As someone who stopped playing this game long ago, My opinion about sprawl changes

[MagnusDux]

If it would make Paradox more money (from more games and DLCs sold) to have more punishing rebellion mechanics, they would have done it.

So your argument is that there can't be a design flaw in a game because otherwise more money could have been made by removing the flaw? By that logic every video-game is absolutely prefect.

I seriously don't understand why some people white knight so hard for the devs, i'm just giving constructive criticism, not flaming anyone. Paradox has implemented rebellion mechanics in other games (like ck2) successfully, they can do the same in stellaris too. It's all i'm saying.

Arguing that players don't like that kind of mechanics because one reddit coment has more upvotes than another is completely absurd.

 

[Marmelado]

It would need to be based on a resource like influence that doesn't scale with empire size. It has to be "Do I spend 150 influence to add another habitat, claim 2-3 systems, or add 2 more base growth to my capital?" You can spend that influence on one of those three options and you might be able to split it up like claiming 1 system and adding only 1 base growth to your capital. However, it has to be a system where you can't just get bigger and then choose all of them, and if you want to do all 3, you have to do one, wait for influence to accumulate, do the next, wait, and then get the third.

It is an interesting approach. Introducing a parallel linear formula isolated from the snowballing one, seems like an asymmetrical design choice that may help, but it needs testing. There may be hidden unintended consequences somewhere.

 

[Nevars]

The only winning move is not to play

No, it is not and you would be idiot to think that it is.

The sprawl penalty is pittance compare to your potential output that come with thing that generated those sprawl so you will always outproduce the penalty if you fvking manage your empire properly instead of braindead not building any labs, unity building, etc.

So the winning move is to play the game properly.

Also from Wiz

"This is called 'rubber-band mechanics' and is generally a very, very bad idea. Players are not dumb and will understand perfectly well that they are simply being arbitrarily punished for being successful, removing all causation between their actions and the game's consequences. It's probably among the worst possible ways to handle internal unrest and late-game challenge, as far as I'm concerned."

Me, looking at new Sprawl systems and it's divisive reception: Welp, that's amusing.

The player does not 'arbitrarily punished' for being successful and that comment doesn't even talking about sprawl penalty either so nice strawmaning.

I don't get this flaming of the devs at the time. If you actually read the reddit thread, you'll see that Wiz's comments explaining why there are no potent and annoying rebellions in Stellaris have wayyyyyyy more upvotes than the comments criticizing Stellaris for having weak rebellions. Clearly the vast majority, as Wiz explained, really don't want to have to deal with rebellions all the time.

This thread is not representative of the greater Stellaris playerbase that doesn't have hundreds of hours and spend all their time on the official game forums. The devs have to care about answering everyone's concerns and making the best game possible for the largest amount of people, not just what the loud minorities talk about here.

By your logic, reddit also isn't representative of Stellaris playerbase so any arguement that use reddit upvote of Wiz comment to support their own argument are all invalid.

 

[tinculin]

So you didn't read my entire post? Seeing as how I explicitly brought up espionage as an example of why this particular feature ended up landing like a wet fart. There are plenty of possible (and more likely) reasons as to why espionage is terrible besides "the devs are sucky suckfaces of suck".

I never called the dev team names, I'd appreciate you not doing so either.

That said, you can't evade the point that if a company puts out a substandard and underwhelming feature or product like they did with espionage, only for it to have nearly zero impact on gameplay (which we seem to agree on), then that fault lies entirely with the development team.

In particular, the product analysts and designers that control the balance of the game clearly failed in making this an impactful feature or, the QA analysts for not shouting loud enough during QA and saying 'Guys, this mechanic, it sounds cool, but it does practically nothing....'

They've also had a hell of a long time to acknowledge this and fix it - have they? No. Espionage is still a meme mechanic & for the effort that must have gone into the expansion, that's sad.

 

[Gethsemani]

I never called the dev team names, I'd appreciate you not doing so either.

That said, you can't evade the point that if a company puts out a substandard and underwhelming feature or product like they did with espionage, only for it to have nearly zero impact on gameplay (which we seem to agree on), then that fault lies entirely with the development team.

You didn't. In the short time that I've been back on this forum though, I've seen at least half a dozen other posters refer to them as lazy, incompetent etc., so I got a little caught up in my annoyance. Sorry, I did not mean to belittle what you said (or the devs for that matter).

