Can we talk about "emergent gameplay"?

[Liggi]

This is something that I feel that Stellaris lacks, and that Crusader Kings III has nailed (so far).

I'd define it as "the degree of freedom of approach offered when multiple mechanics and systems overlap and interact in meaningful and complex ways".

"Hooks" are a near-perfect example of this. They are an abstraction representing some leverage that one character has over another. They can be used in combination with a lot of different systems (murder plots, getting vassals to join your factions, keeping unruly vassals out of factions against you, encouraging characters to marry their children to your children in ways that benefit you, agreeing to alliances... and those are just off the top of my head, and don't at all cover everything).

Another example would be the "Stress" system. It encourages you to roleplay, but it also interacts with other systems. There are a lot of different ways to manage Stress (You can Befriend characters and take perks that compound the effects of friendships on Stress, you can pick up a trait that allows unique stress-mitigating actions, you can even EMBRACE Stress and take perks that make your character BETTER the more stressed they are).

Crusader Kings III has really nailed this aspect of gameplay, and I think it's what makes it a masterpiece.

Contrast this with Stellaris:

- Favors can be used in a few different ways, like getting an AI to agree to a Research Agreement, or boosting your Diplomatic Weight in the Galactic Community, or maybe getting them to agree to a law change. That's a great start! But the only way you can really get favors is via trading resources. Additionally, you never really see the impact of what you've had to give up to get those favors. If you want to get something done, but you aren't quite there, you open up a trade window, trade a bunch of whatever resources for some favors, and then use the favors. It's close, but not only are the uses of Favors limited, there's also really not many varied ways to GET Favors. And if an AI has Favors on you, it doesn't matter.

- Ethics / Factions have little impact on anything other than modifiers. You get faster Research Speed for being Materialist, and you get more Unity for being Spiritualist. You get some slightly different buildings (which are just more modifiers). Factions have some limited and predictable set of "Issues" that you can check off, and if you do, it boosts your influence slightly. If you don't... they are just a bit unhappy but they don't really do anything about it or cause you any problems.

- And coming up, we have Espionage. Which seems like the basis for a cool system, but again, unlike CK3 where it interacts in myriad ways with other systems, Espionage just seems to consist of one-time Operations you can run to get some bonus or modifier (or just totally ignore).

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What I'd like to know is: how can we create more "emergent gameplay" in Stellaris?

How can we make the mechanics and systems overlap in a way that makes the galaxy feel vibrant and alive? That makes each empire feel like a unique experience to play, and makes the player feel like they have an incredibly wide number of playstyles they can adopt, and almost infinite ways that your actions can interact and produce consequences for your Empire and for the galaxy at large?

Stellaris has a foundation of great systems, but they all feel somewhat isolated from one another. Some interact marginally, but there's so much more potential there. I'd love to hear other people's ideas on how this can be improved.

 

[Oculument]

Turn Stellaris into space CKIV? I thought it was better when Stellaris became space Victoria III.

 

[sillyrobot]

Fundamentally, emergent gameplay happens when other actors are proactive and the player and other actors can react but the type of reaction isn't specified. Two neighbours go to war. The player decides to react.

In Stellaris, there really is just one way to react: declare war on one of the two enemies. There is no reaction from either of the two combatants.

I suppose offering a sweet trade deal to one of the enemies might count as a reaction, if either combatant could in turn react to your offer/involvement. But they can't beyond simple accept/reject. You can't attempt to broker or intimidate a peace. You can't attempt to change the scope or nature of the war. You can't, well, do anything that will cause the other parties to react and adjust the situation/environment.

 

[grommile]

One of the problems with this discussion is that we have different definitions of "emergent gameplay".

For me, the important aspect of "emergent behaviour" is that it emerges from interaction between systems, rather than being designed directly into a system as a formal interface.

If the threat posed by non-participant parties factored into the AI's willingness to sign Status Quo, then intimidating someone into making peace by massing warships on the border and spending influence on territorial claims would, if the threat recognition logic was solid, be emergent behaviour.

