The game is micro-hell

[Asuzu]

So I play this game from the day of release, which is a while, and I play it a lot.

Every once in a while I reboot it to check the new DLCs coming out and how the game changes progress.

Just playing 1000 stars Grand Admiral game, for the maximum contents (20 AI empires, 5 Fallen Empires, 3 Raiders)
150 years in I find myself in a micro-hell, just barely managing 15 fleets and 40 planets.
The automated governor is beyond inept to make any use of the planets I give to the AI if I hope to get any resources out of them.

Each and every thing requires my undivided attention here and there with no way to automate the basics and have fun either conquering everyone or playing political games.

Let's go over the topmost offenders:

1) Outliner

That thing has been there from release, and is clearly outdated. Trying to manage all your stuff from the thin right sidebar with a miniature scroll is beyond abysmal user experience.

At the very least - split farmable Ground Facilities (Planets/Habitats/Ringworlds), Space Installations (Star Bases/Utility Megastructures), Fleets + Armies, and Civilian ships apart into their respective tabs for ease of access to see the lists, and work from there.
Having to scroll entire Outliner to find the new Colony ship or my fleets through all my 40 planets and 20 Star Bases is just an offensive experience. And no, shrinking and expanding accordeon controls do not help it one bit, because then you just hide another information you will miss. Left sidebar is barely used anyway - I literally only use it to click "Situation Log" and "Technology", and rarely sometimes other stuff once in 3 hours (like Policies Species etc). So it is time to actually make it useful? Maybe move the contents back to top (where they were on release, btw), and use sidebars for more pressing content (left sidebar for Planets, right sidebar for Fleets, for example)

I believe the company has enough money from all the DLC shenanigans to afford to hire a proper UI designer and resolve this.
The old Outliner has to go, and the new UI for managing a huge star empire has to come in.

2) Notifications & Popups

Since Stellaris is using gutted CK2 engine.. where are notification settings?

It was a great feature that worked perfectly fine, and allowed player to expressly setup - which notifications he wanted as a popup in his face, which ones he wanted just as a tiny icon reminder on top, and which ones he doesn't give a flying fudge about.
Considering how much stuff is going on around in these sandbox games, it makes sense to filter the information, otherwise it's distracting flood.

The game doesn't bother notifying me that a new Colony ship is ready and needs orders, now removed the anomaly notification popup, so I have to manually find them on the map again. but it does popup in my face that some Prawns in the backwater corner of the galaxy became more Militaristic, like I care.
See, this is why we need those "Notification Settings", and need them badly.
This way the player can define that the event is important and requires attention (e.g. "New building slot available!"), and some events he doesn't care about (some backwater aliens became more Xenophilic of Pedophilic, whatever).

Open Endless Space 2 notification settings and freeze in awe - you can set up each and every event to notify you with a popup or not. You can just enable everything, then disable the unnecessary ones as they come in, and in 10 turns of the game you have perfectly fixed up notifications, that are informative and don't distract you. And that's turn-based game!

Just please get this done, it;s been years of us stuck with 1 notification option in game settings "Display Popups Yes/No". That is just sad for a huge strategy sandbox real-time game.

3) Pop Jobs Interface & Priorities

Once and for all, there is no need to invent bicycle. It's done, it's out there. Let the player manually build a ladder of jobs in the importance order he desires, favoring some jobs and disfavoring others.

The automated job weights are
- Clogging CPU
- Rarely ever fit what the player wants and the planet needs

Try making a simple test - make a species with Intelligent, build a bunch of research labs, hit unhappiness, and build an amenity building. News flash - your pops prefer to stay in research, and will never work amenities. Even manually putting them into amenity jobs, as soon as they see there is a research job available they are better at, they're gone, and your planet is dropping into spiral of unhappiness. So please, let the player decide which jobs go in which order, and be done with it.

That means, when I build a mining colony, and it has a city district, do NOT put pops randomly into Clerk jobs. Put them into mining, because I need minerals, I do not need Clerks.
And while at it, get rid of + - microbuttons, these are just offensive UI elements to manage hundreds of pops. The whole 2.0 update was going on about how cool it is to have very tall worlds, and then you guys put + - button to manage 100 pop jobs? And no, Shift-clicking it doesn't do the trick.
Replace the current + - interface with drag-and-drop where the player can arrange jobs however he sees fit, and the pops fill those jobs in that exact order.

