A simple request.

[Franton]

Plot-Twist 01: Every bug ( whether it's just a minor or a mid or a major one ) affects ( or will affect ) every player since every player plays most likely the same ( newest ) version of Stellaris. Plot-Twist 02: The situation doesn't get better with Paradox "tradition" to accumulate bugs like badges. Plot-Twist 03: "It's hard to fix" is an ... explanation ... that customers and most laws ( in regards to customers ) don't accept anyways.


Plot-Twist 04: Paradox is past the point to "survive" ( profit = ( at least ) 0 ), but how much profit. Plot-Twist 05: "Shame" on customers that live capitalistic core-values on their own as if ( plot-twist 06 ) capitalistic core-values aren't just pureley reserved for companies.

1. Incorrect, since many bugs only happen under certain circumstances. Those that do are typically caught by Q, even if QA is bad. It's the ones that don't happen to everyone that can be missed by QA and therefore make it into the released game.
2. And your point is?
3. As for customers, as long as only a minority encounters a specific bug, why should paradox care. As for laws, as long as the game works as advertised, there's nothing to base a legal case on. Any bug making the 'works' part merely more difficult isn't sufficient.
4. Paradox is not a non-profit organisation. Fixing bugs requires an investment. No company in the world makes investments with no chance of a return in some form, even if it's only for reputation. And reputation is only meaningful if your efforts are visible to a significant number of people (or a number of significant people ). Fixing bugs that are only visible to a few people is therefore not a sensible investment of money and resources.
5./6. No idea what you mean. Me, I eat to survive. And so do companies. I've never heard that producing hot air has a nourishing effect...

 

[Wintermist]

Generally, fixing bugs is important to companies since people will be more wary to buy the next game knowing how buggy the last one was. How good they are at it though is another question.

 

[Franton]

Generally, fixing bugs is important to companies since people will be more wary to buy the next game knowing how buggy the last one was. How good they are at it though is another question.

Absolutely. That's what I meant by reputation. That's why some bugs get fixed. If not for that, no company would bother to fix bugs and release patches (unless they get paid for that, obviously)

 

[Hansatron]

"Gone vacations".

It's sweden. They are probably legally required to take vacations and not look at their email.

The OP is somewhat asking the developers, who are paid real money to perform a job to instead treat it like a passion project.
I have made some mods for the game with a few thousand subs, and there are things about stellaris that set off enormous red flags under the hood - clearly whoever got stuck with implementing these things either didn't have enough time or enough support or both. (See the entire performance saga.)

How good they are at it though is another question

This is where these kinds of threads go off the rails. For the devs to make the game suitably balanced for dedicated players (several bullets points the OP points out are really just game balance) requires them to be able to play and understand the game at that level. That takes a lot of mental investment that they aren't necessarily being paid for. This exact problem is quite apparent over at Firaxis wrt Civ6 - the game has long standing numerical balance issues that i suspect aren't ever addressed because the people who make the game essentially only play it on easy mode.

~
This will never happen, but they could also release some internal documentation of the actual features of how the stellaris language works and what all the effects actually are and how to use them. There's also stuff like inconsistent file loading practices and some things just not being moddable (like adding new living standards) that make modding a huge PITA. I'm not asking for the "source code" here. Of course they don't make money on mods, so there is zero motivation to do this.

 

[CrazyJ]

base a legal case on. Any bug making the 'works' part merely more difficult isn't sufficient.
4. Paradox is not a non-profit organisation. Fixing bugs requires an investment. No company in the world makes investments with no chance of a return in some form, even if it's only for reputation. And reputation is only meaningful if your efforts are visible to a significant number of people (or a number of significant people ). Fixing bugs that are only visible to a few people is therefore not a sensible investment of money and resources.
5./6. No idea what you mean. Me, I eat to survive. And so do companies. I've never heard that producing hot air has a nourishing effect...

