Why does seemingly everybody want Stellaris to be HOI in space?

[KaiserRichter]

Purely observational, purely my own 100% completely anecdotal and subjective opinion - but why does it seem like everybody wants this to be map painting space blob game. "War is the core of the game", "why can't strategic resources not exist", "why is XYZ so complicated".

I'm gonna admit I'm biased - I'm a massive Victoria II fan. I like the fact that with federations and megacorp, you can absolutely dominate the game with diplomacy and economic might in conjunction with military strength. I loved that in Victoria II, blobbing was not an option and you were confined to moderate territorial gains out of your arch rivals but still had space to grab uncharted lands.

Why do I see so many people wanting this to be watered down, more simple, more focused on war. HOI is a great series, it's fun, but the core is war. There's very little economy or diplomacy to complement that. I don't like that. The popular consensus seems to be to make it more like a map painting simulator, and less like a diplomatic-military-economic civilization builder that it was intended to be. Or at the very least, whichever one of those playstyles you prefer and can play accordingly since there's room for all of it.

 

[Serenity84]

It would be great if strategic resources were more like in HOI. There some things like oil and rubber are only available in certain countries. And if you don't have them you have to conquer or trade for them. In Stellaris that's not the case. Strategic resources are neither rare nor actually strategic.

The "war is the core of the game" is thing is maybe only a reflection of reality than a wish. Sadly that is what the game is about. I wished it were more, but it's been years and there is no internal politics whatsoever. Or much to manage in peace time. So to not get bored you go to war. It's just how it is.

 

[KaiserRichter]

It would be great if strategic resources were more like in HOI. There some things like oil and rubber are only available in certain countries. And if you don't have them you have to conquer or trade for them. In Stellaris that's not the case. Strategic resources are neither rare nor actually strategic.

I prefer to see it through the lens of inspired realism. Stellaris is obviously a game, it's fantasy. But I think of the need for these resources for advanced economies in a similar way to how they function in Victoria II or reality. Developed nations have little need for industry or manufacturing nowadays for example, and outsource it. They produce advanced goods with resources not found locally that they obtain through a global trade network. Victoria functioned exactly the same way.

If you didn't have rubber for luxury furniture, you either have to take it from somebody else, colonize empty space that has it, or trade for it. If you couldn't do any of these, you were hard pressed to do so. Or you coped and capitalized on the resources you did have, even if you were slightly less competitive. I like that.

In Hearts of Iron, it's a given you just take it. But the game's core is not war. It's not a blob simulator by nature, although you certainly could do that and there are advantages to playing the game in that way if you go that route. Just as there are advantages for other playstyles

 

[KaiserRichter]

Basically, my gripe is that the game is supposed to encompass multiple playstyles. It's half 4x, half GS. There are a thousand different ways to play, and it seems like people only want the war aspect at the detriment of every other playstyle. I thoroughly enjoy a hegemonic monarchy in a middle sized nation, or a small megacorp that dominates through diplomacy and economy. I enjoy playing smarter, not harder. Taller, not wider. The consensus seems to want the opposite, which would jeopardize the entire game's intended purpose of being a civ builder plus strategy.

 

[otro_dia]

I have not played Victoria II, but I did play HOI4 and CK2, and IMO, Stellaris has more in common with a RTS like Rise of Nations than with the other grand strategy games of Paradox. In fact, at times Stellaris feels like a massive RTS, which is why the micro is so annoying, because you have to micromanage the populations of lots of planets when in your average RTS in the late game you have like, I don´t know, 2-3?

This is the reason why this game has to get more simple, because more complexity equals to more tedious micromanagement (take into account that deepness is not equal to complexity). Unless they rework everything again, of course.

 

[KaiserRichter]

I have not played Victoria II, but I did play HOI4 and CK2, and IMO, Stellaris has more in common with a RTS like Rise of Nations than with the other grand strategy games of Paradox. In fact, at times Stellaris feels like a massive RTS, which is why the micro is so annoying, because you have to micromanage the populations of lots of planets when in your average RTS in the late game you have like, I don´t know, 2-3?

Is for this reason that this game has to get more simple, because more complexity equals to more micromanagement (take into account that deepness is not equal to complexity). Unless they rework everything again, of course.

