Cherryh 2.0 - the end of the Galaxy as we know it

[Harle]

They'd still need the bigger fleet. At that point, in the current system, they could have just made my capital planet a cede planet demand. And I couldn't have stopped them from taking it.

The planetkiller itself isn't so terrifying.

Are we talking about the current system or are we talking about the proposed changes? Because it seems like most of the people angry about the changes are specifically angry about the FTL changes. Paradox has already said they're changing the warscore system to prevent exactly that. So it's completely irrelevant to bring that up, isn't it?

If Paradox changed everything except the FTL setup, then the situation I described above is what you need to worry about, not warscore.

 

[Tale]

Are we talking about the current system or are we talking about the proposed changes? Because it seems like most of the people angry about the changes are specifically angry about the FTL changes. Paradox has already said they're changing the warscore system to prevent exactly that. So it's completely irrelevant to bring that up, isn't it?

We're talking about planetkillers in either. They're not that scary if they take months to charge up. They're just an advanced bombardment that frees the fleet up for other tactical tasks. You could probably conquer planets by ground invasion faster.

 

[Peko?]

Though this announcement of the expansion raises another major concern for me. Which was the priority, fitting the scope of the expansion into the base game or adjusting the base game to the needs of the expansion. As it is now brings motives and priorities into question. Were the 2.0 changes done just so could make the expansion able to go live in order to be able to recover costs from a potentially failed expansion development?

So the logic goes like this?
Introduce changes that are unpopular with a significant fraction of the player-base to then sell more DLC (unclear how that would work). Rather than not and still sell DLC - perhaps not the exact same DLC but there are still a lot of potential areas for DLC for Stellaris.
Even if there was sunk costs for this DLC - and even then only the costs of the planet busters are relevant - when the decision was made (which is quite an assumption), if profit was the only motivation it's a pretty backwards way to go about it.
If we compare it to the alternative where the FTL changes were made because PDX thinks it will make the game better even if it might hurt the bottom line I know which I find more likely.

I'm aware going to get flak from that opinion, but I'm not a fan of drastically reworking a base game to sell an expansion, and won't support developers that think that is acceptable(not saying that is paradox's veiw, but it is now something that is in question for me). And there will likely never be a convincing argument as to why things were done in the way they were.

An argument for what exactly? The FTL changes? Only if you choose to ignore the reasons given. You might not find them compelling but the arguments are there, you just choose to disregard them.

 

[Harle]

We're talking about planetkillers in either. They're not that scary if they take months to charge up. They're just an advanced bombardment that frees the fleet up for other tactical tasks. You could probably conquer planets by ground invasion faster.

How do you not see that destroying someone's capital within a month or two of wardec is an unbalanced and uninteresting game mechanic?

Every system in an enemy empire is equally easy to destroy in a game where you can warp wherever you want. The lack of an ability to prevent or delay movement into your territory would makes things like planet destroyers incredibly powerful weapons. 'Core worlds' (built up worlds deep in your territory) should not be as vulnerable as border planets. You can reconquer a homeworld, but you can't rebuild it from dust. The damage done is irreversible. It's not the same thing at all.

 

[Tale]

How do you not see that destroying someone's capital within a month or two of wardec is an unbalanced and uninteresting game mechanic?

Because you can occupy a capital within maybe a week, currently. This also kills all production from the planet for me. The planetkiller doesn't worry me a ton.

Whether this is generally balanced is a different matter. I'm talking about planetkillers, not FTL.

 

[Harle]

Because you can occupy a capital within a week, currently. This also kills all production from the planet for me. The planetkiller doesn't worry me a ton.

Whether this is generally balanced is a different matter. I'm talking about planetkillers, not FTL.

Have you never retaken a planet during a war? I have. I got the vast majority of my pops and infrastructure back before the war was even over.

It's interesting how the FTL changes would make rapid core-world occupation so much more difficult, solving that problem as well.

It's almost like having long-range warp and wormholes as starting movement technologies reduces strategy to 'have the biggest fleet and occupy/destroy their core worlds, since there is no way to defend against it.'

 

[Tale]

Have you never retaken a planet during a war?'

