Or all pops with Full Citizenship produce 1 defense army - that would definitely contibute to a unique play style.
3.3 Unity Open Beta Discussion Thread
- Thread starter MrFreake_PDX
- Start date
-
We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
That might be a little OP, given that you could get potentially 80+ defensive armies with that (plus ridiculous naval cap).
I currently have citizen service modded so you get a soldier job per 25 pops, and it works quite well (and is thematically appropriate), but it does then remove the inherent naval cap bonus (you make it up within 50-100 years easy)
- 1
While not directly a change to Federations, the patchnotes tell us that Traditions will now unlock different Federation types. So after all Gestalts and other ethics are getting access to new Federation types which we did not have before. Thats a great change and many players asked for this!
I have never used Federations much since I just conquer everything in my games. But for those of you who do, maybe those Federation bonuses would be useful as a way to grow stronger without expanding and gaining a ton of empire sprawl? I would have to look up the actual bonuses of Federations. But maybe they could serve as something inbetween Tall and Wide while also working as a defense mechanism?
- 1
I agree. In keeping with the idea of planetary ascension. I'd like to see the campaigns maybe moved from edicts to planetary decisions. Like the martial law, anticrime campaign etc. Makes more sense that planetary unification would effect the planet only and halve a greatly reduced cost because it's only active on that planet. Really alot of the edicts I think make more sense as planet decisions. At any rate as they stand I would never spend 45 energy a month on a recycling campaign.
Last edited:
- 2
I think instead of viewing it as a penalty you're supposed to interact with and mitigate, you should view it more like the way that technologies increase in cost as you get into higher tiers. As you move along in the game and expand, of course we want technologies to increase in cost; otherwise technologies would take ages to research early game and research instantly late game. Sprawl is just a way of doing that which is dynamic instead of static. It also serves as a way to reduce the snow ball a bit.
That said, there are ways to reduce the impact and interact with the system. There's traits and civics that reduce sprawl from various sources. Several tradition trees also have reductions to sprawl. There are also different ways of expanding your empire's power, some of which add more sprawl and some of which add little to none. Megastructures don't add any sprawl, ecumenopolises and ring worlds are very district efficient compared to other options, etc.
Again, the problem isn't that you can't interact with it; it's that people are viewing it as a negative penalty that like all negative penalties must be reduced to zero. It's not like that, though. It wasn't like that before 2.2 or whenever they first introduced admin cap. It was simply understood that a core mechanic of the game was that as you grew, traditions and technologies got more costly. It wasn't a penalty that needed to be mitigated or reduced; it was just a mechanic. You could manipulate the mechanic some by choosing ways of growing in power that increased your size less, but it wasn't seen as a "penalty." They added some ways to interact with that to add some extra interplay and suddenly, tons of players now saw this mechanic as a penalty that must be reduced to zero, and all kinds of crazy weird play styles sprung up that weren't healthy for the game. Then they added more mitigation mechanics to reduce it to zero and suddenly it was trivial to blast through the tech tree in the first 100 years with only one or two research planets regardless of size.
Right now, to double the cost of technologies, you need to reach 1,050 sprawl. If you don't have way, way, way more than double the research output at 1,050 than you have at sprawl 50, then you're doing something very wrong. Growing in the game still increases the speed at which you research technologies as long as you continue to grow your science at a proportional rate. The only difference now is that being twice as big (with the same proportion of your empire dedicated to tech) doesn't necessarily mean you research techs twice as fast. Instead, you research them like 80% faster (actually numbers vary, but you get the point).
- 11
- 5
- 3
All Federations will be significant efficiency devices letting players run high-specialist/low-worker economies by using diplomatic trust (and vassal power disparities) to get high relations to trade CG/alloys for more basic minerals than they cost. At cordial relations from ethics alignment alone you can get 1-CG-for-2 basic resources, or net 6 minerals per industrial worker, and potentially far, far more at strong relations.
The non-DLC federations will also have key synergies for the 3.3 meta.
-Martial Federations will be extremely strong for getting towards 0-influence claim builds that let you take large or even entire empires in a single war, as well as the best military bonuses for winning the wars at relative tech parity which will likely become more common.
-Hegemonies will be the best Tributary federations, where each level of Federation increases the amount of tribute your tributaries provide.
