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

[Critical Ethics]

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.

I agree that these things are good and needed, but it's not an either/or. You still also need long term ongoing costs in addition to this to properly reduce exponential growth, as an empire with more existing resources can more easily afford to eat the short term costs of more expansion leading to easier acquisition of more resources leading to easier expansion leading to etc etc. You can't (and obviously shouldn't want to!) completely get rid of the more resources = better than pipeline, that would be crazy. But, again, exponential vs linear/logarithmic.

As an aside some of these short-term and long-term tradeoffs already exist; setting up a new colony requires (not a lot of) alloys and CG and food, a lead-in time where it eats a lot of energy while producing nothing, and a big investment of minerals and strategic resources to get per-pop returns up to par with your other more established colonies. Part of why it's not enough is because the big immediate return from having extra planets is extra pop growth and extra pop growth still trumps all. One of the big changes I'd make to new planet colonization is eating a pop per colonizer. It's silly that colonizing a new planet doesn't just get you bonus pop growth but also three to six years' worth of free pops immediately on completion.

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

As above, purely frontloading the cost for expansion still leads to exponential benefits from early-game advantages. Which is why structures and pops and jobs all have upkeep. That's the thing, the game has always had sprawl. All 4Xs with any form of structure upkeep have sprawl, because sprawl is just upkeep by another name. You have CG sprawl from pop and job upkeep, mineral sprawl from CG and Alloy jobs, energy sprawl from upkeep for pretty much everything that exists. Everything but Research and Unity costs already scale with growth. You can't run a 100 pop 25 system empire on the same energy, mineral, food, alloy, CG, or strategic resource production as a 90 pop 20 system empire. Failure to invest in production of any of these resources in line with your growth leads to death spirals and invasion.

Without sprawl or some other form of research/unity "upkeep" you only need to build additional labs or unity producers to go faster, while everything else (bar influence) either directly or indirectly requires some investment just to compensate for expansion. Sprawl doesn't treat unity and research weird, it brings them in line with everything else, just with a different flavour. Is sprawl the only way to do this? Of course not. One way to do this would be to treat research and unity like energy and food. Structures require a certain amount of physics and engineering science to maintain while pops and planets require a certain amount of unity and society research to maintain. But instead why not have a nice, flavourful, unified mechanic that can also be built on for other things, like the shiny new sprawl vs fleet cap mechanic?

Other than people gettin' mad because science upkeep has its own section on the resource bar while energy upkeep is hidden behind a mouseover.

 

[happyscrub]

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)

That's not a tall vs wide argument. That's a peace vs war argument.

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

One of the main issues with Stellaris is that it is designed to be a multi-player friendly game... that is one very big reason why internal politics, rebellions and actual empire management is so neglected by the developers. They could easily have done a good job with making empire management difficult if they s had chosen to.

What I don't understand is why Paradox are so multi-player focused when the vast majority of the people playing their games does so in single player... making a perfectly unbalanced game with good empire management systems would be quite interesting for the single player experience.

There also should be more less conquer focused victory condition in the game, probably based on ethics, species and government types. This also would set different empires on different paths from the start.

Stellaris is basically a snowball game and there are very little checks and balances in place to stop an empire that simply start steamrolling, you can easily see this in multi-player streams how that work. Games should make military conquest allot harder to maintain long term as it is in real life. Trade and peace have always shown to be far more powerful in the long term. War should not just be about taking resources but should also be about philosophy of governance, culture or even religious differences between species.

All in all... empires should fracture eventually... all large empires should, even in games. It should be more about what you do with the time you play and the score you accumulate along the way that is important. Can you accumulate more score that you did in your previous game, it does not matter if your empire implode at the end.

The whole mentality that more is always better is just so old and not even true for real people. It sort of take over in the mentality of how a game needs to progress, you always need to have more than you did the turn before or you feel you are moving backward. Challenges should be able to come as much within as without and as a player you should need to deal with all kinds of challenges.

In my opinion the Paradox developers are just catering to the larger mass that want to see their coloured points raise more and more and take that as a measure of their success rather than more subjective objectives that is not just pure numbers. You could get score for saving a weaker neighbour from an invasion of a stronger neighbour. You could get score for brokering a peace deal between two warring factions. You could gain score for allowing a faction within your large empire to break away and form their own empire.... even more score if you get them into the same federation as you.
I simply don't understand why everything have to be about coloured points.

