3.3 Unity Open Beta Discussion Thread

[grommile]

But I will still argue that 2 amenities per job is useless

Unless the job is an enhanced variant of a base job that doesn't produce 2 amenities/job and so needs a separate source of amenities.

(Also there are ways to reduce amenity demand.)

 

[John MacWhat]

Responding to this from the Feedback thread.

Edict funds were introduced to help tall empires where funds would cover some edicts. Funds are not meant to cover all edicts, not even to cover one whole edict in wide empire, and this goal is somehow achived, yet edicts on its own are too expensive. Funds are great but wider empire have more unity production than taller one, and thus they both can enable more-less same edicts. Imo tall should be able to use more tho.

I don't think it is good design (nor the Dev's intention) to tie Tall and unity together. Spiritualists are allowed to go Wide, Tall is not their niche. Tall is the niche for Pacifists due to their reduced Pop sprawl bonus.

Regardless, the main effect of Empire Size is to impose a rubber-band on Big empires. In that regard, I understand why edicts were given any sort of scaling cost. That's fine.

But even Tall empires suffer from the lack of scaling of edict funds. The problem with the current system is that whether you are Tall or Wide, when you grow Big many edicts become uneconomical because you would need to spend more resources generating the unity to afford the edict than you receive in bonus from using it; this runs against the patch's goal of making unity more important. But if edict fund actually scaled at all, many of these edicts would be much more appealing.

The effect is also, whether you are Tall or Wide, to make edict fund less relevant as the game continues. By late game, Empire Size can easily be 1k or more. That means something like 100 edict fund (from Executive Vigor) essentially turns into +100 unity (which is a lot early in the game, but insignificant in late game).

 

[Tech Noir Synth]

(I edited my latest reply, so I decided to post what I edited as a new reply so it won't get buried and to explain it better)

As others have said, Planetary Ascension as it is now not only lacks flavor but it's not as that much viable for Tall empires due to the fact that in order to get max effect from it it requires heavily specialized planets. Tall empires usually don't have that many planets so they can't specialize them as much as Wide empires.

In order to add flavor to the whole Planetary Ascension and to make Tall empires more viable, I suggest these changes:

• every time you use Planetary Ascension to level up your planet there's a chance to get a permanent bonus to your planet.
• the smaller empire you have, the higher chance to get a permanent bonus to your planet upon leveling it up.

this would not only add flavor to the whole Planetary Ascension mechanic, but it would also make it more interesting and viable for Tall empires.

Edit.: it also means that Wider empires, that can have more specialized planets than Tall empires would benefit more from the bonuses to their planetary designations, and Tall empires, that cannot have that much specilized planets would benefit more for getting the permanent bonuses to their planets.

We already have RNG from events. Why are we adding even more RNG to the game?

This game already has atleast 2 RNG effects for planets, but no one uses them. Can you guess what they are?

Spoiler: Effect 1

Planetary Prospecting has a small chance to add strategic desposits to your planets. Also the type of disctrict options are completeley random, so its a terrible choice to use because it doesn't help you with your specialisation unless you get lucky.

Spoiler: Effect 2

The Spiritualist Ascension perks Consecrate worlds adds a random bonus. This thing is bugged for years now but no one uses it and no one bugfixed it. It says you can get up to 3 planets consecrated but I managed to consecrate 5 once, getting the max bonus anyway even with bad RNG.

Effect 1 is not even worth using. I suggested a buff multiple times. Maybe some day.

There are lots of things in this game which are so weak no one is using them. And obviously the "JUST ROLEPLAY LOL" argument doesn't fix things. You can't roleplay every bad effect away, so they stay forgotten.

 

[marcodp]

Edict funds were introduced to help tall empires where funds would cover some edicts. Funds are not meant to cover all edicts, not even to cover one whole edict in wide empire, and this goal is somehow achived, yet edicts on its own are too expensive. Funds are great but wider empire have more unity production than taller one, and thus they both can enable more-less same edicts. Imo tall should be able to use more tho.

In my tall run I could run 3 edicts all game. If I optimised some more I bet I could run 2/3 of the unity ambitions within the fund limit.

A high level governor and planet ascention alone can take sprawl down 75 %

 

[Ludaire]

This is bad design imo, since it makes you take way longer to be able to put planets to productive use.

It's been this way for gestalts or at the very least for machines for ages. I don't see any problem with ruler pops no longer trivializing amenities for regular empires until they grow to a larger planet size. A nexus district for the maintenance drones is one of the first couple of things I build on new colonies, and I don't see any reason why you can't do the same with medical workers or entertainers, especially given how much more pop efficient those are than maintenance drones.