That said, you make a valid point. Of course the fault lies with the dev team when they deliver a substandard DLC. My point in this thread is that a failure to balance mechanics or delivering undercooked DLC doesn't mean the devs are bad at their jobs, lack vision or don't understand the game. There are plenty of legitimate reasons why espionage continues to be meme-tier bad as a mechanic that doesn't come down to lack of vision or understanding, but rather the realities of both software development and being a publicly traded company expected to turn a profit.

 

[happyscrub]

That's why there isn't really a "tall" playstyle in Stellaris and there almost never has been.

If you consider tall vs. wide in Civ, for instance, a tall build has few cities but each city has more population and can work more tiles. Whereas a wide build has more cities but they have to overlap and share workable tiles so each individual city has a lower peak productive output, but the empire can do more builds in parallel as a result.

But in Stellaris having more planets presents absolutely no obstacle to reaching peak productive output on every single one of them, and you basically can't increase productivity without adding population and you can't add population without adding sprawl, which is the game's way of measuring how wide you are (which you used to be able to do when systems counted for the most because you could jam a few systems full of habitats and have a really low penalty, but that didn't matter back then because tech didn't matter for productivity and naked corvettes or beelined armour cruisers ruled the day, so even when you could be tall it didn't get you anything).

The only reason this is true is because pop growth has been tied to number of planets forever. People repeatedly asked them to change that.

 

[GloatingSwine]

The only reason this is true is because pop growth has been tied to number of planets forever. People repeatedly asked them to change that.

No, It has pretty much never not been true.

I've been playing since release day, there has never really been a functional "tall" playstyle which wasn't an explicit challenge build for when you were messing around (one planet/system challenge etc), because there has never not been a time where you could reach exactly the same optimisation ceiling in all settlements no matter how many you had.

 

[happyscrub]

No, It has pretty much never not been true.

I've been playing since release day, there has never really been a functional "tall" playstyle which wasn't an explicit challenge build for when you were messing around (one planet/system challenge etc), because there has never not been a time where you could reach exactly the same optimisation ceiling in all settlements no matter how many you had.

I don't understand your reply. I said it's only true because of X needs to be changed. You reply to reiterate that it's true ?????

 

[Nevars]

No, It has pretty much never not been true.

I've been playing since release day, there has never really been a functional "tall" playstyle which wasn't an explicit challenge build for when you were messing around (one planet/system challenge etc), because there has never not been a time where you could reach exactly the same optimisation ceiling in all settlements no matter how many you had.

No, there is one patch that tall is better than wide but that is consequences of vassal swarm being op.

The patch that you get naval cap from your subjects (amongst other things) and OPM (one planet minor) usually pick galactic force projection perk which give flat 200 naval cap iirc.

So the most op build of that time is keeping small number of system but a lot of developed core planets (in that patch planets don't give sprawl, only system so if you found one system that has multiple habitable planets that would be golden or just spam habitat) and released everything else as OPM, especial from small planet cuz iirc small planet from that patch is sprawl inefficient (a net drain from output Vs penalty though I don't remember the cut off size) unless it has multiple planets in same system.

It was proven in multiplayer that this set up pretty much beat anything else, wide included.

Then paradox kill it cuz too op.

 

[TheRevanchist25]

The player does not 'arbitrarily punished' for being successful and that comment doesn't even talking about sprawl penalty either so nice strawmaning.

Not really, he clearly implies rubber banding as a concept is pretty terrible. It takes reading that comment with blinders on to not see that. Second, the Sprawl is arbitrary, because it does not solve anything. "Tall" is no closer to being competitive than it was before, Tech Rushing is no less viable than it was before. The goals they clearly wanted to achieve, were not. Therefor, it's clearly just punishing Wide for being Wide.

This is honestly the problem with what most people call "tall." Often, what they actually mean is "small." If you have fewer pops, fewer planets, and are generally smaller in every way than another empire, you shouldn't be competitive with them. Rubber banding mechanics are good, but equalizing every empire regardless of size and success is not. Tall needs to be a different kind of big, not be a strategy where you doing nothing can remain competitive to someone actively expanding and conquering. You need to be expanding in a different way; otherwise, it becomes a game where a player who sits there twiddling their thumbs and one who actively plays the game are competitive with each other.

Which is why I think focusing on more penalties for wide strategies is the wrong aspect of the game to focus on. The problem is that tall expansion only exists in the form of having the same number of colonies spread across fewer systems. What people seem to want (or at least the sane version), the same number of pops spread across fewer planets, isn't made possible by the game mechanics.

