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Stellaris Dev Diary #177 - Edict Rework

Greetings!

Today we’ll touch upon a subject dear to the hearts of many galactic rulers - namely Edicts!

Background
Edicts are meant to be a way for your empire to focus on certain issues without necessarily taking a permanent stance on them. More permanent stances on issues would be covered by Policies.

Although we felt that Edicts do fit this role pretty well, there were a couple of issues with the system that we think could be improved. The fact that Edicts would always time out felt like a little bit of unnecessary micromanagement at times, and didn’t really emphasize the feeling of “I am choosing to focus on these 2 things right now”. We felt that it would fit better if Edicts had a greater emphasis on making choices that you can go back and change, rather than being things you constantly go in and refresh.

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An old friend with a slight makeover. Some Edicts are now toggled on/off instead of being on a timer.​

Edict Capacity
Enter Edict Capacity – a new mechanic that puts a soft limit on how many Edicts of a certain type that you can have active at once. Similar to Starbase Capacity, your empire will suffer penalties if you exceed it, and the penalty in this case being Empire Sprawl. For every toggled and active Edict above the Edict Capacity, your Empire Sprawl will be increased by +25%.

By default, an empire will start with an Edict Capacity of 2, and can be modified by things like Authority, Civics and Ascension Perks. These values are very prone to being changed as more balance feedback comes in.

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Dictatorial and Imperial Authority now increases Edict Capacity by +1.​

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The God-Emperor knows best.​

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You can now vigorously enact more Edicts.​

Not all Edicts will use Edict Capacity, but rather only the ones that last until cancelled will. Edicts that can be toggled will have an Activation Cost and a Deactivation Cost, which is usually Influence. This means that you are paying the Influence when you are making changes, rather than paying to upkeep the Edicts you want.

Edicts that last until cancelled will be marked with a different icon from the edicts (and campaigns) that expire once their duration runs out.

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An example of two different Edicts. Red: toggled - lasts until cancelled and uses Edict Capacity. Blue: temporary - lasts for 10 years and does not use Edict Capacity.​

Edicts
Some of the Edicts have changed and we have added a couple of new ones, to better fit with the Edict Capacity. Let’s take a look at a few of them:

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Whenever you need to stimulate your economy, subsidies can be the way to go. There are Farming, Mining, Energy and Industrial subsidies.

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Neighbors suddenly turned hostile? Need to secure your borders? Pass this Edict to refocus your efforts!

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Has the galaxy become more hostile? Do you need to build a powerful fleet to project your power? Focus on Fleet Supremacy for a more powerful and imposing fleet.​

Pop Growth is problematic, so we have made some changes in the upcoming patch that will reduce Pop Growth from different sources across the board (more on that later). Food Policies are no more, and the popular Nutritional Plenitude is now a toggled Edict instead.

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No longer a food policy (they don’t exist anymore). There are different versions for Hive Minds and Rogue Servitors.​

Resource Edicts, Campaigns and Unity Ambitions
The model for the new Edict Capacity doesn’t fit very well for all types of Edicts, which is why the rare resource Edicts, Campaigns and Unity Ambitions remain unchanged and keep working like you are used to. This is also better for modding purposes, so that modders have the opportunity to use Edicts however they see best.

Finishing thoughts
Overall we feel like the new system better allows us to structure how the players get the tools they need to focus their empires for certain tasks. As we make more additions to the game in the future, this new system will also allow us to give the players more tools to address certain issues.

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That is all for this week! We will be back again next week with another dev diary, this time about some federation-related content!
 
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klickor said:
If I remember right we did have an edict for that at release I think. Like you got +15% to your chosen field but - 5% to the others. Would be neat since at different times in the game you need different techs. Would help if they buffed society a lot so you wouldnt just keep it on engineering through the whole game.

