Seriously PDX... Fix your AI Logic across the board..

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Hi all,

I came into the thread this morning to find that it had been deleted from the forums by the moderator team. While I can see and understand their action, in any normal circumstance this thread would have warranted some similar action; however, we're going to restore the thread on the proviso that it remains the civil discussion that is being had. Important topics should be discussed, so long as we do so in a respectful manner so let's continue that from here.

We'll keep an eye on things and if it goes too far out of line, our moderators will take action against individuals. If the thread devolves too far from respectful discussions, we'll have to lock it just to keep things on a level. :)

Sorry for the disappearance of the thread for a while there. Feel free to ping me if there are any further issues.

-Dale/badgr

Oh yes I will !

Please, could you explain to us, as moderator, why this thread was deleted or should be under normal circumstance ? From my understanding it does not break any forum rule and nearly all replies are respectful... and even if that was the case you, moderators, could have just deleted posts, not the thread.

Enough of marketting bullshit ! We have it on account for the game state, now we have it for thread deletion ? What age do you think your base customer has ? Do you take us for some kid playing fortnite ? I do not judge, but sadly for you, the complexity of the PDS games call for a much more mature public....
 
Personally, I've seen major improvements in the conceptualizations of core systems in the last few patches, its astounding. Stellaris is now not even comparable to other strategy games, because nothing in the genre even comes close in terms of fidelity of design, and nothing in other genres has take comparable leaps in innovation.
On release Stellaris was basically a poor man's Civ in space. To come so far from that beginning in terms of design in just two years is impressive.
Certainly there are areas that could still use some more development and complexity, but everything Ive seen so far makes me confident in the future.

In the shorter term, there are bugs, but I've seen both constant interaction from devs, work and discussion on improvement, and huge activity in the bug report forum.

I'm seeing long-term progress in terms of design, and short-term progress in terms of maintenance.
Why am I supposed to be upset again?
 
Thank you for restoring the thread. I was actually just about finished typing out a rant regarding PDX's behavior in this matter and posting it on here and on reddit. Deleting a thread like this is one of the worst causes of action that you could take.

Yes, the tone in this thread is harsh, but it is not toxic. People are rightfully angry that they paid for an unfinished product with little to no acceptance of responsibility by PDX and PDS.
 
Please, could you explain to us, as moderator, why this thread was deleted or should be under normal circumstance ? From my understanding it does not break any forum rule and nearly all replies are respectful... and even if that was the case you, moderators, could have just deleted posts, not the thread.
The good sir Badgr doesn't have much to do with the moderators so I'll take this one :D!

The thread was reported last night and one of the moderators removed it as a temporary measure and assigned it to me for review. It was also at this point that Mr Badgr (not to be confused with Mr Rogers) got involved. This isn't uncommon actually, sometimes when a report comes in and we aren't in the office, threads are temporarily removed to prevent them from spiraling out of control until we get a chance to review it. In this case I feel that this was justified as tensions were running high (since it was linked in various places) and we'd rather be present to give you proper replies instead of leaving it alone for several hours giving some people the impression that we simply aren't caring or can't be bothered to reply.
 
Personally, I've seen major improvements in the conceptualizations of core systems in the last few patches, its astounding. Stellaris is now not even comparable to other strategy games, because nothing in the genre even comes close in terms of fidelity of design, and nothing in other genres has take comparable leaps in innovation.
On release Stellaris was basically a poor man's Civ in space. To come so far from that beginning in terms of design in just two years is impressive.
Certainly there are areas that could still use some more development and complexity, but everything Ive seen so far makes me confident in the future.

In the shorter term, there are bugs, but I've seen both constant interaction from devs, work and discussion on improvement, and huge activity in the bug report forum.

I'm seeing long-term progress in terms of design, and short-term progress in terms of maintenance.
Why am I supposed to be upset again?

Strange. I saw the exact opposite.

I saw a PDS game in space. An unfinished, lacking PDS game but a PDS game nonetheless.

Now I see an unfinished civ5 in space.


Not telling there was no progress mind you ! Civ is a pretty good game, even if it lacks some depth and can so easily be cheesed by just playing it well it becomes trivial, but if the 2.2 gives me some hopes about it, the 2.0 was a detroying one, reducing a grand strategy space opera 4X to a merely sub galciv on a larger scale. When - and if a day - Stellaris recover from 2.0 (and I mean really, beginning with an AI that know how the game work, and having expansion plans and knowing how to wage war...) we will talk about progress, for now they just took a good game with flaws, throw it in a blender and serves it with interesting functionnalities that do not work. Not exactly my definition of 'improvement'...
 
and we'd rather be present to give you proper replies instead of leaving it alone for several hours giving some people the impression that we simply aren't caring or can't be bothered to reply.

