FTL Discussion Thread

[scaper12123]

NOTE: A Moderator has merged all FTL threads, and this one ended up being the OP.

Let's not kid ourselves by saying the changes Wiz announced aren't among the better options for FTL in the game, but it is still upsetting that we're losing the cool flavor of being an empire based around the wormhole, or around the warp drive. To that end, I would like to make a suggestion to compensate for their loss: adding the ability to choose an FTL aesthetic. Basically all three FTL systems would work exactly the same as hyperlanes, except you would see the animation for charging warp drives or preparing a wormhole (without the need for a station in this iteration). It's simple and would give us a way to say we "kind of" still have warp and wormholes.

In an effort to give this thought more reason to exist (and to bump this back up to the top :3), maybe there could also be a slight difference between the warm up and cooldown timers of each FTL type. Like Warp could have more cooldown than warmup, Hyperspace could have equal parts of both, and Wormholes could have more warmup than cooldown. Not a meaningful difference but would be a difference and could still adhear to the current hyperlane ideal

Mod Edit:
In order to prevent this forum from getting flooded with threads discussing the same topic, all FTL discussion will now take place here.

Until further notice you may only discuss FTL here and in any Dev Diary that directly mentions it in the dev diary itself. All other FTL threads will be merged with this one.

Thanks,
Mr.C

 

[BlackUmbrellas]

Let's not kid ourselves by saying the changes Wiz announced aren't among the better options for FTL in the game, but it is still upsetting that we're losing the cool flavor of being an empire based around the wormhole, or around the warp drive. To that end, I would like to make a suggestion to compensate for their loss: adding the ability to choose an FTL aesthetic. Basically all three FTL systems would work exactly the same as hyperlanes, except you would see the animation for charging warp drives or preparing a wormhole (without the need for a station in this iteration). It's simple and would give us a way to say we "kind of" still have warp and wormholes.

I'd love to have some more visual customization, yeah.

 

[Malonex]

If you read the dev diary the other warps aren't going away, they're just changing and not even in a bad way. I've seen two people say they purchased Stellaris because of the fact it had 3 types of FTL instead of one, or that they want a refund because of these changes and plenty others saying how disappointing or saddened they are..

A bit dramatic, a bit idiotic to say the least. These changes do not harm roleplay, if anything it adds more. Being able to find random wormholes that could take you across the galaxy?! Hell YES. If that doesn't enhance the roleplay I don't know what will, not only does that present roleplay opportunities but it also adds a strategic opportunity. The idea of sending a fleet through a wormhole, entering some distant unexplored system full of squishy aliens while having aggressive first contact policies just makes me moist. On top of that, we are essentially getting the ability to create our own Mass relays/star gates.. Who can honestly tell me that isn't cool as heck.

Stepping back from the roleplay thing, war is an integral part of the game. The unfortunate thing is that as it stands war is boring, tedious and .. did I mention boring? Bigger number always wins in the meta right now, and the current 'one fight to end all fights' way the game plays right now is super unsatisfying, wars don't feel rewarding they just feel like mindless clicking with the most interesting part being when the enemy fleets runs away and you briefly have to pay attention to where its going so you can send your ships there. With this change at least we have the opportunity to bait an enemy into a system where their shields are useless, while your ships are decked to the breasts with armour and your enemy is defenseless in that fight? Come on - that sounds awesome on it's own. Imagine fighting the Unbidden, or Fallen empires? Now there is something ELSE you can do besides spamming ships. There are advantages you could set yourself up for.

Having terrain advantages is amazing, on top of that we can expect planetary invasion changes and the current war goal system is going bye bye. Basically everything we related to wars that we have wanted changed since launch is being changed and people are complaining because to do it they had to change FTL. Note- the key word is CHANGE, not remove. It's still there, just different.

It is all so good, I am hyped. I can't wait to see the planet invasion changes and what they do to fix or change doomstacks.

 

[Repeats]

People hate change, that is why. I have seen plenty of games that make drastic changes, people lose their shit, then play anyway realizing its better. The devs should not bow to internet trolls. It is their game, and I have confidence that they will pull through.

 

[Summin Cool]

The other FTL types have been removed outright. The point is that you can grab the old FTL types and make them work well within the new system. Hopefully we will be given the modding tools to show that this can work because If I know paradox it's that once they have made a decision they don't normally undo it, even if a good portion of the community is unhappy about it.

 

[Malonex]

The other FTL types have been removed outright. The point is that you can grab the old FTL types and make them work well within the new system. Hopefully we will be given the modding tools to show that this can work because If I know paradox it's that once they have made a decision they don't normally undo it, even if a good portion of the community is unhappy about it.