I think I used to get society first back then since robots werent as broken and you needed way more techs to get influence and able to even colonize different worlds. Also had border bonuses. Society were much stronger and even good to rush while now its mostly crap if you dont go bio ascension. Then changed it to physics for the upgraded FTL techs since they were vital in war when you didnt have choke points. And then mostly engineering for the rest of the game.

But they need to fix the tech categories as if it were introduced now you would never ever take it off engineering until you are in repeatables. Then maybe go for physics since upkeep cost for fleets hit EC harder than minerals so its slightly better but you could as well keep it at engineering.
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I didn't play the game at release, so I wouldn't know. I started when Utopia was new. Upgrading a Research Lab used to specialize it into one field. Now all Researchers are exactly the same. Now, the only things that change the balance of research outputs are Culture Workers and space deposits. My Engineering usually ends up my lowest output, which is discouraging knowing how many key techs it has for letting me do stuff in the game.
 
grekulf said:
Pop Growth is problematic, so we have made some changes in the upcoming patch that will reduce Pop Growth from different sources across the board (more on that later).
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Ooh, you got me so excited rght now. Maybe that's because my imagination is running rampant since you didn't tell us more, but I am so ready to see these changes. Are we finally going to get more interactive growth patterns, where pops come in faster if you have lots of available amenities, jobs, and housing? I so hope so.
 
I think looking at this brings up something that has been missing from this game since we first got the economy update, and that is an overall job/demographics page that has a breakdowns of jobs and stratas.

It would be nice to see a general overview page of jobs so I can see how many farmers I have before I increase their upkeep by .5.
 
Shark7 said:
On the other hand, Nutritional Plenitude is a non-starter for me in this form. It's just not worth it for the increase in sprawl. I am not going to do anything that could potentially hurt my game start by putting me over admin capacity early on and hurting the early game research speed. And by the time I do have the admin capacity to turn it on, honestly I don' t need it. I find nutritional Plenitude is mostly useful in the early game when you only have 1-3 planets and need those building slots opening up as quickly as possible. Of course this is also the point of the game where I am on a shoestring budget with admin capacity and don't have it to spare because I have better things to put in building slots than bureaucrats. Not to mention that +10% growth speed is not that big of a difference in the bigger picture (0.3 in most cases).
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That surprises me.

+10% empire sprawl from pops is insignificant in the early game, and trading off that increased pop empire sprawl for 10% growth on your own species (or something else equally valuable) is quite common do to these days when min-maxing, because, in the current form of empire sprawl, gaining 2 extra trait points for Unruly is a gift.

Getting the same benefit with an extra 5% happiness on top and having it apply to all your pops regardless of species at the cost of the empire sprawl and 25% increased food consumption is a steal. Sure, it is not as good as the current state where you get all of that without the increased empire sprawl, but it remains great.
 
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Squared79 said:
My first thought when reading this was, “what the hell am I going to spend influence on now?”

My second the thought was, “was this change made so I have more influence available for the new habitats? If the tech is now much sooner. Will still probably have a period of maxed out influence with nothing to spend it on though.”

^2
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I suppose it lets you feel more free to spend influence on resolutions. Perhaps they are also adding influence costs to some new things and felt they needed to reduce the costs elsewhere.
 
01. Edicts could have been untouched a bit longer whereas something like the vanishment of scroll-bars should have been already addressed and fixed a week ago.
02. The new stuff about edicts itself is pretty ... slim as well.
03. Even said slim stuff looks incomplete: The junior-partner of edicts ( planetary decisions ) should have been looked at, too. ( Actually campaigns, ambitions and edicts about strategic resources, too ). The UI should have been reworked as well since edicts, campaigns, ambitions and the edicts about strategic resources are all cluttered into.
04. Edicts have now a cap, "Hurray". Double influence-costs to change an edict sounds not that well thought out. ( At least the edicts run now ad infinitum ). But if an edict runs ad infinitum then the actual influence-costs of that specific edict run towards ... 0. Sounds not that well thought out, too. That's why "everyone" prays for edicts with monthly influence-costs ( which will still run ad infinitum ( for less micro-management ) ).
 