-Trade Federations will be the Unity behemoths due to the Trade Policy. Trade builds will also be exceptionally effective in the meta, requiring fewer districts overall, for somewhat lower penalties.
-Research Federations will be the research behemoths. The president will have greater ability to pull and focus on high-value techs, but any member can focus on high-payoff techs before getting massive stacking research bonuses on established/shared technologies, minimizing overall time spent researching.
Honestly, trading with the AI is so cheesy that it may well be considered an exploit for how broken it is, and I prefer to avoid it.
- 12
- 1
Early so far, haven't gotten very far into the game. I don't think the sprawl costs for regular empires is too bad, but just purely in terms of theme it doesn't feel right that sprawl starts almost instantly at the game start. I'd rather see the base admin sprawl set at like 100. I really don't think anyone should have sprawl penalties until after they have colonized their guaranteed habitable planets
- 5
In general having leaders cost unity is making the game alot more based on luck. You can't "cycle" leaders to look for good ones. You can't have more than 2 extra scientist early game. I think giving 200 unity or an extra scientist won't fix the issue. I think from a flavour perspective it makes sense that it cost unity to hire leaders, it also makes sense that it cost money... even more-so. Why not make leaders cost 100 unity AND 100 energy credits with 1 of each for upkeep?
- 5
I actually like this idea of lowering the initial cost but than as sprawl increases so does the cost. I think 50 is too low though. 50 would mean 6 scientist = 1st Tradition. 75 seems about right. Heck I wouldn't even mind if it was 75 unity and 75 energy which than increases as sprawl increases.
Yeah depends on your situation. If you are playing on a fuller map or get unlucky with placement it is easier to get boxed in without knowing because of the slower exploration process due to the higher initial cost of Leaders than before.
I think this brings up a fair point on "cycling" leaders. In the previous version you could spend 25,000 energy credits to cycle for Governors or Scientist that you needed. (Like getting a voidcraft scientist). Cycling has become something you can't really do anymore because the cost of getting one specific leader is way too much. You would be losing out on multiple tradition perks or even an ascension perk just to cycle leaders.
Maybe a good fix would be to spend energy credits to reroll leaders? Like 500 energy credits to reroll either the Governor, Scientist, Admiral or General section. So 500 energy credits will make 3 new leaders of that leader type appear. I don't think making leaders cycle faster fix the issue.
- 4
- 3
- 1
Or possibly biasing the pool to always give you at least one scientist with a research trait and one with an exploration trait? Honestly this has always been a bit of a problem with scientists, since they're the only leader type that has two different jobs. It just was less noticeable before because leaders were fairly cheap to obtain and replace.
- 4
- 1
That wild because I expected then to make the penalties harsher. That's what they should do.
Also I'm fine with how the early game is with leaders. Makes it so you have to make decisions and can't just spam leaders like a chicken with it's head cut off. Hell for the 1st time ever I took a leader with that trait the lowers their cost! Lol I've always wondered why that was in the game but now there's a reason to consider it.
- 3
- 3
(quoting this from the main feedback thread to discuss)
I think this might actually be a really fantastic idea if for no other reason to reduce the "Oh no, sprawl is evil and must be defeated" reaction people are having. Right now, sprawl only has negative effects, so people are obsessive about trying to keep it as low as possible even in situations where it doesn't make sense.
As an example, going from 500 to 1,000 sprawl only increases your tech costs by 33% (~150% -> ~200%), and for unity, that same increase would be a 50% increase (~200% -> ~300%). But you've doubled your empire size, and thus, if you aren't neglecting your research and unity production, you've doubled your tech and unity output. In terms of time it takes to gain a given tech/tradition, the empire that's twice as big with twice as much tech/unity output will get their tech in 67% of the time and their tradition in 75% of the time compared to the smaller size (incidentally, without sprawl penalties, both of these would be 50% of the time, and reducing that difference is why sprawl exists).
What this means is that it isn't about eliminating sprawl entirely or even minimizing it. If you want to aim for tech and unity, what you want to do is increase your sprawl in intelligent, efficient ways where you can get more output out of your empire for a given bit of sprawl. If in doubling your empire size, you can get 2.5 times or 3 times as much tech and unity, you'll be better off, and things that reduce sprawl or provide output without increasing sprawl help that.