Don't get me wrong here, I too dislike the late game micromanagement and I do believe something needs to be done. Especially with sectors, and AI in general.

 

[otro_dia]

Don't get me wrong here, I too dislike the late game micromanagement and I do believe something needs to be done. Especially with sectors, and AI in general.

I got you. But just take a look at Stellaris. You have to collect resources and assign your civilians to them by micromanaging them, like in other RTS games. Sure, it´s a bit more automatized since the pops go to their job automatically in each planet, but in essence is the same. You have your troops that you move around like in any RTS, and you use these troops to defeat the enemy and capture/destroy the enemy bases. Just in a bigger scale.

And that summarizes the game: you collect resources and you use them to destroy the enemy. Introducing mechanics that don´t polish this concept and make it less tedious, will make it a worse game. And don´t get me wrong, the game can introduce dynamics like the Galactic Community and federations because they don´t hurt the very core of this war like mechanic, they in fact make it better, which is a good thing. But, things like depending on shitty buildings (that can´t even be upgraded) to produce "rare" resources to improve normal buildings and make a fleet is an absolute failure, because you almost spend more time looking for an adequated planet (or a system) to build a gas refinery than in actually playing the game.

EDIT: Sorry, I didn´t wrote my point: my opinion is that this game is closer to becoming a good war focused game than becoming a good-at something else-game.

 

[Zoolimar]

Purely observational, purely my own 100% completely anecdotal and subjective opinion - but why does it seem like everybody wants this to be map painting space blob game. "War is the core of the game", "why can't strategic resources not exist", "why is XYZ so complicated".

I'm pretty sure most people actually don't want that. But Stellaris development constantly pushes everyone in this direction.

-All the faction and pop happiness mechanics got neutered and became absolutely toothless. You need to go out of your way to make a planet actually unhappy with your rule. Making it rebel is an actual challenge.
-Trade wasn't very good but with bottomless market it died outright and now you don't even care if any of your neighbours who had some resources you needed survive. Because you can get anything you want from the market or from generic buildings.
-Diplomacy always was a weak point and still is. It more or less doesn't exist beyond getting a bunch of modifiers from federation or whatever.
-Espionage and limited information never were implemented. Research with all the cards is still in many cases just +X% or +Y% to some production empire wide.

In war you at least see some progress. And events can be fun, first dozen of times.

 

[Pancakelord]

but why does it seem like everybody wants this to be map painting space blob game

It's always been a map painter, its always moved towards being more of a map painter when you look at the major changes since 2016.

1. In the beginning people complained about the influence costs of forward outposts and colonisation so on and so fourth, because expansion was slow AF, and there wasn't much else to do once you'd run out of events by midgame (things like diplomacy were particularly sparse) except expand and wage wars.
2. So rather than working on cooperation/diplomacy and other "political" things, to fill that "void" whilst empires expanded slowly, they gave people what they wanted and lessened influence costs and made expansion easier and easier, so most of the "slack" time in a match became filled with expanding and blobbing.
   • This IMO sewed the seeds that would drive PDX towards the economic rework, they saw blobbing "did well" with players so why not build on that, people seemed to want more worlds (literally) so make em deeper to manage as they seemed to take up a big chunk of the game-loop.
   • Factions - which used to exist to fill political needs (e.g. Planet X / Sector Y is pushing for Independence, Slave Faction Z is trying to ban slavery, the Pretender faction wants to depose your leader), were GUTTED and replaced with the ethically aligned political parties in v1.5.
     • New political parties became cocaine-mules for influence generation, keep them happy, pump out more influence, expand faster,
     • you cant even piss off a v2 faction, they go from 0% to 100% happiness and nothing happens at 0%.
       • The meter starts at 50% rather than going from -100-zero-+100, that design language should speak volumes to you,
         • PDX didnt prioritise internal politics or political stability.
           • Why? Because It got in the way of empire expansion (blobbing) because that's what most players seemed to want.
3. Then 2.0's border changes came along and were the capstone on making expansion easier, all you needed to do was dump outposts everywhere, wait a little bit for influence/mana to fill up and expansion became rock-bottom easy.
4. The new economic system came alongside Apocalypse (the main military expansion) and the two became intertwined, you needed a bigger economy for a bigger military, and the new border/claims systems incentivised absolute control and conquest (partial system ownership, for example, was removed). Most resources were streamlined down to further make the economy more of a "+1" function and less of an "A or B" function (numbers-at-any-cost over interesting build choice)
   • Gestalts epitomise these changes, as half of the planet modifiers don't really apply to them, they just need to focus on rampant growth and alloy production.
5. Then by 2.2 the process was complete with the last of the stratified resources being ripped out (Grey materials to nanites) - which had started in 2.0 by boiling down some 12-15 resources in to Alloys, Motes, Gasses & crystals.
6. Megacorp & federations have attempted to walk back, a bit, by adding side-grades
   • Branch offices are a nod to the old co-shared systems but they're honestly a bit lame without a few mods rebalancing them
   • And the GC sanctions are a feeble attempt to both introduce
     1. A CK2-style threat system vs players (lets be real, the AI almost never breaches GC law) and
     2. Give [newer]players that have yet to figure out the economy (and so have weaker fleets) a bit of breathing room via envoy/favour trading.
7. And around this time civic reworks have been happening to once again make the game more flavourful and less an orgy of stacking numerical modifiers.