your point about them making money is valid, but you missed one thing. the ai could be fixed by integrating starnet, and since that would cost time(and thus money) they offer the creator their name in the patch notes and credits in exchange for what time it would take the mod creator to integrate it. that is probably the cheapest possible solution to the issue, and would do more to fix the ai than paradox has done in years.
or maybe skip all of that nonsense and just hire the person who made starnet to be the new stellaris ai guy since that would be a massive improvement. i doubt that last one would ever happen but a guy can dream right?

my idea to simply integrate starnet code into the base game is fully possible, and paradox even has a precedent for doing so, the current ui for surviving mars was originally created with a mod and then was integrated later as it was a major improvement. i know they were developed by different people but all the same the precedent is there. i don't pretend to be a modder and barely can understand the basics of code,but isn't it true that for the mod to work in the first place it has to have been built around the stellaris code? that means it should be fully compatible for integration.

and addresssing your point # : the ai is one of the most visible features of the game as almost anyone who plays will encounter it, and i have not encountered a single report of the stellaris ai being a serious opponent . which for a game that is primarily about either fighting or coexisting with AIs... well it's not a good sign that pretty much anyone can win their first game of stellaris on grand admiral simply because the ai is broken.

 

[Franton]

whoever got stuck with implementing these things either didn't have enough time or enough support or both.

That is most likely. In fact that is the case for most software projects, no matter the kind and size of the project: there's never enough time to put everything in a perfect shape! You can blame capitalism or the managers if you like, but the truth is that software is never done! Someone has to pull a stop at some point, or the software will never get released.

 

[Franton]

your point about them making money is valid, but you missed one thing. the ai could be fixed by integrating starnet

Indeed. My statements were meant as a response to the unreasonable request (not yours) to pretty much fix everything. But this one thing I agree on.

 

[CrazyJ]

a game as large as stellaris will never be bug free and that is a fact, i have accepted that and so has pretty much any long time fan. what ticks me off is when serious issues(ai, crisis ai) are ignore for years onend with no fix insight. the ai and crisis are core features of the damn game, so when both are FUBAR for years on end you can see how i'd be annoyed. if it were some typo or harmless graphical bug i wouldn't care if it went unfixed for a while because it doesn't seriously impact me. but something as vital as the ai being borked for that long just sets off all of the alarm bells. those who expect every bug to be stomped are crazy, but the game still needs work.

 

[Hansatron]

That is most likely. In fact that is the case for most software projects, no matter the kind and size of the project: there's never enough time to put everything in a perfect shape! You can blame capitalism or the managers if you like, but the truth is that software is never done! Someone has to pull a stop at some point, or the software will never get released

I've made enough software under less than ideal conditions to empathize with this.

My cynical side says that they have somewhat mediocre developers, though - because some of the ways they chose to program things are like the worst possible choices and pretty much anyone could immediately come up with better methods that take less work to implement and maintain. The job system is an amazing example here - not only the performance disaster of, for whatever reason, checking all jobs every day until recently - but also some of the ways jobs and modifiers are set up in the code. It's a disaster.

An example would be "we implemented all these job weight modifiers from traits at the job level instead of at the trait level. So anytime you want to change a trait's job modifiers you actually need to check every single job in 5 different files." Things that would be way faster: store the weight modifiers on the traits and let jobs inherit that at runtime. Or, if you want to totally solve job impacts on performance: all job weights are dictated purely by features of the species template. Therefore, job weight modifiers could be entirely precalculated for gene templates, and only updated when they change. Then job calcs don't need to compute each job for each pop. You are checking jobs against ~20 templates and not ~10,000 pops.
Maybe that was too much work. The wheels were set in motion and no one can be bothered to redo the files. Fine. But when they tried to fix job calcs, they did all the work to implement the ideal solution (flag a planet for recalc only when the jobs, or the pops change) but then decided to use their groundwork to do something much messier.
It just makes me screech.

 

[CrazyJ]

and lemme guess, the issues you've highlighted are un-moddable so modders can't even clean up their mess.

