3.3 Unity Open Beta UPDATED Feedback Megathread [EXTENDED TO FEB 7]

[Echo Candor One]

I have to disagree with the people who say that edicts are too expensive; investments in unity are more important now, so there's an interesting decision to make about what sort of progress you want to make. Do you want to run a 10% research bonus at all times? Build some administration centers to help manage it.

 

[Tech Noir Synth]

Making the sprawl penalty apply later might be less confusing for new players, but this is still again another nerf to the penalty, which is the exact opposite of what we wanted. We want to make Tech snowball less. This is doing the opposite.

Planetary Ascension was not good enough in the last beta. This change to reduce sprawl is a good change. Maybe its worth testing out a change in amenity upkeep for pops? Just a small one, maybe 2% less amenity upkeep per Planetary Ascension level? This might not sound like a lot but with max planet Ascension being 10, you could get a massive -20% amenity upkeep on your pops which results in a lot more stability and more efficient planet output. I think adding this would be reasonable. Its certainly a reward for players who add a lot of Ascension levels to planets.

BUT

The penalty to research speed from empire sprawl needs to be higher for everyone. It was still way too easy to snowball simply by conquering and expanding. The changes to tradition cost and edict cost could be a little lower.

Edict funds should be removed from the game. Just like I said in my earlier post. The scaling effect of edict costs means Edict funs can either be very strong or close to useless. This is especially bad since its is now granted from civics, meaning those civics can either be amazing for snowball but eventually you will want to get rid of them. This is not how civics should be designed.

Also edict funds tech clutters the tech tree. We want slower tech progression. But we also do not want even more tech to prevent us from drawing the techs we want and need.

Please remove edict funds from the game and simply adjust edict cost penalty to be lower while increasing research speed penalty for all empires. And think about where else you can cut redundant techs from the tech pool to make research less about lucky draws.

 

[theBigTurnip385]

Rogue Servitor now are producing good unity and seem very balanced compared to the last patch.

While not a unity focused build they constantly accumulate more unity naturally.

This lets you focus on the things you are supposed to be focusing on which is science/alloys.

however, If you want early unity, just take memorialist and they will give you very high early game unity output.

 

[Lidhuin]

Edicts are too expensive. There's basically no reason to run most of them ever. No amount of pops producing unity could ever equal the benefits received from them (unless they're free).

Technology is too cheap. Base tech production is +4 to each (+12) vs base unity production of +4. But Tech is vastly more important than Unity still, so every administrator is basically kneecapping myself, because I could be producing technology instead - and why wouldn't I? The tech bonuses outstrip any unity bonus I could ever obtain. Tradition also increases in cost exponentially, but technology does not. Tradition costs also increase at a higher % than research cost % does from sprawl.

Unity producing jobs are bad. Bureaucrats produce a base of 4 unity. Memorialists produce a base of 2 unity and 2 society research (and some stability - let's call that the bonus from the civic) Therefore, Stellaris is implying that 1 society research = 1 unity. Let's accept that ratio. Now let's also agree that society research is the worst of the three types of research. Yet a researcher produces 12 research total vs a bureaucrat producing 4 unity, for the same cost. In other words, my bureaucrats are worth 33% of a researcher and technology provides vastly more benefits than unity does. Basically the only good unity job at the moment is Politician.

Priests are basically bureaucrats with +2 amenities. Again, 33% the value of a researcher if 1 society research = 1 unity.

Death priests are priests with -1 unity and +1 society research (again, implying 1 research = 1 unity) with +2 amenities. Again, 33% the value of a researcher and you lose a "good" job slot!

If Stellaris thinks that 1 research = 1 unity (in actuality, research is far more important than unity), then either a researcher needs to produce 4 research total, or a bureaucrat needs to produce 12 unity - even a politician can't outproduce a researcher! And since civics (and ethics) should actually benefit you, they should not trade unity for science, but instead add unity or add science or just add stuff (kind of like how masterful crafters makes your artisans into unequivocally better artisans that produce more consumer goods, plus engineering research (i.e. a greater benefit than exalted priesthood if 1 research = 1 unity) plus trade value.

 

[Archael90]

I would also suggest to tied empire size from pops with pop happiness, and colony with stability so that unhappy pops or unstable planets are harder to manage.
An example: base pop sprawl is X with 50% hapiness, then its modified by specific variables, like docile trait, some traditions, maybe nerve stapled pops etc. and then hapiness modifer is applied, every 1% below 50% is +2% empire size from pops, and every 1% above 50% is -1% to empire size from pops, and exactly same formula should go with colony sprawl.

