An honest and hopefully constructive critique

[ShockMeSane]

So with the release of the newest patch the game is what I would call "a playable state". But there are some inherent problems that are so fundamental that they flaw the game greatly. I'm sure other people have similar concerns, and this thread is both for them and me.

But I don't see a lot of this stuff being discussed. Maybe because the average player is more casual than me (which is fine, games should be fun for everyone). So here's my list. Tell me what you agree or disagree with, and list your own issues.

*The amount of micromanagement required got too much in MegaCorp. Before, Stellaris was 100% winnable on Grand Admiral if you managed your first 3-7 worlds and threw everything else into a sector and put it on research. Now I feel like a babysitter. Yes, you can essentially put your worlds on ignore by hitting the stop growth Decision. And yes, it's still easily winnable. You don't need to handhold all your planets, but if you aren't you are playing at a huge deficit. Now I get 1-2 planet sectors, that all need minerals individually doled out to them by me personally. Have you played a 600+ star game of Stellaris? You will end up with way over 100 worlds, and probably 40 governors in 40 sectors you need to individually dole out resources to, or babysit them each individually. I'm sorry, but in a grand strategy game, this is my biggest complaint. Removing my ability to reduce micromanagement just feels like Paradox removed an actual game feature.

* I posted this earlier but from a fair amount of observation, the AI makes no decisions based on distance when it comes to issuing orders to its Constructors and Fleets. This is crippling and makes the game easy even on Grand Admiral with all it's absurd AI bonuses. If you can survive the first 20 years of a Stellaris game (pretty sure the only way to lose is hit a Grand Admiral Advanced Start AI Swarm/purifier race, and thats still winnable with smart use of Bastions), you will win on any difficulty because the AI makes frankly absurd decisions about how it chooses targets. This is not something fixable by modders and an issue that needs to be addressed. If you want to know what I'm talking about, play a game in Observer mode and watch the AI use its construction ships. It will construct a starbase in a system and then send it to the opposite end of the galaxy to build a mining station, while it sends a constructor from the very system it just issued orders to the opposite end of the galaxy to construct. This is a critical issue in making the game fun for single players that actually don't mind the idea of losing a strategy game.

*Ship design is boring. Against any AI you can win every time just building the same generic Giga Cannon/Neutron Torpedo battleships as possible. There is no composition the AI uses that has a chance against it. They will just keep loading up on 10 billions point defense focused ships and lose. I don't have a ton to say on this topic other than it is a rich area for Stellaris as a game to explore.

*There needs to be more "crisis" type of events, at more random intervals. Always knowing that you need to be able to beat the Khan in 2350 and the Crisis in 2400 is both boring and game-y. And they don't all need to be military threats. There could be economic ones as well. I realize the start years are customizable and so is crisis strength. But even the Crisis themselves aren't actually difficult. They vaguely attempt to expand at the beginning and then just sit their waiting to get beaten down in a multi-front war the AI can't handle because it doesn't make distance calculations.

*My nit-picky one: Gestalt empires need a little bit of tender loving care. They are just sort of stripped down versions of regular empires, with some bonuses in a few categories. I want the game to feel a bit more different when I'm playing a Devouring Swarm than it does a fanatic Xenophile race.

Lets hear yours, and tell me why I'm a terrible person for not loving those things

 

[Tech Noir Synth]

I do like the complexity added by having ressources like alloys which need refinement. However I agree the micromanagement is a little over the top.

Compare this game to ANNO, a city builder. You build up your city on 1 island and eventually you need goods from island number 2 which you need to settle and develop from scratch. But on island 2 you already have access to all advanced buildings since you progressed further into the tech tree on island 1. Therefore you need the same buildup but it doesn't feel tedious since its faster.

Compare this to planets: On every planet you need to start micromanaging from scratch. Your only way of increasing the pace is to move in pops from other planets. Maybe the devs can come up with a smart idea of reducing the early buildup time on newer planets. My suggestion would be to remove reduce growth rate on newly colonized planets.


More about micromanagement: Machine empires and Synths need automatic migration. For them, the game turns into resettlement simulator which you have to do all by yourself later on and at the cost of energy. There is no reason one playstyle should require an enourmous and tedious amount of micromanagement compared to other playstyles (organic).

"Grand strategy"

You would think that as your empire expands, you will make choices about big parts of the map easily. Instead, you still have to micromanage every nook and cranny of your empire. This way, wide playstyles do get held back simply by the player who is unwilling to face obnoxious and tedious amounts of micromanagement.

This could be solved by a working sector system, as it has in the past.



