Continuing the early game story telling

[tapewormlondon]

One of the most applauded aspects of Stellar is is the early game discovery phase, where you are getting cool events and researching anomalies.

It really makes the game feel alive by telling the tale of your first foray into the stars.

This disapates until by mid game the story telling element is gone, leaving the game feeling colder as a result.

I would like to see Stellaris expand on it's story telling by creating more events and event chains, lots more, however most importantly, I don't want these events to just happen to me the player, I want them to happen to AI.... And I want to hear about it!!

Imagine getting news events talking about a biological plague spreading throughout a neighboring empire, or simmering tensions between a pacifist and a militarist empire and a diplomatic faux pas that breaks into war.

All events with multiple outcomes, turning the mid and late game into much more of a soap opera.

It would add context to wars, character to empires and grow on one of stellaris strengths.

What's everyone's opinion on this sort of thing?

 

[Roddo]

I'm all in for this, as you I love the exploration phase, even though right now it feels way more bland than ever before.
But nevertheless, YES. More events, planet related, systems related, tech progression related, etc, and not just click two buttons in a few pop ups and be done with it, REQUIRE player input by moving fleets, moving pops, constructing things, acquiring resources, etc.

The only thing I'm doing right now in mid-game is spamming commertial zones everywhere and setting up crappy patrol runs trying to work around the holes left in these new systems that do not seem to work in the way they were intended.

 

[Badesumofu]

My empire's story always continues well into the mid and late game... I just tell it myself.

 

[tapewormlondon]

I'm all in for this, as you I love the exploration phase, even though right now it feels way more bland than ever before.
But nevertheless, YES. More events, planet related, systems related, tech progression related, etc, and not just click two buttons in a few pop ups and be done with it, REQUIRE player input by moving fleets, moving pops, constructing things, acquiring resources, etc.

The only thing I'm doing right now in mid-game is spamming commertial zones everywhere and setting up crappy patrol runs trying to work around the holes left in these new systems that do not seem to work in the way they were intended.

Yeah, this brings me onto another bonus for this argument. It gives the player something to do in peace-time. If there is one thing all Paradox games suffer from its a lack of meaningful things to do in peace time. Event chains - clever ones both for the player and news of events in distant realms, could be a real solution to that

 

[tapewormlondon]

My empire's story always continues well into the mid and late game... I just tell it myself.

Oh and I get this, and agree - there is a deal of role playing and head canon that can be built ourselves, but this would surely add to that rather than take it away?

 

[Roddo]

There are some shy attempts at doing these things. Like planet events, the wreckage anomaly, the different crisis, the worm, etc.
It's just... too few of them, and personally I love the story part of stellaris MORE than the actual gameplay, but well, I cannot expect everyone to agree on that.

 

[Badesumofu]

Oh and I get this, and agree - there is a deal of role playing and head canon that can be built ourselves, but this would surely add to that rather than take it away?

I think those events and explicit story telling work well early on. As my empire grows, it starts to tell its own story without the need for the game to tell it to me so much.

It would be cool if there were some more sort of emergent events that could happen in the midgame that were based on the sort of empire you'd built. It would have to be dynamic and emergent so that it supplemented the story I'm telling rather than got in the way, though. A good example of where that can go wrong is with the robot revolt - even if you have only one or two robots in your empire, it will still take over 50% of it. It can work really well in some cases, but it can work really poorly in others. In practice it just means I avoid researching red AI techs unless I'm going to turn AI rights on.

 

[ncourt]

The game is almost too balanced for my tastes. I'd like a play through where I get some rare tech early that I can actually use (i.e. not the cultist one) and go on a war spree before others catch-up and the advantage is lost. Or alternatively, run into an opponent that has and I have to try desperately to kill a ship and salvage the tech somehow. Right now you never really run into those situations. It's like the planet modifiers that give you +5% on some production, not really exciting and not going to change my use of the planet until it specializes much later and then...meh. Another example - I used to attack the Xenophobe FE before I could actually beat him, and try to trick him to giving me enough time to take down a shield world and maybe pick up one of those mothballed fleets at a point in the game where they would make a difference. I'd attack, grab a fleet, take a licking, and surrender, but then I had a 16k fleet that materially improved my position. Now, you can't do that, and the FE is so strong that by the time you are in a position to annex the system and pull down the shield, the reward you get is...meh. Same goes with the L-Cluster stuff. There is really no option but to take on their entire fleet to get the rewards of the L-Cluster and then the reward is incidental to the power you already had to build to take them out, so why bother unless all the L-Gates are well away from your core systems and the other players bear the brunt of the attack.

I'd like to see more internal political events. More rebellious planets (I'm always swimming in amenities and no one rebels), attempted coup d'etat that can replace your leader or even change your government type and drastically change relations. However, there are always issues with these sorts of things, like unfairly breaking a MP game, so maybe there is a slider to adjust severity/frequency. I'd also like to see a return to having certain anomalies giving great rewards, like getting the +7 society research back for that one, instead of nerfing everything to +3. The game gets boring when the veil covering its fundamental spreadsheetiness gets thin.

