A THREAD FOR FIRST THOUGHTS (NO DEBATES, PERHAPS?)

[ruzen]

Here is my first impression

6 hours to work yet I'm still playing Stellaris

Surprisingly I find the patch in good condition from the feature side that is...
because...
The AI is somewhat less confident?! I even put it on the highest aggression, even trying to encourage it by deleting all my fleet yet still it never attacks?

Does AI need to cheat regarding the intel side of things? I think it should. Also, envoy skills are a must I feel, why shouldn't a good diplomat or even spy try to join the elections? I mean Putin won...

 

[Calvax]

First impressions after a few hours: automation is significantly improved. As a test I put every planet but my homeworld on automate, and the AI didn't do a half bad job. Builds were logical, there wasn't an unnecessary excess of jobs or housing, and it seemed pretty responsive to empire wide changes (I removed the agri districts from my homeworld and my agri planets quickly picked up the slack). Very keen to grow to a much larger empire and test it out further.

 

[slv]

I ended up enjoying the new economy.

Some weird quirks I've noticed: Due to the S-shaped growth in early game your pop growth is more quick than it used to be. It is fairly easy to have 5base pop growth on your homeworld which will be about 40% faster growth even when taking into account changed mechanic. New colonies have full growth from the get go (+100% growth compared to before). This means that until 2250 your economy is ramping at a much quicker rate than in 2.8, everyone is rich now.

It became easier to commit suicide economically (by overbuilding industry districts) but it became harder to mismanage alloy-research ratio. In 2.8. often there was a choice between what to focus for and in 3.0 in the earlygame there is much less control. You can't change designation for your homeworld so will end up producing consumer goods and alloys at relatively the same rate so it makes sense to invest in some research for everybody (so consgood surplus isn't wasted).

This will probably help new players and will save people from being rushed down too early, it's not possible to overprioritise research at the very start.

 

[DreadLindwyrm]

First impression.
Spawning between three xenophobes was not fun, especially as each of them had initially out built me due to difficulty bonuses. Then they took it in turns to invade me.


So, restarted with the same empire, and now I'm rolling along having "fun" with the laws for determining the leader in our little hegemony federation changing at every opportunity. I want it to be fleet based; the megacorp wants it to be economy based. But everyone seems happy voting to change the rules everytime it comes up...

I've not been able to get into the espionage yet because I've been needing to use my envoys to keep the federation afloat, but it looks intriguing.

First contact has been interesting. I've had a couple of survey vessels dissected by the AI, but I've also had co-operative first contacts (and one empire that basically just seems to want to be left alone - so I'm just leaving them a couple of bribes every so often until I can get my federation under control

I am finding that my production seems somewhat random and unreliable, but I might be leaving too much up to the AI and suffering from mass migration every time a tier 2 job opens up, meaning that my farms, mines, and power stations appear to be emptying far too easily. Next time around I'll have to try using some priority shenanigans, or manually adjusting what jobs are open until I've got a deeper population.

 

[Zoomy]

Now that I've had a chance to experience Dick, I must say I'm impressed.

It does help that my first thought on loading a map was "oh hey neat I can see what systems have planets HOLY FORK IS THAT A RINGWORLD!?"

 

[Ffc]

I like it so far but I only played like 2 hours

I made a few friends and I got some fun with some first contact story

 

[MateuszS]

I like that AI decides to attack various hostile entities instead of leaving them alone.

 

[Tamwin5]

Espionage (without DLC) is a complete dumpsterfire. The only available option (50 years in) is Intel Gathering. But Intel degrades fast, both during and after Intel Gathering completes, the latter of which it does provide no notification for when completed, and therefore requires intensive micromanagement (constantly checking whether the operation completed, to then immedeately requeue the operation). Why there wasn't a button to automate this, I don't know.

Which would be fine if you could just ignore the barebones 'Espionage' system alltogether when not owning the DLC. But you can't, because now, after the AI declares war on you because it doesn't have enough intel to realize it cant win, you cant even attack them because you lack the intel to have their systems explored, thus preventing your fleet from moving in unless you micro a science ship about.


The economy / pop changes look nice, but that alone doesn't save the "3.0" update from being a continuation of what I perceive in a strict downward trend in Stellaris, since Wiz left the game design team.

