3.3 Unity Open Beta Discussion Thread

[blahmaster6k]

Even before i suspected that early mid it is better to ignore sprawl and try to outlab it. So my playstyle havent changed. And it works better now.
Tech progression is faster if you more or less focus on that.

However i see a problem that you might start with initial penalty which could be discouraging. So increasing grace period to 100 sprawl could be an option.
Also while getting rid of bureaocrats is welcome, the small technologies giving 10 or 20 bonus sprawl could stay. Nominal values. The super wide will still hit penalty, but small empires could surf on the edge of sprawl limit for a bit longer. There will still be limit how many techs you can possibly get.

Other option is to play with sprawl sources values. For example reducing pop sprawl (and nerfing unrully trait) while increasing planet or system sprawl could push advantage towards tall empire. So if we decide to have a couple of ringwords in minimal system number we can have a lot of pops and still decently low sprawl. Basicly fallen empires limited their size so they can avoid sprawl (mystery solved).

This is also good moment to talk about vassals. For starter: 1) ability to boost acceptance for vassalization 2) ability to switch type of vassalization 3) ability to manipulate levels of obligations or buff them otherwise. There could be ascension perk buffing our vassal play, or while Domination Tradition dedicated to vassalization.

On the other side, there could be civics and ascension perks exacly for wide players (reducing sprawl from systems) so if you like wide you can burn some goverment and blob crazy.

That might make for some interesting ascension perk options for giving a transformative playstyle. Something like -50% empire sprawl from pops, +500% empire sprawl from systems. That being said, I'm sure people would just cheese something like that by abusing vassals and raiding that it would end up being broken.

 

[Nevars]

That might make for some interesting ascension perk options for giving a transformative playstyle. Something like -50% empire sprawl from pops, +500% empire sprawl from systems. That being said, I'm sure people would just cheese something like that by abusing vassals and raiding that it would end up being broken.

Make vassal great again lol

 

[blahmaster6k]

Make vassal great again lol

People were already cheating the pop growth system back in 3.1 by repeatedly releasing and integrating vassals, or by setting up empires to raid every ten years to get around the empire growth penalty. Forgive me for not having faith in players to not abuse whatever system we end up getting lol.

 

[John MacWhat]

People were already cheating the pop growth system back in 3.1 by repeatedly releasing and integrating vassals, or by setting up empires to raid every ten years to get around the empire growth penalty. Forgive me for not having faith in players to not abuse whatever system we end up getting lol.

You say abuse, I say dystopian social order. Creating states for the express purpose of harvesting them sounds pretty sci-fi to me

 

[Marmelado]

I have opposite experience from faction, the highest unity produced one I have is 18 (almost 100 approval rating) that's hardly high, about equavalent to 2 bureaucrats.

Am I doing something wrong?

No, you are not wrong. In current campaign it is 2268, and unity production is +151. Factions produce only +39 unity or about 25.8% of the total output. The capital alone produces 65 unity or 43%. That's why players may not bother with factions at all. Building three additional administrative centers is more than enough.

 

[HFY]

Even before i suspected that early mid it is better to ignore sprawl and try to outlab it. So my playstyle havent changed. And it works better now.
Tech progression is faster if you more or less focus on that.

However i see a problem that you might start with initial penalty which could be discouraging. So increasing grace period to 100 sprawl could be an option.
Also while getting rid of bureaocrats is welcome, the small technologies giving 10 or 20 bonus sprawl could stay. Nominal values. The super wide will still hit penalty, but small empires could surf on the edge of sprawl limit for a bit longer. There will still be limit how many techs you can possibly get.

Other option is to play with sprawl sources values. For example reducing pop sprawl (and nerfing unrully trait) while increasing planet or system sprawl could push advantage towards tall empire. So if we decide to have a couple of ringwords in minimal system number we can have a lot of pops and still decently low sprawl. Basicly fallen empires limited their size so they can avoid sprawl (mystery solved).

This is also good moment to talk about vassals. For starter: 1) ability to boost acceptance for vassalization 2) ability to switch type of vassalization 3) ability to manipulate levels of obligations or buff them otherwise. There could be ascension perk buffing our vassal play, or while Domination Tradition dedicated to vassalization.

On the other side, there could be civics and ascension perks exacly for wide players (reducing sprawl from systems) so if you like wide you can burn some goverment and blob crazy.

Spitballing some ideas for Wide / Tall mechanic buffs under 3.3b rules:

- Wide Frontier: reduced sprawl and reduced productivity for Frontier worlds -- go forth and conquer, but the way you are oppressing the conquered means they don't contribute as much to your economy.

- Tall Builder: reduced sprawl of all kinds in your Core sector, increased sprawl everywhere else.

