Certain Ethos/Government Types Overpowered?
- Thread starter gathomas88
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While I agree on the general futility of trying to guess the balance of an unreleased game, I find I have come to the complete opposite conclusion to the OP. Spiritualist looks extremely powerful, due to the general utility of being able to maintain high happiness and the spiritual governments all having ways to deal with ethics divergence (being militarist isn't going to make nearly as much of a difference if all your pops are pacifists). By contrast, I'm actually worried that the small science bonus from materialist will wind up being too weak.. from what we've seen there are many, many ways to get research boosts on individual pops, while there are very few ways to get Empire wide ethics divergence reductions.
Similarly, xenophobia and xenophilia both offer ways to coexist with alien pops (the former by tolerating them, the latter by enslaving them). If you can't see the advantages of that, let's assume you conquer a planet from a rival species with the intelligent trait. This trait gives 10% bonuses to all science output, which is the same as fanatical materialist. Without xenophobia or xenophilia, your ability to exploit this is negligible, all you can do is leave them on their home planet and hope they don't come near you and make everyone miserable. With xenophile, you can encourage them to your homeworlds and stick them in science labs.. voila, all the benefits of fanatic materialist. With xenophobia, you can enslave them (which does lower their science output) and use them in a similar way, while also having much more control over them. In fact, all the benefits of alien species and their traits can be exploited in this way, not to mention the benefits of being able to colonize worlds outside of your original species habitability range. Hugely powerful, not to mention a lot more fun than having a boring, homogenous empire.
Ultimately, we will have to wait and see, though..
Similarly, xenophobia and xenophilia both offer ways to coexist with alien pops (the former by tolerating them, the latter by enslaving them). If you can't see the advantages of that, let's assume you conquer a planet from a rival species with the intelligent trait. This trait gives 10% bonuses to all science output, which is the same as fanatical materialist. Without xenophobia or xenophilia, your ability to exploit this is negligible, all you can do is leave them on their home planet and hope they don't come near you and make everyone miserable. With xenophile, you can encourage them to your homeworlds and stick them in science labs.. voila, all the benefits of fanatic materialist. With xenophobia, you can enslave them (which does lower their science output) and use them in a similar way, while also having much more control over them. In fact, all the benefits of alien species and their traits can be exploited in this way, not to mention the benefits of being able to colonize worlds outside of your original species habitability range. Hugely powerful, not to mention a lot more fun than having a boring, homogenous empire.
Ultimately, we will have to wait and see, though..
i would be glad if the governments are not equal. this makes the game much more intresting i think.
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It all depends on how you play the game. I plan on playing fanatic individualist to start, so with the ethics divergence penalty, that spiritualist ethos is looking very good to get the boost to happiness.
I'm sure that there will be a "best build" for an empire and that the gaming community will find it rather quickly.....and IF something turns out to be game breakingly unbalanced, then it will certainly be patched.
Just play the game. If you enjoy finding and playing as the most powerful combination of ethos, traits and government, then by all means do that. If you instead enjoy adding a bit of RP and picking for that reason regardless of whether its the "best" option or not, then by all means do that too.
I'm sure that there will be a "best build" for an empire and that the gaming community will find it rather quickly.....and IF something turns out to be game breakingly unbalanced, then it will certainly be patched.
Just play the game. If you enjoy finding and playing as the most powerful combination of ethos, traits and government, then by all means do that. If you instead enjoy adding a bit of RP and picking for that reason regardless of whether its the "best" option or not, then by all means do that too.
You know what? I was going to come in here and rail against people for being disingenuous and trying to deliberately mislead new players into ignoring all of the valuable information that one can glean from the Blorg stream which Paradox has so lovingly put together for us, but I guess you're right. Despite the fact that we have basically a dozen hours of gameplay footage from the Blorg and Quill and the AngryJoe video, despite the fact that we have extensive dev diaries and a wiki that is constantly growing due to the presence of beta testers in our community, we obviously have no idea how to play the game or if pops exist or what spaceships are like. Obviously there is no body of evidence available to us. Thank you for showing me the light. Now if only we could get Paradox to release gameplay footage so we could figure out how the game plays then we could get back to figuring out what is likely to be good based off of that footage and our previous experience with 4x games and Paradox games.
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No-one is forcing you to do anything, if you don't want to play space hitler then don't.
Yeah, there will ALWAYS be a "best" government type that can let you win easiest. It doesn't matter how well they balance it. And people will figure it out. But then, if that was the point then everyone would play the ottomans or France (or something) in EUIV.
If all you care about is winning then I really have to wonder if you didn't miss the point.
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Well, speaking for myself, I see a hivemind like an ant colony. One Queen-like being rules over countless, more or less mindless minions.
Look at it like the Zerg, or the Tyranids if you are more familiar with them.