I don't play Stellaris anymore and are quite happy that a we soon will have a new version of the king of space games available for people that really enjoy an unbalanced and challenging real 4x single player game.

 

[HFY]

One of the main issues with Stellaris is that it is designed to be a multi-player friendly game... that is one very big reason why internal politics, rebellions and actual empire management is so neglected by the developers. They could easily have done a good job with making empire management difficult if they s had chosen to.

As of 1.9, those things were in the game. The developers did choose to do a decent job of it, too.

2.2 broke those things.

One of the major issues with Stellaris is that it was NOT written as it was designed, but rather it was re-written to break away from many of its previous design decisions.

I'm happy that the Custodian Team is trying to build a new foundation amongst the ruins of the previous work, but let's not pretend the state of Stellaris was the result of a coherent vision with reasonable trade-offs. The thing you're saying could have been done WAS done, and then deliberately broken to try to do something different instead, but the different thing was only done halfway.

 

[GloatingSwine]

As of 1.9, those things were in the game. The developers did choose to do a decent job of it, too.

Eh, not really.

In 1.9 you just managed your five biggest systems by tile count and stuck everything else in a megasector, which you occasionally interfered with so the stupid AI didn't gimp you too hard.

There's never been an actual internal politics system in Stellaris that we didn't game the hell out of. Like at first if a planet was unhappy it would start generating a separatist faction who would occasionally blow something up and if they got enough support secede. But if you put that planet in a sector it would turn into a sector separatist faction instead, and if the rest of the sector was content even if everyone on the planet was a rebel they would be swamped and never get enough support to generate a sector rebellion. And if they were you just flipped them in and out of the sector, resetting the faction's progress every time, until their ethics all shifted so they were happy or your happiness buildings got built and pacified them that way.

There were times where ethics divergence was super strong, so we just played egalitarians who reduced the penalties for divergent ethics and conquered as we pleased. Times when you could skip the penalties by vassalising and integrating and pacifists were the best and painting the map because they were really good at integrating.

There have been times where internal politics "mattered", but never a time where the playerbase didn't default so some sort of gamey response to work around it (which is the unspoken part of what Wiz was talking about in that reddit post someone linked, if the most common player response is to find a way to trick their way out of dealing with a system, it's because they're not having fun engaging with it).

 

[Gethsemani]

There have been times where internal politics "mattered", but never a time where the playerbase didn't default so some sort of gamey response to work around it (which is the unspoken part of what Wiz was talking about in that reddit post someone linked, if the most common player response is to find a way to trick their way out of dealing with a system, it's because they're not having fun engaging with it).

I think most people don't set empire internal goals when playing Stellars but tend to do the conventional 4X thing and want to focus on expansion, diplomacy and warfare. Your empire is the tool you use to paint the map your color, whichever way you do that painting. As such any mechanic for internal politics that gets too intrusive, obstructive or hampering will be considered unfun and busy work, because it is a mechanic you need to engage with so that you can turn your attention back to the mechanics you really want to engage with.

I've been dabbling in Jurassic World Evolution 2 and that game has a mechanic where you need to refuel your power generators and field team vehicles. You do this by selecting the generator or base and clicking the refuel button, then selecting how much fuel and confirming. It is pure busy work and it always makes me less eager to play the game, because I'm there to build a dino park, not to roleplay a logistics employee. It is a mechanic meant to keep the player on their toes, because no fuel for a generator means escaping dinos, but in essence it is just a pointless plate spin that distracts from the actually cool mechanics and features of the game. The game also has a discontent meter for all your scientists (which researches tech, brings you new fossils etc.) that means you regularly have to put them in the staff building for a cooldown period. If a discontent employee isn't rested they might sabotage the park. In theory a cool feature, in practice just pointless busywork that only keeps the player from doing the cool park building that's actually fun.

Why bring that up? Because a lot of the internal politic systems in Stellaris have been like that. You need to click a bunch of buttons or bad things might happen. There are no interesting choices to make, only a binary "do this or suffer consequences" that keeps your attention away from the things you want to engage with.

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

As of 1.9, those things were in the game. The developers did choose to do a decent job of it, too.

2.2 broke those things.

One of the major issues with Stellaris is that it was NOT written as it was designed, but rather it was re-written to break away from many of its previous design decisions.