The game's core elements are great but since the update it is severely held back by tedious amounts of micromanagement. You can see there is a clear goal to make all these elements managable with a sector system. To give players the option to either optimize their planets to the fullest themselves, or let the AI handle it for them with less efficiency while you focus on controlling the map with your fleet. Too bad Le Guin destroyed a perfectly fine working sector system and hasn't fixed it since.

A little off topic, but something I wanted to say:

The current focus on pop growth has made the "Rapid Breeders" trait absolutely mandatory. In the current iteration its so good to the point that every empire has 2 less trait points to play around with.

This might be radical, but what if all growth speed bonuses on species were simply removed from the game (maybe keep special ones from genetic ascencion?) and instead the base growth speed was increased by a flat %. Everyone would get 2 additional trait points to play with.

 

[RoverStorm]

The problem with sectors ATM is we can't control them and they aren't static on galaxy creation. If we could manually designate sectors , it'd be much easier to fit your empire into clean sectors even with the current limitation (three jumps from sector capital). The problem is the game auto-makes a sector everytime you settle a planet outside a current sector. But wait, it gets worse! Did that devouring swarm snipe a system linking two planets in the same sector? Now it splits into TWO sectors, and taking back the system doesn't fix it!

If sectors were static for everyone in the galaxy, none of this stupid stagger-sectors and conquest sector gore would happen. If we could control it, we could manually delete and add sectors and optimize it properly. Rather than the first world I settle being a sector capital and most other planets being outside the three jump range, I could choose a system that actually reaches all said planets in three jumps, thereby fitting them into one sector.

*Ship design is boring. Against any AI you can win every time just building the same generic Giga Cannon/Neutron Torpedo battleships as possible. There is no composition the AI uses that has a chance against it. They will just keep loading up on 10 billions point defense focused ships and lose. I don't have a ton to say on this topic other than it is a rich area for Stellaris as a game to explore.

This is the fundamental Paradox Combat Problem. The player has control over two things: ship design and the retreat button. How do you design a hands-free combat system that isn't either "best number auto-wins" or "rock-paper-scissors"? Can one even be designed?

*My nit-picky one: Gestalt empires need a little bit of tender loving care. They are just sort of stripped down versions of regular empires, with some bonuses in a few categories. I want the game to feel a bit more different when I'm playing a Devouring Swarm than it does a fanatic Xenophile race.

Machine Empires just got buffed, and some devs think the Hive Mind might be OP ATM. But yeah I get you're referring to thematics. The "no happiness" mechanic is kinda pointless since amenities directly affect stability anyways, rather than affecting happiness that affects stability. Sure you get no factions, but neither do slaves. Their most unique mechanic is no consumer goods (or a strange version for rogue servitors) and no strata differences (well technically there's one policy...), and that's kinda on the boring side.

* I posted this earlier but from a fair amount of observation, the AI makes no decisions based on distance when it comes to issuing orders to its Constructors and Fleets. This is crippling and makes the game easy even on Grand Admiral with all it's absurd AI bonuses. If you can survive the first 20 years of a Stellaris game (pretty sure the only way to lose is hit a Grand Admiral Advanced Start AI Swarm/purifier race, and thats still winnable with smart use of Bastions), you will win on any difficulty

Yeah, so higher difficulties are jokes because the massive cheats the AI gets to resources causes them to immediately sell their excess to the global market. This causes comically low prices, meaning all you need to do is generate energy to cover the rest of your expenses.

 

[Blodo]

*Ship design is boring. Against any AI you can win every time just building the same generic Giga Cannon/Neutron Torpedo battleships as possible. There is no composition the AI uses that has a chance against it. They will just keep loading up on 10 billions point defense focused ships and lose. I don't have a ton to say on this topic other than it is a rich area for Stellaris as a game to explore.

This is more an AI problem than ship design, so just to throw my own two cents in: one of my first games on Megacorp I played had me spawn right next to a Devouring Swarm. This swarm then became overwhelming in fleet power to me in a matter of 20 years and declared war while my fleet was about half of its fleet power. I was expecting a running fight all the way to my capital, what I got instead was my fleet completely massacring their 2x fleet power attack fleet. I don't have a screenshot of this which is a shame, but while I was winning that fight I clicked on one of their corvettes to see the loadout: it was half loaded out with point defense, the other half was level 1 railguns against my blue lasers and autocannons. I mean, no wonder it lost.

Key point here: AI really shouldn't overbuild PD like this, it actually makes its fleets much weaker than they would otherwise be against the player. This is a behaviour that continues all throughout the game pretty much.