 

[Roddo]

I was thinking that what got me into this state of affairs with stellaris is my prominent amount of hours played, thus, no amount of anomalies will hold with so many runs and repetition after all.

So it got me thinking what could Paradox do to tackle this (if they are even interested in doing so)... and I came up with a rather rudimentary, but surely plausible way of doing this and posted it on the suggestions thread.

Since that thread has SO many good ideas, I'll just go ahead and post it here, in the hopes it gets at least a chance to be noticed

Right now my experience with Stellaris is hitting an all time low, mainly because there's just not that much to explore and discover anymore.
I have tons of hours sinked in the game and personally I don't think this is a problem that's related to Paradox inhability, but rather a natural game-progression thing.

So, in the light of this "problem" I'd like this to be considered:

Add a possibility to submit player created anomalies, event chains and the like.
They could be created as mods in the steam workshop and you (Paradox) could hold a voting contest with the users every month to get out "some" of those submits.
After getting the submits list, you (Paradox) get some of your content related devs to check these and adapt/add them to the game, so that when the new version rolls out, we (all the players) get new and fresh things to discover EVERY TIME!

Imagine that, a game that's constantly renewing itself, adding lore here and there, always getting something new, each time you play.

Of couse, you'd need to sit down and talk with the devs about the plausability of this, after all it requires work, and introduces A TON of new content which might need to be fixed/tweeked/optimized/scrapped every time you release a new expansion.... but if we are being truthful here, we can all see you lack the amount of ppl to REALLY check all the content already in the game to be balanced right before a major release, so... a bunch of "new" anomalies and events broken by expansions would not be anything new in our experience as players

 

[Ecervele]

They should add some events tide to the ascension perks, add random link to internal politics, things happening on your planets due to your ethics or civics...

Which if unchecked can cause decadence of your empire.

Psychic plague or etherial parasitic link to the shroud for psionic pops, existencial crisis for ascended synthetic pops, bad experiments for master of evolution, political scandal of democracies, succesion war for imperial regime, mutation due to environnemental hazards, creation of local culture by planet, system or sector which can fracture your empire, etc...

May be in future dlcs...

Edit : By the way, I wish they had added religious and atheist, instead of spiritualist being de facto religious... I want my psionic scientist who try to tame the shroud and my cult of machines venerating AI as manifestation of the divine!!!

 

[Rhym3z]

I agree there should be more especially for mid game.
There are some really well made mods to cater for some good events, anomalies and the like that are really worth trying out to cater for this

 

[BlackUmbrellas]

Edit : By the way, I wish they had added religious and atheist, instead of spiritualist being de facto religious... I want my psionic scientist who try to tame the shroud and my cult of machines venerating AI as manifestation of the divine!!!

You can absolutely do the first. I do agree a "machine cult" civic might be interesting, though.

 

[Ecervele]

You can absolutely do the first. I do agree a "machine cult" civic might be interesting, though.

I know you can, but you must have a hell lot of luck ( unless I missed something which totaly possible) and there is no special ways to interact with the shroud if you're not spiritualist...

Which was my point of pointing there should be those ethics in the game.
It could add so much RP stuff by the way.

 

[Sifer2]

Yeah it would be nice if there were events that happened on into the mid/late game. I notice there are lot's of random events when you border Marauder Empires. I could see them doing more like that when you border regular AI empires. And also have some designed for AI's interacting with each other. Since events could be used to alter relations it would go good with the Diplomacy expansion.

 

[tapewormlondon]

Yeah it would be nice if there were events that happened on into the mid/late game. I notice there are lot's of random events when you border Marauder Empires. I could see them doing more like that when you border regular AI empires. And also have some designed for AI's interacting with each other. Since events could be used to alter relations it would go good with the Diplomacy expansion.

Yeah exactly the type of content I think would be good for the game.

Like I said in my op I think it would add character to empires to be able to get event pop ups of a similar nature for other empires too, so you are getting a narrative about the galaxy, not just your empire.

With a toggle obviously, for those that don't want to hear about it.

 

[Longprao]

I would be willing to pay for a DLC which expands more stories like that.

 

[Highlordelliot]

I think there going to do a mix of diplomacy espionage politics and internal interactions as part of the next expansion to flesh things out. Should allow for more events and stories to unfold in a chaotic mess of a mid game.

 

[Eled the Worm Tamer]

We definately need more internal tensions, for unrest to be a more than local issue and things.

 

[Matoro_TBS]

I'm working on a mod exactly like OP described. It's pretty long shot, though, so don't hold your breath. I've always wanted Stellaris to be filled with all sorts of events, a little like there's hundreds of events in EUIV and they change depending on your idea groups, religion, government and all that.