Also, I think having a bit more of a delay before a colony becomes a net benefit and starts producing serious output is a good thing. It slows down the expansion snowball a bit, especially if you're trying to colonize a bunch of worlds simultaneously really early on.

Also, how are you needing more amenities at 5 pops than before? If I'm remembering right, they didn't change the amenities on colonist jobs. They only changed the ruler jobs, which you don't have until you upgrade your capital at 10 pops.

 

[John MacWhat]

Looks like the feedback period was extended until next Monday. Pleased to see that, gives more time to see how late game feels.

I have to say, the optimization and AI improvements have been pretty incredible. I find myself playing a lot more on Normal speed than I used to, and not just to reduce lag; Normal actually feels like a good pace for mid and late game

 

[Ludaire]

I find myself playing a lot more on Normal speed than I used to, and not just to reduce lag; Normal actually feels like a good pace for mid and late game

Oh good. I'm not the only one. I was kinda shocked at how quickly things were moving on Fast and wasn't expecting normal to be the new... Normal. Lol

 

[DC E1G]

I haven't had a chance to play the updated version of the beta yet, but I'm a bit concerned to hear that people have found ways to stack quite a few sprawl reducing modifiers.

I think such modifiers should be very hard to come by, because they're tough to balance. They run the risk of being so good as to invalidate the sprawl system and become mandatory, or so weak as to be useless noob traps, with only a small area between the two where there's a real choice.

 

[Lidhuin]

I haven't had a chance to play the updated version of the beta yet, but I'm a bit concerned to hear that people have found ways to stack quite a few sprawl reducing modifiers.

I think such modifiers should be very hard to come by, because they're tough to balance. They run the risk of being so good as to invalidate the sprawl system and become mandatory, or so weak as to be useless noob traps, with only a small area between the two where there's a real choice.

Most are available to everyone and just reduce the complexity of choices. If you're any kind of wide, for example, you need imperial prerogative (and everyone wants to go wide, so unless you're just roleplaying it's an auto pick, and that's a shame. It also nerfs megacorps hard)

Three require very specialized ethics (fanatic pacifist & egalitarian + a civic).

 

[Flamgino]

I haven't had a chance to play the updated version of the beta yet, but I'm a bit concerned to hear that people have found ways to stack quite a few sprawl reducing modifiers.

I think such modifiers should be very hard to come by, because they're tough to balance. They run the risk of being so good as to invalidate the sprawl system and become mandatory, or so weak as to be useless noob traps, with only a small area between the two where there's a real choice.

Currently I don't feel the sprawl reduction options we're given are really too "meta". Yeah, you will go for them, but granted there's a variety of ways to get them, you're not locked into a single path. Imperial Prerogative is only a sprawl reduction from owning planets. Each planet causes 10 sprawl, but each district adds 1 sprawl, and every pop adds 1 sprawl. Therefore, if you had ten planets, Imperial Prerogative may take your colonies from 100 to 50 sprawl, but your 400 pops or so are still causing another 400 sprawl and your 100 districts are causing another 100 sprawl. Imperial Prerogative has effectively only reduced your sprawl by a total 10% in that scenario, which in this case reduces your tech penalty by something like 3.5% - I'm not sure on the exact numbers there, but you'd actually get a better tech bonus from technological ascendance. It's not an auto-grab, but I would definitely consider it for something like Void Dwellers.

The point of the game is to grow your empire. What it means to "grow" could be variable, but the devs are not treating it that way. Megacorps, for example, just eat a 25% sprawl penalty for basically nothing. I think the devs are trying to punish Megacorps into staying small, but they refuse to offer any gameplay benefits that would encourage it. It's the disincentives with poor incentives problem again. Probably, Megacorps would do a lot better if their branch offices offered a country modifier that increased their national production by a percentile, such that instead of getting a flat +10 minerals, each branch office would give them +2% mineral worker output. Then you could hit them with sprawl penalties, and they'd "grow" through branch offices that aren't these piddly, non-scaling nothing-burgers. I also don't know why Megacorps are getting +10% unity when they could be getting a bonus to trade, and then convert trade directly into unity. Seems a little unity obsessed. A trade bonus is better than a unity bonus.

For robots the sprawl penalty kind of makes sense because they can colonize more planets early, but then, robots really don't feel that strong or competitive to me because only Assimilators can capture pops in a useful way and aside from that robots are stuck with only what they can manufacture. They're good noob empires because they have less to manage, and arguably they're the most competitive noob empires for passive play, but they're not that good of empires overall once you factor in competitive behavior. To me, the fact that they can build on more planets than usual at the beginning is all the standard robot empires have going for them. The penalty they're taking isn't all that bad for the same reason Imperial Prerogative isn't as good as it looks, but it's weird because it's a penalty being applied to their core advantage.