If there's a button labelled "Demand Peace Settlement", then it's not emergent behaviour; it's designed behaviour.

 

[Ezumiyr]

Fundamentally, emergent gameplay happens when other actors are proactive and the player and other actors can react but the type of reaction isn't specified. Two neighbours go to war. The player decides to react.

Emergent gameplay comes from the multiplicity of interacting features and how that leads to interesting situations and opportunities.
Stellaris does have a multiplicity of interacting features ; the issue is that their interactions are so little that it doesn't matter.
For example, when two neighbours decide to go to war, you can close borders, you can stop trade, you can decide to change your ethics towards something that is closer to one of the two empires. You can make gifts.
But eventually it doesn't matter, and as a player you're the only entity that tries to do that. As a result, there are very, very few opportunities or interesting stuff going on in the galaxy - and it's always because of scripted events.

Big empires don't crumble ; internal politics doesn't give opportunities for neighbours to interveine ; technology doesn't unlock new ways to approach situations. Overall, everything in Stellaris is extremely linear. As you advance through time, you just get more and more of the same, with a few exceptions. What's really bad about that, is that thematically we are supposed to be unlocking completely new ways to evolve. But gameplay wise, it is mostly translated into economic modifiers.

Whereas if you look at CK3, the interacting features actually change what you can do: how you deal with a threat will change completely depending on the character you play (more intrigue oriented, diplomacy oriented...?), the time (with time, new laws unlock new actions), and the place (some religions allow you to do certain things etc). As a consequence, sometimes you'll react just by provoking a duel, other times you'll build up a fortune to build a mercenary armies, or you'll just marry a kid to make a powerful ally, etc. All your options are different actions, they aren't just +1 to martial or +2 to diplomacy.

Stellaris is just not build in the right way. The devs kept stacking modifiers in every feature instead of making the game about what you can and cannot do. The early obsession to not lock anything because a part of the fanbase was against it is still being an issue today - meanwhile, this initial fanbase lost interest a long time ago.
Frankly, I don't think Stellaris can still be redesigned in a way that makes emergent gameplay possible, for the same reason CK2 kept its shallow minmaxed characters til the end. It would simply require too much work. Maybe for Stellaris 2.

EDIT/
Honestly, the dream to make Stellaris some kind of new Victoria with an economic simulation is a trap. That's never going to make a great game. Planets should have been simultaneously much more abstracted and detailed. We don't need to know exactly how many people of what species produce how many units of what. This is space opera. We just need to know what economic sectors are covered by the planet, who lives there, what are their traditions, what's the biosphere looking like, what are the interesting people to interact with to change how things work. Make the planet reactive to what happens. When you go to war, make us see the local governor to ask for more weapons. Or a local maffia leader to buy a fleet of privateers in exchange for a more lenient approch to the law (that will have consequences later). Eh, even let us interact with a gang leader from an enemy planet to negociate a sabotage... Planets need to be lively and interactive ; full of opportunities. Not the dead cookie clickers they are now.

 

[sillyrobot]

Empires used to crumble. It was one of the areas where a player and AI empire could (and did) react to the new diplomacy opportunities. The devs 'fixed' factions and civil wars so they don't any more.

There are few structural instabilities. The game relies on 3-4 scripted shake-ups and if you get a lucky map start, 1-2 serious threats from total war snowballs.

 

[grommile]

Frankly, I don't think Stellaris can still be redesigned in a way that makes emergent gameplay possible

Of course it can. Emergence is something that can be achieved incrementally.

Empires used to crumble.

AI and noob empires used to crumble.

Perpetually intermediate and expert empires didn't.

So "empires crumble", in SP, was basically a handbrake on the AI.

 

[sillyrobot]

Of course it can. Emergence is something that can be achieved incrementally.

AI and noob empires used to crumble.

Perpetually intermediate and expert empires didn't.