It would be great if strategic resources were more like in HOI. There some things like oil and rubber are only available in certain countries. And if you don't have them you have to conquer or trade for them. In Stellaris that's not the case. Strategic resources are neither rare nor actually strategic.

This used to be the case (i have an entire thread on the death of this feature). 2.0 killed that - L-cluster is the only part of the galaxy that now has unique stuff (and nanites are pretty underwhelming after they replaced the old grey resources)

• My personal belief is that the 2.0 FTL changes didn't mesh well with geographically stratified resources In late game, they wanted to focus mostly on "economy tiers/upgrades" and less on "economy asymmetry"
• so everyone can build tier 2-3 science labs with abundant resources, so what differentiates nations is in how many they can build, not them using different strategies or builds - flavour and diversity were killed in the pursuit of "bigger" numbers.
  • This "Bigger numbers" emphasis reinforces the war loop which also relies on bigger numbers (they killed weapons diversity off long ago, everyone starts with access to everything and can research anything, way back you only started with one weapon type).

The consensus seems to want the opposite, which would jeopardize the entire game's intended purpose of being a civ builder plus strategy.

People want what they have, people always want more of what they have, it takes a visionary (usually) to offer them something they didn't know they wanted.
The game only offers them war and ways to further their economy for war, so they build their economies and they go to war, and, as that's what they've become accustomed to, they ask for more war (by ask I mean PDX reviewing sales figures, play-time-analytics and marketing reports, not the vocal minority crying out for an internal politics rework).
It's a self fulfilling loop.

For what it's worth I agree with you, war can spawn interesting stories (rarely these days) but the mechanics of war - themselves - aren't that interesting to me. In fact, despite Apocalypse aiming to "enrich" warfare, aside from adding "chokepoints", bootleg-deathstars and ripping out FTL types (3-way FTL wars did get migraine inducing), it really dumbed it down further - both mechanically - and politically.

• No more do we have real-world strategies like influence pushing (look up China influencing central Asia via the "string of pearls" strategy, pre 2.0 that was an actually viable strategy with forward outposts and colonies in Stellaris),
• No more "dense" combat zones with dozens of balkanised AI factions and one-planet(yes, planet, not system) states all duking it out in like a 20v20 battle-royale after an empire exploded into a bajillion city states.
• Missiles/PD never got reworked (a request since like v1.1.), strike craft remained awful too (up until like 2.4 or 2.5 when they rolled in a fix from a modder).
• Ground combat actually got stripped back visually (they got rid of the graphics up at the top of ground combat screens) and received a soft nerf on doom stacking armies in the form of combat width. It never got a proper overhaul and has been left to languish ever since.
• No more do we have locational ship-modifying effects (pre 2.0 you could apply auras on a per ship-basis now everything is handled at a per-fleet or system-wide basis -
  • This was obviously done for performance as the 2.0+ economy allows for massive fleet sizes, but it means no more interesting (modded) weapons like ships dealing AOE damage, or minelayers etc, everything is fleet-to-fleet single-target.
  • and this reinforces DPS stacking on ships and doom stacking with fleets.
    • So much so they had to add the relative-fleet-size & emergency retreat mechanics just to try and band aid how badly warfare balance had been damaged by other changes with the 2.0 update.