 

[Culann]

Stellaris is an amazing game, and i love it in all it's broken glory, but that does not change the fact that the game is in a dire state.
these are some of the most egregious issues.
the ai is broken, crisis ai too.
game breaking bugs abound
micro is at an all time high
the sector and planet ai is worse than useless
the ui is so bad that a mod that fixes it is the most downloaded mod on the workshop
the balance is so bad that thanos would have a seizure just looking at it
tall is dead
hives are dead
several origins are outright broken(scion and it's weird issues with borders and agreements)lost colony seeming iffy at best.

all of these issue are bad, but most can be fixed or avoided. with the right mods it is fully possible to fix most of these issues. so that leads to the question: why has pdx not integrated the code from these mods into the game? because mods like starnet and stefan's perfectly balanced mod fix issues players have been complaining about for years, so why has paradox not hired them to fix the game, or at least integrated the mods. seriously if modders, who are mostly hobbyists who can only access part of the game can fix it why can't the very people who made the game? if you spend more than 30 seconds on the forum you will find posts that complain about these issues and the thread usually has a comment about how this mod or this mod fixes the issue.

the code that fixes the game already exists, it's on the workshop and as it is created from stellaris files it is legally yours to do with as you wish. you could have used the many fix mods out there to fix the game, or done it yourselves, if random nerds can do it why can't you? so my question is: why haven't you fixed the damn game, because every update seems to bring more problems than it solves.

i am fully aware that this rant may be controversial but the simple fact is that many years old issues are fixable via mods, so if pdx can't be bothered to fix their own game they should just integrate the mods that do, or at least make the unmoddable, but broken features(like crisis ai) moddable. i know you are on vacation but these issues most assuredly are not.

it's a pretty simple request. FIX YOUR GAME, or if you can't be bothered, borrow somebody else's code. i am not alone in these sentiments, if you look on the forum around about half of the threads are people complaining about one or more of these issues, hell the bug report subforum makes up 2/3 of all stellaris posts.

stellaris is an amazing game but it badly needs some work

please just fix the game, or hire somebody from the modding community to fix it, they at least seem to care more about fixing the game than pushing out broken half baked dlc(2.2 looking at you)

I mean no offense to the devs, i am sure your corporate overlords demand that you push dlc out before they are ready and that is not your fault, the offense is aimed at the people who won't let you stop making dlc's long enough to make the base game function.

I don't know if I necessarily agree with everything you said, there are some broken things and a few cases it is game breaking but I don't know if I'd call it dire but the term is subjective. What you are willing to tolerate and what I'm willing to tolerate are different. I do share the same frustration over end game crisis behavior. When it does nothing it anticlimactic and frustrating. Sector management is awful but to a greater extend AI management is awful. I find some of diplomatic interactions annoying, not explained well, pointless, or gamey.

I agree a lot of this could be fixed in short order and more importantly for me it does feel on some level to be unfinished which isn't exactly abnormal for a Paradox game IMO.

Then main point of disagreement is that micro is at an all time high assuming you mean planet management. Compared to other games in the genre I find micro not anywhere close as bad, the only 4x space game that I'd say had a good grasp on not being micromanage nightmare is MoO3(and yes I loved that game feel free to insult me over it) though so much of that game didn't work. I don't honestly understand the issue so many people have with planets in this game. Eventually you get to the point where you can have jobs=housing and then you limit or stop population growth. Problem solved.

I remember a turn in MoO2 taking hours going through hundreds of planets in the late game. I wanted to quit. Even MoO Conquer the Stars has more micromanagement than this game does.

I haven't played all the origins, but I think lost colony is WAD not entirely sure what your issue is with it. I can't comment on Scion but I don't have too many issues with any origins I've played aside from on common ground/hegemon it's silly when one of the three powers is blocked/leaves the federation at the start of the game.

Some of your other complaints lack definition to me. Why is X playing style dead? I think I'd need more information before I could comment on that.

 

[Wintermist]

For me the game works rather well, but one thing bothers me and it's late game slowness. My thinking is it's because of all the different species variations that has accrued over time. I notice this especially well when I play a Xenophile and fill up my empire with all the species, when I click to produce a colony ship it takes several seconds to get the list of my species to show up. In my mind that's an indication the game struggles with many species and variations and perhaps something could be done to speed that up.