 

[HFY]

Is this new?

It looks like the AI Shipset from a mod which I like.

Really hope this means that shipset might get integrated into the game! Yay more cool ships!

 

[Turnil]

I played a fanatic pacifist and with the inward perfectionist.

Even with all these bonuses, it is really hard to have more than 1 resource edict running and other edicts that increase empire sprawl are not worth it.
Some edicts are however very useful and cheap (like Map the Stars and Peace Festivals). I think that the resource edicts and edicts that increase sprawl need to be cheaper so that it's more worthwhile taking these and it would also make edict cap increase (look) more worthwhile.

 

[Ffc]

Hello,
I'm playing a Unity heavy playthrough with a Fanatic Spiritualist Exalted Priesthood/Citizen Service

1) Monument

I feel like the +5% Unity from the monument is very weak.
Even with already 8 priest (4 temples), 1 great priest and one politician, it still stronger to just build an other temple than the monument.
The upgrade is better, but the first rank building isn't good.

2) Edict funds

I already wrote about it when testing the first version of the beta :
Edict funds are REALLY good early game, but soon become nearly useless since it's a fix amount that doesn't scale, which is a bit sad.

In early game, 40 edict fund correspond to basically 2 free edict but sooner or later, it's now equivalent to 1/10 of an edict.

Here is my proposition, which I think correspond more to the initial design :
- Reduce values of edict funds given by ascension perk/civics/leader
- Make edict fund "ignore" Empire sprawl so it stays consistent the whole game

Example :

If I have 10 edict fund and my base edict cost is 20 :

My cost in Unity would be : 20 - 10 = 10 and then multiply by Empire Sprawl edict cost penalty

The formula would be : Unity_Cost = (Base_cost - Fund)*Penalty_coeff instead of Unity_cost = Base_cost*Penalty_coeff - Fund

3) I like platenary interaction being in Unity, I use them a lot more since it's not anymore in competition with the precious "expansion mana" influence

4) Even if I didn't suffered a lot from it since I generate a lot of Unity, I feel like the new leader cost is better in early game

5) With Ascension, planetary designation bonus become more important, and has to be interesting for every type of worlds :

Some designation are a bit weak :
- Fortress world is mecanically meaningful but it doesn't give any bonus to soldier job for example which is a bit lacking I think, I would add a little +5/10% naval capacity from jobs
- I would maybe add something to Tech/Alloy/CG designation, maybe not production because it could be too strong, or only like +5% which would become 12.5% with Ascension 10.

 

[marcodp]

I like the new update a lot, it really rewards optimizing planets at much as possible.

I do think the ascension perks should be a little more powerful for all te unity you have to put in.

And tall play style does seem possible at least against a admiral non scaling AI. I could keep 3 edicts running the whole game.

To make tall really playable i think Ecumenopolis should be available a little bit sooner. Also with one ascension perk and the expansion tree you can negate a lot of sprawl from a wide play style if i had 12 planets instead of only 6 my sprawl would not increase a lot compared to what i have now but i would of doubled my pop growth. I would suggest increasing sprawl from colonies and make the ascension upgrades cheaper so u can upgrade a few more worlds.

 

[ZomgK3tchup]

Spiritualists are no longer allowed to take Byzantine Bureaucracy since they don't have Bureaucrats.

I get why this change happened, but it feels awkward from an immersion standpoint. Religious zeal is the other thing the Byzantines are famous for and a Byzantine-themed empire being locked out of Byzantine Bureaucracy feels bad.

Easiest solution would be to rename the civic to something that doesn't reference the Byzantines, though keeping a Byzantine-themed civic would be ideal.

 

[HFY]

Regarding the change from "Empire Sprawl" -> "Empire Size"


Did some silly salesperson tell you that us players would be okay with the sprawl mechanics if you just renamed it to something more attractive than "sprawl"?


This change is unhelpful. It won't make me like the sprawl mechanics more (improving the mechanics will do that), but what it will do is make discussions about empires of different sizes more confusing. "Sprawl" was meaningful and unambiguous, "Size" is ambiguous.

Please change this back.

 

[Alastor17]

What would solve a lot of the Unity issues I've been reading about would be to change how we unlock traditions. Swapping from a "Unity saved threshold" to "total Unity produced threshold" would make spending Unity viable. Which would make edicts more appealing, and bureaucrats less dysfunctional.