 

[methegrate]

Purely observational, purely my own 100% completely anecdotal and subjective opinion - but why does it seem like everybody wants this to be map painting space blob game. "War is the core of the game", "why can't strategic resources not exist", "why is XYZ so complicated".

I'm gonna admit I'm biased - I'm a massive Victoria II fan. I like the fact that with federations and megacorp, you can absolutely dominate the game with diplomacy and economic might in conjunction with military strength. I loved that in Victoria II, blobbing was not an option and you were confined to moderate territorial gains out of your arch rivals but still had space to grab uncharted lands.

Why do I see so many people wanting this to be watered down, more simple, more focused on war. HOI is a great series, it's fun, but the core is war. There's very little economy or diplomacy to complement that. I don't like that. The popular consensus seems to be to make it more like a map painting simulator, and less like a diplomatic-military-economic civilization builder that it was intended to be. Or at the very least, whichever one of those playstyles you prefer and can play accordingly since there's room for all of it.

Imo it's because Stellaris already is a watered down HoI in space. There is no meaningful economic, political or diplomatic gameplay. The post-2.0 redesign doubled down on that by emphasizing intra-empire optimization over inter-empire relationships.

By the end of the early game the only thing to literally do is declare war on other empires. I agree with you, I really want Stellaris to be a meaningful, deep geopolitics game, but it just isn't. So for a lot of people the response is to figure that since Stellaris is a war game in practice, the best move is to stop pretending that politics or diplomacy are going to add real depth to gameplay and just make it the best war game it can be.

Personally, I'm on the fence. But I'm leaning toward the camp of "just admit that it's HoI in space" given that after four years we still don't have meaningful geopolitics.

 

[OnyxAbussos]

For me, more complexity is better.
A lot of what people suggest here seems to amount to "make it so that all i ever do is literally move fleets around until I own the galaxy." Fuck that.

 

[TTJ]

It seems that one reason for constant warfare is that tall playstyles don't work well. Thus, you simply can't stay within your borders and still get enough points for victory.

 

[STABBY5]

I wish it were hoi in space, then I'd play it. The border and FTL changes were needed. I really would have preferred short range warp over Sins of a Solar Stellaris but its fine. They really messed up the economy. They spent all that time and effort on it and it just broke the game. The population mechanics don't make sense and its all micro hell. All of the games systems are disconnected. Most of the empires play the same. Warfare is kind of awful. Paradox has never been good at ship combat and this game revolves around it. I just wish they would sit down and pick a direction of the game. It was easily one of my favorites, and a game I could get anyone to play. Now not even I play it and none of my friends will touch it.

 

[Morbus Bubbonicus]

Because HoIIV have, like, 2 times more concurrent players than Stellaris

 

[Madzai]

Because they failed to provide any interesting Gameplay outside from Wars? And now, people rightfully treat the game as another paint-the-map simulator? Where is internal politics? Where are faction? Where are actual diplomacy? Where is espionage? Where is complex resource system(refer to original DD about 2.0 and thing they cut from it). Where are Sectors that matters? Where is interesting planets development and POP system?

 

[Cat_Fuzz]

I'll be candid and say what got me interested in Stellaris in the first place. Prior to this my experience with 4x games had been GCII and III. I felt let down with III as it was largely the same as II but with missing features resold as DLC piecemeal throughout its early development.

I saw that the developers behind CKII, EUIV and the like were making a 4x. I haven't ever played these games (historical strategy not really my thing) but I did read a lot of gaming articles about the intrigue and diplomacy of these games (with mods like the game of thrones mod for CKII). I thought 'oh wow, if those guys make a space 4x which has a similar degree of intrigue and galactic diplomacy, that would be mind-blowing'. I bought it on day 1.

Then what @Pancakelord describes above is a pretty accurate account as to where the development went and the disappointment I think many of us early adopters feel now is that it's basically Command and Conquer in space.

I would love to see the original vision come to life, but I can also understand those who have given up on this idea some 4-5 years later and just want what it does do (aka a blobbing war simulator) to actually work well, and forego some of the more innovative potential that hasn't really materialised yet.