If you are completely out of ideas, look at job management interface in AoW Planetfall, and copy from there.
Player can do amazing things there - can favorite and disfavorite any jobs, and the game will sort the pops in needed order right away.
All done with a few mouse clicks! Literally 1-3 clicks per new colony and I have NEVER to come back and fix what pops are doing what jobs! Compare this to the mind-bogging experience of Stellaris +- buttons.
It's your purchased Paradox company anyway so you can copypaste I guess. Or invite their UI designer and ask him to help. There is no shame in it.

4) Automate Resettlement & Planet Maintenance

There is nothing more annoying and boring than revisiting your shitty Rural worlds and fix the leftovers, resettling overflowing unemployed pops and cleaning trash.

As In Endless Space 2, in the colony interface you simply select another colony to send population to. From now on, excess population will pack up and automatically leave for the other pasture.
No need to manually go over your 50 planets and click Resettle Resettle Resettle
One simple feature shows respect to player and reduces the micro hell.

Just need a feature "Resettle Unemployed pops" on the planet, pick destination planet, done.
And no, it should not cost anything, it's a basic core mechanic to help player reduce the micro hell.

5) Obnoxious Invasion & Warscore Mechanics

Declared war to vassalize an empire. Had to trash both their fleet and their Defensive Pact buddy fleet.
Took over ALL of their space stations. That's it, they literally have no means to make ships and come back, ever.
There is no "Call to War" mechanic so they cannot get help anywhere. They are done. Their capital worlds are taken over.
32% warscore.
Now you require the player to grind each and every of their habitats, planets, whatever. And they spam a lot of those.

Whoever thought this system was good, was wrong. It is not. All it does is annoying the player and forcing him to make repetitive boring grind actions "Land army", "Next shithole", "Land army", "Uhh what was I doing?" "Ah Land Army". All of this is done by clicks in tiny Outliner interface to select your army ships, click planet, invade, next, with constant misclicks here and there. It is beyond abysmal user experience.

Looking at Endless Space 2 (again), they have done with army logistics much more graciously - they got rid of Master of Orion-esque Army/Troop ships, and instead those military ships represent a specific amount of Manpower, which is actually an invasion/troop force. So let's say a Frigate would have some marine troopers, while a Battleship can land a serious ground force with Aircraft/Tanks/Giant Death Robots/whatever.
So getting rid of physical army ships to navigate them all over the place would already help a lot. Right now all they offer is goofy experience when the AI has all his army ships stacked somewhere just to be obliterated by randomly passing hostile fleet, or you literally forgot your army ships somewhere to get popped by AI. It doesn't offer any good experience. Not to mention how many commanders I forgot leading armies after merging, just dying in ground battle when their unit is lost, up to the point that players deem commander leaders completely useless.

- Getting rid of army ships will unclog a lot of CPU for AI management, same as reduce player annoyance micro, it is literally thousands of extra unnecessary army fleets gone from the game to improve performance
- Just make your battle fleets represent specific amount of invasion power, and when your fleet docks the planet and bombing, you can click "Invade" same as before. The power of invading army will depend on your fleet composition (bigger ships carry more advanced armies) and army researches.
- Each fleet now can have 2 leaders in it - an Admiral doing space stuff, and Commander doing ground stuff. Can even combine, whatever.

If you are unwilling to get rid of the army clownfiesta, at the very least some core rules of war have to change.
Same is an AoW Planetfall - losing your Capital World must be GG, no options. war is over. All remaining colonies are thrown into anarchy.
This will require player to think twice about leaving his Capital unguarded and open for backstabs, this will show some serious defense effort at the Capital and so on.
Right now, Capital World doesn't mean shit. "Oh, lost my capital, -10% warscore, because I have 100 more shit worlds, whatever".

At present, after waging just 1 war and having to undergo the obnoxious process of invading each and every world/habitat, looking at another empire to wage war with, I shudder - I don't want this experience. I would rather close Stellaris and play another game, where waging war is more fun. My concept of fun does not include repetitive micromanaging clicking of army fleets to land on every shithole. This is exactly what filmmakers cover under the curtains and say "5 days passed...", when the action is not worth seeing and spending time on.
If they lost their Capital world and their means of fleet production - the war is over, gg it was fun, next.

6) Influence & New Edicts

Cool new edicts. I wish I had Influence to use them.

