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Summary: Rework empire sprawl to make it more consequential and remove existing ways to increase administrative capacity. Instead admin cap is increased by creating sectors, semi-autonomous entities which resemble vassals in Crusader Kings. They administer your territory for you but they have their own interests which need to be managed, and if handled poorly they can cause trouble for your empire. I want it to be possible (rare perhaps, but possible) for empires to split apart entirely due to sector mismanagement.
It is my opinion that Paradox games are at their best when the player has to deal with threats and obstacles both outside and inside their territory. If Stellaris had a system to facilitate internal politics meaningfully, I believe it would add an entirely new axis of difficulty and mastery to the game, as well as making the game even more true to the sci-fi genre.
Part 1: Empire Sprawl
It seems to me that empire sprawl is not currently fulfilling its intended purpose, so I think it should be changed even without the desire to facilitate internal politics. Here is how I think it should work: Firstly, for psychological purposes it should be changed back to empire cohesion, a positive thing. It will begin at 100% and decrease as an empire gets bigger, with the possibility of eventually going negative. Positive empire cohesion should give a scaling discount to tech and tradition cost, so it works out to be roughly the same as the current system in that regard, pending balance. The reason I think this change should happen is partly so that there can also be negative cohesion, which I will talk about next, but also so that playing tall feels like more of an active choice with clear rewards, rather than just a different point on the empire size spectrum.
Once empire cohesion goes into the negative, it will start actively getting in your way. The effects of empire cohesion on tech and traditions will stop at zero, but as it goes further into the negative it will increase resource costs across the board, and then at a certain point increase unrest and crime on your planets as well as the chance of pirates appearing. This is important. There should be strong incentives for players to engage with the new sector system I will detail in part 2 to address empire cohesion. However, it should also be possible for players to take a kind of authoritarian approach by just using military might to deal with the consequences of low cohesion.
Before going into my idea for sectors, I want to talk about what causes empire cohesion to be lowered. This is where it gets interesting. Firstly, owned systems and planets should give a flat decrease to cohesion (or perhaps it should scale with distance from your capital, giving further bonuses to empires playing tall). Beyond that the main source of cohesion loss will be pops, but importantly, not all pops will decrease cohesion equally. The amount by which a pop decreases cohesion depends on its ethics divergence and its habitability, perhaps its species rights as well. I think this is a really good idea. It would make ethics divergence and habitability more important and terraforming more useful. Additionally it would offer a trade-off between expanding rapidly vs. taking your time to stabilise your territory. As if that wasn’t enough it would also make migration treaties into a trade-off, rather than a more-or-less objective benefit.
Part 2: Sectors
In my proposed system sectors will be set up by an empire in order to help manage their territory. You will assign systems to sectors in much the same way as the old system. Interactions with a sector will largely revolve around two numbers which each sector has: loyalty and legitimacy. Loyalty is a measure of how much a sector is willing to do what you want it to, and if it gets too low the sector will disobey your commands and eventually rebel if things get bad enough. Your main goal with sectors is to keep their loyalty as high as possible. Legitimacy is an abstraction of how well the sector is doing its job in the eyes of your citizens. More drastic means of bringing a sector in line will require its legitimacy to be low, otherwise other sectors and your citizens will see you as a tyrant. However, lower legitimacy will increase unrest in the sector, as well as speeding up ethics divergence. Generally you will want legitimacy to be high for sectors who are loyal and low for sectors who are disloyal.
There are a variety of means by which to interact with sectors. First and most obvious is adding and removing systems, which will increase and decrease loyalty respectively. Additionally, if you have multiple sectors, they will expect to be roughly the same size as each other. Having one sector much larger than another will gradually damage the loyalty of both of them. Another straightforward interaction is assigning envoys to sectors, either to increase their loyalty or to undermine their legitimacy.
Beyond that there will be three new ways of interacting with sectors: governors, requisitions and sector interests. Sectors will need to be assigned a governor from your leader pool. Failing to do so will cause the sector to lose legitimacy. When choosing a governor, you will be faced with a choice between a governor who shares your ethics and a governor who shares the dominant ethics of the sector. A governor with your ethics will have a bonus to loyalty but a penalty to legitimacy, and vice versa for a governor with the sector’s ethics. If a sector becomes very disloyal you always have the option to replace the governor, which will substantially boost loyalty (representing the new governor being grateful to you for their position). You must be cautious when using this option however. Replacing the governor of a sector with high legitimacy will cause the legitimacy to drop, and it will also decrease the loyalty of all of your other sectors by a proportional amount. Replacing the governor of a sector with low legitimacy will not make any other sectors angry, and if the original legitimacy was low enough it can even be increased by assigning a new governor.