This feels like it would have warranted to close down the forums for the whole month of PDXs absence during the holidays ;)
Thanks for the clarification though.
 
The good sir Badgr doesn't have much to do with the moderators so I'll take this one :D!

The thread was reported last night and one of the moderators removed it as a temporary measure and assigned it to me for review. It was also at this point that Mr Badgr (not to be confused with Mr Rogers) got involved. This isn't uncommon actually, sometimes when a report comes in and we aren't in the office, threads are temporarily removed to prevent them from spiraling out of control until we get a chance to review it. In this case I feel that this was justified as tensions were running high (since it was linked in various places) and we'd rather be present to give you proper replies instead of leaving it alone for several hours giving some people the impression that we simply aren't caring or can't be bothered to reply.

That transparency is appreciated. Thank you
 
I'm seeing long-term progress in terms of design, and short-term progress in terms of maintenance.
Why am I supposed to be upset again?
Because you want to play the game you bought now? Not in some potential future 3 years from now?

Look don't get me wrong, I also liked the direction Stellaris was going for with LeGuin, I was very excited about it before release, following up all dev diaries etc. I'm still here after this disastrous launch because I still have some hope that the game can be salvaged and become what it should have been. But that doesn't make what happened any less of a disaster. And if I could play the game, even with all the bugs, even with the effectively brain-dead AI, I would be more patient. But when the game chokes on lag and dies on me even on a 600-star map, that's borderline unplayable. When the game is reported to cause stutters and indeed it does for me on occasion making me worry about my hardware, that's totally unacceptable. When the company I have put all this trust in throughout the years and supported with my wallet time and again is behaving thusly, that's very disappointing.

Now admittedly being upset is perhaps taking it far, at least after all these weeks. The annoyance goes, the disappointment stays. But people expressing their dismay, makes perfect sense.
 
Because you want to play the game you bought now? Not in some potential future 3 years from now?

Look don't get me wrong, I also liked the direction Stellaris was going for with LeGuin, I was very excited about it before release, following up all dev diaries etc. I'm still here after this disastrous launch because I still have some hope that the game can be salvaged and become what it should have been. But that doesn't make what happened any less of a disaster. And if I could play the game, even with all the bugs, even with the effectively brain-dead AI, I would be more patient. But when the game chokes on lag and dies on me even on a 600-star map, that's borderline unplayable. When the game is reported to cause stutters and indeed it does for me on occasion making me worry about my hardware, that's totally unacceptable. When the company I have put all this trust in throughout the years and supported with my wallet time and again is behaving thusly, that's very disappointing.

Now admittedly being upset is perhaps taking it far, at least after all these weeks. The annoyance goes, the disappointment stays. But people expressing their dismay, makes perfect sense.

If only I could play the the potential game I saw 2.5 years ago... That would be the best game ever, and with a fair margin ! Sadly I'm pretty tired of waiting and hope ! I payed a lot for this one, I'll pay eagearly 5 times that to play the potential one (no joke..... @Paradox, give me an optional AI DLC at $40 that does nothing if the issue is about money). Now I want a working game....

Edit : yes, 5 times of a $200 customer. No regret. And if I doubt any new customer will throw as much, I'll be happy to see - and pay- for it. But I fucking want a working game ! And that is not debatable !
 
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Because you want to play the game you bought now? Not in some potential future 3 years from now?

Look don't get me wrong, I also liked the direction Stellaris was going for with LeGuin, I was very excited about it before release, following up all dev diaries etc. I'm still here after this disastrous launch because I still have some hope that the game can be salvaged and become what it should have been. But that doesn't make what happened any less of a disaster. And if I could play the game, even with all the bugs, even with the effectively brain-dead AI, I would be more patient. But when the game chokes on lag and dies on me even on a 600-star map, that's borderline unplayable. When the game is reported to cause stutters and indeed it does for me on occasion making me worry about my hardware, that's totally unacceptable. When the company I have put all this trust in throughout the years and supported with my wallet time and again is behaving thusly, that's very disappointing.