This man says it better than me. If the goal is to balance Tall vs Wide, their currently wasting their time, because Tall does not really exist at this time. Tall is just people twiddling their thumbs with roleplay for hours while wide players are waging wars and conquering. To expect those things to be competitive is an absolute joke and can only be achieved by forcing so many negatives upon being wide that people stop going wide. At that point your just gonna lose the player base that plays wide, because their tired of their playstyle being subjected to nonsense rubber banding.

 

[DeanTheDull]

In a situation where you have two equivalently powerful empires each following equivalent policies they would both be experiencing rebellions to an equivalent degree. If there is a way to mitigate or prevent rebellions it would come at a cost comparable to allowing the rebellion to go ahead. So successful strategies would be playing a small stable empire, a large, stable, empire that invests a lot of its resources into staying that way, or an empire that goes through boom and bust cycles of taking over neighbors, exploiting their resources for as long as you can, and then releasing/losing the rowdy ones when they get to be too much trouble. Or a mix, releasing the rowdy planets and keeping the happy ones etc.

If you have a situation where two equivalently sized empires are acting similarly and one is experiencing rebellions and the other isn't then there's been a design failure somewhere.

That would depend on how they grew to equivalent size, would it not?

For example- conquering an empire of opposing ethics, versus peacefully vassalizing and assimilating a same-ethic empire (say after an ideology war).

Or- in the opposite direction- an empire that is Size X becuase it suffered a major setback- say half the empire was overrun by genocidals- compared to an empire that was never as successful in expanding nor suffered the same setback.


What makes empires stable/unstable would matter more than size, and a logical basis for empire stability/instability would be pop ethics.

 

[FinbarFlin]

You didn't. In the short time that I've been back on this forum though, I've seen at least half a dozen other posters refer to them as lazy, incompetent etc., so I got a little caught up in my annoyance. Sorry, I did not mean to belittle what you said (or the devs for that matter).

That said, you make a valid point. Of course the fault lies with the dev team when they deliver a substandard DLC. My point in this thread is that a failure to balance mechanics or delivering undercooked DLC doesn't mean the devs are bad at their jobs, lack vision or don't understand the game. There are plenty of legitimate reasons why espionage continues to be meme-tier bad as a mechanic that doesn't come down to lack of vision or understanding, but rather the realities of both software development and being a publicly traded company expected to turn a profit.

Ive made a post about your last point mentioning those constraints and saying sorry if i sound too harsh sometimes... but it was deleted due to foul language... but the point stands... if those undercooked mechanics appear again and again and new mechanics breaking the game over and over again or problems beeing not addressed for years... i mean you sound like youre contradicting yourself by saying: "That said, you make a valid point. Of course the fault lies with the dev team when they deliver a substandard DLC" and then telling us "My point in this thread is that a failure to balance mechanics or delivering undercooked DLC doesn't mean the devs are bad at their jobs, lack vision or don't understand the game..." so what now... are the devs fault or not... and IF they are fault what you admit they can be... how shall someone call it? You even mentioned in a former post that "dirty" coding can lead to problems... but who does the coding? The devs... and IF they code "dirty" too much, things will break more easily with every update / DLC that means that the "dirty" coding leads to a justified "they cant control their own game"... or is my logic flawed? I dont think so... i rather think you work in a similar job and you hate to deliver "BAD RESULTS" but is often forced to do so... well knowing you could do better...

 

[GloatingSwine]

I don't understand your reply. I said it's only true because of X needs to be changed. You reply to reiterate that it's true ?????

There have been points where population growth wasn't a significant obstacle, but the optimisation ceiling was still achievable on an essentially unlimited number of planets. (Especially since arguably the best way to get pops is getting other peoples)

 

[FinbarFlin]

@Gethsemani

The amount of downvotes i collect here on several subjects clearly shows that people like you say actually never think about the engine and other constraints... and they think that an uncountable number of variables to please all of their desires leads to a better game... its the current "Zeitgeist" to think "everything goes" and i think that is not true

If you want to play CK3 in space... try the game star dynasty... if you dont like the game... bad luck. You can come to the forum here and tell us that you want it and that it would be awesome if Stellaris would be that game... but its stupid... it would be a game on its own in another game... too complicated, too expensive...

If you want to change "ground warfare" to be more like sieges in any other paradox game... than its totaly fine and feasible because we already have a siege mechanic in Stellaris... its called "exploring anomalies"... they would still hate it because now you have to station a certain amount of your fleet around a planet for a some time... you cant no longer drop an 1.5K army on the 180 AI planet army and conquer it nearly instantly... now they would rage "conquering planets with armies was faster!!! We need better ground warfare mechanics!!! Mental contradiction is strong in this forum...