As long as you have an overlord or a synapse creature near your minions to spread the will of the hive, things will work as the... well lets call it Queen, wants them to run.
To control you colonies, one could start with the sensor range, as a form of range for the hivemind. Outside of it, your critters relight on instinctive behaviour. (f.e.: pops kill it each other, do nothing or might even evolve to an independent swarm…)
I see those minions as emotionless little creeps with no own will. So there work for the hive fits quite well with “slavery”. But they should not be affected by things like "happiness".
Now the people here will cry "balance" in a high pitch voice.
And yeah, I now, that seem unfair, but perhaps it can be solved with some kind of science penalty or a "synapse ship" needed to control your ships. Destroy the "mothership" and the fleet will die(?) or flee. (*cough* independence day *cough*)
Another point is “science”. I think you all see that my opinion of a hivemind really comes down to “ants in space”. So science does not fit my perspective, I would like to go with some kind of forced or controlled evolution. Ships will not be build, they are hatched, and so on and so forth…
I know this might change way too much, so it will fit far better for a dlc or mod.
*sry for the long text, I’m am really enthusiastic about that sort of hivemind
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But isn't that how Fanatical Collectivism already works?
You can turn your pops to "slaves" without them being in any way upset about their new lot in life. They will therefore not form slave factions trying to get themselves freed from the hivemind. Any non-slave pops you leave around your empire (say for science purposes, since slaves get a penalty to science-generation) would the represent more "free-willed" members of the hive, allowed some sort of autonomy in order to benefit from the advantages this brings to the hive. Those would then be the pops that might try to "split the hive" - not a bad parallel to new princess-bugs being born and trying to form hives of their own.
This would allow you run a completely centralized "zerg-hive" where everything is run by the hive mind directly and every pop is a slave. That would allow you to produce alot of minerals/energy with little risk of insurrection, while crippling your science (turns out mindless drones aren't all that creative). You could also run a more "tyranid-like" hive where a decentralized synapse-structure allows a leadership-class drone to exist, leading to more autonomy at the risk of more challengers to the hive hierarchy. In both cases you also have to deal with ethos divergence where certain members of the hive evolve wills of their own and suddenly aren't so willing to live like mindless drones.
You can turn your pops to "slaves" without them being in any way upset about their new lot in life. They will therefore not form slave factions trying to get themselves freed from the hivemind. Any non-slave pops you leave around your empire (say for science purposes, since slaves get a penalty to science-generation) would the represent more "free-willed" members of the hive, allowed some sort of autonomy in order to benefit from the advantages this brings to the hive. Those would then be the pops that might try to "split the hive" - not a bad parallel to new princess-bugs being born and trying to form hives of their own.
This would allow you run a completely centralized "zerg-hive" where everything is run by the hive mind directly and every pop is a slave. That would allow you to produce alot of minerals/energy with little risk of insurrection, while crippling your science (turns out mindless drones aren't all that creative). You could also run a more "tyranid-like" hive where a decentralized synapse-structure allows a leadership-class drone to exist, leading to more autonomy at the risk of more challengers to the hive hierarchy. In both cases you also have to deal with ethos divergence where certain members of the hive evolve wills of their own and suddenly aren't so willing to live like mindless drones.
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Yeah, well... you`re not wrong, but.... it is hard to explain cause English is not even close to one of my first languages, so have mercy
I don´t know if you will catch my drift but I will try:
It is about the response from the game that I will get for playing a fanatic collectivist.
All that you´ve said is right, from an absolute medio to hard core RP point of view.
What I would like, is that there are other game mechanics, other "responses" for me as the player, when I play my little swarm. No ethos divergence when I keep them controlled (or do you know of a tyranid fleet, where the ethos changed to pacifist?
)I would like some other form of science, more like a "adoption" to specific things. Swarm is hungry -> queen orders drones to try out other things to gather more food. Either she finds a way, or the swarm won´t grow further.
My swarm ships get attacked by other aliens, so my queen adopts thickerchitin or Bio-shields or whatever stuff creative people may imagine
Instead of science, a form of "adaption rate" based on the seriousness of the problem I am facing could be a way to describe what I try to say.
Don´t get me wrong, I am more than satisfied and happy with how the game appears right now and I can’t wait to get it in my mandibles, errrr I mean "hands".
But this all started by some sort of "wish-listing", someone dropped hivemind and I got triggered. I see that it all works fine when I am more open minded for RP.
I am not able to defend or even prof with arguments why I think it will not ..."feel"(?) like playing a hivemind from my pinot of view, so I will end it here.
Perhaps somewhere out there, a Modder has a stunning Idea for "ants in space".
Then I will be the first to download his Mod
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THE ONLY CONSTANT IN THIS THREAD IS THE AMOUNT OF RESPECTFUL DISAGREES.