So much weight is put on influence it is not even fun anymore:
- Build an Outpost? Influence
- Elections? Influence
- Make a Non-aggression/Research/Commercial pact? Influence
- Build any Habitat, Megastructure, including simple Gates (like metro)? Influence, buddy
- Make Claims to go to war? Influence of course
- Need to do a planet decision like Ecumenopolis or even "Stop making robots"? (lol why this is costing me anything, it's a basic game mechanic to reduce micro)? Need influence bro
Anything I have missed? Ah right, every fart in the Galactic Community like veto and proposing new stuff also costs Influence.

Back in a day I was at least able to enable Map the Stars edict, while it was still relevant, and there was something to explore.
Now, I just stare at it 40 years in,. when there are literally no systems to survey.
160 Influence for Map the Stars??? Seriously? That's 3 systems worth.
200 Influence to affect elections? That's absurd amount, when I get +4 per month... I can build a ringworld with that.

Anyway - guys just get someone sit down, play the actual game and figure out the real new Influence pricing. Influence is being taxed ways too heavy with too much put on it, and is a very tight hole to enjoy content through (like new Edicts, for example)

Right now, I consider the entire Edict update to be useless, simply because
- Only 1 edict per time without penalties, without any ability to get more
- Edict gains are simply not worth the Influence costs
- In current meta Influence is more precious than Living Metal and spending it on shit edicts is just a no-no

I believe that is enough for start.
I am done buying new DLC for this game now as I don't really see any progress, and the more content Paradox is slapping on top of Stellaris, it just makes the game less and less enjoyable and more and more micro hellish.
If the developers take it to heart and actually work on reducing the amount of micro hell in Stellaris, it might be worth a shot again.
Meanwhile, I would rather play games that respect their players and try to reduce the amount of micro to minimum (AoW Planetfall, for example)

Cheers,
Asuzu

Edits: Spelling and grammar. English is not my native, sorry.

 

[Zag14]

Try Automatic pop migration and Tiny outliner mods, it helps me a lot in micro my big empire

 

[arosenberger14]

The outliner is by far the worst offender. How anyone can think that the vanilla outliner is in any way acceptable with the current game is beyond me. Like so many other systems in Stellaris it just breaks down once you have more than a dozen-ish planets.

The mid and late game experience is just straight up broken in so many ways. We don't just need a few tweaks here and there, the devs needs to take a step back, look at the game as a whole, and plan out a lot of fixes to the UI, AI, and game balance.

Its been this way since Megacorp, over a year and three new DLC's. Some improvements have been made, but they've been few, slow, and in my opinion not enough to raise the quality much beyond what I'd expect from an indie early access game.

Try Automatic pop migration and Tiny outliner mods, it helps me a lot in micro my big empire

Mods can help, but they're no excuse for the base game being in such a poor state, especially when the fixes are relatively straightforward.

 

[Zag14]

Mods can help, but they're no excuse for the base game being in such a poor state, especially when the fixes are relatively straightforward.

i dont try to advocate devs, i just wat to give you opportunity ta get rid of micro hell

 

[Asuzu]

Try Automatic pop migration and Tiny outliner mods, it helps me a lot in micro my big empire

Thank you, I know these mods exist, but I would like the actual game developers to do their well-paid job once in a while
Besides, mods tend to either break themself or break the game. This is a basic QoL that should be present in base game from the release of 2.0

The thing is - Stellaris was fresh on start.
Now, with enough competing 4X Space Strategy games around, it looks like a poor relative in the corner.

It has
- terrible outdated interface to manage anything
- worthless AI that is completely impotent even on Grand Admiral
- oversaturated micromanagement of planets, jobs and fleets
- completely illogical war system where you win every battle and lose the war

100 years in, on Grand Admiral, I am 100k+ diplomatic power from fleet and economy, next AI is 11k
That's just screaming "oh my God, playtest me more!"

I look at new content and it is barely worth any money.
I try to play a game and quickly find myself overflown with useless information, and thrown into micro-hell management (click "-" on clerk, click "+" for miner).

The game is simply not fun, which is the very first reason to play it, yes?

 

[Ramiel]

I agree regarding the outliner, notifications and other UI elements; improvements in those areas are always welcome.
I also very much agree with war mechanics. I can appreciate wanting to try something different from other Paradox games, but it just is too borked in too many ways. An adaption of something like EUIV's system would do so much good for the game.

