3.6 "Orion" Open Beta - General Feedback Thread

[mooloh]

Possible bug report - conquest vassals automatically converting to bulwarks.

I noticed this while trying to vassalize empires which already had their own vassals. In the span of one game, I won wars to vassalize two other overlord empires. The first empire had one scholarium, and the second had one scholarium and one unspecialized vassal. In both cases, those sub-vassals immediately converted to bulwarks when I won the war to vassalize their overlord, without any apparent opportunity for me to reject this conversion. This is problematic since bulwarks are unique among vassal types in their mandatory subsidies, so instead of my economy growing from gaining new tax-paying vassals, I suddenly found myself buried in deficits.

If it's relevant, my empire was a imperial fanatic spiritualist authoritarian with imperial cult, cutthroat politics, and the feudal society civics.

I'm not sure if this is intentional or not, but I don't think AI vassals should ever automatically convert to bulwarks without the players approval - it's extremely irritating to suddenly need to pay subsidies. It felt like I was punished for playing well and conquering.

 

[Asran]

Since I spent the better part of today tracking down a bug that I was seeing with vassal independence wars, I might as well comment in more detail what's the issue with current vassal bloat:

1. Acceptance bonus from relative power for diplovassalisation is large enough to counter large portion of penalties, so simple superiority is often enough to get someone accept even with distance maluses etc. (These values should be revisited to be better balanced.)
2. Acceptance modifiers are calculated on the instant the proposal is sent. Since the relative power of empires can fluctuate over time due to e.g. wars, one can often "snipe" the diplovassalisation when another empire is temporarily low on fleets. (Acceptance should not be based on immediate relative power.)
3. Relative power does not affect vassal relationship or loyalty gain after the deal is accepted. So if you can "snipe" someone to be their vassal, their relative power becomes irrelevant for future calculations. (Powerful vassals should be inherently less loyal.)
4. There is a bug that's probably been around since 3.4 that can prevent disloyal vassals from declaring independence wars if there are multiple disloyal vassal. (I left a bug report.)

The stagnant late-game politics have ultimately been the reason why I have not been bothering to finish many Stellaris games after Overlord dropped, so it would be nice to see these addressed in 3.6.

 

[Lorenerd11]

The upkeep reductions with planetary ascensions are great, but it honestly bothers me that for instance, as a Rogue Servitor, you have to choose between the bonus output from the Capital designation, or the upkeep reduction from the Forge World designation

Maybe Capital designation could have a smaller, -5% upkeep from Jobs modifier? That way the Capital would also be able to benefit from upkeep reductions with planetary ascension, although not as much as a non-Capital Forge World.

 

[jedavis]

Since I spent the better part of today tracking down a bug that I was seeing with vassal independence wars, I might as well comment in more detail what's the issue with current vassal bloat:

1. Acceptance bonus from relative power for diplovassalisation is large enough to counter large portion of penalties, so simple superiority is often enough to get someone accept even with distance maluses etc. (These values should be revisited to be better balanced.)
2. Acceptance modifiers are calculated on the instant the proposal is sent. Since the relative power of empires can fluctuate over time due to e.g. wars, one can often "snipe" the diplovassalisation when another empire is temporarily low on fleets. (Acceptance should not be based on immediate relative power.)
3. Relative power does not affect vassal relationship or loyalty gain after the deal is accepted. So if you can "snipe" someone to be their vassal, their relative power becomes irrelevant for future calculations. (Powerful vassals should be inherently less loyal.)
4. There is a bug that's probably been around since 3.4 that can prevent disloyal vassals from declaring independence wars if there are multiple disloyal vassal. (I left a bug report.)

The stagnant late-game politics have ultimately been the reason why I have not been bothering to finish many Stellaris games after Overlord dropped, so it would be nice to see these addressed in 3.6.

Agree with all of this. I was fiddling around with the game yesterday to try to get a sense of how the acceptance modifiers work for Request Subjugation and there are basically only four things that matter - if they're hostile attitude that's -1000. Distance penalty caps out at -500 but often caps out even at fairly short distances, which is why we see the behavior of very distant vassalization - it's not any harder to vassalize someone on the other side of the galaxy than it is two empires away. If they're already an overlord with a subject that's -800. And then relative power caps out at +750. The only two other values I saw for relative power besides +750 were +375 and +0. I still don't really have any idea how the VASSALIZATION_ACCEPTANCE_POWER_DIFFERENCE_* entries in 00_defines.txt get turned into those huge modifiers (if they are at all and it's not just hardcoded logic that ignores them); these modifiers are way bigger than the relative power modifiers to eg Defensive Pact at the same power level difference. The only other modifier that gets up into the hundreds is from the loyalty they would have under the agreement, which can be -200 at -100 loyalty, but that's way smaller than the relative power bonus. All the other stuff, like the +20 if they're friendly vs +0 if they're neutral, is just insignificant compared to the hundreds-of-points bonuses and penalties. I'm not sure what value you could change Base Acceptance to here that would actually help - if it's huge enough to counterbalance the relative power bonuses, it's also so huge that it will just never happen without those relative power bonuses.