- System Focus: reduced sprawl of all kinds in systems with an upgraded Starbase (or one Starbase building). Might need a mechanics change to limit Starbases a bit more.

- Colonial Viceroys: reduced sprawl of all kinds in your capital system and sector capital systems; increased sprawl everywhere else. (This is for empires which intend to spawn off a bunch of Vassals, the idea is that you build up your sector capital sufficiently and then release the sector.)


Might relate some of these to your Diplomatic Stance -- being Expansionist might get you cheap Outposts, but expensive colonies, for example.

 

[Nevars]

Did you change something with the factions? After some conquests I had all factions like always but this time they were evenly distributed and extremly hard to satisfy. Promoting and Suppressing factions didn't do anything and since you basically patched edicts out of the game I couldn't use Information Quarantine either (my unity would have gone negative just by this one edict). Some planets had 9% Stability and there wasn't anything I could do about it.

The problem is that factions are mutually exclusive. Have robots? Spiritualists are pissed. No robots? Materialists are pissed. It's the same with everything. Since conquered pops have different ethics, you will end up with all 7 factions and most of them are not happy. My empire was so inefficient because of this it was hard to play. In 3.2 it was no problem at all. Once again, bio empires have a huge drawback.

I just hope the whole 3.3 version will be scrapped. It is so bad and unbalanced and does not achieve ANYTHING (other than making the game less fun). For me, my Stellaris journey will be over if this comes out.

How many sprawl you have that you can't use information quarantine edict, one of the edict that has lowest upkeep, iirc it's base is 10.

If you research various tech that increase edict funds then that should be able to keep up with the upkeep scaling and if you are really really wide that you can't keep up with the upkeep then you should produce enough unity to easily effort it.

So I don't understand how you can't use information quarantine unless you are incredibly mismange your empire, in that case the problem wouldn't be with the game I'm afraid.

You can easily ignore minority faction in favor of major one and even then faction is kind of pointless anyway so I don't know how can you have trouble from them.

 

[UAreDie]

Did you change something with the factions? After some conquests I had all factions like always but this time they were evenly distributed and extremly hard to satisfy. Promoting and Suppressing factions didn't do anything and since you basically patched edicts out of the game I couldn't use Information Quarantine either (my unity would have gone negative just by this one edict). Some planets had 9% Stability and there wasn't anything I could do about it.

The problem is that factions are mutually exclusive. Have robots? Spiritualists are pissed. No robots? Materialists are pissed. It's the same with everything. Since conquered pops have different ethics, you will end up with all 7 factions and most of them are not happy. My empire was so inefficient because of this it was hard to play. In 3.2 it was no problem at all. Once again, bio empires have a huge drawback.

I just hope the whole 3.3 version will be scrapped. It is so bad and unbalanced and does not achieve ANYTHING (other than making the game less fun). For me, my Stellaris journey will be over if this comes out.

Thankfully its just a beta, hopefully they remove some nerfs, because as-is a merchant habitat build has 35% stability on day 1, and trade is back to being useless. Things I think need rebalancing are:

Increase habitat amenities so void dwellers don't have 35% stability
Increase Unity production from trade back to 0.25
Reduce leader Unity costs, as 200 is way too much early game, maybe to 50 unity each
Give merchants civic unity production again
Increase Rogue Servitor pop unity production

 

[Marmelado]

I like the idea of the Unity rework, but after playing through a few games on the beta, I feel like the goals of the rework were not reached.
Tech rushing is still a stellar strategy, spiritualist empires are still weak, and by late game unity is just as useless as before.
I would mostly like to focus on the edicts though. I am not sure why you would change it again, the rework feels clunky and honestly just not thought through. You placed a cap on edicts in earlier patches for a reason, yet here you essentially allowing a free-for-all for edicts as long as you can sustain them, which means playing wide is the obvious thing to do (despite your goal of improving tall play). Being able to toggle them on and off whenever is also just broken. If I need a better scientist just pop that philosophical mindset, get a good one, then turn it off (there are examples like this for a lot of them).
Also, I would say that influence for the first half if the game becomes essentially useless. Often the most limiting factor for whatever playstyle I go, has now become worthless and again encourages playing wide.

Changing the game just to change it doesn't make it better. This rework needed to be more focused and centralized, rather than change entire established systems of the game. If you want unity to be more valuable make it harder to get, if you want spiritual plays to be stronger buff the psyonics, if you want tech rushing to to be harder increase upkeep of science workers. You guys are thinking waaay to hard to address simple issues in the game.

Correct. This rebalance fails to achieve its goals because it either does not understand or does not want to address the deeper reasons for the snowballing problem.

Stellaris is a math-based game and its math always favors the snowballing (the wide playstyle). Read more about it here. No amount of number-juggling, penalties or bonuses will ever change that. No matter how many artificial obstacles you put in front of the wide in Stellaris, math will always catch up and the wide will always win.