So "empires crumble", in SP, was basically a handbrake on the AI.

Sure, but I submit a better dev response would have been to widen the instability to make fewer empires immune rather than to (almost) eliminate the instability.

 

[DanielPrates]

Turn Stellaris into space CKIV? I thought it was better when Stellaris became space Victoria III.

Stellaris could only wish to one day become Vic3 in space.

To me the only real breakthrough stellaris needs is a good set of domestic mechanics. Factions being meaningful, revolts, disloyal leaders. Separatism. The "emergence" would flow naturally as you meta-play, balancing conquest/wars with keeping your own backyard stable.

 

[grommile]

Sure, but I submit a better dev response would have been to widen the instability to make fewer empires immune

That's not an arms race the devs can win, because – bluntly – the expert players are better at the game than the devs are and will cheerfully write (and keep updated) a paint-by-numbers guide on How To Not Have (Meaningful) Rebels for the perpetually intermediate players.

 

[sillyrobot]

That's not an arms race the devs can win, because – bluntly – the expert players are better at the game than the devs are and will cheerfully write (and keep updated) a paint-by-numbers guide on How To Not Have (Meaningful) Rebels for the perpetually intermediate players.

Sure it is. If you have an unmitigable minimum monthly risk of 0.1% if colony count is over 3 then any empire with any size will experience rebels at some point. The goal is to make expansion valuable despite rebellions.

It's only a race that can't be won if you allow the other side a chance to guarantee a win.

 

[grommile]

Sure it is. If you have an unmitigable minimum monthly risk of 0.1% if colony count is over 3 then

you have not so much won the arms race, as actually launched the missiles.

 

[safe-keeper]

Yes, definitely. It's one of the main problems with Stellaris, that it's way too scripted, with way too few systems driving the gameplay and story. Hence it just turns into a static map painting and empire management game, where nothing happens unless you start a war.

I hope Stellaris 2 is more of a systemic game, like PDX games are supposed to be.

Since you speak of dynamic character traits, though, I actually once suggested implementing species-wide traits to Stellaris. They'd work kinda like the ones for characters in CK2, but each would be more of a national identity, like the ones around the world in real life. So as the "story" of your Stellaris game unfolded, you unlocked traits, with positive and negative effects, based on your actions and how you handled various "crises".

 

[safe-keeper]

Empires used to crumble. It was one of the areas where a player and AI empire could (and did) react to the new diplomacy opportunities. The devs 'fixed' factions and civil wars so they don't any more.

There are few structural instabilities. The game relies on 3-4 scripted shake-ups and if you get a lucky map start, 1-2 serious threats from total war snowballs.

I really love the idea of empires rising and falling throughout the game, it's something I'm really hoping to see in Stellaris 2. You'd build an empire, and then managing your empire would become an increasingly strenuous effort as it grew wider and your frontier more distant.

 

[ChiefBigFeather]

I haven‘t thought about it this way, but you really hit the nail on the head describing what this game lacks. Aside from anomalies and scripted stuff, the game really is an exercise in stacking modifiers (which are wildly imbalanced to boot).

 

[Serenity84]

Espionage just seems to consist of one-time Operations you can run to get some bonus or modifier (or just totally ignore).

Most things in the game are just system after system tacked on with barely any interaction between them. You just get more buttons and modifiers that often don't mean much and the whole things becomes messier and messier.

This is a result of the DLC model. They need to design things in a way that doesn't alter the core gameplay loop with paid features and they need to consider that not everyone has all the DLC. So the interaction between them is minimal. Other PDX games suffer from the same. It's not necessarily immediately apparent but gets worse the more is added

 

[Hyomoto]

There are two things which drive the gameplay in CK3 that are relevant to Stellaris and we can see being partially incorporated. Firstly, imperfect information: a big part of CK can be just getting the information you need. Who is in a position to provide what you want to accomplish a goal? With this new update, we are losing some of the perfect information we had before. What we need now are ways to use that information. For example, in the trailer for Nemesis we don't know who blew up the star, that's exciting: who IS the end game crisis? An intersting piece of information the owner might want to keep secret as they amass power.

