Come on devs, Ring Worlds are NOT the reason tech rush is so OP.
- Thread starter Aeroclub
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We already have a problem with ringworlds never being fully populated with pop cap and Paradox is going to nerf them more?
It’s a really puzzling decision to put it mildly.
It’s a really puzzling decision to put it mildly.
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Did you even read their post? The Nerf's are specifically for shattered ring. Also you have the sliders to pretty much change pop growth to before 3.0X.
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Honestly I don't like it.
Like Remnants already is such a start, except you practically don't start on a relic world but a normal world that uses relic world graphics. The main difference to a normal planet start is that once you reach a certain tech level you can press a button to get an Ecumenopolis without the ascension perk.
A similar nerf to shattered ring would be massivley boring, as it'd basically be "Start on a kinda normal planet but hey ringworld later". Except if it is done as before at the time you get to use that special part of your original, normal access to ringworlds is already around the corner.
When Federations was announced it was explicitely stated that Origins were not intended to be balanced, and now they're being balanced. And being balanced by making them more or less the same as any other game start.
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I just want to clarify that while the Shattered Ring start in particular allows an absurd tech rush that dwarfs all other players, "tech rushing" itself being bad is not necessarily an idea I think is good. I'm old enough to remember in Stellaris when there was such a thing as "Naked Corvettes", where for the cost of a high tech ship you got way more raw damage and survivability out of just spamming corvettes with nothing but the crappiest guns. I'm old enough to remember when there was a bunch of technologies you deliberately avoided picking up because they unlocked building upgrades that were useless since level 1 building spam beat upgrading the buildings (actually this problem is back).
Na, tech beating not tech is a fine world to live in. My bigger problem is that alternative things to focus your efforts on are, on their own merits, not worth investing in. Why invest effort in Unity when a finite income of it is all you ever need? Why invest in strategic resource harvesting or refining if you can just buy unlimited stacks of it from the market? The only thing that comes close to research in terms of economic importance is alloy production.
Na, tech beating not tech is a fine world to live in. My bigger problem is that alternative things to focus your efforts on are, on their own merits, not worth investing in. Why invest effort in Unity when a finite income of it is all you ever need? Why invest in strategic resource harvesting or refining if you can just buy unlimited stacks of it from the market? The only thing that comes close to research in terms of economic importance is alloy production.
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I cannot stress enough how sad Remnants makes me as an Origin. It is ostensibly a "flavor" Origin like the Gateway and Shoulder of Giants Origins, but all of the "lore" or "story bits" it has are tied to blocker descriptions, 1-3 dialogue boxes you get when you colonize your first few planets, and a planet reskin that doesn't do what literally every other relic world does. From a gamer's perspective, you get like 7 free techs at the cost of having to suffer tile blockers until you want to roll for a random tech, and your homeworld gets a discount on ecumenopolis construction, though it does not need an ascension perk.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: this origin should embrace the "you are a collapsed fallen empire" lore it CLAIMS it has. Your empire collapsed, your fellow Fallen Empire buddies are all laughing and mocking you the whole game while a FE selected as your rival keeps causing issues for you. Your technology supposedly starts on par with FE's, but a lack of anyone knowing how anything works anymore means that each accident and sabotage from your rival on the home relic world is an irreplaceable loss of technology. Your people are scared they'll be annihilated, but also are anxious to return to their hedonistic ways as soon as the threat seems to have subsided. Your guaranteed habitable worlds have plenty of infrastructure like FE buildings and precious caches of FE technology, but the longer you are unable to convince your population to go reclaim them the more likely they will be ruined by the time you get there. And once you have reclaimed your "FE borders", you have to contend with your population believing they've suceeded, not realizing the danger they are still in due to the collapse of infrastructure and technology. As the game goes on, your culture becomes more and more accustomed to the understanding that you are in fact an empire more in line with the newcomers with a few advanced buildings on your homeworlds that nobody can replicate.
Finally, you will need to get revenge on your rival, who obviously is behind your great humiliation. Should you do too well, your rival will decide to finish the job directly. If your rival awakens and begins subjugation of the galaxy, your population will furiously demand the same. Either way, playing as one of the FE's in a War In Heaven feels like a missed opportunity for NEMESIS.
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And now alloy production and research don't even compete for building space. I don't think research districts are that big a deal any more since almost every colony is filled with research labs. An entirely foreseeable consequence of the industry districts.
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So are they nerfing void dweller since its pretty easy on your research habitats to build 6 Research districts giving you 18 scientist's + at least 1 research building giving you 20 scientist total. Each scientist puts out at least 27 research * 20 = 540.