Pop job interface/priorities I would put again under UI elements. Some enhancements would be nice, but giving direct control over pops and jobs undermines the whole system (and leads to a very different type of micro hell). What the game really needs is functional planet and sector AI so you can just say "Make this planet X" to all but your most important worlds and it'll work mostly on its own. Empire AI has been fixed up quite nicely - not perfect, but leagues better than it was, and I'm quite hopeful that planet and sector AI will be getting similar fixups in the near future.

But your last two points I vehemently disagree on.
Ok, so some influence costs might be worth tweaking. But overall Influence should be rare and valuable. I don't see 'having to make hard choices with limited resources' as a negative, but rather a core part of any game. Granted I haven't had time to play a huge amount with 2.7 yet, but (with the possible exception of Map the Stars) the new edicts all seem pretty well-done to me.

And for POP resettlement - I firmly believe the ability to forcibly resettle POPs at all is a blight on the game, a relic of pre-2.2 that should have been done away with at that point. Resettling POPs at will completely undermines the entire design of the new economy and makes entire game systems for planetary management trivial or pointless. I understand the need for it (and the popularity of such mods) in the current game, but what the game really needs is a fixed POP growth and migration system - no more 'base growth based on # of planets', no more hard caps on potential migration, etc. Yeah this means you're probably always going to have some unemployed or unhoused pops on developed worlds, but dealing with that is part of planetary management. At the very least forced POP resettlement should be a rare and deliberate choice reserved for special circumstances, and should go back to requiring Influence to prevent its overuse.

 

[Asuzu]

I agree regarding the outliner, notifications and other UI elements; improvements in those areas are always welcome.
I also very much agree with war mechanics. I can appreciate wanting to try something different from other Paradox games, but it just is too borked in too many ways. An adaption of something like EUIV's system would do so much good for the game.

Yes, the war mechanics from EUIV could work.
Casus Belli is an okay system, but needs more love and special actions around it (e.g. Planetfall Imperial Mandate Operation"You can now declare war without any Casus Belli with full support from your population") and so on.

Pop job interface/priorities I would put again under UI elements. Some enhancements would be nice, but giving direct control over pops and jobs undermines the whole system (and leads to a very different type of micro hell). What the game really needs is functional planet and sector AI so you can just say "Make this planet X" to all but your most important worlds and it'll work mostly on its own. Empire AI has been fixed up quite nicely - not perfect, but leagues better than it was, and I'm quite hopeful that planet and sector AI will be getting similar fixups in the near future.

Have to disagree, the economic AI is plain terrible.
And when I lose the access to fine-tuning the planets, I lose interest to the game as well.
Going through your settled worlds and making necessary changes are fine, as long as they are not overdone.

But your last two points I vehemently disagree on.
Ok, so some influence costs might be worth tweaking. But overall Influence should be rare and valuable. I don't see 'having to make hard choices with limited resources' as a negative, but rather a core part of any game. Granted I haven't had time to play a huge amount with 2.7 yet, but (with the possible exception of Map the Stars) the new edicts all seem pretty well-done to me.

Well, there is a Russian proverb - "The spoon is most valuable for the dinner time"
What the means, is that most of the game content/edicts, and similar actions are inaccessible in the time they are needed for.
In the case of new edicts, and Map the Stars specifically, the influence costs are outrageously prohibitive, at the time when you should spend all your influence on expansion.
That means, that nobody in developer staff actually bothered to playtest this, and they have no idea if these features they spend time doing are actually useful.
They just copypaste old Influence prices from 2016 and move on.

And for POP resettlement - I firmly believe the ability to forcibly resettle POPs at all is a blight on the game, a relic of pre-2.2 that should have been done away with at that point. Resettling POPs at will completely undermines the entire design of the new economy and makes entire game systems for planetary management trivial or pointless. I understand the need for it (and the popularity of such mods) in the current game, but what the game really needs is a fixed POP growth and migration system - no more 'base growth based on # of planets', no more hard caps on potential migration, etc. Yeah this means you're probably always going to have some unemployed or unhoused pops on developed worlds, but dealing with that is part of planetary management. At the very least forced POP resettlement should be a rare and deliberate choice reserved for special circumstances, and should go back to requiring Influence to prevent its overuse.

Well, yes overcrowding is a problem to resolve, but in current iteration the Immigration/Emigration are simply not doing it. They are practically useless to affect the overcrowding.
So other strategy games resolve this with automated protocols for resettlement to reduce player annoyance. Stellaris does not offer any solution and just leaves it on the player to micro manage this until he is annoyed to hell.