The only way to address and do something about the wide/tall disparity is to introduce some sort of non-linear (not overtly mathematical) gameplay. Some problems for the wide that would be hard to beat by throwing more resources at it.

 

[gamerk2]

"Tall" v "Wide" is not about having less pops. its about having those same pops and the same economy denser concentrated in one spot. Your Tall Empire should optimally have the same 640 and 1920 pops just like the wide empire, but in a significantly smaller Space. So 1920 pops on 24 colonies in only 8 Systems. The idea is that instead of spending your resources on expanding around you, you can spend those resources on upgrading your planets and into spamming Habitats and building Ringworlds.

But for that, the new Planetary Ascension is not strong enough. Expanding into other Systems and colonizing(or conquering) more planets is far cheaper than building Habitats. One cost 1 colony ship and 0 tech, the other costs a lot of alloys + Influence + colony ship and requires a level 2 tech. And finally, the Sprawl, as it currently is in the Beta, completely fails to simulate the challenges of a sparse Empire and the synergies of a dense Empire because it just blatantly counts pops. (Example: South Korea and Canada have the same GDP and are within 25% of each others population. One is just so much denser and better interconnected than the larger one)

Right raises a key point: Shouldn't the "Tall" (dense) Empire have significantly less Sprawl despite having the same number of pops? The input shouldn't be pops, it should be systems/sectors/planets.

 

[Archael90]

Correct. This rebalance fails to achieve its goals because it either does not understand or does not want to address the deeper reasons for the snowballing problem.

Stellaris is a math-based game and its math always favors the snowballing (the wide playstyle). Read more about it here. No amount of number-juggling, penalties or bonuses will ever change that. No matter how many artificial obstacles you put in front of the wide in Stellaris, math will always catch up and the wide will always win.

The only way to address and do something about the wide/tall disparity is to introduce some sort of non-linear (not overtly mathematical) gameplay. Some problems for the wide that would be hard to beat by throwing more resources at it.

Like decreased stability and production the further from capital you are. Sprawl penalties could affect not all science/traditions, but could increase penalties of far sectors, with unity spend to keep it in empire or release as vassals, otherwise those sectors would just rebell and ask of independence and start a war if not acceped.

 

[evilcat]

Right raises a key point: Shouldn't the "Tall" (dense) Empire have significantly less Sprawl despite having the same number of pops? The input shouldn't be pops, it should be systems/sectors/planets.

Each system has some resources. Also systems give you more planets. And access to invade some other empire.
Tall empire could invest in ecumenopolis or ringwords and mass pops there.

 

[Obeliskkai]

Correct. This rebalance fails to achieve its goals because it either does not understand or does not want to address the deeper reasons for the snowballing problem.

Stellaris is a math-based game and its math always favors the snowballing (the wide playstyle). Read more about it here. No amount of number-juggling, penalties or bonuses will ever change that. No matter how many artificial obstacles you put in front of the wide in Stellaris, math will always catch up and the wide will always win.

The only way to address and do something about the wide/tall disparity is to introduce some sort of non-linear (not overtly mathematical) gameplay. Some problems for the wide that would be hard to beat by throwing more resources at it.

I would suspect introducing some kind of non-linear gameplay probably isn't possible, at least in an elegant way that interlocks with the game as it currently is. It's probably something they should consider once Stellaris 2 starts becoming more than an abstract topic of discussion but we are far from that at the moment.

Leaving aside the nuances of the current feedback for the moment, I believe it wise to reflect upon the purpose of the rework.

It is to make unity viable as a resource, which it does, and to hobble (but not destroy) the tech rush playstyle through the introduction of rubber band mechanics.

The feedback is currently suggesting that the impact of sprawl on technology just isn't strong enough right now, that it needs to be considerably more pronounced in order for Paradox to achieve it's design goal. Are the developers worried that the more the increase the penalty, the more the people who don't like this change as it inhibits wide play will get upset? That is possible I suppose, and they maybe erring on the side of caution, but I can't help but feel that IF they are going with this philosophy it would be more advisable to commit to it, to tune the numbers so that it bears the philosophy out and see if it leads to a healthier game at the end of it. A half hearted implementation that does not fulfil these goals will degrade the experience and leave nobody happy, that is not an outcome worth the effort.

Stronger penalties for sprawl on technology and a reduction on unity costs for leaders, traditions and edicts would be an iteration I would argue is well worth testing and I would hope there is a beta update that applies such changes so we can see how it works out.