 

[blahmaster6k]

By your logic, reddit also isn't representative of Stellaris playerbase so any arguement that use reddit upvote of Wiz comment to support their own argument are all invalid.

You're right, but it does have a couple orders of magnitude more players than are active on this forum, so it's a better sample size which does mean something. It's not necessarily fully representative, but it's a very different community from this one and the devs have to take into account what people here want, what people there want, and what people who don't participate in either forum probably want.

 

[Gethsemani]

Not really, he clearly implies rubber banding as a concept is pretty terrible. It takes reading that comment with blinders on to not see that. Second, the Sprawl is arbitrary, because it does not solve anything. "Tall" is no closer to being competitive than it was before, Tech Rushing is no less viable than it was before. The goals they clearly wanted to achieve, were not. Therefor, it's clearly just punishing Wide for being Wide.

Sprawl is not a complete rubber band mechanic, mainly because it doesn't allow smaller empires any rebound mechanics. If you're shafted by an early war, poor starting position or something else there's very little you can do to recover. You can't tap into a special comeback mechanic, you can't count on some other feature (like stability and unrest in EU4, for example) to screw with a larger empire, you are stuck being dead last unless another empire intervenes. Sprawl isn't so much a rubber band mechanic as it is a resistance mechanic that's meant to make it harder for a snowballing empire to reach critical mass. By making tech and traditions cost more you off-set the absolutely massive science advantage accumulation that a big empire can have over a smaller. As others have said, this off-set will not be higher then the extra research you get (assuming that you still invest in science obviously), it will only make the adjusted science gain from each researcher or system lower then for someone with lower sprawl.

Since this is the goal they talked about achieving, curbing the runaway science production ramp in the mid-game, I'd say sprawl does exactly what they intended.

so what now... are the devs fault or not... and IF they are fault what you admit they can be... how shall someone call it? You even mentioned in a former post that "dirty" coding can lead to problems... but who does the coding? The devs... and IF they code "dirty" too much, things will break more easily with every update / DLC that means that the "dirty" coding leads to a justified "they cant control their own game"... or is my logic flawed? I dont think so... i rather think you work in a similar job and you hate to deliver "BAD RESULTS" but is often forced to do so... well knowing you could do better...

I work in a job far removed from software programming and my employer is in the public sector, so that's not even close. What my work does contain, and which I have great empathy for, is great constraints on how much time and resources I have to do my job.

The devs are ultimately responsible for what they deliver to their customers. Here we need to make distinction between Espionage-bad, obviously undercooked, broken or buggy content, and Sprawl-bad, design decisions I disagree with. Sprawl-bad is subjective and we can easily stop talking about that but that the devs deliver some things that are Espionage-bad is to be expected. Just as it is to be expected that a physician occasionally misdiagnoses an illness, a cook screws up a meal or a scientist draws the wrong conclusions from their data. Because making software is really hard and adding things to established software is even harder, especially if code that was fine five years ago turns out to not be suited to what you want it to do now.

The Stellaris devs aren't told to take their time and use whatever resources they need to make the next DLC the bestest DLC ever delivered. No, they are given a budget and a release window and are told that the DLC needs to be out by then (and most likely already have the budget and release window for the next DLC after that lined-up) and then are set to work. And at that point a thousand things can make their budget and deadline much harder to hit. Maybe the design turned out to be boring to play. Maybe the initial code was too much spaghetti or did weird stuff with some other part of the game. Maybe the artists couldn't deliver good enough assets or their assets clashed too much with something already in-game. Maybe the forum went up in arms when they heard about the content and demanded something new.

These things happen and affect the final product. That doesn't say anything about the devs being bad, it only tells us that they aren't magical über-mensch that never make mistakes or bad calls. So yes, the devs are responsible for the product they put out. But that they occasionally put out a sub-par product does not mean they are bad at their job. If Stellaris had gone five years being an unplayable mess and all DLC only contained buggy, broken mechanics that everyone hated, then there'd be a case for calling them bad. But since that's patently not true, maybe we should give them the benefit of doubt instead? Because most of what they put out turns out to be good and playable and enjoyable.