I don't think balance should be "pro" centric because at the end of the day I still think Stellaris is kind of a water cooler game in a lot of ways. You socialize with your friends while you play, maybe have a beer, eat some pretzels. But it should probably be balanced towards players who can at least win the game on standard settings while playing "Ensign", which means occasionally conquering AI empires and interacting with the broad mechanics a little more.

 

[Lidhuin]

I can immediately think of one case where it's a free 10% research -- imperial cult. With the utmost respect for the spreadsheet crowd, they have a tendency to get myopic about what is and isn't viable, good, or interesting, and they are especially good at ignoring the context of a specific game in lieu of planning around incredibly idealized situations.

Nope, because the number of technicians you'd need to support your researchers basically negates any value from the edict before accounting for unity. Your technicians would have to produce 20 energy credits in order to beat out researcher with 100% modifiers. With 200% modifiers, you end up needing to produce 33 energy per technicians in order to gain any additional research over just having more researchers. With no modifiers to researchers, you'd "only" need to produce 10 energy credits per technician, but your researchers basically start out with close to +50% modifiers from tech, stability, etc... and if you're non-gestalt, it's iffy to produce much more than 10 energy credits starting out. Not impossible to be sure, but certainly not worth focusing on an edict with questionable utility at best.

The edict isn't viable, good or interesting, and there is no context in which it could ever be viable good or interesting until the energy upkeep it comes with is removed (which is a relic from when it had no monthly upkeep). Imperial cult isn't even a good counter, because it means I have to adopt a very specific set of ethics and spend a civic just to fund one edict into the mid-game (after which sprawl takes over and it'll be more expensive than the funds the edict provides anyway). I could also just spend a civic, or one ethic, and gain the benefit of the edict without the costs, and have vastly more flexibility.

The idealized situation for researchers, by the way, is just the natural steady state, so it's not really idealized at all.

 

[DeanTheDull]

But I will still argue that 2 amenities per job is useless because 1 pop consume 1 amenity, meaning that priest amenities can only support oneself and one other pop so it probably only worth it in one situation that you brought up, that's in planet specialized in unity that it will only has priest job there.

With planetary unity designations and the efficiency meta, this is exactly how you want to do it.

Unity from faction is uh just cherry on top cuz even when majority of my pop is spiritualist and has high approval rating, spiritualist faction only produce about 90-100 unity (and that's factoring in a lot of empire wide unity bonus) which is good but not good enough.

And a mighty nice cherry it is in the early/early-mid game, when unity is most useful for cracking open strategically key traditions and ascensions, without having to give up scientist output. That the 10% buff to unity gets bigger the smaller a share the faction unity is is just a scaling advantage.

Does this means that for spiritualist to be good, you need to play specific build like oligarchy, spiritualist, egalitarian? If it is then...yeah not gonna do it for me.

Nah, spiritualist's virtue is that it's very flexible. It has synergies with almost every government type, no core conflicts with any other ethic other than Materialist, is compatible with every economic model (slave/trade/autarky/trade deal/corporate), and is very compatible with high-stability builds due to ease of reaching high faction happiness (even, yes, when using robots up to droids).

Of the three core grand strategies- early military snowballing, pop blooming, and trade-build-diplomacy coalition building- Spiritualist (or even Fanatic Spiritualist) are not only 100% compatible, but can be a core enabler. Psionic is fundamentally tied to Psionic in terms of both gaining reliable early access to the best war-ascension and then get post-war stabilization and ethic consolidation, the maximized pop-bloom strategy is a pure-organic budding zombie mega-corp, which ties into the highest trade value trade build in the game, Gospel of Prosperity MegaCorps. Even diplomatic/coalition building is stronger with Spiritualist, which has the highest ethics attraction potential through diplomacy in the game and can make even non-xenophile Federations exceptionally cohesive. Even the Crisis-rush builds are optimized through spiritualist.

 

[Lidhuin]

Currently I don't feel the sprawl reduction options we're given are really too "meta". Yeah, you will go for them, but granted there's a variety of ways to get them, you're not locked into a single path. Imperial Prerogative is only a sprawl reduction from owning planets. Each planet causes 10 sprawl, but each district adds 1 sprawl, and every pop adds 1 sprawl. Therefore, if you had ten planets, Imperial Prerogative may take your colonies from 100 to 50 sprawl, but your 400 pops or so are still causing another 400 sprawl and your 100 districts are causing another 100 sprawl. Imperial Prerogative has effectively only reduced your sprawl by a total 10% in that scenario, which in this case reduces your tech penalty by something like 3.5% - I'm not sure on the exact numbers there, but you'd actually get a better tech bonus from technological ascendance. It's not an auto-grab, but I would definitely consider it for something like Void Dwellers.