 

[Spaceception]

I agree about the crisis. There could be a "random" option on the sliders, where it could start anywhere from 50 years after the start to 500 years after the start or something like that. But the "midgame" and "endgame" are separated by at least 50 years. Something like that could throw in a bit more suspense.
More internal crisis' are good as well. Maybe an equivalent Gene modding crisis (to an AI rebellion), where there's a small chance much of your population is badly affected by extensive genetic engineering (Or alternatively, revolts because they flat-out don't want to be genetically engineered), and revolts against you. And non-military threats like an economic crash is something I would definitely like to see.

 

[Tech Noir Synth]

I agree about the crisis. There could be a "random" option on the sliders, where it could start anywhere from 50 years after the start to 500 years after the start or something like that. But the "midgame" and "endgame" are separated by at least 50 years. Something like that could throw in a bit more suspense.
More internal crisis' are good as well. Maybe an equivalent Gene modding crisis (to an AI rebellion), where there's a small chance much of your population is badly affected by extensive genetic engineering (Or alternatively, revolts because they flat-out don't want to be genetically engineered), and revolts against you. And non-military threats like an economic crash is something I would definitely like to see.

More challenges are always fun. However you have to consider the playerbase usually consists of few very good players, a ton of average players and a few players who struggle very hard with the game. I would go as far as to say the people who are very good are more likely to invest time discussion strategies and are thus more represented on the forums/reddit/discord etc. If they want more challenges it might not be the right thing to do since you will ruin the players who struggle already (and we do get a fair number of posts complaining about the economy system, so there might be more players struggling than you think) and the people who are not as involved and average might be irritated about why the game suddenly became way harder.

Tl;Dr you are probably better off simply using mods like glavius AI with non scaling grand admiral. As we know you can still have other empires become pathetic in tech within 100 years with this setup. So you would need other mods on top of that, or you simply setup challenges for yourself like "no turtling at choke points".

 

[Spaceception]

snip

Tl;Dr you are probably better off simply using mods like glavius AI with non scaling grand admiral. As we know you can still have other empires become pathetic in tech within 100 years with this setup. So you would need other mods on top of that, or you simply setup challenges for yourself like "no turtling at choke points".

You definitely have a point. But I'd like for the base game to be more fleshed out without mods. Personally anyway.
I'm not saying these have to be hard either (In regards to non-military internal crisis'), just not easy. And is all mainly to help make the game feel more dynamic, so you have something more to do, something to counteract, something that forces you to rethink your strategy on your feet from time to time, and so on. First though, I think there needs to be more done with internal politics, and for the current economic system to be balanced and fixed. Then those kinds of features would fit in better.

 

[ShockMeSane]

First, thanks to everyone who responded. I'm kind of in the middle of leaving work but I'll quickly respond to a few things.

I want to say that I strongly agree with the idea that games should be fun to as large an audience as possible, and I know 98% of people will never play Stellaris for 1k hours and have a deep understanding of how to exploit the AI's flaws to win despite them starting with multiple systems and a 50% bonus to basically everything. Nor should they have to. I want the game to continue succeeding because this is the only sandbox game in a sci-fi setting you can really even play. So while I personally feel like the game is a bit too easy with every slider set to max, I understand that there are people who aren't as invested in me, and it needs to be fun for them as well. But that's kind of what the idea of difficulty sliders is for.

And while you can set personal limitations on how much you are taking advantage of the AI's flaws, in practice this is not particularly fun. Thankfully a dev did respond to my message about distance calculations and it is something Paradox is actively working on.

Sectors are..... just a mess at the moment. I don't even really understand the logic of why they changed it, other than the fact that under the old system you could easily have a 200 planet empire with 2 governors. And I get that maybe that isn't ideal, and it also isn't ideal to automate anything. I don't mind playing somewhat sub-optimally if it makes my game experience more entertaining and less tedious. Since Megacorp came out I have played far less Stellaris, just because the idea of it feels a bit like a chore because i know i have to manage every world to play at even 50% efficiency. Under the old sector system you could still play at something like 80% efficiency with every planet past your core limit put into one huge sector. I personally made a mod that makes the sectors HUGE and the game still feels overwhelming because I still have to constantly give assign sectors minerals. That they will spend in some horrible way if they spend them at all. Sectors are just messy and horrible right now.

I want to hear what your pet peeves are!

 

[ShockMeSane]

Oh, and to add something constructive to this discussion, here is an easy fix:

I want to be able to assign job priorities. I don't know why this isn't a thing. I shouldn't have to count on either Paradox or Glavius to manage my worker priorities. A simple button next to each job that would assign it a #1, #2 etc priority would make a huge difference. Under the current system all I can do is unassign some miners to get amenities, for example. The problem? It disables the job completely and permanently. Workers will literally never work that job again and sit unemployed, so it's one more thing I need to mentally keep track of and is part of the micromanagement hell that currently exists.