 

[Kayden_II]

1. Incorrect, since many bugs only happen under certain circumstances.

All bugs occur under "certain cirumstances" so that as soon as said "certain circumstances" are met the respective players are affected. You haven't just got that a bug remains to exist even if players haven't just met and recognised said bug YET. To take something like that seriously is called prevention and an expression of careful behaviour since at the end of the day, a bug is a bug that's fix-worthy. I've more a problem that you're pretty persistent to spread the impression that Stellaris has only some tiny edge-case-problems ( we've deliberately and desperately to search for in order to meet the respective "certain circumstances" ).

2. And your point is?

"Accumulation" means "More with time" and in this context: "More ( instead of fewer ) bugs ( or problems in general which includes not only bugs, but incompletions, badly optimised code ( -> bad performance ) and imbalances as well ) with time )".

3. As for customers, as long as only a minority encounters a specific bug, why should paradox care.

You're still pretty persistent to spread the impression that Stellaris has only some tiny edge-case-problems ( we've deliberately and desperately to search for in order to meet the respective "certain circumstances" ).

As for laws, as long as the game works as advertised, there's nothing to base a legal case on.

You try to spread the impression that the game works as advertised. I mean you can try to prove that, but don't be surprised for counter-proofs.

4. Paradox is not a non-profit organisation.

Just a reminder that you've tried to spread the impression that "Paradox needs money to" ... "survive" as if Paradox would struggle with its profits. Plot-Twist: No.

Fixing bugs requires an investment.

An investment is a money-spending ( and a more or less risky ) action ( by a company ) that's taken before in order to get more money out of it ( from customers ) later. DLCs are investments for Paradox, but to fix bugs ( or to solve Stellaris problems in general ) aren't and that's exactly the behaviour you get from Paradox when topics like this occur. Efficient ( now in regards to profits ) ? Yes. Effective ( in the long run in regards to profits ) ? Doubtful. One of my professors had often joked about how companies had efficiently ruined themselves, ( because they haven't thought effectively in the long run ). I mean sure, Paradox can continue with such a behaviour, but the release of "Imperator: Rome" should've already shown that customers get more reserved towards Paradox, so "good luck" for CK-III or titles like EU-V, VIC-III, HoI-V or Stellaris-II.

Fixing bugs that are only visible to a few people is therefore not a sensible investment of money and resources.

You're still ( x 2 ) pretty persistent to spread the impression that Stellaris has only some tiny edge-case-problems ( we've deliberately and desperately to search for in order to meet the respective "certain circumstances" ).

Me, I eat to survive. And so do companies. I've never heard that producing hot air has a nourishing effect...

That sounds like that you try to spread the impression that Paradox is barely able to feed itself. Are you actually aware that profits = sales - costs and that costs include already stuff like wages / salaries which means that even if Paradox profits = 0 ( plot-twist: No ) Paradox will still "eat" and "survive" ? Paradox is past that point ( since profits > 0 ) and from that point on its first-world-problem / luxury of "how much profits" kicks in.

 

[Ridixo]

Dissidia: They go on vacations every year, and come back every time. That's not new at all, and it has nothing to do with dissidia. They wouldn't keep producing content if that were a real problem.

They go on vacation every year? Yes. Do they tell us that? Yes. Did they tell us that instead of letting us guessing what was happening for weeks? NO. They left the business closed and with us waiting another dev diary outside. I don't complain on them taking vacations, i complain on them making a dev diary letting us waiting for the next without a word of them not doing any other DD for a while. I complain on them waiting weeks to say to us: "Sorry guys but we don't have any material for a DD, so we are gonna go fishing". That is the disssidia i am talking about, not the vacations itself, but their complete disregard of us in not telling us anything at all

Pride: while the devs may have their pride, they can't possibly want thousands of players complaining about stuff they are responsible for! How could they take pride on that?