The sprawl penalties are linear as far as I've noticed, so 50 less sprawl (from just 10 colonies) is effectively -5% tech cost and -10% tradition cost, plus -50% edict upkeep and -500 unity to reform your government. Technological ascendance is an additive bonus on top of your existing +research speed, so with just 10 colonies, Imperial Prerogative already gives you more.

The point of the game is to grow your empire. What it means to "grow" could be variable, but the devs are not treating it that way. Megacorps, for example, just eat a 25% sprawl penalty for basically nothing. I think the devs are trying to punish Megacorps into staying small, but they refuse to offer any gameplay benefits that would encourage it. It's the disincentives with poor incentives problem again. Probably, Megacorps would do a lot better if their branch offices offered a country modifier that increased their national production by a percentile, such that instead of getting a flat +10 minerals, each branch office would give them +2% mineral worker output. Then you could hit them with sprawl penalties, and they'd "grow" through branch offices that aren't these piddly, non-scaling nothing-burgers. I also don't know why Megacorps are getting +10% unity when they could be getting a bonus to trade, and then convert trade directly into unity. Seems a little unity obsessed. A trade bonus is better than a unity bonus.

I don't necessarily disagree with a trade value bonus, but the unity bonus is arguably better because it's a post-production benefit: I.e. if your trade produces 200 unity, +10% unity gives you 20 more unity. In contrast, +10% trade value on top of an existing +100% trade value would turn 800 trade value into 840 trade value, which works out to 10-20 more unity (depending on what the trade league bonus ends up being).

But also arguably, trade value is more for empires that are producing trade value, and if megacorps are supposed to build branch offices, then they actually benefit from others producing trade value, not from producing it themselves. Unfortunately, Paradox needs to decide what they want Megacorps to be supposed to do, because right now it seems like they're supposed to just fail in comparison to other empire types.

I don't think balance should be "pro" centric because at the end of the day I still think Stellaris is kind of a water cooler game in a lot of ways. You socialize with your friends while you play, maybe have a beer, eat some pretzels. But it should probably be balanced towards players who can at least win the game on standard settings while playing "Ensign", which means occasionally conquering AI empires and interacting with the broad mechanics a little more.

I'm fine with Stellaris having a casual experience, but it's easier to have a casual experience when choices aren't so ridiculously lopsided as they currently are.

 

[John MacWhat]

Yes, for me I don't care about things being balanced because of multiplayer balance, it's so that when I am just playing casually there are multiple viable options. For example, I have shared how much it bothers me that Cut-Throat Politics is a terrible civic in the current Beta. That's not because I need it to be viable for multi-player, it's because I'd like multiple good options for my single player experience (I have also focused on that civic in particular because it is centered around the new version of Edicts)

 

[theBigTurnip385]

Why did they double nerf the Death Cult Civic.

Death Priests are worse than priests

Sacrifice edicts now cost unity

 

[Flamgino]

The sprawl penalties are linear as far as I've noticed, so 50 less sprawl (from just 10 colonies) is effectively -5% tech cost and -10% tradition cost, plus -50% edict upkeep and -500 unity to reform your government. Technological ascendance is an additive bonus on top of your existing +research speed, so with just 10 colonies, Imperial Prerogative already gives you more.

I think tech speed might be equivalent value. It's a multiplier to your base tech production, and it's fighting the base tech cost. Sprawl increases the base cost of the tech. So if you make 100 tech, +10% tech speed is 110 tech. If sprawl makes a tech 10% more expensive, a tech costing 100 tech points costs 110 points.

When people say the tech speed boosts are additive, as a caution, they just mean it's not as big as you think. Once you factor in 100% speed bonuses and go from 100 tech production to 200 tech production, another 10% boost will not get you 220 tech. It gets you 210 tech. It does still increase that base value by 10%. So I think Technological Ascendency is still better for tech except in circumstances where colony sprawl is causing you a 20% tech malus or more.

I don't necessarily disagree with a trade value bonus, but the unity bonus is arguably better because it's a post-production benefit: I.e. if your trade produces 200 unity, +10% unity gives you 20 more unity. In contrast, +10% trade value on top of an existing +100% trade value would turn 800 trade value into 840 trade value, which works out to 10-20 more unity (depending on what the trade league bonus ends up being).