Next is requisitions. I think the idea of using sectors to reduce player micromanagement is a good one, so sectors will be capable of managing all of their own construction without input from the player. The player can still build things in sectors but instead of being built immediately, the sector will have to agree or disagree, with disagreement causing a hit to the sector’s legitimacy. This is a requisition, you are requisitioning the sector to build a building or ship or starbase module. You can also requisition resources from sectors (and perhaps more abstract things like tech bonus or fleet capacity). Whether or not a sector agrees to your requisition will depend on both its loyalty and its legitimacy. Obviously a sector with high loyalty will be more inclined to agree to your request. A sector with low legitimacy will also be more inclined to agree to your request, since it will not want its legitimacy to go even lower.
Finally we have sector interests. These will subsume the current factions system and are another way to influence the loyalty of a sector. I think loyalty should probably work on an equilibrium system like we have seen in some other Paradox games. Sectors will have interests derived from their ethics and species (and perhaps leader traits as well might be cool). These might be instantaneous things, which would result in an immediate boost to sector loyalty, or long term things like policies (like how it works now for factions), which would increase faction loyalty equilibrium. I’m not sure exactly how the current faction influence gain would fold into this new system, but I reckon it wouldn’t be too difficult to sort out.
Quite a few things I have mentioned involve ethics divergence, so I think they should be beefed up a little bit. Pops should diverge faster and more often, and there should be a way to discourage ethics divergence through the new sector system. Maybe sectors can be requisitioned to enact edicts on their planets which counteract ethics divergence, but at the cost of sector loyalty.
So yeah that’s my proposal. A bit ambitious perhaps and I haven't thought of everything, but I think there are ideas and principles in here which could work out very nicely, especially with the upcoming espionage system. Imagine for a second that you have been working for ages to build up your spy network in another troublesome empire, messing with them every chance you can. And then it happens: they have a bad day. Their sectors wind up a bit less loyal than usual and you pounce, you trigger an operation that damages their loyalty even further. They all revolt and before too long the empire explodes into five different pieces. Just imagining it gives me unreasonable joy.
It is my opinion that Paradox games are at their best when the player has to deal with threats and obstacles both outside and inside their territory. If Stellaris had a system to facilitate internal politics meaningfully, I believe it would add an entirely new axis of difficulty and mastery to the game, as well as making the game even more true to the sci-fi genre.
Part 1: Empire Sprawl
It seems to me that empire sprawl is not currently fulfilling its intended purpose, so I think it should be changed even without the desire to facilitate internal politics. Here is how I think it should work: Firstly, for psychological purposes it should be changed back to empire cohesion, a positive thing. It will begin at 100% and decrease as an empire gets bigger, with the possibility of eventually going negative. Positive empire cohesion should give a scaling discount to tech and tradition cost, so it works out to be roughly the same as the current system in that regard, pending balance. The reason I think this change should happen is partly so that there can also be negative cohesion, which I will talk about next, but also so that playing tall feels like more of an active choice with clear rewards, rather than just a different point on the empire size spectrum.
Once empire cohesion goes into the negative, it will start actively getting in your way. The effects of empire cohesion on tech and traditions will stop at zero, but as it goes further into the negative it will increase resource costs across the board, and then at a certain point increase unrest and crime on your planets as well as the chance of pirates appearing. This is important. There should be strong incentives for players to engage with the new sector system I will detail in part 2 to address empire cohesion. However, it should also be possible for players to take a kind of authoritarian approach by just using military might to deal with the consequences of low cohesion.
Before going into my idea for sectors, I want to talk about what causes empire cohesion to be lowered. This is where it gets interesting. Firstly, owned systems and planets should give a flat decrease to cohesion (or perhaps it should scale with distance from your capital, giving further bonuses to empires playing tall). Beyond that the main source of cohesion loss will be pops, but importantly, not all pops will decrease cohesion equally. The amount by which a pop decreases cohesion depends on its ethics divergence and its habitability, perhaps its species rights as well. I think this is a really good idea. It would make ethics divergence and habitability more important and terraforming more useful. Additionally it would offer a trade-off between expanding rapidly vs. taking your time to stabilise your territory. As if that wasn’t enough it would also make migration treaties into a trade-off, rather than a more-or-less objective benefit.