You can repeat the above using 0 gas too and your only restricted by how many planet research deposits you find.
Your home system has room for 1 more so you get two total giving you around 1100 base research from your home system alone, again with out spending any gas
In 100 years how many of those do you think a good void dweller player can push out
You can repeat the above using 0 gas too and your only restricted by how many planet research deposits you find.
Your home system has room for 1 more so you get two total giving you around 1100 base research from your home system alone, again with out spending any gas
In 100 years how many of those do you think a good void dweller player can push out
My current non-void dweller game is pulling ~40,000 monthly research per category currently at 2340. I'm into repeatables LX for armor and energy weapon damage.
lol i almost always do ringworld origin and i've never hit 40k
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I'm doing "On the Shoulder of Giants". 3 energy weapon damage repeatables a year, still -- and the empire is still hampered by lack of pop. If only I could get enough to fill the colonies...
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This strikes me as the tail wagging the dog (for those not familiar with the idiom, it means getting the cause and effect backwards). This type of game essentially always comes down to tech development, and as a result unlocking more tech earlier is an advantage. Some games offer alternative development options (like cultural development in Civ 6) which are other viable paths to succeeding in the game. But it's a priorities-in-time issue; you get something else worth having by focusing on something other than tech, and the benefits you derive from that allow further development in other areas that matter (and can eventually provide more research, offsetting the lack of early tech focus).
Stellaris really doesn't have those options. If you're not focusing on technology, you're focusing on your fleet. If your economy isn't focused on one of those two you're gambling that you'll be left alone by other empires. There is nothing else to direct your economy towards that gives you enough of an edge to survive. That's fine, as the overall design of the game focuses on those two approaches.
The shattered ring origin definitely leans into the tech rush strategy, and is disproportionately powerful in executing that strategy (especially if you go for an extreme optimization strategy). But so what? I don't understand why that's such a problem. Having a better tech rush is irrelevant in SP (you can manage a strong tech rush without shattered ring), and if it's a problem in MP then games can ban it by common agreement (just like they already ban various things). I don't think that this is worth the dev's time, given the menu of other things they might give some attention. As an example touching on this issue, if the AI were capable of managing tech development then rushing wouldn't be quite so dominant for players.
I really don't care either way if there are changes to shattered ring, but even a kludge improving AI would make the game more fun for me in every playthrough, not just make the ones where I play shattered ring different (if I'm not tech rushing) or worse (if I am tech rushing).
tl;dr: Research is a dominant part of the game, and that's not going to change any time soon. That means that tech rushing is almost guaranteed to be a powerful strategy, and that's the case whether or not shattered rings are especially strong for it. But shattered ring + tech rush being extremely strong doesn't strike me as a problem that really needs to be addressed, and there are other issues that, if addressed, would actually improve Stellaris.
Stellaris really doesn't have those options. If you're not focusing on technology, you're focusing on your fleet. If your economy isn't focused on one of those two you're gambling that you'll be left alone by other empires. There is nothing else to direct your economy towards that gives you enough of an edge to survive. That's fine, as the overall design of the game focuses on those two approaches.
The shattered ring origin definitely leans into the tech rush strategy, and is disproportionately powerful in executing that strategy (especially if you go for an extreme optimization strategy). But so what? I don't understand why that's such a problem. Having a better tech rush is irrelevant in SP (you can manage a strong tech rush without shattered ring), and if it's a problem in MP then games can ban it by common agreement (just like they already ban various things). I don't think that this is worth the dev's time, given the menu of other things they might give some attention. As an example touching on this issue, if the AI were capable of managing tech development then rushing wouldn't be quite so dominant for players.
I really don't care either way if there are changes to shattered ring, but even a kludge improving AI would make the game more fun for me in every playthrough, not just make the ones where I play shattered ring different (if I'm not tech rushing) or worse (if I am tech rushing).
tl;dr: Research is a dominant part of the game, and that's not going to change any time soon. That means that tech rushing is almost guaranteed to be a powerful strategy, and that's the case whether or not shattered rings are especially strong for it. But shattered ring + tech rush being extremely strong doesn't strike me as a problem that really needs to be addressed, and there are other issues that, if addressed, would actually improve Stellaris.
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Aren't the devs talking about early science and early tech rushing how is 2340 early????
By 2340 your origin start is meaningless, if your a good player and know how to expand.