 

[Metztli]

I don't care about a new content pack/expansion for the game, I just want valuable QoL changes that will help you manage your own planets.

 

[klickor]

I agree regarding the outliner, notifications and other UI elements; improvements in those areas are always welcome.
I also very much agree with war mechanics. I can appreciate wanting to try something different from other Paradox games, but it just is too borked in too many ways. An adaption of something like EUIV's system would do so much good for the game.

Pop job interface/priorities I would put again under UI elements. Some enhancements would be nice, but giving direct control over pops and jobs undermines the whole system (and leads to a very different type of micro hell). What the game really needs is functional planet and sector AI so you can just say "Make this planet X" to all but your most important worlds and it'll work mostly on its own. Empire AI has been fixed up quite nicely - not perfect, but leagues better than it was, and I'm quite hopeful that planet and sector AI will be getting similar fixups in the near future.

But your last two points I vehemently disagree on.
Ok, so some influence costs might be worth tweaking. But overall Influence should be rare and valuable. I don't see 'having to make hard choices with limited resources' as a negative, but rather a core part of any game. Granted I haven't had time to play a huge amount with 2.7 yet, but (with the possible exception of Map the Stars) the new edicts all seem pretty well-done to me.

And for POP resettlement - I firmly believe the ability to forcibly resettle POPs at all is a blight on the game, a relic of pre-2.2 that should have been done away with at that point. Resettling POPs at will completely undermines the entire design of the new economy and makes entire game systems for planetary management trivial or pointless. I understand the need for it (and the popularity of such mods) in the current game, but what the game really needs is a fixed POP growth and migration system - no more 'base growth based on # of planets', no more hard caps on potential migration, etc. Yeah this means you're probably always going to have some unemployed or unhoused pops on developed worlds, but dealing with that is part of planetary management. At the very least forced POP resettlement should be a rare and deliberate choice reserved for special circumstances, and should go back to requiring Influence to prevent its overuse.

Problem with the influence pricing is that there are no hard decisions to make. The bad pricing make the choices for you.

Like you will use the new Extended shifts edict or the pop growth one and then never touch influence edicts again for the rest of the game. The only decisions worth doing on a planet is the crime lord one and arcology. And that first one is a steal and seriously broken. Ofc you make a resort world and a penal world late game since +15% amenities or - 15% crime empire wide is worth it with enough planets and you finally have the techs for it. No decision making there either. But then you have the trap decisions that is only a decisions for those not in the known.

I dont think there is a single realistic scenario outside of RP in which spending influence on Mastery of Nature is worth it over any other way you could spend those influence. Not even taking the energy or ascension perk cost in to consideration. Its like map the stars. People think its good because it sounds good but if you really think about it the only logical decision in 99,9999% cases is to not spend the influence. The adaptability decision for 25 influence falls in the same category. Its never worth doing.

Elections are also in almost all cases also a trap. At least until you have built all your megastructures/ecus/habitats and claimed all the space you want and start swimming in influence. Fixing Elections is almost equivalent to giving the new ruler a negative 1 influence a month trait. Gotta have to be a huge difference in the leaders up for Elections, like 3 really bad ones and one very good. Still only a 1/4 to get a specific bad leader.

Galactic community is also a no decision decision to make. The only one worth spending the influence on is the market and an AI will do that for you. Most of the others will have the AI getting as well so no need to waste there.

You should use influence for 1(2 if authoritarian government) edict and keep it running and then only use it for expanding. Claiming systems or to build outposts/habitats/megastructures or upgrade planets with crime lord deal and arcology project. No decisions to make since all others are so subpar that its been decided for you.

On another topic.

I was surprised when I came back to Stellaris after a few years and the tiny outlier mod still wasnt a core feature. Same with the extra colors mods. These are 2 of the first mods for the game ever made and should have been integrated to the base game as soon as someone from Paradox took a look at the workshop. Their reactions 3 years and 11 months ago should have been "Why didnt we think of this obvious thing while developing the game. This will be in the next patch!"