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Purge them. Even in a hivemind fleet, you may well get outliers popping up that do have some autonomy, "evolving" if you will or simply serving a new queen (the new queen being the one with a different philosophy - think of it as a minor rebellion). You could tolerate them if they get in line, or you could purge them.Yeah, well... you`re not wrong, but.... it is hard to explain cause English is not even close to one of my first languages, so have mercy
I don´t know if you will catch my drift but I will try:
It is about the response from the game that I will get for playing a fanatic collectivist.
All that you´ve said is right, from an absolute medio to hard core RP point of view.
What I would like, is that there are other game mechanics, other "responses" for me as the player, when I play my little swarm. No ethos divergence when I keep them controlled (or do you know of a tyranid fleet, where the ethos changed to pacifist?
I would like some other form of science, more like a "adoption" to specific things. Swarm is hungry -> queen orders drones to try out other things to gather more food. Either she finds a way, or the swarm won´t grow further.
My swarm ships get attacked by other aliens, so my queen adopts thickerchitin or Bio-shields or whatever stuff creative people may imagine
Instead of science, a form of "adaption rate" based on the seriousness of the problem I am facing could be a way to describe what I try to say.
Don´t get me wrong, I am more than satisfied and happy with how the game appears right now and I can’t wait to get it in my mandibles, errrr I mean "hands".
But this all started by some sort of "wish-listing", someone dropped hivemind and I got triggered. I see that it all works fine when I am more open minded for RP.
I am not able to defend or even prof with arguments why I think it will not ..."feel"(?) like playing a hivemind from my pinot of view, so I will end it here.
Perhaps somewhere out there, a Modder has a stunning Idea for "ants in space".
Then I will be the first to download his Mod
Also, if you only have one ideas person in an empire, technological progress is basically going to be nil anyway.
It is an interesting idea but it would be pretty different to the other species I think... possibly dlc or perhaps "different game" levels of difference.
I had a post about Really Different Aliens in a thread that someone deleted and I think that Stellaris - at least initially - is focusing on a particular kind of gameplay. We might see that game branch into hive minds, sentient stellar clouds, or intelligent planetoids later (as we got new governments in CK2) but I suspect the Hive Mind we have seen is more like a network of hierarchically-organised decision-makers than something programmable.
As I say: interesting idea.
In a real ant colony though, the queen is just as stupid as the rest of the ants. All she does is sit around laying eggs.
Ants do sometimes exhibit a kind of collective intelligence, but it's not controlled by the queen. Instead, each ant leaves a trail of pheremones as it moves around, which other ants can follow. If the ant finds food or something interesting, it produces different pheremones, so while individual ants are pretty stupid, collectively they will gravitate towards the most efficient solution for getting food and resources they need because the best pathways become more and more saturated with ant pheremones, attracting more and more ants.
The problem with Zerg and Tyranids is that both rely on supernatural means of communicating instantly over long distances (i.e. psychic powers). Psychic powers exist in Stellaris, but are linked to tech rather than being inherent to creatures, so it does raise the question of how these hive minds are actually communicating. If they literally all share one mind, then the communication would have to be very, very sophisticated, way more so than anything found in nature.
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Of course, with Xenophobia the key word is "diverse". Xenophobia makes enslaving or purging pops easier to do, so you can repopulate that planet with your own species who are happy as Larry that you've given them all this nice, virgin clay.
This game, like EU4, looks set to be great for finding niche ways of playing and exploiting them to create an empire that's very powerful at what it does. Whether that be min-maxing slavery, diversity, economy, teching, happiness, diplomacy etc, all for the good.
Even stuff like the pacifist way, with all its diplomatic strength, many people seem to be assuming will be lame. But we've only watched the Blorg so far, who have massive traits penalties to their diplomacy, so we aren't seeing a good diplomacy game. The fact they have any diplomacy at all when every alien they meet starts off hating them suggests a high diplomacy species will be able to play off different alliances to great effect.
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So norgles_, what in your experience makes food so important in Stellaris? You started out saying what the benefits of it should be, then wandered away from it.
I keep seeing people repeat this for some reason, but it's misinformation. Looking at any tile resource production tooltip in any of the gameplay videos disproves the claim that a pop's resource production is multiplied by its happiness value. Instead, there's a flat +10% production modifier above a certain happiness threshold (IIRC, most likely 70% - somebody helpfully provided a screenshot the last time we hashed this out) and most likely a -10% penalty below another one (probably 30%).
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If happiness drops below (whatever) threshold, it seems like factions form and strikes happen, dropping production to 0%.
The way you deal with unhappy pops is slavery or killing them off. And you can get a bonus from slaves. So what does all of this mean? It means there are many ways to play the game.