I'm happy that the Custodian Team is trying to build a new foundation amongst the ruins of the previous work, but let's not pretend the state of Stellaris was the result of a coherent vision with reasonable trade-offs. The thing you're saying could have been done WAS done, and then deliberately broken to try to do something different instead, but the different thing was only done halfway.

Stellaris have pretty much gone from worse to bad... that I can agree with. The tile based planets system was pretty broken from the start as a game of this scope should not have planet management on that detailed scale. Planet development could have been way more abstracted and still interesting, including AI friendly. That way they could have concentrated on the empire level and beyond this much deeper and fun mechanics.

The issue with Stellaris is that planets really don't matter, distance really don't matter and you don't really get the sense of scale between planets and/or object in space. Nothing really is individually important except things like shipyards, this is also the sense you get during wars.

In my opinion Stellaris is really like a complex board-game set in space.... it is also full of mechanics that don't interact with each other and you just spend points to enable powers. To be honest it lost allot of what the initial thought of the game were suppose to be, at least from looking at the early dev diaries.

In my opinion Stellaris is a lost opportunity for a great game... instead it has become a bland and boring 4x game that is all about spending coloured points to get powers and abilities and conquer territory is the only way to see any real progress.

Even the exploration is pretty boring as events are just glorified loot boxes with a few interesting game altering events... I don't see why even bother reading 99% of the events anymore when playing this game.

There was potential to make the game fun, but they failed on so many levels to deliver and made the game complex in areas it should not and not deep enough in the areas it should have been. Personally I rate Stellaris below most of the classic 4x games... the only good it has done is probably use the Paradox name to draw in new people into the genre, and that is the only positive I can see.

 

[GloatingSwine]

The other thing is that we've never actually had granular ways to do internal politics.

Let's say I'm playing an Egalitarian empire and I conquer a planet full of Authoritarians with the Decadent trait and that matters the way it used to and they're *amazingly* unhappy and rebellious.

What can I actually *do* about that?

Nothing, really. All I can do is press the martial law button if I really need to and hope the passive process of ethic shift makes the problem go away.

Because all the social decisions are *global*, there's no way to respond to localised internal politics, let alone multiple different ways that different governments and ethics can be good or bad at.

 

[Critical Ethics]

The other thing is that we've never actually had granular ways to do internal politics.

Let's say I'm playing an Egalitarian empire and I conquer a planet full of Authoritarians with the Decadent trait and that matters the way it used to and they're *amazingly* unhappy and rebellious.

What can I actually *do* about that?

Nothing, really. All I can do is press the martial law button if I really need to and hope the passive process of ethic shift makes the problem go away.

Because all the social decisions are *global*, there's no way to respond to localised internal politics, let alone multiple different ways that different governments and ethics can be good or bad at.

I wouldn't say more granularity is the solution but yes, the big problem with pre-2.2 factions was that there was no fun way to deal with them. A planet wants independence? Your choices are to give it to them, murder all the dissidents, dump influence onto them, or game it. I'd like to try the old system but with the new system's faction demands factored in. A faction for planetary independence pops up, you can keep the concede/murder options as they were but replace the "dump influence" option with a bunch of faction demands. We won't give you independence but we'll make the planet a sector capital (+20) and make sure none of the species on it have lower rights (+15) or living conditions (+15) than the primary species and maintain a minimum of X Leaders and Y Specialists (+20) and basically drown them in concessions until the movement gets too small and collapses.

 

[grommile]

Mental contradiction is strong in this forum...

Because the forum is not, contrary to the belief of some people, a hive mind.

 

[sillyrobot]

The other thing is that we've never actually had granular ways to do internal politics.

Let's say I'm playing an Egalitarian empire and I conquer a planet full of Authoritarians with the Decadent trait and that matters the way it used to and they're *amazingly* unhappy and rebellious.

What can I actually *do* about that?

Nothing, really. All I can do is press the martial law button if I really need to and hope the passive process of ethic shift makes the problem go away.

Because all the social decisions are *global*, there's no way to respond to localised internal politics, let alone multiple different ways that different governments and ethics can be good or bad at.

Well, I used to force migrate several rebellious pops AWAY from the colony and force migrate several obedient pops TO newly conquered colonies to control internal politics, but the change to consume influence for such mobilization effectively took that tool away. So there were more tools in the past than currently exist.