Unity is still not an important resource, really. Trade can be energy, consumer goods, unity, or even all three. It's flexible and makes two really important resources, and then unity if you want to generate it that way - at least until they remove trade unity to further give Spiritualists a monopoly on it, but that'll be frustrating. Trade's just better. I'm not saying that trade is better at producing unity than actual unity buildings, but if I had to choose between getting 0.5 energy and 0.25 unity versus getting 1 unity, I'd take the first option all the way, buy a bunch of alloys, and then kill the guy who took the second option. We're not entering a "unity meta" in 3.3, even though they say we are. You can even tell it from the dev stream. "Our Lady Trappist" is the most unity-heavy nonsense possible and as of year 50 they're in a scoreboard nose dive in spite of having the best possible trade partner in the game for their build.

But also arguably, trade value is more for empires that are producing trade value, and if megacorps are supposed to build branch offices, then they actually benefit from others producing trade value, not from producing it themselves. Unfortunately, Paradox needs to decide what they want Megacorps to be supposed to do, because right now it seems like they're supposed to just fail in comparison to other empire types.

If you have a large friend group and everyone agrees to do a trade-friendly build and have only one player be the Megacorp, they're pretty good. But without engineering them like that, yeah, I agree, they're pretty weak for casual play and tend to wind up being like normal empires, but worse.

 

[HFY]

Sacrifice edicts now cost unity

Well better than them costing pops.

Wait, they cost pops too?!

 

[theBigTurnip385]

I am absolutely baffled by someone calling entertainers a waste.

they are zombie domestic servants are better

 

[Lidhuin]

I think tech speed might be equivalent value. It's a multiplier to your base tech production, and it's fighting the base tech cost. Sprawl increases the base cost of the tech. So if you make 100 tech, +10% tech speed is 110 tech. If sprawl makes a tech 10% more expensive, a tech costing 100 tech points costs 110 points.

When people say the tech speed boosts are additive, as a caution, they just mean it's not as big as you think. Once you factor in 100% speed bonuses and go from 100 tech production to 200 tech production, another 10% boost will not get you 220 tech. It gets you 210 tech. It does still increase that base value by 10%. So I think Technological Ascendency is still better for tech except in circumstances where colony sprawl is causing you a 20% tech malus or more.

There's three factors though:

Research output
Research speed
Tech cost

I think we all agree that, all other things being equal, +10% research speed is better than +10% research output, because there's so many other sources of output.

But AFAIK there's almost nothing that modifies the base cost of technology, so -5% technology cost is effectively increasing the combined output & speed by +5% (Having run the numbers, it appears I am wrong on this)

Because there's already several sources of research speed, and almost no sources of reduced tech cost, reducing empire sprawl should generally give you a better return than increasing research speed, although you're correct there's situations in which increased research speed should be better (running some quick numbers tells me that with +100% output and +45% research speed, +10% research speed is better than -10% tech cost, which tells me that you'd need more than 20 colonies for imperial prerogative to pay off in that scenario at least)

So you're mostly right, although I think the reduced tradition costs also helps.

Unity is still not an important resource, really. Trade can be energy, consumer goods, unity, or even all three. It's flexible and makes two really important resources, and then unity if you want to generate it that way - at least until they remove trade unity to further give Spiritualists a monopoly on it, but that'll be frustrating. Trade's just better. I'm not saying that trade is better at producing unity than actual unity buildings, but if I had to choose between getting 0.5 energy and 0.25 unity versus getting 1 unity, I'd take the first option all the way, buy a bunch of alloys, and then kill the guy who took the second option. We're not entering a "unity meta" in 3.3, even though they say we are. You can even tell it from the dev stream. "Our Lady Trappist" is the most unity-heavy nonsense possible and as of year 50 they're in a scoreboard nose dive in spite of having the best possible trade partner in the game for their build.

Yeah, unity can't ever possible compete with alloys or tech in its current iteration, given that alloys can give you a bigger fleet, and tech can pretty much give you 10x the bonus of anything (without having to struggle or make any choices either) unity can provide, and unity has to make hard choices on top of that.

If you have a large friend group and everyone agrees to do a trade-friendly build and have only one player be the Megacorp, they're pretty good. But without engineering them like that, yeah, I agree, they're pretty weak for casual play and tend to wind up being like normal empires, but worse.

Multiplayer megacorp/regular empire are very fun for multiplayer I agree, since the AI loses their bonuses from being in a federation and suck at doing trade builds, but a human player can actually pump up their trade value and then both the megacorp and regular empire benefit enormously and become exponentially more powerful.

 

[grommile]

they are zombie domestic servants are better

Those are from a DLC I'm never going to buy