To come back to the quoted suggestion, I think it helps by providing a green UI number that people can fixate on to shift player perception. "Your empire has more pops, more planets, and thus more everything, so you're better than smaller empires, penalties or no" doesn't seem to be enough of an advantage for people, so having a few things where you have a clear bonus from being larger would be really cool.
I think subject power relations are one cool way, but I think there's more places that are less situational. Sprawl could be added as another source of diplomatic weight. It could factor into victory points or your economic strength. It would likely need to be things that aren't too overtly powerful because again, more sprawl already means more power. However, something in the UI to mitigate the feeling of "Oh no, sprawl is bad" would probably be really helpful. It might be a bit awkward to have various sprawl reductions have negative effects, too, but I don't think that's a huge deal. For example, having an empire with an unruly population have more political clout than a similar sized empire with a docile population makes perfect sense. I think the traditions are the main places that might need a change, or at least have the sprawl-reducing traditions move into one or two trees that are more thematic and empires that don't particularly care about sprawl can just skip those in favor of other trees. Any positive effects of sprawl could also be based on the pre-reduction sprawl. Maybe they could have two numbers, sprawl and size where sprawl is modified by the various traits while providing the penalties, and size can be the same thing but ignoring any modifiers and provide the positive benefits. That way, stuff that reduces sprawl is always still good, but your empire's size is better understood as a positive thing, so overall, you still want to be bigger (you just want to be more efficient with that size where possible if you want to emphasize tech/unity).
Oooooor they could continue to tweak the UI and make more red numbers yellow or white and hope that over time, the player base gets it. I just hope they don't knee-jerk react to all this feedback that's more about misunderstanding the game than anything else. That's how we got bureaucrats in the first place, and we all know how that turned out: not well.
- 6
- 3
- 1
It only seems to make sense for capitals, ringworlds and habitats, as only they carry output bonuses.
So a fun thing for anyone interested in a Psionic Or Bio-Ascension Mega Corp run-
Permanent Employment (zombie bio-pop assembly) does, in fact, stack with budding.
You can manually set which bio-pop you assemble, to grow your main species instead of the zombies. This gives you a starting 2.5 bio-assembly growth on your homeworld, and will strictly speaking out-produce robots on any planet above 10 pops. (You have to upgrade the capital building to build the zombie center.)
Permanent Employment (zombie bio-pop assembly) does, in fact, stack with budding.
You can manually set which bio-pop you assemble, to grow your main species instead of the zombies. This gives you a starting 2.5 bio-assembly growth on your homeworld, and will strictly speaking out-produce robots on any planet above 10 pops. (You have to upgrade the capital building to build the zombie center.)
- 3
- 1
- 1
So in your opinion, is this a good or a bad thing? Like I said in my other post, being forced to actually invest into unity and amenies more than before is a direct nerf to tech rush, which is exactly what this game needs. Because you know we would simply be building labs instead of these buildings normally.
The entire tech progression in this game is so weird, but the fact that the devs keep adding more and more tech doesn't help either. When stuff like strategic ressources to upgrade buildings to higher levels were introduces, tech became even more important because otherwise you will run out of building slots quickly. Now we have tech for alloy output bonus, artisan output bonus, general output bonus + upkeep bonus to increase per pop values but all of this clutters the tech pool and makes it harder from getting the techs we need. And of course everyone is used to this progression for a long time now.
And ontop of this science from events got buffed not too long ago, which means by spamming scientst on science vessels we get EVEN MORE science. And of course we cannot afford 6 scientists to gather up all the science from exploration events in the beta because the unity costs are too high.
Having lower tech progression is definately needed and I think being pushed into building buildings other than labs is a good thing. Ontop of this, lower the amenity output from non-Gestalt jobs is also a good thing! Because Gestalts are notoriously terrible with amenities, so bringing all empires closer together is a much needed balance change.
But like I wrote above, I expect we are going to need some changes to upgrading buildings, or rather the way we unlock those building upgrades, in the future if tech progression slows down.
- 3
- 1
- 1
I'm at about 2280 now and honestly the only thing that feels really badly off are the edict and campaign costs. Aside from that, bad RNG with scientists dying is another issue as paying for them with unity is much more expensive than when they were paid with energy.