 

[John MacWhat]

Just wanted to try something out quickly. Played about 30 years of an egalitarian, democracy. Some observations:

1. Making leader hire cost increase with number of leaders is good; it felt like a significant choice on how many scientists to hire at the start. I also like that the initial cost was reduced.
2. HOWEVER, it really feels like this system would be better if leader costs increased by leader type. IE, number of scientists leads to the next scientists being more expensive; having all leader types pooled together feels weird. Why does a scientist make an admiral more expensive and vice versa? This system also basically guarantees Generals will never be worth hiring
3. The Cut Throat Politics civic is still really bad. It is also unclear what it does because the civic lists both "Edict Cost" and "Edict Upkeep" as being reduced by 20%. Anyways, back to the math. The way the civic works is that the base cost of the edict is reduced by 20%, while the sprawl penalty is applied to the original base cost. Let's pretend I have 100 sprawl, Cut Throat Politics, and I want an edict with a base cost of 10. The civic saves me 2 unity, while the sprawl adds a cost of 10 more unity. So, what would be 20 unity for that edict is now 18. The math for how much savings I am getting works out such that I'd have to run like 60 base edict worth of edicts (12 unity saved) for this civic to save me from building the equivalent of just one more administration/temple building. Saving 2 unity per 10 base edict is really, really weak. I suggest making the benefit multiplicative rather than additive so this civic is more useful and scalable into the game (so in my example with 100 sprawl and 10 base cost, the edict would have cost 16 rather than 18).
4. The support candidate button is way too expensive for democracy at 500 unity per click. I'd back this down to maybe 100 per click.
5. The Planetary Unification technology should just grant 1000 unity or none at all. The 6 months of unity, max 1000 just makes me want to delay taking the tech until the bonus is maximized. This feels arbitrarily arcade-y to me in a way that other optimal decisions don't.
6. While you can, as a player, deal with higher edict costs by building more unity, the fact that edict fund doesn't scale with sprawl has big impacts on what traditions, civics, ascension perks are worth taking.
7. Executive vigor jumps out as a really mediocre ascension perk right now because 100 edict fund can easily be eclipsed by sprawl just 100 years into the game (additionally, +100 edict fund for an ascension perk seems weak when there is a tradition that grants +50). Perhaps Executive Vigor should be changed so that choosing Executive Vigor makes the edict fund scale with sprawl? This would turn it from a very weak perk to one that is strongly considered and remains useful throughout the game

Also just did a quick test on Citizen Service. It appears that while the description was reverted, soldier jobs DO NOT currently grant any unity.

 

[Dlin369]

Could Citizen Service maybe replace some Clerk jobs with soldier jobs?

 

[Gamgy]

Ok, I mostly played on previous version of Beta, but got a lot of feedback, but still want to share. I played on 2.5x unity/tech cost, megacorp on void dwellers. Spiritualists, xenophile, pacifist.

• Unity to spend on. There is still not a lot of ways for me left to what spend unity after I close traditions: planet Ascension is too high, I lvl up two planets to 5lvl and one to 3rd. And to progress later I need a lot. A LOT. It just does not make sense for me to continue produce unity because one planet lvl up costs like 100k+ and bonus from it is not that high. Good it been addressed and now price is reduced, but still.
• Ascension tiers feels a bit boring. It just gives flat bonus to designation. Good is that with update it is now reducing spawl, but some more interesting bonuces would be really nice.
• Unity planet designation. What is I want to build planet-temple? What designation I should assign to it? All the boduces applied to administrators only, but not priests or managers -_- I ever have priests Arcology in my ecumenopolis, but no proper designation. Nothing =(
• Influence. At the begining it was not enough. I need it for building/upgrading habitats and for expansion. But in mid/late game it was too much. What I should spend it on? Should I be able to buy/sell favors for this? Have some more interesting diplomatic interactions to spend it on? Would be nice if I would have more options to get influence when I need it(currently I can only build corverts without drivers/weapon).
• Habitats. It just should not could as whole planet. Until late game I got my spawl from planets more than from pops =( Because habitats are too small and I need a lot of it. And I can't do anything about this. Should it be that Void Dwellers origin or Voidborne perk gives you discount on habitat size? Should habitats get more Districts from Ascension tiers? Been able to increase size for unity?
• Death priests. I think people already pointed this, but they should be better than regular priests.
• Citatel of faith is worser in unity production than fully upgraeded temple? I am not sure it should be like this.

Overall I like the change, it feels like a move in right direction. Only thing I noticed - AI did not form Federations. I opened it quite quickly and create one, but only in late game one more federation appeard in the galaxy for 30 AIs.

