a take on "pop science meets Star Trek meets Star Wars".

As such I don't mind military power being a huge, even primary, consideration. I will obviously agree that things like Diplomacy, War Systems, "push pull trade options", etc. would all make the game better but I'm not going to criticize Paradox too much for their overall vision. Lets see how upcoming Diplomacy, Espionage, and similar DLCs turn out and then see if we're headed in a good direction.

Devil's Advocate: I have wished that there was more "victory conditions" other than "score" or "sole survivor"

 

[Monturiol]

Here's the big problem with that idea: other Paradox games are, as far as I'm aware, based on a pre-set starting configuration that doesn't change.

Due to being historical games, the "game board" is always set up the same way. The vast power disparities between playable factions in those games arises from differences of scale/scope- playing a barony gives you very different priorities than playing as an imperial successor-state or something.

Stellaris doesn't do that. Stellaris creates a fresh game board with heavily randomized elements, every time, based on the idea that a lot of empires are emerging at the same time. You can't "zoom in" to play as one planet within a larger empire like you can play as a minor subservient family in a CK game. All empires are fundamentally using the same tools and scope.

Balance matters a LOT more in this context, because you have no ability to predict or plan ahead for the existence of other empires and their capabilities. Or, well, you do, but that's a result of the game's lack of tech variety more than anything.

If Stellaris was built along a design philosophy like other Paradox games, or, say, New Horizons uses- where the empires are all pre-defined, with clearly established strengths, weaknesses, and timelines of activity- then "machines should be super OP!" would be fine, because you could argue they should be like the Borg- some distant, extremely powerful empire that you need time and distance to overcome. But they're not. They can appear right next to you, start with the same stuff you do, and drastically outpace you in a way you can't avoid or meaningfully counter.

Oh, I agree totally.
But this is an argument for a prescripted galactic map, not an argument against power differentials.

Peace in this game is extremely boring. Which makes this game lean towards favoring military.

What leads to the game favouring military is that the non-military interactions you can have with your enemies are extremely limited.
(Which I guess could be the same as saying "peace is boring")
I'd like something akin to Civ VI's missionary mechanics: you have a bunch of nonmilitary cultural / espionage units, that can ignore borders and snoop around enemy civilizations pouring cultural influence on them. If you could spend your peacetime trying to zerg rush your opponents with Psyops Ships that encourage enemy planets to break away and join you, this would make peace less boring and give you a nonmilitary means of expansion, while not requiring a big new interface because it's still just ships flying around on the galactic map.

I don't want to insist on a strictly nonmilitary expansion game too much; because I like how EUIV does it. You can nonmilitary your way to a grand coalition that can stomp your enemies, but in the end you do need a war to actually enforce your will on your neighbour. The "nonmilitary" part is the clever arrangement of your pieces in the lead up to war, not a strict replacement for war.

 

[moridin84]

I think people need to appreciate that if you've been playing the game for 3 years, for hundreds of hours, your opinion that "the game is bad" or "the game is boring" doesn't have a lot of weight. If it was really bad you would have stopped playing a long time ago. And any game is going to be boring after hundreds of hours.

Saying that, I actually do agree that the midgame can be boring. It's just the overly negative attitude these people have makes me roll my eyes.

The problem that I have with the midgame is that sometimes I'm just waiting for the end game crisis to happen. I can't or don't want to go to war so I'm just building up my fleet to prepare for it.

Adding more exploration isn't going to fix that. The Great Khan mid game crisis can be fun but it only fires sometimes. Internal politics is the obvious solution to the "boring midgame" but Paradox simply haven't managed to get it right yet *shrugs*.

 

[Mikhail_Mengsk]

I think most of the "boredom problems" could be solved with the "diplomacy and internal politics" patch that they'll release some time in the future. The rest are omeopathic suggestions: making exploration meaningful over the entire game may slightly help keeping things interesting, but it won't be much more than "rescan all your systems as soon as you reach next Scanning Tech", and if you find useful resources in other races' territory you'll still be stuck with the current minimal diplomatic frame to operate within.