Did you read what you write? "they can't possibly want thousands of players complaining about stuff they are responsible for! How could they take pride on that?", do you even know what pride it is? They insist on being fixing the game, they have insisted on that for year, all they do is to throw more bug and content and call it a day. "We wil fix the game. We will fix the game." they say when the fix is already outside there. If they don't use it, if they insist on their fix over any other, even after years, what can i call that other than pride?

 

[Hansatron]

For me the game works rather well, but one thing bothers me and it's late game slowness.

It is still heavily tied to pops and jobs. There is a fundamental limit of computability with that system, particularly that you have computations scaling off each pop on a planet is checked against each job on a planet (times some amount of computation per check, which is actually quite a bit chunkier than needed.)
The number of planets scales things out linearly, but pop numbers make it quadratic. I think the true performance hit is with open jobs in particular since those are constantly evaluated against your entire population.

There's a ton of things that could be done, but you could heavily mitigate the amount of computation per check to just a lookup operation, and you could reduce the frequency of these checks quite a bit too - potentially down to 1 or 2 times per year. (Only as often as you add a new job or pop to the planet.) So while 2.6 brought a huge performance boost to the late game of like, 2x-5x speedup, just checking only when necessary would have given a ~100x speedup, and storing the precomputed modifiers on the species level instead of pop level would save you ~100x by the late game. Which would basically solve the issue since players don't play past 2500 in most cases anyways.

Everyone told them this directly when performance threads were big last year, but I have to assume that the guy tasked with "fixing" things either would be faced with way too much work to implement this system over the old one, (stellaris has a lot of tech debt, as they say) or there were other constraints being insisted upon. For example, it may have felt safer to just compute jobs more frequently to rest assured you wouldn't have unintended issues with a bug in the implementation.

 

[caffrn]

They go on vacation every year? Yes. Do they tell us that? Yes. Did they tell us that instead of letting us guessing what was happening for weeks? NO. They left the business closed and with us waiting another dev diary outside. I don't complain on them taking vacations, i complain on them making a dev diary letting us waiting for the next without a word of them not doing any other DD for a while. I complain on them waiting weeks to say to us: "Sorry guys but we don't have any material for a DD, so we are gonna go fishing". That is the disssidia i am talking about, not the vacations itself, but their complete disregard of us in not telling us anything at all

Communication is not existent at the moment besides dev diaries and people need to understand that dev diaries are just marketing. There is no real interaction between devs and the community since Wiz left, which led to so much ignored problems with the game we have now. Personally I dont care about dev diaries since 2.2. Honestly, I miss those weakly twitch streams with Wiz. I wish that might change in the future. Maybe we need another big redit thread to make some noise.

 

[CrazyJ]

i saw some posts in this thread about how hives aren't all that bad, so i decided to compose a list of hives many flaws compared to their few bonuses. some of these may no longer be accurate as i have not played a hive since 2.6
negatives:
Note: some of these also affect machine empires, but due to the strength of robots in this game, it is uncontested that machines are some of the strongest empires available

Spoiler: Cons

cannot use robots

stuck using weakest ascension path

cannot build city worlds

reduced influence due to a lack of factions

amenities issues

hive world are weaker than machine worlds by a considerable margin.

reduced diplo weight due to happy pops producing more diplo weight and hive pops not having happiness(mostly irrelevant with how weak the ai is, but with starnet it is noticeable)

boring civics which range from boring and useless to boring but an no-brainer choice, making all hives feel samey

mortal leaders, unlike M.E.s

no trade value, which does reduce micro, but a late game empire can get a lot out of trade, which means hives lose out on that

one dimensional, hives are built to expand rapidly, it's the only thing they can do somewhat well. thus doing anything else is is a bad idea, forcing you to play a specific way, which is always a negative in my book. honestly they're not even that good at it.

lacks access to a lot of interesting and powerful events(horizon signal and self modified for starters)

incapable of controlling xenos until ascension is finished, which means you must either get rid of them, or keep them as slaves which further annoys your neighbors.

