A Paradox Employee Contacted Me Regarding Current Backlash on Forum

  • 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.
This would actually be really good. There are ZERO reasons whatsoever why a Machine Consciousness or even a Biological Empire should keep building new Robots when there are neither jobs nor housing. Now you could argue you they want to "ship" them out. That's reasonable. But only to an extent.

Machine Empires/Robots really need a way to set a point where assembly stops. Either if all the jobs, or all the housing is filled or simply when a certain specified number is reached. And to resume assembly if pops are moved out/move out on their own. Right now it's an absurd planet by planet micromanagement which even costs influence for no good reason.




"Impatience". Oh please. Crises and other things are broken for OVER A YEAR NOW. This isn't impatience. Especially given these things used to work before Paradox took the sledgehammer to this game and completely reworked large swathes of the game to cater to the new head devs vision. Then never bothered to properly make things work.

And no, the AI is obviously no concern. Otherwise, it wouldn't be broken beyond belief for over a year now. Same with advertised and prominent features such as AEs, Crises, etc. And while they used to be decent at communication, that has ceased almost entirely.

And going "valid criticism is just whining", would allow everyone here to use some unkind words in turn. I personally won't lower myself to that level. But this feels more like a personal and unhealthy investment in Paradox rather than a reasonable response from your end.
i didn't say valid criticism is whining. i meant posting the same criticisms over and over and over and over and over again is whining like a 3 year old.

the devs are hearing, 'are we there yet? are we there yet? are we there yet? are we there yet? are we there yet?'
 
  • 31
  • 8
Reactions:
i didn't say valid criticism is whining. i meant posting the same criticisms over and over and over and over and over again is whining like a 3 year old.

the devs are hearing, 'are we there yet? are we there yet? are we there yet? are we there yet? are we there yet?'
If the criticism remains valid for over a year and genuine problems aren't being addressed people have no reason not to keep bringing them up. Do you know how you achieve people shutting up about those issues? Fix them! It's that easy. If you were a plumber and you'd break the plumbing in someone's house. You can be damned sure they would keep reminding you of that. Telling them to "shut up" and "stop acting like 3-year-olds!" because you're tired of hearing about it doesn't fix the issue. You sitting down to fix it does. Which will in turn get them to shut up about it.
 
  • 25
  • 3Like
  • 3
Reactions:
I've got a few things I'd like to see either fixed or changed. Nothing game-breaking here, but it would certainly increase my enjoyment factor.

1. Ability to demolish ruined buildings without repairing and downgrading them. If this is a bug, it really needs to be fixed. Demolishing buildings should be a 1 click procedure.

2. The ability to place population/colonization/migration controls on modified sub-species of my founding species. In my current game I am really fighting with this annoyance as an AI empire made about 10 different sub-variants of my founding species and the way the game is now, I can't prevent them from growing, even when I do not want them. And since pop-growth is the way it is, the AI automatically starts growing the unwanted sub-species, forcing me to go to every planet and lock in the one I do want to grow manually.

This problem is not unlike the whole cross-breeding issue, and when I play cross-breeding is toggled OFF.

And, if anyone knows a way to make a mod for this until it is fixed, I'm interested.

3. The AI needs to be less aggressive in building habitats. It just spams out way too many of them. Finding the balance here may be tricky though.

4. A global setting that tells my planets to stop growing new pops when certain criteria are met would be nice. For example stop growing when there are no available jobs or if there is only 1 housing slot open, etc. It should be done in a way that each player can set his/her own criteria as we all play the game differently.
 
  • 2
  • 1Like
Reactions:
I would like a pack focused on crisis including new crisis or completely changing mechanics. I would appreciate a crisis that isn't combat focused. Maybe that precurser pox can come back and swathes of population dying can be the crisis the galaxy needs to face together. Not going to lie the current global covid pandemic does inspire in its own way but it can show civilisations can face a crisis that is not just war against antagonists. Another crisis that could be interesting is an economic crisis of some sort or a crisis that needs and economic solution aside from more ships. Like perhaps a crisis that supernova's systems and you need to build shields around stars of systems that you want to protect before the galaxy goes dark which could also mean rerolling the map entirely with new hyperlane generation as systems are eliminated from the map.

One of my smaller pet peevs though would be having trade value or goods made from trade not being included as economic weight. My megacorp games do not appreciate having little economic weight when they have a massive amount of income generated from trade value.
 
  • 11
Reactions:
3. The AI needs to be less aggressive in building habitats. It just spams out way too many of them. Finding the balance here may be tricky though.

It shouldn't be tricky, though.

1) Got unemployed? -> If Yes, move unemployed to required Planets as required.
2) Any habitats or Planets available within borders to settle? -> If Yes, colonise those instead.
3) Are current settlements at least X% developed? -> If Yes, pick location and build habitat.

Extremely simplified steps that they should take, not just the "got resources, build them and never colonise them" that we see. This is just an example of logic the AI should go through to determine whether or not to expand with habitats.
 