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The post I quoted was talking about how many research habitats can be built in the first 100 years. My answer is it doesn't matter. Without them, I *only* break 100K monthly research total.
holy... what's your pop number? what year? what's your ethics and civics
here I have been sitting satisfied with getting to 6K research, 14K maybe in my top game?
this thread has convinced me I need to commit harder to science than ever before next MP game lol
I hope you guys also review the costs of T4 and T5 techs. I think T1 tech costs 2000 and you start with around 20/month, so 100x your monthly research. But T5 is around 70k and you have far more than 700 research/month by the time you're advancing into those cards. Shouldn't T5 tech cost 250k or more to account for the explosive research growth and modifiers? Especially since the default settings for midgame/endgame are still 2300/2400 for some reason, the assumption is players shouldn't be in repeatables during the midgame.
Granted, an admin cap rework may help mitigate some of that, but from the sound of things the earliest we would see that is 3.2 at the end of the year (since it's not listed as part of the curator patch and in early design).
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Edit: All of my examples assume 1x tech cost, default growth sliders, etc., if it wasn't clear from screenshots.
I've done a lot of messing around with optimized tech rushing, and I'm going to assume you're just throwing out '2220s' because it sounds nice in that sentence. Realistically, you do not have the pops to accomplish that. 1k, certainly. But to get anywhere near 2k even by 2229 would require not just the most broken start in the game - DA Shattered Ring - but to execute a perfect rush with an extremely close neighbor and thus a fast war, then to quickly transition into an energy deficit economy (an 'exploit' you guys could easily have patched out ages ago if you were concerned about these sort of things) and filling your ringworld with most of the new pops. But even then you will probably tank your economy almost immediately unless you've managed to get enough gas refineries up and running.
A more 'reasonable' time for ME Shattered Ring would be in the mid-to-late 2230s. 2239 is my earliest time using a normal ME and a functional economy:
Now is this good for the game? Certainly not.
But is it even comparable to what other origins and starts are capable of? Also no.
The power of ME Shattered Ring is not just that you're guaranteed research jobs, but that you can also expand onto any planets you come across. Most empires are limited by either of those two factors, but not ME Shattered Ring. I get all the benefits of free expansion, but still get to work all the research jobs I could ever want.
For comparison, consider Void Dwellers - another Origin specifically referenced in the dev diary. VD also has less expansion restrictions and a lot of research jobs early. This allows it to jump out to a very strong early tech rush, albeit at a higher cost than Shattered Ring:
The thing is, this number does not increase very much in the next 20 years (VD must transition the other half of its economy to alloys to expand), and in that time other empires can catch up and surpass VD if they have good expansion opportunities available. Necrophages - also using Technocracy, of course - can reach this number not long after, and because of the fact they have far more pops, build a better economy and easily overtake VD.
In this 'recession' period, VD has to wait a significant amount of time to gain access to additional jobs. In my best VD run, for instance, it took until 2238 to get enough extra habitats online to hit 1k research:
Keep in mind that with this strategy you experience large 'jumps' in research, rather than a steady buildup, so while the numbers are fairly impressive for each era when you hit them, the overall amount researched is not as high as you might imagine. In any case, 2k was not reached until 2248:
This is still quite strong, of course, but keep in mind we're talking about incredibly min-maxed play almost 50 years into the game here. By this point, you could have achieved far more via conquest, and you would have a fleet to continue the snowball much faster to boot! Also, even this example is an entire era behind ME Shattered Ring. By this point my Shattered Ring empire above had already surpassed 3k, was researching Mega-Engineering, and had the alloys ready to start on multiple projects.
Overall, aside from ME Shattered Ring being a bit too far out of control, the only problem here is that the AI is so incredibly inept right now that it can hardly threaten players when they tech rush.
When I play with Starnet, for instance, not only am I not anywhere near as far ahead in tech because the AI actually knows how to build labs, but I'm also at constant risk of outright losing the game if I get attacked. The Starnet AI is able to 'check' my builds and as a result I have to play a lot more honestly.
If the vanilla AI were capable of consistently threatening the player like this - and not just in a tiny window around 2210-2215 (wherein sometimes you haven't even finished first contact yet) - I don't think we'd even be having this discussion.
The correct number is somewhere around 70-80. It's not 2k of each research type, it's 2k total, and researchers are going to have at least double output by the time you get anywhere near that level.
Still, even a ME optimized for assembly is only going to have around 70-80 total pops available to work on your ringworld by 2230, so you'd have to gain a ton of extra ones while still maintaining a decent tech rate to even come close to this number.
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