They're still there, you can still use wormholes to travel you just can't pick it at the start of the game. There is still an element of warp drives in the form of psi and jump drives. So they're not gone but they're different and more interesting now in my opinion.

 

[Crenickator]

Variety is the spice of life. Being able to perfectly predict your enemy's movements because you know their only line of travel is, in a word, boring.
And from what it looked like, "balancing" the FTL types consisted of trying out increasingly long wind-down times and nothing else.
If we'd actually seen some more attempts, perhaps we wouldn't be so averse to just having them ripped out.

 

[Malonex]

Variety is the spice of life. Being able to perfectly predict your enemy's movements because you know their only line of travel is, in a word, boring.
And from what it looked like, "balancing" the FTL types consisted of trying out increasingly long wind-down times and nothing else.
If we'd actually seen some more attempts, perhaps we wouldn't be so averse to just having them ripped out.

Sure, I can understand your argument towards the refined predictability being 'boring'. But the alternative is what we have now, a hyperlane empire being hopelessly out paced by a wormhole empire simply because of the amount of jumps it takes for one versus the how few it takes for the other. This way no one tech is inherently better than another, and one empire doesn't have a speed advantage over another. So for players who play strategically, there still wasn't variety because one form of FTL is better then the rest no matter what so people would pick the best.

That same argument can be made towards the starting weaponry, no one picks lasers because they're the worst starting tech.

I hope I presented this argument clearly, I fear I may not have.

 

[Purussaurus]

And I've enjoyed practically every change so far. While I think the change in the wormhole makes sense and is necessary (and it was compensated by the introduction of natural wormholes and gateways), the removal of warpdrive reduces the diversity, makes very restrictive and draws flavor from the game.

Of course, some people exaggerate.

 

[Tavior]

They're still there, you can still use wormholes to travel you just can't pick it at the start of the game. There is still an element of warp drives in the form of psi and jump drives. So they're not gone but they're different and more interesting now in my opinion.

I feel it is so much more better to have FTL type choices for a start.

Freedom to move around IE not limited to hyperlane is much better even if it meant harming defense starbase vs attacking fleet gameplay. There are great games out there that didn't fallback to hyperlane FTL system even although you could if you want. Half a dozen FTL type in SoTS Prime and one more FTL in 2; Endless Space 1/2 both had starting hyperlane moving into warp-like end-game FTL type.

Galactic terrain doesn't need hyperlane FTL system after all Endless Space 2 had isolated hyperlane constellation and nebula and what not. I find it disturbing that they used that as an excuse instead of keeping 3 different FTL in.

I hate that Stellaris doesn't even remotely use war of fog to hide hyperlane lanes. IE how are you "aware of hyperlane" over 100 million light years away from where you are? Either you have something like sentry array already at game start or Paradox doesn't want to hide the lanes for some reason or another.

AI can't handle chokehold so you already have an upper hand and can rush to block off critical route and the same can be done to you via FE border/monster etc... Too restrictive for my liking. If you could use STL (slower than light) travel to bypass it wouldn't be a problem. Sadly IT is a big problem and unless they can completely guarantee thing like this won't happen. I will continue to stick to wormhole FTL.

One of the problem with how 3 FTL works is there isn't any distance penalty. In the same sense that you can travel from London to Macau at 1444 at diplomatic tech 4 in EU 4. There is no attrition for being out of supplies like at all. It would bring all 3 FTL problem down a tone if they add this.

 

[Crenickator]

And I'd like to add that I'm not really seeing why the terrain changes couldn't have been added with the 3 FTL types. A lot of the changes don't seem like an either/or thing between 3 FTLs and Hyperlanes only.

 

[Riftwalker]

The other FTL types have been removed outright. The point is that you can grab the old FTL types and make them work well within the new system. Hopefully we will be given the modding tools to show that this can work because If I know paradox it's that once they have made a decision they don't normally undo it, even if a good portion of the community is unhappy about it.

you can't though, nto without over complicating things. Like i said, if you REALLY don't want to call FTL hyperdrive, call it warp and say that off-line travel is just dangerous zones. Worm holes are system to system now. we don't need to add crazy rules for each FTL,

 

[Malonex]

And I've enjoyed practically every change so far. While I think the change in the wormhole makes sense and is necessary (and it was compensated by the introduction of natural wormholes and gateways), the removal of warpdrive reduces the diversity, makes very restrictive and draws flavor from the game.

Of course, some people exaggerate.

I disagree, I don't think any flavour is removed. Flavour has been changed for sure, wormholes can now be found and viewed as a strategic territory versus a starting tech. Much cooler in my opinion.

 

[Drachenfels]

I am personally torn apart.