But yeah, even if you fixed the modifiers, the sniping would still be an issue. Maybe relative power should take long-term factors like economy and tech more into account for vassalization purposes?

 

[mooloh]

Balance Concern: Enhanced Recycling, the new Adaptation tradition which grants -10% rare resource upkeep to districts and buildings, should be either buffed, or gain another effect.

Reason: At the moment, Enhanced Recycling grants a strict sub-set of the bonuses granted by the Prosperity tree's Administrative Operations tradition, which grants -10% upkeep of all types of districts and buildings.

Edit: This is wrong - Enhanced recycling also grants -10% strategic resource cost to districts and buildings, so it is not a sub-set, and I can't make a judgement on its balance anymore.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

Balance Concern: Enhanced Recycling, the new Adaptation tradition which grants -10% rare resource upkeep to districts and buildings, should be either buffed, or gain another effect.

Reason: At the moment, Enhanced Recycling grants a strict sub-set of the bonuses granted by the Prosperity tree's Administrative Operations tradition, which grants -10% upkeep of all types of districts and buildings.

Enhanced Recycling also grants -10% to building and district cost in gases, motes and crystals, but it may still need a buff - I'll have a look.

 

[mooloh]

Oh you're totally right, I missed the word 'cost' in the description across multiple readings. That's on me. I redact my balance concern - I don't have a good enough sense of how much the cost-savings will add up to make any further judgement. Also, thanks for such a quick response!

 

[theBigTurnip385]

Common Ground - Mega Corp.

Mega Corps have for a long time not generated similar ethic federation partners; this is causing Common Ground builds to collapse their federation a few months after forming a Trade Federation.

The only work around is to play as a Mega Church, as that triggers the code is_spiritualist to be true which means both your partners will be spiritualist empires.

 

[theBigTurnip385]

Oh you're totally right, I missed the word 'cost' in the description across multiple readings. That's on me. I redact my balance concern - I don't have a good enough sense of how much the cost-savings will add up to make any further judgement. Also, thanks for such a quick response!

For Hive/Machine
Cyborg - 25% from leader
Prosperity - 10%
Enhanced Recycling - 10%
Nexus Designation - 10%
Total = 45% energy reduction, 55% gas/motes etc

 

[HFY]

3.6 Ring World designations now include +% pop growth, which is generally NOT what I want at the time I'm able to build a Ring World, and definitely not something which should be doubled by Ascension.

Suggest replacing with -% upkeep instead.

 

[SpecterXXVIII]

I think there is a bug in the way fleets are managed.
1. I check a fleet in the fleet manager and suddenly all of the corvettes are of the same class. Previously there were of two classes
2. I divided the fleet into two separate divisions and went to use the retrofit button. The names of the ships are now different. Previously the names were Razor Mk IVE and Raider Mk IVE. The names were changed to Razor Mk IE and Raider Mk IE.

 

[Ishyro]

Focusing on Unity for Planetary Ascension Tiers don't feel rewarding because of the way they are unlocked.

Currently we have 1 Tier per Ascension Perk unlocked starting with the 3rd, plus 4 additional Tiers when we have all the perks unlocked.
This mean :

• 1 Tier per completed tradition tree starting with the 3rd one
• 1 Tier with Ascension Theory
• 4 Tiers when we have everything

While this looks ok on paper, in practice when we focus on unity, that means we have only 5 Tiers available until we get a rare Tier 5 tech.
So a Unity build has half his potential locked behind a late game technology.

I don't mind having the last Ascension Tiers being locked behind technologies, but I feel it shouldn't be half of them.
We could change the system so that each Tier is unlocked independently. Here's a few places where I feel we could unlock a Tier:

• The first 2 Ascension Perks (but I guess if it's not in the game it's for slowing down the process)
• Capital Statecraft techs (Colonial Centralization, Galactic Administration)
• Slaying a Leviathan (only the first one should count)

We could also have a system where it's possible to have more than 10 ways to unlock an ascension Tier (but it would still be maxed at 10 Tiers), and we could add some special ways to unlock tiers for specific empires, for example:

• Destroying an Empire as a Fanatic Purifier/Devouring Swarm/...
• Finding the "original empire" as a Lost Colony

 

[rubert]

Tooltips for Strikecraft lack information about the engagement range. Carrier computer has bonus to it but there doesn't seem to be any information on the actual base range (judging from the game files the base seems to be 125).