As the game is set up, wide will always trump tall. That is never going to change, it's simply an expression of the game's most basic design. However, if these changes are implemented AND TUNED correctly, the disparity between wide and tall should be significantly narrowed and the each playthrough will offer us a meaningful choice of how we wish to proceed, rather than being funneled into the one meta for optimal play.

 

[Vladisi]

You say abuse, I say dystopian social order. Creating states for the express purpose of harvesting them sounds pretty sci-fi to me

To paraphrase a bad movie:
"I CREATE LIFE!.. And I take it to work in my factories."

 

[Grenartia]

Right raises a key point: Shouldn't the "Tall" (dense) Empire have significantly less Sprawl despite having the same number of pops? The input shouldn't be pops, it should be systems/sectors/planets.

I did point it out before, that the sprawl system basically penalizes pops multiple times. First, directly. Then for having districts and planets. Like, get rid of district sprawl and just count pops, colonies, and systems. Then make each kind of sprawl have different effects.

Pop sprawl should increase pop maintenance.
Colony sprawl should increase edict cost.
System sprawl should increase tech cost.

None of the sprawl effects should make expansion prohibitive (but it should be felt), and it should be manageable.

 

[HFY]

The only way to address and do something about the wide/tall disparity is to introduce some sort of non-linear (not overtly mathematical) gameplay. Some problems for the wide that would be hard to beat by throwing more resources at it.

In earlier versions, my larger empires had to worry about unrest and instability, especially if I went on a conquest binge.

In recent memory, there's no meaningful unrest.

Unity vs. Unrest might be a good mechanic to explore -- where you spend Unity to quell unrest and stabilize regions which would not voluntarily follow your rule.

 

[grommile]

Not having to compute sprawl might even improve game performance.

Computing sprawl should be pretty fast; the number of pops, colonies, and systems your empire has doesn't change that fast, so there's no reason to recalculate it every time you need it vs. caching the result and directly updating it when it changes.

 

[Marmelado]

I would suspect introducing some kind of non-linear gameplay probably isn't possible, at least in an elegant way that interlocks with the game as it currently is. It's probably something they should consider once Stellaris 2 starts becoming more than an abstract topic of discussion but we are far from that at the moment.

It is a hard design task, especially for an old and a complex game like this, and it requires quite a lot of creativity, but I don't think it is outright impossible. One organic way to make the wide weaker in current Stellaris is by revamping the internal stability, something many have suggested in this thread. This revamp may include non-linear game design ideas, like making rebellions far more potent than linear numbers would suggest. Something similar to old CK2 system of rebellious vassals calling other, non-rebellious vassals into action resulting in some truly dangerous revolts. It is just an example of a mechanic that does not rely on math too much and may be used in this case.

As the game is set up, wide will always trump tall. That is never going to change, it's simply an expression of the game's most basic design. However, if these changes are implemented AND TUNED correctly, the disparity between wide and tall should be significantly narrowed and the each playthrough will offer us a meaningful choice of how we wish to proceed, rather than being funneled into the one meta for optimal play.

Since the wide is still better than the tall, making penalties harsher won't make a difference. Even if there were off the rails penalties like "each new system increases tech cost by 10%", the gap would still exist and would still grow over time. Making things harsher would only delay the inevitable and alienate the majority of the playerbase.

 

[moyang]

I did point it out before, that the sprawl system basically penalizes pops multiple times. First, directly. Then for having districts and planets. Like, get rid of district sprawl and just count pops, colonies, and systems. Then make each kind of sprawl have different effects.

Pop sprawl should increase pop maintenance.
Colony sprawl should increase edict cost.
System sprawl should increase tech cost.

None of the sprawl effects should make expansion prohibitive (but it should be felt), and it should be manageable.

Current sprawl effect doesn't make expansion prohibitive (it's quite the opposite), but pop sprawl increasing pop maintenance might do so.

 

[DeanTheDull]

I did point it out before, that the sprawl system basically penalizes pops multiple times. First, directly. Then for having districts and planets. Like, get rid of district sprawl and just count pops, colonies, and systems. Then make each kind of sprawl have different effects.

Pop sprawl should increase pop maintenance.
Colony sprawl should increase edict cost.
System sprawl should increase tech cost.

None of the sprawl effects should make expansion prohibitive (but it should be felt), and it should be manageable.

Or have system sprawl be a multiplier effect, rather than an additative value. If you, say, took the number of total systems and divided by the number of system you had the colonies in, and then multiplied your sprawl penalty by that, this would have a significant efficiency penalty on dense vs distributed empires. Dense- tall- empires with a Habitat in every system would be far more efficient than empires where habited sectors are months or years of travel time away from the next inhabited sector.


Now this is an example, not a recommendation, but you could absolutely use system sprawl in a different sense to incentivize tall vs wide.

(For example- instead of multiplying the penalty, decrease it in a way that favors the tight empires.)