 

[Mikhail_Mengsk]

I think people need to appreciate that if you've been playing the game for 3 years, for hundreds of hours, your opinion that "the game is bad" or "the game is boring" doesn't have a lot of weight. If it was really bad you would have stopped playing a long time ago. And any game is going to be boring after hundreds of hours.

This doesn't make any sense.

One could rack hundreds of hour of early games because he likes the initial phase of discovering the galaxy, then drop every playthrough as soon as he discovers it, because midgame is intolerably boring to him. Another guy could have racked up hours just for achievements because he is a completionist. Some others could have sunk many hours just to try and see if the game was worth the money spent on it, and then drop it. Another important factor is the sheer number of patches/DLC that allow a player to try new things quite ofted, maybe hoping the new features will ease midgame boredom, then discovering they don't and dropping the game again.

Having a lot of hours in a game doesn't mean it can't be a boring game.

I agree with the rest of your post, though.

 

[Monturiol]

I think people need to appreciate that if you've been playing the game for 3 years, for hundreds of hours, your opinion that "the game is bad" or "the game is boring" doesn't have a lot of weight.

Do, please, tell me more about how my lengthy experience makes one somehow LESS perspicacious than a n00b.
One feels that such an assessment may be somehow... self-serving.

If it was really bad you would have stopped playing a long time ago.

Joke's on you, I just have OCD.

 

[LWE]

Oh, I agree totally.
But this is an argument for a prescripted galactic map, not an argument against power differentials.

What leads to the game favouring military is that the non-military interactions you can have with your enemies are extremely limited.
(Which I guess could be the same as saying "peace is boring")
I'd like something akin to Civ VI's missionary mechanics: you have a bunch of nonmilitary cultural / espionage units, that can ignore borders and snoop around enemy civilizations pouring cultural influence on them. If you could spend your peacetime trying to zerg rush your opponents with Psyops Ships that encourage enemy planets to break away and join you, this would make peace less boring and give you a nonmilitary means of expansion, while not requiring a big new interface because it's still just ships flying around on the galactic map.

I don't want to insist on a strictly nonmilitary expansion game too much; because I like how EUIV does it. You can nonmilitary your way to a grand coalition that can stomp your enemies, but in the end you do need a war to actually enforce your will on your neighbour. The "nonmilitary" part is the clever arrangement of your pieces in the lead up to war, not a strict replacement for war.

I usually find the whole “non military units” thing to be quite annoying. It’s often a Red Queen’s race. I don’t think that peace should be waged similar to war.

For me, Stellaris peace is roughly par with Vicky2. Sure, there are boring bits, but it’s far above EU4. I finished 7 Stellaris games, abandoned 1, got an early defeat in 1. I still can’t finish my EU4 games. There’s one I occasionally keep playing, maybe I’ll finish it someday...

 

[Kayden_II]

I think people need to appreciate that if you've been playing the game for 3 years, for hundreds of hours, your opinion that "the game is bad" or "the game is boring" doesn't have a lot of weight.

I see this argument very often, but hundreds or thousands of played hours also include "wasted" ones since the respective game(s) has / have to be abandoned for what-ever reason(s) and in general, it's pretty suspicious, that critics are suddenly not valid anymore, just because the respective players have reached a mystical / arbitrary hours-limit or a mystical / arbitrary hours-per-bucks-ratio.

01. If you have played hundreds / thousands of hours with the SAME game then it's suspicious to say, that the game is "bad", but as "Mikhail_Mengsk" said, PDS has this behaviour to change this game A. quite radically and B. quite often, so that hundreds / thousands of played hours could rather be a consequence of the curiosity for each of the zillion NEW game-versions ...
02. As I said, "wasted" hours count, too ...
03. AfaIK, "modded" hours also count, which means, that the vanilla-game "decorates" pretty much itself with "foreign feathers" in cases in which the players have played (hundreds / thousands of hours) with mods and this becomes more and more meaningful the more mods (at the same time) or the more complete overhaul-mods (like Star Trek: New Horizons) you play.