Outposts/starbases have a sensor range of +1, so in a war capturing an outpost will reveal adjacent systems. You'll still need a science ship if part of their empire is in a nebula, or if you haven't yet uncovered the borders of their territory, but IMO that makes sense.

 

[Azhcristokos]

1) I like that when I need consumer goods or alloys, I don't have to sit and wait for a planet to grow a 5th pop. I just build an industrial district.

2) I like first contact. I just wish it was longer.

3) A smallish thing, but I am enjoying playing a ringworld more after the rework/nerf than before.

4) I really like that space resource extraction was buffed and that the relevant techs also affect starbases.

5) The pop growth will need some tweaks. I expected this would be the main issue where the numbers got too weird.

6) I love pop assembly. As a spiritualist bio-ascended empire, I can easily keep pace pop-wise with robot-using heretics.

7) They FINALLY gave Void Dwellers tradition swaps. Very happy about that.

8) The ability to choose the crisis is great.

Curious to see how automation is. I'm actually playing with 1x habitable worlds instead of .25x for once.

 

[tremor3258]

Impression a bit further in: Pop feels slow, it's really, really easy to overbuild specialists.

 

[mergele]

Espionage meh
Building revamp good
Cannot judge Ai yet

Not enough to make me buy DLC again but so far seems a good direction.

 

[15JTaylor]

Its difficult to put my feelings into words. Ultimately, I like this update. I haven't had a whole lot of time th o play yet though, just 30-40 years.
Pop growth does seem slower, and that was deliberate. I understand that. But, your planets dont feel quite as bustling.
The consumer goods districts and alloys not being two different districts is kind of weird. If they wanna do it their way, they should do it so the consumer world or alloy world designations swaps the jobs. So a consumer world will have two consumer jobs and no alloy jobs. Same way the other way.
The first contact seems too fast. I LOVE that you no longer have to pause your research just to get first contact. And it's annoying af that you cant see their Civics and stuff at base. I know it goes into the espionage mechanics, but just learning the basic stuff is difficult, time consuming, micro intensive, and usually altogether not worth the effort. Your spies are too valuable and just burning them on just learning basic government stuff for everyone is so annoying.
Just a few things I've noticed

 

[Kid'mera]

I like the First Encounter system. It's just too bad I only got to use it once, because everyone else learned about me through a long game of telephone.

Maybe make trading contact info start a first encounter scenario or something?

 

[exi123]

My first thoughts are totally devastating. Year 2435, observer mode, commodore difficulty:

- The ai is stil not able to manage a stable economy. If it runs on deficit it is not able to stabilize. It swaps around jobs prios every few circles on the planets.

- Pop growth is crippled to total boredom. It feels that the only goal was to reduce pops and not to get control over the empire. 150 months to grow a new pop on a habitat with free housing and free jobs everywhere in the empire?

- AI stil starts to build new stuff on planets to early, leading to too many free jobs in the worker strata, destablelizing the whole economy.

- AI stil not able to upgrade buildings to T2 and T3, falls behind in midgame very fast.

- AI stil has split fleets, never really merging to big stacks to reach an efficient force.

- AI stil spams idiotic amounts of habitats, unable to upgrade and/or build them up to useful economic factors.

- Overall strength of AI empires is pathetic, no empire (except of a devouring swarm) has more than 150k fleetpower in 2435.

- The unbidden is stil not able to expand, sits around and does nothing.

- Daily tick stutter is there and will stay forever i guess.

This result is the next skip on this patch and expansion. I am really losing my patience with Stellaris and this dev-team. Is it really so hard to teach the AI how to freckin build up a planet? Do i really need to go back 3 years in development to see an ai upgrading a building to T2 or a crisis actually working? Oh and we had a mechanism in the early days which stoped excessive pop growth without idiotic mathematical measures: tiles.

Do the Devs know what skill inflation in games mean? When a game ages the overall skill of the players increase, the game needs to get harder and better to maintain a challange. Stellaris fails on every single aspect it has to achieve for me. I really cant be the only one who sees this like me.

 

[15JTaylor]

My first thoughts are totally devastating. Year 2435, observer mode, commodore difficulty:

- The ai is stil not able to manage a stable economy. If it runs on deficit it is not able to stabilize. It swaps around jobs prios every few circles on the planets.