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Peter Ebbesen said:
I must admit that seeing just the skeleton of the system presented here, I could easily see most players just enact the Nutritional Plentitude edict at the start of game using their initial 100 influence and then forget about the other influence edicts for the rest of game unless they were playing a build with increased edict capacity. Let's see how it goes.

Also, I have to wonder about whether/how spiritualist will be changed. Currently its edict/ambition cost reduction is an extremely weak bonus and this makes it practically irrelevant.
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Given this change - it would be a nice buff to Spiritualists to remove the cost reduction but give them an effect bonus instead. So Spiritualist edicts are 15/30% better than everyone else's for example.
 
Atreides said:
Given this change - it would be a nice buff to Spiritualists to remove the cost reduction but give them an effect bonus instead. So Spiritualist edicts are 15/30% better than everyone else's for example.
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I like that idea.

To make it more interesting, make it multiplicative on BOTH positive and negatives of edicts.. and possibly increase the multiplier. If the multiplier only affects the positive aspect that strictly limits how powerful it can be - if it does both you can use a much larger one without overly unbalancing the game.
 
I've never been this person for other paradox games but fix your damn bugs! you released like two patches after federations and just moved on to this stuff already? It's nice but I don't care when I can't even declare a war while in a federation or build up my fleets because of ghost ships from ghost shipyards!
 
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I'm going to assume we'll see dev diary on pop growth. This one does raise questions about other things. No mention of healthcare campaign or drone campaign, are these going away? I would assume so, but figure I would ask. Planetary decisions, are we going to see a separate diary on those because there is encourage growth and distribute luxury goods, which are both things that impact pop growth. Then the their are the decisions to stop or slow growth, which are mostly regarded as traps because you can resettle. This gets us to a, are we going to see a resettlement edicts because I'd very much would love to see the whole "Pops are everything! You must do everything you can to grow them! Also going to do this is such a way that it really confuses new players, by saying 'colonize everything' when what I really mean is 'once it's worth colonizing for your empires, do so!'" Gets annoying when people get butthurt when you call them out for giving new players bad advice because you fully get how "colonize everything regardless of habitability" is going to be interpreted; especially, since there all the old guides based habitability percent no mattering. The new thing, of wait till you have robots or a migration treaty is pretty different from the old "colonize everything!" because you are actually giving a damn about habitability. Anyways looking forward to the diary on pop change because it's pretty tedious that pops matter so much and that results in stuff being bumped down on the power scale.

Anyways, as for edicts any chance we could get a list of the ones that ready to be seen. I'm interested in what the new costs are, both to implement and then any costs for ones that we have to turn off. I suppose this does solve the issue of some being bad because of their high influence cost, if they always stay on, that does make the cost less of an issue and maybe we'll see costs adjusted anyways.

One concern I do have, if pop growth ends up being considered the end all be all, then nutritional plenitude and it's counterparts will be considered mandatory by almost every player, which means people only get to choice one edict at a time. If you can't make pop growth less important, you might want to consider to just removing nutritional plenitude altogether. I'd rather eat the nerf of it going away and have some choices on what edicts I grab, at least when I can cheese it with more bureaucrats in the early game and maybe even into the mid game. Than to have a setup where I always start my game by selecting it before doing anything else.

Also going to second the idea of having it display tradition and research time increases if it's going to put us over admin capacity. That setup would actually help more players because "this increases your sprawl by X," really doesn't tell the player much because not all setups eat the same penalties for be over capacity and most don't want to do the mental math check to figure out what that actually means. So the player likely won't know how that truly impacts them until they eat the sprawl increase and then hover over the admin capacity to see what is really going on. A setup of "If you implement this edict, your empire sprawl will increase by 25%, this will put you Y over your admin capacity and that will result in X time to adopt new technology and Z time to adopt new traditions.
 