Now admittedly being upset is perhaps taking it far, at least after all these weeks. The annoyance goes, the disappointment stays. But people expressing their dismay, makes perfect sense.
Thats perfectly reasonable!
Personally I actually skipped Apocalypse, Distant Stars, and Synthetic Dawn because to me the game had not developed far enough for me to invest more of my time in it. When I finally did buy those expansions later, it was at a deep steam discount.
I've also been doing a decent amount of modding, bug-reporting, and bug-fixing since the 2.2 release, so believe me I'm about as deeply aware of the bugs in this release as a customer can be.
The changes in 2.2 were just so huge that its obvious a few eggs got broken, rather than hold that against them I applaud the innovation. In a few weeks most of the bugs will be gone, and improvements that enticed me to spend money on the game again will remain.
I just think that some of the toxicity you see around here is purely bad-mannered.

Please dont take this as lecturing either. I fully accept the futility of lecturing a community, I dont expect to change any minds.
But when devs wander through here I want there to be at least a few people reasonable enough for the devs to see us as a worthwhile community, rather than a herd of sheep to be sheared while they ignore our bleating.
If few enough of us act like humans and treat them like humans, few enough of them will treat us like humans, thats my philosophy.

Paradox has embraced a new ethic: Xenophobe
Species - Customer - Change Citizenship: Slaves
Speces - Customer - Change Slavery Type: Livestock
 
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The problem with 2.2 isn't that a few eggs got broken. When a few eggs break you can throw them out and continue cooking with new eggs. What happened is that they took the eggs including their shell, continued using them in their cake and sold that cake without disclosing that it was unedible.

I realize that I'm quite harsh in my critizim and I truly don't want to sound like this cannot be fixed. If PDS puts in the work necessary and takes their time to actually fix the game and flesh out the features that they have going, Stellaris will be better than it has ever been. I will happily keep on spending once this happens.
 
The problem with 2.2 isn't that a few eggs got broken. When a few eggs break you can throw them out and continue cooking with new eggs. What happened is that they took the eggs including their shell, continued using them in their cake and sold that cake without disclosing that it was unedible.

I realize that I'm quite harsh in my critizim and I truly don't want to sound like this cannot be fixed. If PDS puts in the work necessary and takes their time to actually fix the game and flesh out the features that they have going, Stellaris will be better than it has ever been. I will happily keep on spending once this happens.

Cake based metaphors don't actually sound that harsh.
 
One of my new years resolutions, made after playing megacorp, was to never again pay for game content that I knew was not working as intended. As I get older I find that I have less time to game, and when I do I prefer to spend it with a game that is functioning as intended.

Sadly this means I probably wont be buying any Paradox games for a long time, perhaps ever again if the past few years are any indication. Have their games ever functioned well in singleplayer? I cant think of any; not EU4, not CK2, not HOI3 or 4, and not Stellaris.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me for years and years, that's on me.
 
I'm seeing long-term progress in terms of design, and short-term progress in terms of maintenance.
Why am I supposed to be upset again?

The new features sounded good, they may even work. But in my opinion, most of the new features are lacking, either because they are poorly implemented, or because of bugs and questionable design decisions.

  • The trade routes do nothing more then occupying your fleet and producing lags.
  • The implementation of the new POP-system is complete nonsense. It always tries to even out all the species in your empire, which is totally illogical. A species with more POPs on one planet should take precedence over a species with less, not the otherway around.
  • The new sector system is illogical and not player friendly. There are too often one-planet sectors, there is no way to modify the layout of sectors that may be nonsensical and there is no way to really automate the sectors. Even under the premise that the AI would be more intelligent than a bacteria, you still would have the problem that you have to manually assign resources to your sectors.
  • Since you have no way to automate your sectors, and even if, no sane person would, because of the stupid AI, you have to micromanage every planet. That would normally be no problem (it does works in most other 4x games), but since you only have that stupid outliner you're so much closer to hell than you'd have to be.
  • To play Machine Empires is just hell in the state the game is at the moment. Not only that it takes ages to produce one damn non-organic-POP; your influence gain is near nonexistent, since they can't have factions, granted, this is not new, but the combination of both is killing them.
  • The new job and housing system feels, at least for me, kinda strange. I think that there is a bit too much artificial complexity, because of the combination of available jobs, strata, housing and amenities. In my opinion a bit it would have been better to abstract it a bit more. I feel like the complexity a Civilisation has would have been enough. That means: No need to build Housing districts. Every Planet should be able to house a certain number of POPs, once that limit is reached every new POP generates unhappyness. One or two buildings should be available to increase that soft cap. Also some Traditions or Perks should increase the cap. Further more, Buildings should still provide jobs, a POP that has no job should create unhappyness, but there should be no real need to build amenities, other than to increase happyness. But with the current system I have to constantly balance amenities, jobs and housing. And I most certainly don't see what we gain through stratas, other than more complexity with no gameplay. I mean, I get it, a POP that works in a district is in the lowest strata, a POP that works in a building in the middle and a POP that works in the administration building is in the highest strata. But what is the gain gameplaywise?
For me, many things feel like they were well meant, but not well made. Some are just bugged, others add no true value to the game except from another thing I have to babysit and others doesn't even do that. On top of that are going all the things that broken. An expansion that had less micro as one of its goals added mainly more micro, already questionable systems, like the outliner, are falling apart, because they don't work well with the new features.
 