diplomatic difficulties due to a starting negative opinion which can result in an ai declaring you a rival, with starnet's crazy diplo settings it happens quite often.

no ruler agenda or ruler traits at all, which doesn't sound that bad but several of the ruler traits and agendas are quite strong, so losing them does suck

doesn't have some form of hive world start, akin to resource consolidation, which only further widens the gap between the two

very samey as there's really no difference between to hive minds, unless one is a genocidal but that's whole different discussion.

the only interesting civic is the one that forces you to ignore diplomacy, and the gc.

i'm sure i missed a few due to my extended break from playing hive minds

Spoiler: pros

on to the limited pros:

reduced micro

no need for consumer goods

immortal ruler

leaders while not being immortal do tend to serve longer since they start at much younger ages

no factions which does reduce micro

excellent early game pop growth until empires begin building bots, then it's all down hill from there

tree of life, haven't used it personally but it's apparently quite good, still nowhere near as good as other choices

no pop happiness which does reduce micro, but with the way amenities directly affect stability its not quite as good as it sounds.

the terravore civic combined with calamitous birth is one of the most awesome empires, at least rp wise. the stories i could make up about a species of sentient rocks who crash into planets to eat them, wait isn't there a tv show about that?

this is a rough list and i almost certainly missed a few

 

[Hansatron]

Note: some of these also affect machine empires, but due to the strength of robots in this game, it is uncontested that machines are some of the strongest empires available

What people ultimately complain about with hives is that you have a class of gestalt empire that straight up is just a worse machine empire.
To add insult to injury, hive minds have almost no civics and get locked out of a number of origins. I, like a handful of modders, even made a hive civic/origin mod to some obvious stuff (mining guilds analog, hive world start) because it was so painful, but, anyone who just clicks through empire selection will see that hive minds have less development attention than lithoids.

 

[jmj281]

That is most likely. In fact that is the case for most software projects, no matter the kind and size of the project: there's never enough time to put everything in a perfect shape! You can blame capitalism or the managers if you like, but the truth is that software is never done! Someone has to pull a stop at some point, or the software will never get released.

Hmm, I don't think perfection is the request. Functioning mechanics, well designed mechanics and progress/improvements for each iteration of the game is the request. If none of those things appear to be happening or even set as a priority people will complain. Interesting, people are complaining. Those complaints don't happen every so often. They do not apply to a few areas. It's a good bet one of these threads will pop up like... once a month. At the very least it's a good bet the conversations in them remain a perpetual activity. It's not a good look.

Oh, and can we please retire the, "Bugs are hard.", argument? Yes, everyone knows bugs are hard. Software functioning well and as intended is the literal job description for a software designer/developer though. In pretty much every field if you're not meeting the requirements of your job description you're, uh, doing a bad job.

Oh, and if we're bringing the economics into it.... If a game developer using a rolling update, periodic DLC model wants someone to pay for future DLC the current state of things is not how to do it. Eventually consumers of such a product will see through the smoke and mirrors and recognize what it's really trying to accomplish. In extreme cases you can go right ahead and push any future content developed for the purpose of sale to that consumer out of the equation too. So we can also retire the notion minor bugs all over the place, poorly functioning mechanics, very little depth and "problems" galore is unimportant for the bottom line. All of these are important. Some less than others. They are still important.

If you'd like the short version of that last paragraph, here it is. I believe CKIII is on the horizon. Rest assured, when thinking about this title the current state of Stellaris has entered my own personal thoughts. It's in the back of the mind, so to speak. But... it's there.

 

[Franton]

Oh, and can we please retire the, "Bugs are hard.", argument? Yes, everyone knows bugs are hard. Software functioning well and as intended is the literal job description for a software designer/developer though. In pretty much every field if you're not meeting the requirements of your job description you're, uh, doing a bad job.

The argument is not that bugs are hard, but that people like you are being unrealistic to expect all of them getting fixed in not time at all. You are effectively saying the equivalent of 'masons are doing a bad job if they can't build a house in a day'. And that's a straight insult.