 

[DeanTheDull]

Is Mercantile tradition supposed to disrupt steady-level of monthly mineral market purchases?

Not sure if this is a bug, a change, working as intended, but once you get the 10% market fee reduction from the Mercantile Tradition, it seems it affects how fast it takes for minerals to go to normal. From other discussions/threads/versions, I believe the steady state for monthly mineral purchases is 52, as in if you buy 52 minerals a month, it will always reset to the base cost by the next month. But once Mercantile's market fee reduction tradition is taken, it seems that the 50 mineral a month cost gradually increases, not only above the 'new' monthly price (60 instead of 65 energy for 50 minerals), but above the 'old' (65) energy a month.

Which is to say- if 50 minerals really is supposed to be stable market price, with Mercantile's 10% market fee reduction, the stable mineral price destabilizes until you start paying more for 50 minerals than if you didn't take the market fee reduction.

I think this might be a matter of the internal market price taking longer to settle? I'm not sure, and due to time constraints haven't been able to dedicate time to better note taking and testing. I just know that after awhile of 50 mineral a month purchases, I have to stop buying any minerals to give the market time to reset the price.

 

[Cadzon]

I havnt read the entire thread yet, but to me it feels like you did something good with the ai and difficult level. They beat the crap out of me mid game which havnt happen in a long time. Admiral and mid game scaling. It was a 4v1 but I usually always manage somehow (at least not lose wars).

I'm really glad you added the terraform candidate on the map. But for some reason my brain don't want to get used to the color or symbol for it. Just feels of. Maybe consider something other more suiting? Better this than not have it at all tho.

It also feels like the ai is much "nicer" to me as a player. Before I had to put some effort to make them leave me alone, but now they leave me alone and bombard me with all kinds of agreements. Been like that for 4 5 play though, not sure how I feel about it.

 

[Dudas Drakaan]

I like what you have done with the missile techs (only to missile and swarmer missile techs, not torpedoes). I've found myself using missiles on larger ships frequently now due to their longer range and it means a lot of carrier hull designs are far more powerful than they used to be.

The serious problem I've seen with the new balance, however, is that ALL of the really good weapon techs are in engineering now. Both kinetic artillery and autocannons, ship chassis, missiles, armor, alloy production, megaengineering, robots, strike craft, and sublight engines all are engineering.

Meanwhile, shields have been nerfed directly and by the fact that missiles ignore them, neutron launchers have been nerfed into unusability, lasers are now outranged by kinetics and missiles and outdamaged vs autocannons and torpedoes. There is really nothing going for physics research now except FTL, energy credits, a few megastructures, and research labs.

In the super late game though? Only engineering is useful anymore. Repeatable shields is good if you are psychic but you now have the problem of all the engineering repeatables competing for each other: explosives, kinetic, strike craft, and armor are now all competing with each other... and physics is kinda useless.

Not to mention engineering gets 2 new tier 4 techs (autocannons and flak) while physics doesn't get squat.

In other words, Engineering research, which was already widely acclaimed to be the most important research type, is now even more important and so the balance has swung even more lopsidedly towards only a single branch of the tech tree.

I would strongly suggest moving some techs (like sublight engines) over to physics to put less strain all on engineering as well as maybe... I don't know... make Neutron Launchers slightly less terrible. Yeah, I know we were just in a Neutron Launcher meta but Neutron Launchers have become the new Swarmer Missiles.

 

[mooloh]

Efficient Bureaucracy's new effect is "Bureaucrats and Priests provide Edicts Fund scaling with their unity output". This should probably be reworded to include the ratio of between unity and edicts fund produced. The wording suggests that a job producing more unity will produce more edict fund, but it seems that priests quietly have a better edict fund ratio than bureaucrats (as seen by the two pictures below).

 

[Parsec06]

there is a little bug
terraforming cadidates are shown in white. thats very nice
but if you terraform them into machine worlds they stay marked even if colonized afterwards... i know this is not the case on terraforming into normal worlds

it also stayed this way on the galaxy map

 

[Rage007]

1. You need to show the role that has been chosen for a ship design.
2. I dont see where the role information is shown after you select a role for a ship design.
3. You also do not show the selected roles for the ships when you review them in a fleet.

I do not like the role changing the ships design, that is ridiculous.
The player should control what the design has on it regardless of the role the player chooses for a ship design. Selecting a Role that is overriding your design decisions is a terrible feature. Please fix.

 

[Rage007]

Missing effects -