Part 2: Sectors
In my proposed system sectors will be set up by an empire in order to help manage their territory. You will assign systems to sectors in much the same way as the old system. Interactions with a sector will largely revolve around two numbers which each sector has: loyalty and legitimacy. Loyalty is a measure of how much a sector is willing to do what you want it to, and if it gets too low the sector will disobey your commands and eventually rebel if things get bad enough. Your main goal with sectors is to keep their loyalty as high as possible. Legitimacy is an abstraction of how well the sector is doing its job in the eyes of your citizens. More drastic means of bringing a sector in line will require its legitimacy to be low, otherwise other sectors and your citizens will see you as a tyrant. However, lower legitimacy will increase unrest in the sector, as well as speeding up ethics divergence. Generally you will want legitimacy to be high for sectors who are loyal and low for sectors who are disloyal.
There are a variety of means by which to interact with sectors. First and most obvious is adding and removing systems, which will increase and decrease loyalty respectively. Additionally, if you have multiple sectors, they will expect to be roughly the same size as each other. Having one sector much larger than another will gradually damage the loyalty of both of them. Another straightforward interaction is assigning envoys to sectors, either to increase their loyalty or to undermine their legitimacy.
Beyond that there will be three new ways of interacting with sectors: governors, requisitions and sector interests. Sectors will need to be assigned a governor from your leader pool. Failing to do so will cause the sector to lose legitimacy. When choosing a governor, you will be faced with a choice between a governor who shares your ethics and a governor who shares the dominant ethics of the sector. A governor with your ethics will have a bonus to loyalty but a penalty to legitimacy, and vice versa for a governor with the sector’s ethics. If a sector becomes very disloyal you always have the option to replace the governor, which will substantially boost loyalty (representing the new governor being grateful to you for their position). You must be cautious when using this option however. Replacing the governor of a sector with high legitimacy will cause the legitimacy to drop, and it will also decrease the loyalty of all of your other sectors by a proportional amount. Replacing the governor of a sector with low legitimacy will not make any other sectors angry, and if the original legitimacy was low enough it can even be increased by assigning a new governor.
Next is requisitions. I think the idea of using sectors to reduce player micromanagement is a good one, so sectors will be capable of managing all of their own construction without input from the player. The player can still build things in sectors but instead of being built immediately, the sector will have to agree or disagree, with disagreement causing a hit to the sector’s legitimacy. This is a requisition, you are requisitioning the sector to build a building or ship or starbase module. You can also requisition resources from sectors (and perhaps more abstract things like tech bonus or fleet capacity). Whether or not a sector agrees to your requisition will depend on both its loyalty and its legitimacy. Obviously a sector with high loyalty will be more inclined to agree to your request. A sector with low legitimacy will also be more inclined to agree to your request, since it will not want its legitimacy to go even lower.
Finally we have sector interests. These will subsume the current factions system and are another way to influence the loyalty of a sector. I think loyalty should probably work on an equilibrium system like we have seen in some other Paradox games. Sectors will have interests derived from their ethics and species (and perhaps leader traits as well might be cool). These might be instantaneous things, which would result in an immediate boost to sector loyalty, or long term things like policies (like how it works now for factions), which would increase faction loyalty equilibrium. I’m not sure exactly how the current faction influence gain would fold into this new system, but I reckon it wouldn’t be too difficult to sort out.
Quite a few things I have mentioned involve ethics divergence, so I think they should be beefed up a little bit. Pops should diverge faster and more often, and there should be a way to discourage ethics divergence through the new sector system. Maybe sectors can be requisitioned to enact edicts on their planets which counteract ethics divergence, but at the cost of sector loyalty.
So yeah that’s my proposal. A bit ambitious perhaps and I haven't thought of everything, but I think there are ideas and principles in here which could work out very nicely, especially with the upcoming espionage system. Imagine for a second that you have been working for ages to build up your spy network in another troublesome empire, messing with them every chance you can. And then it happens: they have a bad day. Their sectors wind up a bit less loyal than usual and you pounce, you trigger an operation that damages their loyalty even further. They all revolt and before too long the empire explodes into five different pieces. Just imagining it gives me unreasonable joy.
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