Honestly, I prefer to read something here in the official forum from Paradox officials since that's much less deniable than to read something on an other platform from a guy or girl who's stating that he or she works for Paradox. I mean 01. why not here in the official forum aka the primary place that's actually supposed to communicate and solve bug-reports, issues via suggestions, tech-support-/multiplayer-/mod-/ and any other Stellaris-issues and 02. from accounts you know that you're dealing with Paradox officials ?

I mean besides the thing that he or she states pretty much the same vague phrases I've already read the 4,5+ years before, what I've stated above looks even less serious on Paradox side than anything else before.
 
Last edited:
  • 9
Reactions:
Im gonna say that removing strategic resourcess from upkeep cost, would help with sector AI. Maybe not much but still.
Performance can be handled in few ways, but simply reducing number od pops X2 or X5 can also make a difference.
Crisis AI can be improved, modders shows it, and PDX inability to do this is frustrating as hell.
 
There should be a forum topic from this community guy regarding the issue. Regarding his surprise of negative backslash on forum - of course one wouldn't get any kind of valid criticism on Twitter - it's just repost echo chamber, people artifically pressured to post micromessages just to be visible. Useless social media junk.
 
  • 4
  • 3Like
Reactions:
I'm also very sceptical about this thing but I guess it can't hurt to write a few things in here. What really amazes me is how this very thread seems to be taken as a place for feature request when Stellaris more of all things needs a break on new features in favour of fixing the existing ones.

Anyway here is what I consider to be the worst showstoppers - among with a suggested fix.

1. Military AI is unable to move fleets to the front.
Fix: Well, this is clearly a bug hunt but until you get the 2.7 military AI working it would be a band aid to revert to the 2.1.3 military AI

2. Take Point comand doesn't work
Fix: see above

3. Sector AI non-functional
Fix: Planetary development plans similar to the global AI plan for the global economy. Players just select plans and get a notification in the outliner when a plan has finished.

4. late game micro hell
Fix: That one actually would best be served by rethinking pop growth. I had several suggestions that were all downvoted into oblivion, so I guess I've got nothing here.

5. Purging takes ages - cripples crisis
Fix: make being purged a job. More jobs available when you have armies on the planet or are a crisis or have more efficient purging methods.


0. Forum communication - the radio silence is deafening.
Fix: Forums require moderation and active participation by Paradox.
 
  • 3Like
  • 2
Reactions:
I think we also need more traditions, actually, the system is a plain copy paste from Civ 5.
It should be a matter of choice, did I take supremacy, or prosperity? With 7 traditions slots, we should be able to choose in a greater pool.

Also, hiveminds needs a lot of rework that's sure, they are just an empire type with less features than any other type. No trade, no consumer goods, no Worm (why??) only one ascension path with no difference from regular empire, the weakest rulers...
When we see the amazing work done in the "Forgotten Queens" mod, Pdx can take a lot of inspiration from it!

IMHO, the galactic community is a great idea, but poorly implemented. It's just a not very appealing and quite obscure menu where you just click on things with +5% and others with - 5%. And the AI can't really handle it, it make proposal and reppeling in a totally random fashion who make this features a nonsense, just ignored most of the time. It should be more about story telling (like amoeba and thyanki conservation act) than economic law with no impact on the game, actually I think this features looks more like the world congress in Civ 6, which is not really a compliment.
 
  • 7
  • 2Like
Reactions:
I took a year break from the game, and recently started playing again, so I might have missed some things. I agree with all the issues mentioned above, but they are largely game mechanics (performance, pop growth, etc.).

For me, the major (non-mechanical) issues are:

INTERFACE AND QUALITY OF LIFE
The area where there has been ZERO improvement across all expansions is Interface and Quality of Life.
  • I HATE the popup and notification spam.
  • I HATE cycling through dozens of planets, and having to dig through stupid tabs to find information that should be at my fingertips.
  • I HATE dealing with popups that force you to respond immediately, and interrupt whatever you are busy with.
  • I HATE that the outliner doesn't sync with your planet popup when you cycle back and forth through planets.
If any one thing will save the game for me, is if all the planet notifications and popups were integrated into the outliner, and displayed on the galaxy or system map as well. Being able to filter or sort the outliner would be phenomenal. This way you could attend to issues as you have the time or priority, and identify problem planets without having to continually cycle through them and dig through a half-dozen tabs.

PLANET SCREEN
  • Pertinent Information is hidden away on secondary tabs and under mouseovers.
  • Population counts (species, unemployment, etc.) are not accurate.
  • Job assignment sucks!!!!! Periodically firing everybody so that jobs can be re-assigned is not a great solution.
  • Templates or target builds would be great.
  • A pause construction or 'wait for pops' option on the queue would be fantastic.
 
Last edited:
  • 6
  • 5Like
Reactions:
I
It shouldn't be tricky, though.

1) Got unemployed? -> If Yes, move unemployed to required Planets as required.
2) Any habitats or Planets available within borders to settle? -> If Yes, colonise those instead.
3) Are current settlements at least X% developed? -> If Yes, pick location and build habitat.