Not to mention UI for monitors and resolutions from the current MILLENIUM. You have to use some mods to fix basic UI functionality. If this was the only problem I would have given the development of the stellaris UI a 0 out of 10. Why the FUCK do I have to download a mod to see my different research resources and my advanced resources without having them hidden when the top bar is a mile wide and empty?????????? Seriously! This is basic stuff. And why do I only get a single number for values above 999? The difference between 1000 resources and 2999 resources is quite huge but all that changes in the UI between those is that a 1 turns in to a 2. I have to every few years hover over that value to see if my production is increasing or not. If I went from 1999 energy surplus a month to 1000 energy a month and have a few titans, 20 battleships, a few armies and maybe a megastructure or 2 building soon to be complete I need to know. Or I might be in a downward spiral in my economy without even knowing since the UI never told me I lost HALF my profits. These things make me rate the development ik negative values. Its baffling this is the regression we have had over 4 years for a game in constant development and several DLC.

 

[DrNukeLear]

There’s not a single word in the OP I can argue with. Well said, sorry it needed saying.

 

[Burn1729]

Notification settings are badly needed. Removing planetary construction completion notifications added a huge amount of micro since now you need to keep track of those manually.

Also notifications one day before completion would also be nice since, for example, building a Planetary Administration sometimes results in unemployed specialists or unneeded enforcers.

 

[Shirasik]

About management.

Any suggestions will not solve any problem with management at all, while UI of management tools is represented as lists w/o, at the very minimum, options to sort, filter or aggregate its items.
Own list for [item]s? Wouldn't make any sense when you'll go into hundreds of entries of [item]s. Colonies, megastructures, fleets, civilian ships, armies, leaders, pops, whatever. To much to scroll, to much data to be processed by a player. Those hundreds are perfectly achievable even in vanilla w/o DLCs. So you'll end up not using that lists at all. Just - whoop! - you have minimized outliner since midgame to never expand it in this game again. Never will go to pops tab in colony management window. Never, never, never...
Same with resettlement. ES2's system isn't okay here, because, again, too long lists of [item]s to be managed manually. Full automation for resettlement... while this can't be a solution from gameplay point of view, there is no other option with current pop growth/migration system. Otherwise, endgame is hardly more than a scroll-and-click simulator.

Meanwhile, options for manual micromanagement should remain, because those tiny decisions makes big difference at the start and in edge cases.

 

[Dr. B]

I agree. This game is very fun and interesting in the beginning, lots of cool features to experience, then it becomes micro hell after a while.
And we are not talking about a mild headache type of hell, but a true, fire-and-brimstone soul-devouring hell.

 

[Ramiel]

Have to disagree, the economic AI is plain terrible.

Just want to make sure we're talking about the same thing here. The AI for other empires is fixed up fairly nicely - not perfect, but definitely a lot better than it was. The AI for player automation - planets and sectors mainly - is still practically nonexistent and desperately needs work. But I have hopes that'll be coming soon.
But otherwise yeah, I agree the frustrations are real, and workarounds (mod or otherwise) are kinda necessary for most players. I just think the solutions are to fix the underlying systems, (AI, pop growth and migration, etc).

Influence Snip

Sounds to me this is more of an issue with many (most?) players being heavy conquest and land-grab oriented. Which the game as it stands does heavily encourage (unfortunately). Again though, seems more an issue of other systems needing heavy work.

On a tangential note for Influence, I think expansion in the early game is a fair bit too fast. I'm thinking about experimenting with a mod that'll make the influence costs for building outposts/claiming systems scale with distance from your capital, not your closest border, with heavy discounts scattered throughout the tech tree and the ability to colonize outside your borders for a reduced influence cost. Curious how the game will shape up like that.

 

[Studoku]

Stellaris has been released for barely 4 years. Are you implying that other games are finished 4 years after release? Maybe even finished before they get released?

 

[KubiG37]

This was some awesome reading.

The micro-management of planets and completely retarded Sectors and sector AI are the worst offenders imo. Usually when I reach about 20+ planets I either just stop expanding (AI is pathetic at that moment anyway) ,start making vassals instead, or give up managing those planets at all, apart from building foundries and other basic structures. I don't want to pamper every single shithole that is screaming "Unemployed pop here!".

Another thing driving me crazy is being constantly bombarded with generic events like "smugglers running rampant", "increased crime", or repeated events about observation posts! And this multiplies by the number of planets you have!

 

[Gromit]

All good points but I don't think they care at this point. A lot of this stuff has been brought up time and time again. The bug reports pages are full of bugs that have been reported over and over, some for over a year and are still broken.

