You realise in the post immediately above yours I stated that we are working on the AI and that we're not planning on nerfing ringworlds?
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Come on devs, Ring Worlds are NOT the reason tech rush is so OP.
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You realise in the post immediately above yours I stated that we are working on the AI and that we're not planning on nerfing ringworlds?
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I have a lot of respect for the PDX devs, and appreciate that Stellaris is a huge game with a lot of moving pieces to deal with and it's easy to overpromise (especially when fan speculation can get out of hand almost immediately). I also appreciate that fan demands are... diverse, not necessarily overlapping, and often mutually exclusive, which must be difficult to manage as well. I also really like the opportunity to communicate with devs, and the effort that is being made to keep us in the loop. I am very excited for the coming updates.
But I also think that some of the concern in the Stellaris fan community has been come by honestly. I believe you when you say that AI improvements are forthcoming, and I look forward to them. But that statement alone can't cover much-- the AI was reworked for each major feature release, at least to handle the new features, and the results are what they are.
The split between the Features team and the Custodian team is a pretty new arrangement, so we don't have any track record of it being different from previous development cycle updates. I'm not suggesting anything like "pics or it isn't happening". I don't think that the devs are deserving of any abuse from the fan community (and you already deal with more of that than is reasonable). But with core game features (like competitive AI) for which fans have been almost unanimously clamoring for years, a nebulous promise that undefined improvements will arrive soon is, on its own, kind of limited in how reassuring it is. I don't think that should be surprising, even if it is the best possible path forward.
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I think one aspect that hasn't been focused on much here why the ME Shattered Ring is such a powerful start is minerals. Or rather the lack of minerals.
Shattered Ring start has less minerals than other starts, as an intended handicap.
MEs don't care as much.
Normal empires and hive minds need minerals(->CG) and food for their researchers, so they can't research without.
MEs only need energy. Not only are the penalties of a deficit quite negligible to them, but they can also tech rush much more with just the ring.
They get a generator district which employs 10 tech-drone to produce 80 base energy. 15 of that is consumed as upkeep.
The research district then employs 10 researchers and needs 40+15 in upkeep.
The remaining energy can supply sufficient maintenance drones.
The only thing lacking are the strategic resources.
But compared to other empires those research segments are much easier to maintain.
Shattered Ring start has less minerals than other starts, as an intended handicap.
MEs don't care as much.
Normal empires and hive minds need minerals(->CG) and food for their researchers, so they can't research without.
MEs only need energy. Not only are the penalties of a deficit quite negligible to them, but they can also tech rush much more with just the ring.
They get a generator district which employs 10 tech-drone to produce 80 base energy. 15 of that is consumed as upkeep.
The research district then employs 10 researchers and needs 40+15 in upkeep.
The remaining energy can supply sufficient maintenance drones.
The only thing lacking are the strategic resources.
But compared to other empires those research segments are much easier to maintain.
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Not planning on nerfing ringworlds?
From the DD:
Locking Research Districts -- and I am inferring here -- behind a T5 Tech (Mega-Engineering), or whatever you decide, certainly sounds like a nerf to me. Unless you mean nerfing a Ringworld-based origin isn't the same as nerfing an end-game Mega-structure Ringworld, so the first quote is true. I disagree, but not enough to fall on my sword for it. No one in this discussion is talking about end-game ringworlds, which have been nerfed already due to the 3.0 pop growth mechanics.
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That's precisely what they mean: changing Shattered Ring to start you on a unique planet class that can later be upgraded to a "full" ringworld, in much the same way that Remnants starts you on a Relic World. People who build new ringworlds won't be affected, only the origin.
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And here we come to what i'd say is a "can't see the forest for the trees" moment your having. Tech is one of the only two things that matter now. This wasn't allways the case. Nor is it neccessery that there e only 2 relevant strategies going forward. But it's very hard to create any kind of competitor to tech if the extreme end of the tech strategy is all out of whack with where you want a players power level at a given point in the game to be.
And thats why I've raised the point of progress through the game. A player can fairly easily get deep into repeatables well before the normal endgame year. You have to seriously lower said year to avoid that issue.
You realize that shattered ring origin and a ringworld are different things? It's stated in the DD you quoted and you give this as possibility in your post some why make the quote in the first place?
Concerning the pop changes with the introduction of the new sliders you can set the pop growth however you want and actually increase it compared to 3.02 with no cap but the higher growth from logistical scaling.
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I most certainly do. Go back to the top of page 6 and read the pretty blue box. @Alfray Stryke replies to @Apollo1784 by saying PDX isn't planning on nerfing Ringworlds. I'm willing to bet Apollo was NOT talking about nerfing ringworlds. Why do I think this? Because NO ONE -- in this thread or the DD thread -- is talking about nerfing Ringworlds. Everyone is talking about nerfing the Shattered Ring Origin. So I'm saying that Alfray is being slightly disingenuous and playing some semantic games by saying that PDX is "not planning on nerfing ringworlds" when it is quite clear that the Origin is getting nerfed and the Origin is the topic of discussion.