If someone's rushing my capital with a doomstack at the beginning of a war, I'm unlikely to be able to rebuild and take anything back before it's over. At that point, it's minimizing losses.

I have taken back planets during a war, but it's usually only in the closer wars.

 

[Harle]

If someone's rushing my capital with a doomstack at the beginning of a war, I'm unlikely to be able to rebuild and take anything back before it's over. At that point, it's minimizing losses.

I have taken back planets during a war, but it's usually only in the closer wars.

Problems solved by the upcoming FTL changes. Life is beautiful.

 

[Tale]

Problems solved by the upcoming FTL changes. Life is beautiful.

I support the FTL changes. My only commentary with you has been about you claiming the changes to neuter the terrifying planetkillers.

They're pretty neutered by their chargeup. The FTL changes are good for other reasons.

 

[Harle]

I support the FTL changes. My only commentary with you has been about you claiming the changes to neuter the terrifying planetkillers.

They're pretty neutered by their chargeup. The FTL changes are good for other reasons.

We don't know enough about how ground combat changes (fortresses, etc) will affect occupation time, but for your core worlds it sounds like 'quite a bit.' So yes, given all the proposed changes in compilation, a planet destroyer may in fact be a much more efficient and reliable way of neutralizing a core world than merely running in and occupying it. I don't think it's neutered by its charge-up time given the changes. Which would, again, make the planet destroyer a great deal more powerful in the hands of someone with long-range warp.

 

[BlackUmbrellas]

We don't know enough about how ground combat changes (fortresses, etc) will affect occupation time, but for your core worlds it sounds like 'quite a bit.' So yes, given all the proposed changes in compilation, a planet destroyer may in fact be a much more efficient and reliable way of neutralizing a core world than merely running in and occupying it. I don't think it's neutered by its charge-up time given the changes. Which would, again, make the planet destroyer a great deal more powerful in the hands of someone with long-range warp.

Considering the Colossi weapons have effects varying from "permanently and irreversibly removes the planet from play" to "flips allegiance of world to the attacker's with no damage to POPs or structures", I'd say its definitely far more potent than a typical invasion, especially considering how Bombardment and Collateral Damage will work.

The least potent one is probably the Blue Rinse Neutron Sweep, but even that leaves you with a depopulated planet with all its infrastructure intact, something normal Bombardment can't accomplish (considering the way tiles can now be replaced with blockers by traditional invasion).

 

[Mysticforce]

It's not terrifying in the hands of a player. A player can be reasoned with and it knows that destroying a planet is a huge shame.... MAD works with them... but AI?
I'm terrified of a planetkiller in the hands of an AI because you can't reason with one...

It reminds me of Moo2 late game, where the only outcome is the glassing of most of the galaxy because the AI found it expedient.

They'd still need the bigger fleet. At that point, in the current system, they could have just made my capital planet a cede planet demand. And I couldn't have stopped them from taking it.

The planetkiller itself isn't so terrifying.

If your fleet is only 20% smaller than the enemy, they might be able to siege your capital, but you also can just fly into their territory and have a chance to white peace out. The outcome of the war could be very little losses on both sides.

However, the same scenario with planet killers involved would mean you permanently losing your capital even with white peace.

Planetkillers are terrifying because they cause permanent change in game. No second chance, no reconquest.

 

[Hawklaser]

During the explanation about FTL rework, they stated it will allow them to do a lot of stuff they could not do before. So for me there is no surprise it is tied to the 2.0 rework.

The fact it is paid content... do you expect them to work for free always after 2.0 because of that massive rework ?

See, I'm not arguing that a FTL rework/rebalancing is not needed, but that the removal does not seem to be the correct option at this time.

And no, I dont expect devs to work for free. I am saying the timing of things comes off as very suspicious. If "apocalypse" came months after 2.0 it would not be raising red flags like a simultaneous release with 2.0.

So the logic goes like this?
Introduce changes that are unpopular with a significant fraction of the player-base to then sell more DLC (unclear how that would work). Rather than not and still sell DLC - perhaps not the exact same DLC but there are still a lot of potential areas for DLC for Stellaris.
Even if there was sunk costs for this DLC - and even then only the costs of the planet busters are relevant - when the decision was made (which is quite an assumption), if profit was the only motivation it's a pretty backwards way to go about it.
If we compare it to the alternative where the FTL changes were made because PDX thinks it will make the game better even if it might hurt the bottom line I know which I find more likely.

An argument for what exactly? The FTL changes? Only if you choose to ignore the reasons given. You might not find them compelling but the arguments are there, you just choose to disregard them.

No, not the FTL changes. If the decision to include planet destroying Collosi came before or after the decision to remove the FTLs, and was the decision to remove FTLs made to recoup sunk costs which we also very unlikely to know the costs spent to implement the Collosi. With this timing, there is no real way to argue which decision happened first, and the decision itself may have been out of the devs hands as sometimes higher ups force things to get some kind of return on investment instead of throwing more money at something not working.

I want balanced FTLs, just have not been convinced the correct action to achieve that is removing them.

These new concerns have nothing to do with the FTL removals themselves, but the business and development practices this timing suggests to me.

 

[Bearjuden]

My word, 60 pages to read and I'm only at 13! But I do have a question that I haven't seen asked yet:

To those who are opposed, are you against the reduction to one type, or against the reduction to this particular type? Because they mean very different things. Opposition to hyperlanes is...look, I get it. There are a lot of hyperlanes based games out there. Paradox always brings something special, it shouldn't be forgotten, but I sympathize. They could have gone warp only and probably still done much of what they wanted, and with a little more imagination wormholes only could work. I understand why they picked hyperlanes (it's the most similar to their other games) but it'd have been cool to see a different one.

But to the rest of you, they did have to simplify it to one. Having three was unbalanced and messy. Imagine playing, say, EU4 like that! One empire uses the normal eu4 pathing (hyperlanes), one jumps to any province in range (warp), and one jumps to any province in range of a particular other province (wormholes). And balance all three against each other perfectly and make every feature work for all three. It's insane that they even tried! The longer it goes on, the more it will hurt the game. It was an ambitious experiment, and it didn't work. They had to make a choice.

(oh, and to those whose principal argument is asking why it's okay for Paradox to remove features: where is all the complaining about the loss of army attachments?)

Edit: oh, and one last thing. To those who say that space is huge and therefore why are there roads...well, you have them for the same reason there are shipping lanes on the ocean. Do you strictly speaking have to stay on the path? Well, no. But society has established this as a convention because it is way more convenient and ordered, and safer to boot, than the anarchic alternative. If you're lost, or break down, you don't have an entire segment of interstellar space to search. It's already narrowed down quite a bit.

 

[Juums]

(oh, and to those whose principal argument is asking why it's okay for Paradox to remove features: where is all the complaining about the loss of army attachments?)

Right here! My beer is full of salty tears at no longer being able to build armies of giant robots and give them Xenomorph Cavalry attachments. I'm uncertain how my cold, synthetic heart will learn the power of friendship without the ability to do that any more.

 

[Riftwalker]

The planet destroyers however very clearly require balanced FTLs.

yes but the free FTLs don't require the paid planet crackers. you said the patch was put in place to sell the expansion.

edit: okay i see the argument now.

if they wanted to keep normal FTL and planet crackers, it would be done like most WMDs in vidya games. 1 perside, long cooldown, last-ish unlockable technology. the it would be an end-game fulfiller, forcing a victory from 1 side or another.

 

[Ulfr]

So pray tell how do hyperlanes actually cause a change in available strategies on their own, instead of just changing the locations?

I'm going to be honest with you. I don't think there's anything anyone could say that would change your mind.

There's such a huge difference between 2.0 and 1.9, that nobody of us can really say how they will turn out or how they would have turned out with Warp and Wormholes instead. At most we can make educated guesses.

But I should at least try, shouldn't I?

You might have less total ways you can attack someone, but most of them are just very minor variations of each other. Now you have a more limited system, but more options to defend and more options to deal with defenses.

Now there aren't 30 targets you attack the same way anymore, but only 3 you have to attack in very different ways. instead

That's the short version anyway.

Choke points are brought up time and time again, but have you thought about how Jump Drives counters them? Once the technology is discovered, you can't rely on your Starbases to protect you on their own anymore.

To deal with that situation requires thinking on both sides, how to deal with the new situation. That's much more interesting for me, as I am challenged in my approach to battles.

Though this announcement of the expansion raises another major concern for me. Which was the priority, fitting the scope of the expansion into the base game or adjusting the base game to the needs of the expansion. As it is now brings motives and priorities into question. Were the 2.0 changes done just so could make the expansion able to go live in order to be able to recover costs from a potentially failed expansion development?

Personally, I believe the expansion just expands upon the base game. Many of the new systems seem to be designed and balanced around the way warfare works now.

 

[Hawklaser]

yes but the free FTLs don't require the paid planet crackers. you said the patch was put in place to sell the expansion.

Let me break this down a little further, as it seems to being missed why the one feature announced so far that requires Balanced FTLs (not specifically hyperlanes, or FTL removal BTW) being in a paid expansion that is slated to release simultaneously with the free 2.0 update and the accompanying FTL removal is concerning to me.

First off, the base game would greatly benefit from Balanced FTLs on its own. So Balanced FTLs are a good thing to strive towards having. Second, I think the Planet Destroyers are a great addition for a Space game. You would think everything would be fine from that, right? Its not.

The problem is that the reasons for the removal of the FTLs for the free 2.0 update, have to be convincing enough to stand on their own in the base game without relying on expansion content, or hinted at features that may never come around. At this time, in this context, the reasons are not convincing enough for me. They may be for you. Combine that with the fact that an Expansion needs to work with the base game without major overhauls. And Stellaris is currently in the process of being majorly overhauled, and yet an expansion is slated to come with that major overhaul.

Because the major 2.0 rework, and the paid expansion "Apocalypse" are slated to be released together, and the currently confirmed feature of Planet Destroyers that very clearly requires Balanced FTLs being in the paid expansion is worrying. For me it raises questions of are the FTLs being removed for the sake of the getting the Expansion out the door so can get cash from the sales, or are they actually being removed for the sake of overall base game balance. The question which should be asked, is if the Planet Destroyer content was in the 2.0 patch and not the paid expansion, would it change things?

It does, quite drastically. It would not be raising concerns of the the base game being changed to fit the expansion. And the addition of a feature like the Planet Destroyers, actually does help the argument that the base game does need to be reduced to one FTL, for the simple fact a slight imbalance between the FTLs could be the tipping point for them going between being able to be strong, terrifying, and balanced to absolutely broken(either an overpowered or underpowered state of brokenness)

Not sure if that is what you would look for and would certainly not include 100% of Stellaris player. However, I believe it would include a good majority of them: https://steamspy.com/

This almost does, but it lacks the ability to look at DLC style expansions like used for Stellaris, or which version people are playing. So its not gonna be a good reference for how many are staying on 1.9 vs 2.0 for the base game, or give an idea of how many people came back for and bought "Apocalypse" and shortly after refunded the purchase due to not being happy with the changes. This is more out of curiosity sake, just to get a better idea of how much the full playerbase likes or dislikes the changes, and how well it matches up to what the likes/dislikes on the Dev diary hinted at.

My word, 60 pages to read and I'm only at 13! But I do have a question that I haven't seen asked yet:
To those who are opposed, are you against the reduction to one type, or against the reduction to this particular type? Because they mean very different things. Opposition to hyperlanes is...look, I get it. There are a lot of hyperlanes based games out there. Paradox always brings something special, it shouldn't be forgotten, but I sympathize. They could have gone warp only and probably still done much of what they wanted, and with a little more imagination wormholes only could work. I understand why they picked hyperlanes (it's the most similar to their other games) but it'd have been cool to see a different one.

But to the rest of you, they did have to simplify it to one. Having three was unbalanced and messy. Imagine playing, say, EU4 like that! One empire uses the normal eu4 pathing (hyperlanes), one jumps to any province in range (warp), and one jumps to any province in range of a particular other province (wormholes). And balance all three against each other perfectly and make every feature work for all three. It's insane that they even tried! The longer it goes on, the more it will hurt the game. It was an ambitious experiment, and it didn't work. They had to make a choice.

For me, its actually both. If they had decided on wormhole only or warp only, with the reasons given so far, I would still be against the removals because have not been convinced the removals are actually necessary. If one type alone is indeed needed, I would prefer warp or wormhole over hyperlanes, due to the nature of hyperlanes favoring a fortified chokepoint meta, which tends to stagnate quickly and is very predictable.

(oh, and to those whose principal argument is asking why it's okay for Paradox to remove features: where is all the complaining about the loss of army attachments?)

I wasn't around when those changes happened.

I don't think there's anything anyone could say that would change your mind.

Planet Destroyers being in the base 2.0 patch, instead of the paid "Apocalypse" expansion actually would have helped a lot on this. As while I would like distinct and varied movement types that change how deal with empires and really fits well in a space themed game, Planet Destroyers competes with that pretty good for maintaining that space theme feeling. So like I have said, I am indeed open to the removal if there was something convincing. Its a shame that the one thing revealed so far that helps with the convincing is also stuck behind the paid expansion, which raises totally different and much worse concerns for me.

 

[BlackUmbrellas]

The problem is that the reasons for the removal of the FTLs for the free 2.0 update, have to be convincing enough to stand on their own in the base game without relying on expansion content, or hinted at features that may never come around.

How "convincing" their explanation was is entirely subjective. We can't stop you from being paranoid about it.

 

[Bearjuden]

For me, its actually both. If they had decided on wormhole only or warp only, with the reasons given so far, I would still be against the removals because have not been convinced the removals are actually necessary. If one type alone is indeed needed, I would prefer warp or wormhole over hyperlanes, due to the nature of hyperlanes favoring a fortified chokepoint meta, which tends to stagnate quickly and is very predictable.

It's likely not based on what is happening now but what is going to happen.

So far, they have managed through great effort to maintain three separate ftl methods, which are...compatible. Maybe not balanced, but at least compatible. But the more systems they add into the game - and this is Paradox, they will be adding countless systems - the harder and harder it's going to get, and in turn the more and more time is going to have to be devoted to making all three work, because every time a new system is added, it will have to be balanced against two other systems of that and make sure it works against all of the combinations of systems already in the game on each and every ftl method. It at least triples the amount of work they have to do for every single thing. Time that could be spent on making features with potential fulfill that potential, and making new stuff for the game would instead be spent fighting a perpetually losing battle against a wonky, archaic system.

And don't forget they have the figures for every game everyone plays; there's decent odds they're sitting here looking at numbers saying most people already play games that are purely one type of another, simply due to being more balanced (though I would be curious if it's at all possible to confirm that).

I wasn't around when those changes happened.

Those changes haven't happened yet, they were announced as part of the free patch which we are discussing in this very thread. This is my point with regards to that argument - the removal of features isn't actually something you inherently protest if they're not working as intended. There is an emotional attachment to the idea of three ftl types that, if you can find it in yourself to give 2.0 a chance, will fade, and something even greater can rise out of it.

The problem is that the reasons for the removal of the FTLs for the free 2.0 update, have to be convincing enough to stand on their own in the base game without relying on expansion content, or hinted at features that may never come around.

If you continually judge the decision based only on what has happened so far, it will never happen, because by definition for the system to be in place they must have found some way to have made it at least vaguely work. But this is why I focus on what they could be doing instead of forcing every system to behave with each ftl type. In the immediately coming patch, you could maybe force three ftl types to work, at great difficulty. But then it gets harder for the next patch, and the one after that, and the one after that, and all that time they spend working on ftl is time they could be spending giving us new and cool mechanics. At no single point is the cost so high that it seems like it merits the change, but the combined loss over time is titanic.

Besides, every patch to a game is based at least in part on what the developers want to do in the future. Nothing occurs in a vacuum. To pretend otherwise is folly. They know what they want to do and they know the engine and code they designed better than anyone else. When they say it's going to be extremely hard to implement some of the cool features people want without shifting off of three ftl types, then I believe them.

Edit: sorry @Hawklaser if my edit (the third quote and after) caught you off guard, I originally posted it as a second post but then decided to edit it in, and of course you seemed to post your thing (which quoted mine) at the exact same moment. Didn't intend to cause any confusion.