Using technology to allow a Tiering effect of edicts would be nice. So Nutritional plentitude might be level 1 of 3 for example, and by Level 3 you are spending 100% food for +30% growth, for example.
 
I thought that edicts were meant to be an influence sink. Having said that, the new Galactic Council provides a fresh option for an influence sink so maybe edicts don't need to fill this role.

As others have stated, unless the penalty for edicts is high enough then the influence cost to deactivate seems like a bad idea that will just encourage edicts to be set and never changed. This will have the opposite effect to what is stated as the objective.

Dev diary 102 talks about changing edicts away from a monthly cost. That was before the changes in MegaCorp though with the galactic market. I wonder whether some issues started around ongoing edict cost are no longer an issue since the market can be used to offset that.

I hope the planetary decisions for growth remain but that it can be changed to an ongoing effect with a monthly cost. It feels good enacting decisions for some planets and not others but having them expire is painful. It will be interesting to see how you handle pop growth. Do you look at mods for inspiration like Carrying Capacity?
 
Atreides said:
Using technology to allow a Tiering effect of edicts would be nice. So Nutritional plentitude might be level 1 of 3 for example, and by Level 3 you are spending 100% food for +30% growth, for example.
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Better to gate something like that behind traditions; Arguably too many aspects of game progress are already gated by tech.
 
I see some possible issues here.

Early on I'm probably going to look at Map the Stars and Nutritional Plenitude and conclude that 80 influence each to pop them on is a good deal. 80 influence to get useful bonuses indefinitely - feels like that will be appealing. But then, later on it's going to be a different story. Say I'm thinking of using Mineral Subsidies or something. Now the equation is that I have to spend twice as much influence to change bonuses which is far less appealing than 80 influence to gain a bonus where previously I had nothing.

Now consider that influence is needed to expand until such time as you can get Total War - and when I'm thinking about that 160 influence to change a bonus, I'm thinking of the 3 or 4 star systems I might be able to acquire instead. That might well net me an entire planet. So my worry is that what many of us will do is pick the two most immediately valuable bonuses early and then just never look at it again until we get Total War and influence stops being scarce. I already never propose anything in the GC (partly because someone else will do it for me most of the time) until after I get Total War.

I am loathe to propose something like splitting influence into Diplo Influence and Admin Influence (you could use a dove icon for Diplo and a paper icon for Admin, and oh - hey maybe you could add millitary influence as well and... ahhh. Damn) but right now the way influence is set up and what it is used for is maybe becoming a problem. With a limit on the number of edicts we can use at a time and a downside to many of them, does it really make sense to have them also cost a significant amount of the most valuable resource in the game as well? The limit provides a nice opportunity cost, and the downside provides a direct cost. Adding an influence cost to enable and disable will mostly have the effect of making most players almost never change edicts until influence stops being scarce which I suspect is not your intention.
 
you know, as cool as this all sounds... i have to wonder

of all the things that need fleshing out and reworking in stellaris

WHY EDICTS!?

wat

what is this prioritization, like lets be real here, there are more pressing matters than edicts

how about the military aspect of the game, how about the whole unity system, how about the outliner?

what about sectors, useless empire micro in certain areas, while lacking micro in others?

what about l gates still being an issue, what about all endgame crisis being completly scewed?

what about bringing certain dlcs up to date? what about the bugs that actively impede gameplay?

how about fixing/ reworking the fleet manager?

i could go on and on and on... i doubt ANYONE complained about edicts...
 
this is just showing the real problem of stellaris, the creeping issue of content bloat,

more and more nice things that lack the required "depth" to stand on their own, while making more and more content obsolete. Its bloating the game with outdated mechanics and features with every single update that drops

all the while eating MASSIVE amounts of dev ressources and time to even keep up with the feature bloat. Only to rework one mechanic or the other, and completly introduce new, much more problematic issues than before, instead of fixing old ones (the planet overhaul was a prime example of this)


warframe has this issue right now

seems like stellaris is going to follow

concerning
 
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