- Pop growth is crippled to total boredom. It feels that the only goal was to reduce pops and not to get control over the empire. 150 months to grow a new pop on a habitat with free housing and free jobs everywhere in the empire?

- AI stil starts to build new stuff on planets to early, leading to too many free jobs in the worker strata, destablelizing the whole economy.

- AI stil not able to upgrade buildings to T2 and T3, falls behind in midgame very fast.

- AI stil has split fleets, never really merging to big stacks to reach an efficient force.

- AI stil spams idiotic amounts of habitats, unable to upgrade and/or build them up to useful economic factors.

- Overall strength of AI empires is pathetic, no empire (except of a devouring swarm) has more than 150k fleetpower in 2435.

- The unbidden is stil not able to expand, sits around and does nothing.

- Daily tick stutter is there and will stay forever i guess.

This result is the next skip on this patch and expansion. I am really losing my patience with Stellaris and this dev-team. Is it really so hard to teach the AI how to freckin build up a planet? Do i really need to go back 3 years in development to see an ai upgrading a building to T2 or a crisis actually working? Oh and we had a mechanism in the early days which stoped excessive pop growth without idiotic mathematical measures: tiles.

Do the Devs know what skill inflation in games mean? When a game ages the overall skill of the players increase, the game needs to get harder and better to maintain a challange. Stellaris fails on every single aspect it has to achieve for me. I really cant be the only one who sees this like me.

I just wanted to mention about splitting fleets. This is just one instance in my game, the ai impressed me. My defenses was too high for just one of their small fleets to beat up. But instead, they waited until all of their ships arrived then sent them together into my system. It even looked like they'd send a single ship to their death when the rest of the fleet wasnt there, but it changed course at the last minute. The ai still has the issue that it declares war when its fleets are not prepared.

 

[Azhcristokos]

The consumer goods districts and alloys not being two different districts is kind of weird. If they wanna do it their way, they should do it so the consumer world or alloy world designations swaps the jobs. So a consumer world will have two consumer jobs and no alloy jobs. Same way the other way.

But...it does? If you designate a planet to be an alloy world, then industrial districts provide +2 alloy jobs and 0 consumer goods jobs. And vice-versa.

 

[15JTaylor]

But...it does? If you designate a planet to be an alloy world, then industrial districts provide +2 alloy jobs and 0 consumer goods jobs. And vice-versa.

Cool, I literally only played for 30 years as a fanatic purifier. I never had time to check it. I dont recall those changes in the patch notes, sorry

 

[Azhcristokos]

Cool, I literally only played for 30 years as a fanatic purifier. I never had time to check it. I dont recall those changes in the patch notes, sorry

Aw, I'm sorry dude. I didn't mean to sound like a jerk. Just wanted to point it out because it is a handy little thing to know, but it was buried in the patch notes.

 

[Hyomoto]

Stellaris in my opinion has always gotten better, but often still suffered from not being very good. These last two major updates have really made the difference.

I like the new content, and the further emphasis on diplomatic interactions whether invasive or not is precisely what Stellaris has long been begging for. Three years. It took three years to get where the game should've been six months after launch. I digress, but it's frustrating being proven right after so long. Whatever, we're here now please never go back.

I like the new planet building. I'm not sure how much it will affect as I haven't hit the end game yet, and I can say I think they are a tad more micro-manage-y now since while you could queue up the whole planet, you probably won't. Overall resource management feels a bit tighter and I seem to fluctuate a bit more between having what I need and a surplus. Alloys are much more plentiful in the early game, I had a 20 strong fleet almost out of the gate given the chance for hostilities early on which was interesting. The unknown stuff is the best part of the update by far: that lack of perfect Intel means you have to guess, and being you don't want to trust your neighbors just want hugs it completely changes how you approach diplomacy. Might be worthwhile getting to know your neighbors just for safety.

I haven't gotten to the end game, but frankly this is what the game has been missing. What it really needs next is to go over all the events in the game as expand them. That should be the next free patch: many of these events have been in the game since launch. Hook them up to the new systems, add new branches for them to follow. The game is still a bit weird, but this is definitely the most interesting it has ever been.

 

[Questionable]

Becoming the Crisis feels kinda undercooked.
The way you activate it and the reused assets... Not amazing.
And the pace is so sluggish.