It's been said before but is worth saying again, Stellaris suffered from having a vague direction of travel, with no one vision overseeing the development. It's lead to many half-hearted systems to be integrated, but ultimately had resulted in a streamlined experience that feels lacking in depth or nuance. I would still hope for things to change and for this game to eventually be a fantastic space 4x, but I admit my faith in it is all but spent and feel that moving on is becoming more appealing as time goes on.

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

For me, more complexity is better.
A lot of what people suggest here seems to amount to "make it so that all i ever do is literally move fleets around until I own the galaxy." Fuck that.

Complexity and good gameplay worked really well in Distant Worlds... the problem with Stellaris is that it also have to work in a MP environment. For me personally that is a problem. A game that have MP will never really satisfy me as a SP game as it has to give up too much complexity and depth that works in SP but not in MP.

Distant Worlds had excellent ways for the player to atomisation so the player could focus on the important thing of running the empire and micro manage what was the most important. Stellaris have none of that.

In my opinion Distant Words is by far a much better game even if it is like ten years older than Stellaris.

 

[Ixal]

Because
1. Map Painters are very noisy and constantly try to push all game lines towards easy conquest and demand that any obstacle to mappainting gets nerfed.
2. Because PDX has no own ideas about Stellaris and just copies other 4x games which are all limited to conquest.


And what is funny, HoI is adding more and more internal faction management (see the Bosporus DLC) and is superior to Stellaris in this regard, at least the newely remodeled countries.

 

[Cordane]

• Missiles/PD never got reworked (a request since like v1.1.), strike craft remained awful too (up until like 2.4 or 2.5 when they rolled in a fix from a modder).

The way I look at GW/PD (or equally SC/Flak) as a problem is that neither of the other two primary weapon types and their matching defenses follows a similar path, or even a different path to essentially the same destination. A fleet with enough PD can basically keep their members practically immune to GW damage, assuming they can keep everyone under the PD umbrella. In order to do the same with kinetic/armor, you'd have to go back to old-school "armor as damage resistance", but have it less constrained; ships with enough shields could be similarly unfazed by energy attacks.

But even old-school armor couldn't reach that level of protection, and certainly couldn't do it without completely undermining its ship's defense against anything else - PD both forces no reduction in defensive capability against the other damage types (just in a modest reduction in damage output) and doesn't require that the defended ships even carry the defensive systems, and both were true then and now. Energy attacks completely subvert defensive systems by having various weapons attack defenses in different ways, either doing well against shields or ignoring one/both of shields/armor. This oddly makes shields a relatively poor choice as well, as only a limited number of attacks are actually best defended by them (lasers, plasma, lances, particle launchers are the only ones researchable).

I don't know for certain what the way forward is on this - I've posted more than my fair share of suggestions (see my sig) toward coming up with a solution, without enough positive response to elicit hope in their success or acceptance.

 

[methegrate]

Complexity and good gameplay worked really well in Distant Worlds... the problem with Stellaris is that it also have to work in a MP environment. For me personally that is a problem. A game that have MP will never really satisfy me as a SP game as it has to give up too much complexity and depth that works in SP but not in MP.

Agreed. For me the SP/MP problem became one of those "once you see it you can't stop seeing it" things. So much of Stellaris is clearly designed around the needs of a real time multiplayer game. Most of the game's systems and mechanics are high-complexity but low-depth, and it seems like this was specifically designed to make sure that players need to spend as little time as possible interacting with any given mechanic.

This came up in another thread on the issue of trade and piracy. For the life of me I have never been able to understand why they built trade the way they did. It's a forgettable mechanic. You set up your trade posts, put a few corvettes on "patrol" and then forget the whole thing exists. Then I understood. That's the whole point. A deep trade system (regardless of complexity) would involve competing priorities and instability that force the player to make good choices on an ongoing basis. That would be fantastic for a pausable single player game, but would demand far too much of the player's attention in a multiplayer setting.

It feeds back into the problem someone else mentioned. Paradox just can't seem to make up its mind about what Stellaris is supposed to be. Is it a war game, a geopolitical strategy game, or a story generator? Is it supposed to be a role playing game, a strategy game, a sandbox game or an empire sim? Is it supposed to be a single player game with multiplayer in the box, or a multiplayer game with an SP campaign? "Yes" isn't a good enough answer.