The second thing CK3 has is rules which change how and what you can even accomplish. The galactic council is a great place for this. Start the game with largely lawless and uncooperative nations, but as the Galactic Council grows it begins to enforce rules of conduct between nations. This would be an amazing reason to NOT be a part of the galactic council and potentially lead to interesting internal dynamics as the power of the Council requires nation participation, but also incentivizes scheming since being in charge of those rules could allow for some pretty wild power plays.

The idea that Stellaris needs to be CK3 is silly, but to pretend like it wouldn't benefit from some of the same motivators or doesn't have some of them already is just ignorant. I definitely welcome these new dynamics, the utter lack of meaningful diplomacy has been the single worst part of Stellaris. War in CK3 isn't especially exciting, but how, when and why you go to war most certainly spices it up.

 

[BrokenSky]

That's not an arms race the devs can win, because – bluntly – the expert players are better at the game than the devs are and will cheerfully write (and keep updated) a paint-by-numbers guide on How To Not Have (Meaningful) Rebels for the perpetually intermediate players.

I think the trick is to try to create a system where the stability of the empire scales linearly or super-linearly with size, so empire collapse is mathematically unavoidable (unless you purge 90% of the galaxy and own the remaining 10%), and such that your skill only determines how far up that hill you can climb before implosion happens.

Federations already have something like this, where new members won't join if they dislike one of the existing member empires too much - as the federation grows, the odds of each new empire having a problem with an existing member increases. This puts a hard cap on Federation size and makes larger federations more rickety as a loss of authority can lead to multiple members leaving, droping cohesion further and triggering a death spiral.

If Sectors in an empire had their own ethics (initially these would be 0-1 steps out from the main empire, presumably) and a degree of agency which allowed them to push for greater autonomy or even try to leave, empires could be given a similar capacity to unavoidably crumble (even at minimum autonomy, where they act as current and you can replace the governor at will, they still have ethics and a nominal political presence).

 

[grommile]

I think the trick is to try to create a system where the stability of the empire scales linearly or super-linearly with size, so empire collapse is mathematically unavoidable (unless you purge 90% of the galaxy and own the remaining 10%), and such that your skill only determines how far up that hill you can climb before implosion happens.

"You can't conquer the galaxy even on Settler/Cadet, so don't even try" is never going to be a popular stance for a remotely conventional exploding-starships-genre 4X game to take.

(It's absolutely a viable approach for an avowedly heterodox 4X to take, but if I was going to go there, I wouldn't start from Stellaris.)

 

[Reman]

"You can't conquer the galaxy even on Settler/Cadet, so don't even try" is never going to be a popular stance for a remotely conventional exploding-starships-genre 4X game to take.

(It's absolutely a viable approach for an avowedly heterodox 4X to take, but if I was going to go there, I wouldn't start from Stellaris.)

This. The core gameplay loop for most strategy games revolves around expansion. Trying to balance the primary activity in the game with not doing the primary activity in the game creates messes like Civ 5 where 4-city TradRat became the norm, and half of the game's mechanics became irrelevant because there was little reason to expand, so there was nothing to drive conflict.

For rise-and-fall mechanics to work well, the game needs to be designed with them from the ground up. A game like Field of Glory: Empires does this, where expansion is almost entirely negative with revolt risk, income, military power, diplomacy, etc. all going in bad directions the bigger you become. However, you still want to expand because that's entirely what the victory condition is predicated on. It's an interesting way to turn most strategy game tropes on their head, although I never really want to play the game because of its RNG and micro-intensive building system.

Also, rise-and-fall mechanics generally aren't fun to people who aren't already huge fans of the genre, because it's not fun to see the empire you've been building for the last 10+ hours crumble. Heck, even mere stagnation would be enough to turn most people off.