We get a few crumbs here and there to help promote a DLC (We made it lag less now, please buy federations) but that's about it really. Judging from the last dev diary, I'm not hopeful this mentality will change any time soon.

 

[klickor]

Just want to make sure we're talking about the same thing here. The AI for other empires is fixed up fairly nicely - not perfect, but definitely a lot better than it was. The AI for player automation - planets and sectors mainly - is still practically nonexistent and desperately needs work. But I have hopes that'll be coming soon.
But otherwise yeah, I agree the frustrations are real, and workarounds (mod or otherwise) are kinda necessary for most players. I just think the solutions are to fix the underlying systems, (AI, pop growth and migration, etc).


Sounds to me this is more of an issue with many (most?) players being heavy conquest and land-grab oriented. Which the game as it stands does heavily encourage (unfortunately). Again though, seems more an issue of other systems needing heavy work.

On a tangential note for Influence, I think expansion in the early game is a fair bit too fast. I'm thinking about experimenting with a mod that'll make the influence costs for building outposts/claiming systems scale with distance from your capital, not your closest border, with heavy discounts scattered throughout the tech tree and the ability to colonize outside your borders for a reduced influence cost. Curious how the game will shape up like that.

Probably wont make the influence spending decisions different though even if it would slow down the game a bit.

You still wouldnt use map the stars or any of the production increase edicts, even the science edict is a net loss in science due to the upkeep. Master of nature, the adaptability and stop pop growth decisions would still be bad even if you dropped cost by 80%.

I even forgot to mention relics in my previous post. Most are really bad and not worth the activation cost. The vultaum and ether drake are 2 of the few that are worth spending influence on in the right circumstances but relics is quite random even in SP and I mostly forget I can even activate them in most games after I found out how bad most of them are.

Growth is just too good in Stellaris and you almost always have to decide between expanding or do political stuff or even different/interesting things since influence is the bottleneck to both. And since expanding is way better you should always do just that with every bit of influence.

Probably would have been better if it were split in 2 resources. I really dislike the mana in EU4 but I think stellaris would have been better with separating diplo and expansion. That way you can do both without feeling that you are doing subpar decisions. Like in EU4 "mana" is used for too much.

 

[Sherhi]

I like new edicts, I ran +pop growth until galactic community passed greater than ourselves and ran that since then...I think this basic game mechanic is perfectly placed as it is

enough with sarcasm, your proposed changes are pretty easy to make I think

bottom of the screen is poorly used as well for UI

 

[VerKer]

Gotta say, where Asuzu has a point is that - with 4 years into development of the game - we unfortunately still have to focus on annoyances, that should have been fixed long before the game reached v1.5. And while devs still have to focus these, it hinders them to come up with the real good new stuffs (Jesus, why do hyperlanes have to be 100% static throughout a game?!?).

Yeah, one has to admit that development lead changed several times, and that very hard-to-take decisions were made, some of them maybe purely due to the fact that development lead changed: The way sectors work (good basic idea, poorly executed and heavily critisized, momentarily more or less removed from the game), the cut of several means of FTL travel (meh), the change away from the tile system (with good intentions, but resulting in a tech / performance disaster), the switch from pop to jobs (basically), and some more. In addition, devs stuffed more and more features into a not smoothly working basegame.

If Stellaris needs anything, it would be a halt on new features and a brush up of existing ones, that do not shine yet.

There seems to be soooo much potential, that has not been uncovered yet. In the order things come to my mind: Improve AI, reduce MM (pop shoveling), make sectors work again (get rid of some of their limits, but for a price for the player), improve the "logic" in warfare, get away from "doomstacks always win", give us at least some of the features that are clearly missing (storytelling for my empire? fuel for fleets? stealth? meaningful espionage? random galactic events that alter hyperlanes? more depth in the tech tree? more freedom and simplicity in ship design - get rid of sections and let us build in the slots that we want, instead).

And good riddance, please do fix bugs which have been reported over and over during the last year (disappearing democratic leaders in elections, anyone?). It cant be that hard, let one community manager loose on the bug report forum only, tracking down things and relaying them back to development.

And if any fairy granted me three wishes:

• I wish you would playtest new patches over a week before you released them
• I wish you would playtest new patches over a week before you released them
• I wish you would playtest new patches over a week before you released them

I mean, even if it was an opt in closed beta or sumsuch - you guys do manage to put up a test group and a control group for "optical DLC visibility" - why in the world would that not work with upcoming content patches as well?