"Nobody says it's dev fault but it's clear that someone/management rushed release for cashgrab. This is non-functional, broken, unacceptable! Crises, AI, TODO"

Alright. Now that EVERY point on the status of this release has been made several times, in dozens of pages of different threads over a month, can we just stop beating the dead horse?
Errors have been made, fixes are coming. As Darkrenown said, wait for it and see how you like it. And if you don't, use actions and don't preorder anymore. But it's the same loop over and over again of 'its their fault!' 'no its upper plans fault's!' 'no it's our fault for preordering!'.
Paradox got the message painfully clear. 2.2 isn't up to expectations and is in the process of being fixed. They had meetings and discussed these matters. What more can you possibly obtain by bashing PDS now? Any more words on the subject are overkill. Just relax and see for yourself if you like future direction better.
 
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Well well well... I am so happy to see in this thread that Paradox is finally admitting that they might have just commited something a little insidious by releasing a patch/expansion that makes the game unplayable.

I am willing to give them a chance, after all they did make an awesome game. Let's see how it will look after it gets to 2.2.4 and 2.2.5.

Also I believe that once everything is fixed and Paradox has time to recap what went wrong they will release a statement to the community in which they will explain why the game got released in such a state and what they have done and are commited to to next time to prevent that from happening again. They do not have to do this of course, but it would be a fair move and would encourage people to buy the next expansion and maybe even flip some of those bad reviews on Steam to positive ones eventually? I think it would be a very nice gesture and a start for building up some trust.
 
What i would like paradox todo with their games, is to setup observer games.
Everyday you let some of your workstatios run observer games over night.

The observer games should be diverse in settings.

Those observer games should provide alot of data - more then you can handle without tools - so you need to implement tools to analize the feedback of the games.

Since you run alot of those games, on multiple machines, they should provide information about:
1. Are all events accessable, and happening, how often are they happening, are all options of those events used. (should the events happen this often, options taken)
2. Are all anomalies accessable and exploited.(see 1)
3. Research - Did the AI research all technology there is or not, should the AI research some stuff more often. ...
4. Where the special empires placed ingame? Marauders/fallen. Is the placement reasonable?
5. Did all the endgame/midgame crisis happen?, at what date did they trigger, when was the crisis defeated.
6. Same as 5 but for "War in Heaven".
7. In the thousends of hours of observer-games running over night there should be a hell of alot of data about fleet engagements. Are the fleets build to reasonable standards, are the results reasonable.....
8. Where all the leviatans spawned/defeated - where they defeated in a reasonable time/way.
9. Was there enough/frequent interaction with enclaves(traders/researchers/artists).
10. Which empires are doing a good job, which fail horribly.
11. Where all the different buildings build, and are the numbers reasonable.
12. What about Megastructures.
13. Did the galactic market work as it should, what went wrong.
14. Where all the traditions picked, what is the average tradition progress.
15. Acention perks see 14.
...
This list can be so much longer, with lots of things players have no idea about.

Those game would report a hell of alot of bugs, propably 50-90% of everything which is reportend in the bug forums.
Alot of issues which cant be seen by players, bad AI behavior.
 
What i would like paradox todo with their games, is to setup observer games.
Everyday you let some of your workstatios run observer games over night.
...
Those game would report a hell of alot of bugs, propably 50-90% of everything which is reportend in the bug forums.
Alot of issues which cant be seen by players, bad AI behavior.
I pretty sure they already do this
 
Have their games ever functioned well in singleplayer? I cant think of any; not EU4

Well honestly i never saw EU4 falling on its face in singleplayer like Stellaris and HoI4 do. It's the only PDX game i run without mods.

But despite having untold hours on EU4 i don't consider myself an expert at it because i more or less play it very casually, so i could be very wrong. I just have the impression that it's the most stable and "polished" of the big three.