Extremely simplified steps that they should take, not just the "got resources, build them and never colonise them" that we see. This is just an example of logic the AI should go through to determine whether or not to expand with habitats.
The problem with the AI is the problem with how it was originally coded - See here.

Now it's been a while since I watched that video, but what I remember from that talk is that the AI makes a list of every conceivable action it could make, and then picks from one of them. The problem there is obvious. It builds a Habitat, but it never had any intention of ever colonising that habitat. Then it builds another Habitat etc.

It's not intending to colonise a planet, and building a Habitat to support that aim. It's deciding to do something it could possibly do because it can. It would be better just to build ships.

The whole "AI now has plans" - (Have a 200 mineral income) thing was presented as a revolutionary new way of approaching the AI in Stellaris - but it really shouldn't have been, its a no-brainer.
 
  • 4
  • 1Like
Reactions:
Sorry for the double post:

I think the quality of communications in Stellaris has really dropped with changing personnel.

If we think back to the way communications were handled in 2017 or 2018:

There was a roadmap on what the team would be working on in the future.
The dev diaries didn't halt with no explanation. There was a clear 'Dev diaries are going on hiatus for NH summer' post.
There were more teasers. Remember when teasers were delivered before NH summer even started?
The first dev diary back gave a forecast of what was to come.

I think the communication strategy needs a lot of work.
 
  • 7Like
  • 3
Reactions:
The problem with the AI is the problem with how it was originally coded - See here.
9:14 talk on staffing and team sizes
Jesus christ the 20 seconds following on from that are beyond illuminating.
  • "we have really small teams [...] teams are even smaller after release",
  • "we want to scale and rebalance teams",
  • "worth mentioning, Crusader kings only has 1 programmer at the moment [...] so just imagine if he spent all their time on the AI"
  • Note: CK3's development likely stepped up about 1-1.5 years ago... that, alongside fixing the worst of Imperator's sins before would have demanded most of their coders
Stellaris has been in the dumps for the last 2 years after getting a massive overhaul without following up with a proper AI rewrite - they've probably only got 1-2 coders that are completely stretched-thin working on the game adding stuff for the next expansion as well as patching and reworking game mechanics, with PDX treating it like CK2 with the amount of resources they're throwing at it - even though CK2 never got a fundamental rewrite on the same scale as stellaris.
 
  • 5
  • 3Like
Reactions:
In retrospect one of the biggest design flaws is that pops can different traits. That was the case even with the tile system. Now suddenly certain pops are better at some jobs than others.
Are you using the term "pop" in lieu of species here? Because my solution takes into account different species with different traits living in the same planet. They just have different distributions in the workforce.
 
I'm going to list these by impact factor (i.e. what affects every game)
  1. Late-game performance is _better_ but even so, performance isn't as good as pre 2.0 - which if you'll recall was actually one thing they said would improve by doing away with tiles.
    • Habitats and habitat spam are factors as they exponentially increase pops in the galaxy later on whilst bogging down wars.
    • This has been talked to death so I won't go further in to it. More optimisation is needed for huge galaxies.

Got it in one.

One of the big things that they talked about with the changes to FTL and tiles that came at at 2.0 and the tile system overhaul that came after, was that doing away with the old system would result in better performance. It was implied more than once that getting rid of the FTL options and the old tile systems were necessary sacrifices to make the game run well, and for the AI to be better at playing it.

Except it wasn't true. It was never true. Both the game's AI and performance are categorically and objectively worse now than they were during 1.9.

The big change from 1.9 to 2.0 fundamentally broke this game in a way that it has never recovered from. It has been YEARS and Paradox still expects us to just sit around and wait for the next fix. Every update breaks two things and fixes one, with nasty bugs being left to fester for months if not years before they're even acknowledged, much less improved.

Pre-2.0 I was playing Stellaris a lot. 2.0 rolled around and it had too many issues, so I put it down. Then the next update, same thing. Every time I consider coming back to Stellaris I pop into the forums here or over at Steam to see what the state of the game is, and I am consistently disappointed to find out that it's still riddled with issues. Every update is said to contain major performance fixes, and yet they never materialize.

"Just one more update" is never going to happen. After waiting this long, the only appropriate response is to make my peace with the fact that the Stellaris dev team is incapable of fixing this game in any meaningful way. And it pains me to say that, because at one point, Stellaris was my favorite strategy game ever; but those days are long gone. If meaningful fixes and changes were ever going to happen, it would have been done years ago. Every time they talk about how this time will be different, I get a flicker of hope that maybe the game will finally be fixed, only to be let down every single time.

The only thing I've gotten out of Stellaris in the past two years is frustration. Still hard to believe that we ended up here.
 
Last edited:
  • 14
  • 4Like
Reactions:
the devs are hearing, 'are we there yet? are we there yet? are we there yet? are we there yet? are we there yet?'
In your little analogy, the car is still on the driveway and the driver seems to have left.
 
  • 15
Reactions: