so... a total redesign of the entire economy from the ground up?
Sounds like good material for the sequel.
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Come on devs, Ring Worlds are NOT the reason tech rush is so OP.
- Thread starter Aeroclub
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Sounds like good material for the sequel.
yeah, while I would love for stellaris empires to have private sectors so fanatic egalitarians can nationalize them and run without one, it doesn't seem realistic to expect that kind of economic detail in the current game.
nah, in the stellaris ethics tree modelling of real world ideologies, fanatic authoritarian means private IBM contracts for your slave labour camps.
Either that or a fascist style corpratist economy? Or authoritarian socialism.
Well it was the devs' idea to make Machine empire research stupidly cheap because they changed research upkeep to Energy instead of Minerals. And at that point Energy was produced with 6 Energy base output. Since 3.0, Energy base output for Machine empires has been raised to 8. And since the recent patch, the special buildings which boost raw ressources increase base output even further, which provides crazy high Energy output for Machine or Synth empires.
So in short, everything about the tech rushing problem was made worse by the devs in patch 3.0.
Whether or not they did this intentionally or they just didn't understand the implications of their changes I don't know. I seriously hope they saw this coming, because if they did not, then this does not bode well for the upcoming balance rework and the devs would have to sit down and talk to the community to learn how to play their own game properly. I don't want to sound rude, but they should do this anyway. We have a huge community and we went ahead to make our own balance mod called Stefan's perfectly balanced mod which fixes some of the worst balance problem this game has and has had for many years.
The solution is pretty simple. Unless the devs want to remove some of the output bonuses, they should simply increase the upkeep for non-Hiveminds (since Hiveminds have by far the highest researcher upkeep in the game given they use minerals and minerals have the lowest base ressource output in the game) and reduce the base science output of researchers.
Of course the fact that you can have 1k research by 2240 easily with a non-Machine empire makes a ton of the PvE in this game obsolte quite early. The game simply isn't build around having crazy tech output early and it shows.
So in short, everything about the tech rushing problem was made worse by the devs in patch 3.0.
Whether or not they did this intentionally or they just didn't understand the implications of their changes I don't know. I seriously hope they saw this coming, because if they did not, then this does not bode well for the upcoming balance rework and the devs would have to sit down and talk to the community to learn how to play their own game properly. I don't want to sound rude, but they should do this anyway. We have a huge community and we went ahead to make our own balance mod called Stefan's perfectly balanced mod which fixes some of the worst balance problem this game has and has had for many years.
The solution is pretty simple. Unless the devs want to remove some of the output bonuses, they should simply increase the upkeep for non-Hiveminds (since Hiveminds have by far the highest researcher upkeep in the game given they use minerals and minerals have the lowest base ressource output in the game) and reduce the base science output of researchers.
Of course the fact that you can have 1k research by 2240 easily with a non-Machine empire makes a ton of the PvE in this game obsolte quite early. The game simply isn't build around having crazy tech output early and it shows.
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maybe calculators can take .5 or 1 minerals on top of their current energy upkeep? i don't know what the issue is, i feel like removing tech rush entirely would be bad but sure a nerf to its costs could be fair
Buildings/excavations require bulk cost of resources. So do ships. Increasing upkeep is just going to make it where you make that resource as close to - + 0 then forget about it. If there was a bulk cost for a new research then that empire would need to stockpile resources more. I.E. researching better food production (bulk food cost), researching a new ship (bulk alloy cost), researching new mineral production (bulk mineral cost). Though there's more to be done. For example in Stefan's video I saw the driven assimilators at -100 energy and it not stopping their production. normal empires get in a deficit of Food and there's big consequences.
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This is actually less important than it seems. You don't need to abuse DA or the energy deficit to reach times like this - these factors just seem to help to make it slightly more consistent on average. Otherwise, you are relying on things like a normal ME getting enough planets to produce enough pops to scale by peaceful expansion alone (under these conditions my best time was 2259, but I was able to colonize 9 extra planets peacefully), or another type of empire finding a megastructure to repair in space, which means your results will vary a lot. Stefan in this video does not have good luck, does not min-max as hard as he would off-stream, and yet still manages to hit a solid time. This is a testament not to tech rushing, DA, Shattered Ring, or the energy deficit 'exploit', but to the overall idea behind the build and his knowledge of the game.
So while I do wish that some of these things will be tuned down a bit, and the energy deficit thing fixed, the 'solution' to tech rushing as I said in an early post is not to focus on these things as much, but instead...
..focus on this. The AI being unable to either punish the player for tech rushing, somewhat keep up itself, or a combination of both is the real 'problem' with tech rushing.
As I said earlier in this thread:
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I have nothing against switching the upkeep from Minerals to Energy for Machine empires, it does fit thematically after all. The issue is simply the fact that the base Energy output for Machine Empires is absurdly high, so changing the upkeep from Minerals to Energy obviously translates into heavily reduced upkeep. They could simply increase the Energy upkeep for researchers by a lot to balance this out.
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This i'll agree with. You don't even need a super meta setup, a bit of luck a a decent build can get you a lot of tech in 6-70 years. Even a weakly optimised build and playthrough can be knee deep in repeatable well before the default endgame year. The fact is research in general is way accelerated at the moment.
No the problem with tech rushing is that tech rushing is a problem in it's current state. From a gameplay perspective you want a large verity of valid ways to play that in combination with the RNG of things like mapgen produce a wide verity of different possibble games. An AI that can keep up with or punish a hardcore tech rush is going to flatten anything else and likely be hyper aggressive in a way thats going to further limit game verity.
Tech rushing is a problem because it's so easy to do and scales so hard that it really outperforms virtually any other strategy.
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Nerfing the origin seems okay, albeit I'd argue that Void Dweller needs the same. It's almost in the same league. As for "tech rush". The game encourages it in every single last way. Early techs are bad, you're missing critical buildings, ascension options, even technicians/miners and mining stations are far less efficient. Tech rushing is the way to go.
That postulates that machine empires at large are currently OP. Without the Ringworld start, that's far from true. And they also become progressively worse as time goes on as they lack an ascension path, are locked out from a bunch of things, etc. Don't balance them around the Ringworld start.
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Machine Empires are far stronger than just Ringworld Origin. They have 100% habitability, so any origin with a forced Celestial Body Preference is meaningless (see meaningful decision making) for them. What happens if regular empires run in the negatives for Food? What happens to a Machine Empire if they run into the negatives for Energy? That's right it's across the board. If MEs require Energy for upkeep. If there's not enough energy, how are some of those pops not in offline mode?
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The Ringworld origin is what lets them take advantage of researchers only costing energy. Both because it provides cheap and efficient energy en masse and lots of researcher jobs. Without it they're pretty much in line with other empires.
Why? Because a huge number of their pops are dedicated to producing amenities. Their pops are also fundamentally less efficient and will only become worse as the game goes on as will many other aspects of Machine Empires. They trade long term benefits for early game advantages.
As for running on a minus. That's an entirely different problem altogether. Should that happen? Absolutely not. Should it be punished? 100%. Shutting down pops however would have a quick cascading effect where your energy production would likely tank even further. Especially the Ai would never escape such a trap. A better solution might be to reduce tech output by 75-100% instead setting it to zero and forcing players to actually run a positive energy household.
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Ring Worlds are more of a symptom than anything else. Getting a bunch of researcher jobs quickly is what ME's can do with no downside from ring worlds, but they can also do this with Resource Consolidation. Anything that gives them a bunch of extra building slots, really.
Thing is, however they get the jobs - planet spam, origin, etc - there are two keys that enable it:
1) Low cost of low amenities and deviancy. The tech builds I saw dumped Maintenance Drones and Hunter Seekers. So instead of having 4 pops on the Amenities tax, they had 4 more researchers, with minimal penalties. The fix to this is to have the game cycle deviant drone jobs in and out more quickly. If you have low stability from low Amenities, then you get more deviant drones. That gets rid of the pop benefit for dumping Amenities. Put pops back on maintenance and the deviant drone jobs disappear and they come back and do their real jobs.
2) Internal markets floating significant negatives. The other enabler is using internal markets to float notable negative energy values. The exchange rate for internal markets is the problem - it should have, say double the diminishing returns penalty on cost/profit that the Galactic Market has. That'd make it much harder to float a significant negative with.
Thing is, however they get the jobs - planet spam, origin, etc - there are two keys that enable it:
1) Low cost of low amenities and deviancy. The tech builds I saw dumped Maintenance Drones and Hunter Seekers. So instead of having 4 pops on the Amenities tax, they had 4 more researchers, with minimal penalties. The fix to this is to have the game cycle deviant drone jobs in and out more quickly. If you have low stability from low Amenities, then you get more deviant drones. That gets rid of the pop benefit for dumping Amenities. Put pops back on maintenance and the deviant drone jobs disappear and they come back and do their real jobs.
2) Internal markets floating significant negatives. The other enabler is using internal markets to float notable negative energy values. The exchange rate for internal markets is the problem - it should have, say double the diminishing returns penalty on cost/profit that the Galactic Market has. That'd make it much harder to float a significant negative with.
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I could see a distinction being made between pop upkeep and job upkeep. If you don't have enough energy to "feed" your primary workers, well, they'll muddle through somehow. But if you don't have enough energy, after pop upkeep, to provide for all of your researcher jobs, the ones that have to go without don't produce any science.
The difference is a little easier to see if you consider alloy robots - they could produce with low/no energy, but they couldn't produce anything without minerals. Because primary resource workers never have a job upkeep, they'll always be able to produce something to help you climb out of the spiral, but at the same time, you can't just keep pumping out fleets and technologies in flagrant defiance of your empire's nonexistent economy.
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I have always thought that trying to plug power gamer strategies is such a waste of time for games that are not seriously competitive.
Making the core gameplay loop balanced and, perhaps more importantly, making the game world believable and interesting are far more valuable.
"Fixing" crazy strategies that trivialise the game is useless when the mechanics of economy and research for AIs are in complete shambles to the point a novice player will outpace all AI empires by the mid game in high difficulties.
But maybe this is only me. I just never understood the fascination to pay a lot of money for a game full of systems and mechanics just so that you can Google a strategy that allows you to bypass most of those mechanics you payed good money for.
Making the core gameplay loop balanced and, perhaps more importantly, making the game world believable and interesting are far more valuable.
"Fixing" crazy strategies that trivialise the game is useless when the mechanics of economy and research for AIs are in complete shambles to the point a novice player will outpace all AI empires by the mid game in high difficulties.
But maybe this is only me. I just never understood the fascination to pay a lot of money for a game full of systems and mechanics just so that you can Google a strategy that allows you to bypass most of those mechanics you payed good money for.
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It's another bad case of the dev team thinking correlation = causation.
The real reason tech rush is so overpowered as to be mandatory is that the AI is *spectacularly* bad at managing their resources and buildings in a practical manner. The AI's priority isn't going to be tech, or if it is, it doesn't know how to go about it properly since for most empires it's a stage 3 manufactured resource, made from consumer goods that are made from minerals, It's bad at long-term investment for those, and balancing its own economy catering to technology, energy, and alloy production in that order.
The ideal fix would be for the community to do a demonstration about each of the development stages that player empires go through that results in tech booming, since it's a relatively consistent process. Programming the AI's priorities and behavior to better mimic players in the early game means they'll be in better shape to manage their economy around when players do.
The real reason tech rush is so overpowered as to be mandatory is that the AI is *spectacularly* bad at managing their resources and buildings in a practical manner. The AI's priority isn't going to be tech, or if it is, it doesn't know how to go about it properly since for most empires it's a stage 3 manufactured resource, made from consumer goods that are made from minerals, It's bad at long-term investment for those, and balancing its own economy catering to technology, energy, and alloy production in that order.
The ideal fix would be for the community to do a demonstration about each of the development stages that player empires go through that results in tech booming, since it's a relatively consistent process. Programming the AI's priorities and behavior to better mimic players in the early game means they'll be in better shape to manage their economy around when players do.
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I think Startech AI mod already does it and is able to produce far better research output
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