 

[Unseelie]

Shouldn't the population suffering from the results of alien invasion and out-of-context problems make your Size go up? I mean...if size is a measure of difficulty to govern?

 

[Nebbie Zebbie]

My impressions from playing about 60 years as the UNE:

1. Leaders are still too expensive early. This is a pain especially with elections taking them off science ships and dumping your original ruler as a governor. 500 unity to do one influencing of an election is also CRAZY, even worse than the influence cost was, as now it's just cheaper to let the election happen and replace a scientist.
   The scaling cost itself is a good idea, but I think it should be less extreme early (like +25 per leader, leaders costing 50 to start), and elections should only cost 50 to mess with. And please consider having scientists only candidates in Technocracy empires; UNE's election pool should just be governors and envoys...
2. Influence still feels just uninteractive. Yeah, I can build corvettes, but I'd do that anyways...and the tooltip doesn't even explain power projection properly, it still talks about factions. Give us influence for winning battles with mining drones or something, please.
3. Clerks are awful. Kind of goes without saying, but I feel the need to point out that the most problematic job of the last several patches is still causing headaches by its very existence and it's amazing nothing was done in this overhaul.
4. Sprawl is a joke and wide is really just ideal. We're right back to the old days of completely ignoring it and just building more researchers. I literally think things would be in a better state if we still had bureaucrats, but they produced unity to feed into an admin cap fund and thus were hit hard by habitability; at least then I'd need to find a good planet to make be all about paperwork instead of the old solution of some low-hab world...

I know this probably won't change your guys' minds about these systems, but I will just plainly state that while these changes finally put this patch as overall very slightly better for normal play than 3.2, they also cement over the grave of tall (as in fewer colonies) and push us pretty far towards every empire being basically the same.

 

[Pale Blue]

Can we get a "Exceeding edict funds" notification? I find myself enacting an edict that is covered by funds, but later it starts eating in unity production without me noticing.
Being informed when that happens would be nice so I have the option to switch it off.

 

[pmchem]

I made some more reports with save games / screenshots in latest beta.

Stellaris - [3.3 beta] (b02d) AI with bad/weird economic things (2/x)

Description [3.3 beta] (b02d) AI with bad/weird economic things (2/x) Game Version 3.3 beta What version do you use? Steam What expansions do you have installed? Do you have mods enabled? No Please explain your issue is in as...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

Stellaris - [3.3 beta] (b02d) AI with bad/weird economic things (3/x)

Description [3.3 beta] (b02d) AI with bad/weird economic things (3/x) Game Version 3.3 beta What version do you use? Steam What expansions do you have installed? Do you have mods enabled? No Please explain your issue is in as...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

Stellaris - [3.3 beta] (b02d) AI with bad/weird economic things (4/x)

Description [3.3 beta] (b02d) AI with bad/weird economic things (4/x) Game Version 3.3 beta What version do you use? Steam What expansions do you have installed? Do you have mods enabled? No Please explain your issue is in as...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

Stellaris - [3.3 beta] (b02d) AI with bad/weird economic things (5/x)

Description [3.3 beta] (b02d) AI with bad/weird economic things (5/x) Game Version 3.3 beta What version do you use? Steam What expansions do you have installed? Do you have mods enabled? No Please explain your issue is in as...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

thanks for the new beta build. in general, huge step up over 3.2/3.1/3.0. good stuff from @Offe and whoever else is contributing to this effort. I think 3.4 and beyond can begin shifting some (but not all) of the AI dev focus to military AI, or AI for features like galactic council, federations, spycraft, diplomacy, etc.

but, there are still many weird issues remaining, some of which you've probably already cataloged. I do hope the bugfixes continue, thanks for those.

I think the single biggest boost to the economic AI at this point would be to give them the ability to efficiently use the market when needed to meet near-term goals (e.g. selling some of a 24K-but-not-maxed-out food stash in order to get minerals for districts to employ pops, or to get alloys to rebuild a fleet during war).

p.s. there's a year 2563 save in a couple of those posts for anyone who wants it. unrelated to reports.

 

[John MacWhat]

• Decided to give an oligarchy a quick try. Their elections cost 2000 unity to choose leader. Now, I'm not saying it should be cheap, but that's basically a never touch button for me at that cost.
• Capacity subsidies and other subsidy edicts still seem too expensive. With as many administrators, and consumer goods for upkeep, as I would need to afford those edicts, I may as well employ unsubsidized technicians and not run the edict. I think lowering the base edict cost by a further 10 would make them reasonable