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In short, part of what is good about machine empires is the fact that they don't have to deal with the more intensive and convoluted economy that the non-gestalts have. That was the point of the original message I wrote, and why I don't think that Design Issue 4: The AI is the issue deserving of the most focus. It is taken for granted in every patch that some improvements will be made to the AI as the Paradox team devote more programming time to the game. Stefan ranks Shattered Ring for non-Gestalts as two tiers below ME:SR.
In your posts, for instance, you say that even with a 2250s Megastructure, you're still playing as a ME, not a non-gestalt. It's not SR that is the problem, but the combination of SR with ME.
I think the four mentioned economic advantages are relatively more important. Especially as the game still needs relative power differentials. A better AI wouldn't solve the problem experienced - Stefan only encounters three or four AI or so in that video, one of which is neutral, and two of which he is stronger than. It would be spectacularly bad for gameplay if relative power differentials didn't emerge - if every empire has the same power curve and warfare becomes impossible because there is no way to gain an early advantage over an opponent, either to outright conquer or to vassalise them.
And if the other four design issues are solved, the problem of ME:Shattered Ring would basically completely disappear because it wouldn't be possible to rush as many researcher jobs on a Shattered Ring while relying so heavily on the internal market to solve all the resulting problems, such as insufficient energy, insufficient gases, insufficient mineral production, etc.
It would be much better gameplay-wise if resources were conserved on the map such that if I am overproducing alloys and selling them for consumer goods, that consumer goods production exists somewhere else on the map to be sold back to me.
Welp, this pretty much confirms that no significant ai improvement is coming, just band aids. I already known this since megacorp but i hope now more of the community can come to this realization.
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You do realize that the QA is not actually responsible for programming the AI?
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Trust me, you don't want me attempting to program an AI, the only programming I've done was making Conway's Game of Life in Python a decade ago when I was a student and updating the firmware on my keyboard. Our actual programmers on the other hand, yeah, they know what they're doing. As a bit of a breakdown, here's how the tasks (for AI) would generally be divided:
Game Design: Sets the goals of what the AI should do.
Programmers: Implements the AI.
QA: Verifies the AI acts as it should and suggest improvements for the design.
Apologies, I am a tad pedantic at times and I know it doesn't help (especially with text-based communication), just feel that when discussing things it's good that everyone is on the same page
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Apologies, I am a tad pedantic at times and I know it doesn't help (especially with text-based communication), just feel that when discussing things it's good that everyone is on the same page
To be fair everyone is pedantic on internet.
Back at the topic are you looking only at the Ringworld origin or also looking at the Tech speed as a whole ?
A lot of people seems to think that the Tech Tree is finished too early. Also there is the question that it is now more efficient to just pop out more science lab than upgrading the existent ones.
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To be honest, I wonder what some expect from the developers. Of course every improvement of the AI is desirable, but an AI that can compete with a human being is extremely difficult to program. If the Stellaris developers could do it that easily, you wouldn't be a Stellaris developer but would work on Skynet at Google & Co. Sometimes I have the feeling that some don't even know what you're asking for. In any case, I would like to thank the developers for their work and I am grateful for every improvement, but I do not expect miracles.
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I don't think you understand the point.
Starnet AI is significantly better than the vanilla AI and avaiable as a free mod.So modders have already created better alternatives than the current AI and it is natural to wonder why PDX can't.We do now what we are asking for since we have already seen it.
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The thing about that is, if people feel tech speed is an issue it is always possible to simply increase the tech cost to x2 or something. Yes, this is unbalanced, but not much more than the game currently is on x1. AI empires are crushed by mid/end game events either way, so in single player games it mostly just effects the player.
As it is now, 0.75x is a lot more popular in multiplayer games than x1. If tech were slowed considerably, you could see a move to 0.5 or even lower. Perhaps this would end up fine, but it does go to show that there are widely different opinions on the issue - probably why the tech cost slider exists in the first place.
I don't want to harp on this too much, so I will just say the existence of successful AI mods like Starnet pretty much invalidates your entire argument. It is hard to say 'this isn't possible' when it has been shown to be just that.
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The slider doesn't solve the issue because it is a linear increase accross the board.
The issue is the Gap between each tech tiers seems to not increase enough compare to how each lab tier increase research.
I don't have numbers.
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Lithoid + Hivemind + Technocracy. No food, no consumer goods, only resources are Minerals, Alloys, Science.
One thing I'm curious about, as i've screwed with AI modding in the past, is how do you usually set things up for your tests?
lets say are testing the AI's ability to - idk - beeline for battleships technology, or maybe try and "boom" with a huge amount of Consumer goods by 2300?.
Will you just run a random game and observe it, repeatedly if needed? or will you build a curated galaxy [or edited save] to control for some variables?
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