 

[TheRevanchist25]

Sprawl is not a complete rubber band mechanic, mainly because it doesn't allow smaller empires any rebound mechanics. If you're shafted by an early war, poor starting position or something else there's very little you can do to recover. You can't tap into a special comeback mechanic, you can't count on some other feature (like stability and unrest in EU4, for example) to screw with a larger empire, you are stuck being dead last unless another empire intervenes. Sprawl isn't so much a rubber band mechanic as it is a resistance mechanic that's meant to make it harder for a snowballing empire to reach critical mass. By making tech and traditions cost more you off-set the absolutely massive science advantage accumulation that a big empire can have over a smaller. As others have said, this off-set will not be higher then the extra research you get (assuming that you still invest in science obviously), it will only make the adjusted science gain from each researcher or system lower then for someone with lower sprawl.

Since this is the goal they talked about achieving, curbing the runaway science production ramp in the mid-game, I'd say sprawl does exactly what they intended.

I said Sprawl is Arbitrary, and it is. If your design goal is to merely "Delay the inevitable" I fundamentally feel like your just wasting your time as a developer, when you could instead actually take longer to solve the problem. Custodians are free updates, so they likely get to decide what to prioritize for these updates. YOu work on a more robust system in the background, and put out more bug fixes or AI/ Performance optimization while you do so. Pumping out half measures that don't solve the problem just adds potential bloat and unwanted side effects.

 

[Critical Ethics]

If your design goal is to merely "Delay the inevitable"

You're making a false dichtomy that Sprawl can only be either useless or cripplingly punishing, which is obviously silly.

4X games have a lot of positive feedback loops. Small advantages compound exponentially. If there's no brakes then an early game advantage quickly compounds to being double the size of every other empire then and now your game is just a slow, boring mopping up of the galaxy because the RNG was nice to you. Or it's an AI who rolled well and lol enjoy the 10x your fleet cap rolling over your homeworld at 2250. Exponential gain is bad. But no gain is also bad, because then what's the point in doing well? Note I'm not talking about "going wide" vs "going tall", this applies equally to two 5 planet 12 system empires staring at each other across an infinite unclaimed abyss.

So what you want is linear or logarithmic gain. Enough that I see genuine returns from my smart plays and lucky breaks but not so much that one single early game smart play or lucky break (or dumb play or unlucky break) decides the whole game then and there. That's the point of sprawl. Sprawl doesn't cause "negative gain" from doing well unless the player screws up. It delays and reduce the net returns of smart plays and lucky breaks toward more reasonable levels. Which is exactly what it, and a whole bunch of other similar mechanics, is supposed to do.

 

[HFY]

So what you want is linear or logarithmic gain. Enough that I see genuine returns from my smart plays and lucky breaks but not so much that one single early game smart play or lucky break (or dumb play or unlucky break) decides the whole game then and there. That's the point of sprawl. Sprawl doesn't cause "negative gain" from doing well unless the player screws up. It delays and reduce the net returns of smart plays and lucky breaks toward more reasonable levels. Which is exactly what it, and a whole bunch of other similar mechanics, is supposed to do.

Ideally for me, a lot of decisions in a game like this would be trade-offs between short-term and long-term gains.

For example, settling a new colony might be a short-term pain which reduces your capabilities for some span of time, but eventually returns much more than your initial investment -- it should have a pay-off which delivers for you, but not immediately.

Same deal with making a new Sector -- it could be a resource-drain on a larger scale, so you don't want to do it until you have several planets going strong -- but when you have two Sectors up and running, the returns would justify the initial expenditure.

Part of my frustration with Stellaris is how new colonies are up and running almost immediately, especially if I'm using an empire which can force-resettle pops where I want them.

The same short-term-pain could be applied to conquest: turning a conquered world into a productive world should not be trivial, which right now it is.


There would be less need for Sprawl-as-friction if the friction were built into the expansion mechanics.

 

[TheRevanchist25]

Ideally for me, a lot of decisions in a game like this would be trade-offs between short-term and long-term gains.

For example, settling a new colony might be a short-term pain which reduces your capabilities for some span of time, but eventually returns much more than your initial investment -- it should have a pay-off which delivers for you, but not immediately.

Same deal with making a new Sector -- it could be a resource-drain on a larger scale, so you don't want to do it until you have several planets going strong -- but when you have two Sectors up and running, the returns would justify the initial expenditure.

Part of my frustration with Stellaris is how new colonies are up and running almost immediately, especially if I'm using an empire which can force-resettle pops where I want them.

The same short-term-pain could be applied to conquest: turning a conquered world into a productive world should not be trivial, which right now it is.


There would be less need for Sprawl-as-friction if the friction were built into the expansion mechanics.

This is exactly my point. This is the way to solve the problem, not some lazy half arsed resource penalties. Ofc, your suggestion requires more effort, so naturally it's not possible.