On one hand I do believe current system can be fixed with adjustment to how jump drives are working (by forcing ships to jump between linked stations basically, similar to what Wiz proposed actually with gateways) and standard FTL being more predictable when and where enemy ship can show up, supported by FTL suppressor that pulls all the ships coming in let say radius of 10ly without giving flying fig if it's warp or jump.

That being said. Talk is cheap and perhaps it's really cumbersome to fix and easier is to simplify system. I kinda have faith in Wiz and on the other hand if he fails I will a) revert to the old patch or b) play other game. What I in fact did after release of Stellaris when I found it as a tasteless pulp of bugs and missing features.

 

[Malonex]

I feel it is so much more better to have FTL type choices for a start.

Freedom to move around IE not limited to hyperlane is much better even if it meant harming defense starbase vs attacking fleet gameplay. There are great games out there that didn't fallback to hyperlane FTL system even although you could if you want. Half a dozen FTL type in SoTS Prime and one more FTL in 2; Endless Space 1/2 both had starting hyperlane moving into warp-like end-game FTL type.

Galactic terrain doesn't need hyperlane FTL system after all Endless Space 2 had isolated hyperlane constellation and nebula and what not. I find it disturbing that they used that as an excuse instead of keeping 3 different FTL in.

I hate that Stellaris doesn't even remotely use war of fog to hide hyperlane lanes. IE how are you "aware of hyperlane" over 100 million light years away from where you are? Either you have something like sentry array already at game start or Paradox doesn't want to hide the lanes for some reason or another.

AI can't handle chokehold so you already have an upper hand and can rush to block off critical route and the same can be done to you via FE border/monster etc... Too restrictive for my liking. If you could use STL (slower than light) travel to bypass it wouldn't be a problem. Sadly IT is a big problem and unless they can completely guarantee thing like this won't happen. I will continue to stick to wormhole FTL.

One of the problem with how 3 FTL works is there isn't any distance penalty. In the same sense that you can travel from London to Macau at 1444 at diplomatic tech 4 in EU 4. There is no attrition for being out of supplies like at all. It would bring all 3 FTL problem down a tone if they add this.

I feel like I read that you ARE going to have to map hyperlanes, but that could be a mistake on my part. I also imagine changes to AI's will accompany this patch as they do with most patches to address this issue and any others that are going to arise, it's a bit too early to say.

 

[Philthy]

I can't wait to see how it plays out in the dev streams before I jump to unreasonable conclusions! (or avoid doing so because I watched a dev stream)

 

[Purussaurus]

Sure, I can understand your argument towards the refined predictability being 'boring'. But the alternative is what we have now, a hyperlane empire being hopelessly out paced by a wormhole empire simply because of the amount of jumps it takes for one versus the how few it takes for the other. This way no one tech is inherently better than another, and one empire doesn't have a speed advantage over another. So for players who play strategically, there still wasn't variety because one form of FTL is better then the rest no matter what so people would pick the best.

That same argument can be made towards the starting weaponry, no one picks lasers because they're the worst starting tech.

I hope I presented this argument clearly, I fear I may not have.

If wormhole is better then it needs to be balanced. If you are already balanced, so I was starting location bad luck. But I've always found the reach of the current wormholes very large.

I pick lasers. For RPGing and research purposes.

 

[Tavior]

I feel like I read that you ARE going to have to map hyperlanes, but that could be a mistake on my part. I also imagine changes to AI's will accompany this patch as they do with most patches to address this issue and any others that are going to arise, it's a bit too early to say.

Today steam still show the ENTIRE galaxy hyperlane network.

There is already an addon that does that for Stellaris for awhile now. I don't know why they didn't do it already for current version. Why do we have to wait until Cherryh for an official one? When addon can do it already?

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=886716534&searchtext=hyperlane

 

[Malonex]

I am personally torn apart.

On one hand I do believe current system can be fixed with adjustment to how jump drives are working (by forcing ships to jump between linked stations basically, similar to what Wiz proposed actually with gateways) and standard FTL being more predictable when and where enemy ship can show up, supported by FTL suppressor that pulls all the ships coming in let say radius of 10ly without giving flying fig if it's warp or jump.

That being said. Talk is cheap and perhaps it's really cumbersome to fix and easier is to simplify system. I kinda have faith in Wiz and on the other hand if he fails I will a) revert to the old patch or b) play other game. What I in fact did after release of Stellaris when I found it as a tasteless pulp of bugs and missing features.

I felt the same way initially, I personally never really liked hyperlanes and only used them when I felt like making use of military stations. However, I am willing to sacrifice some things for the sake of a more interesting warfare system which is a core element of the game. I almost always play empires that conquer others just because diplomacy is also lacking and sitting still for 200 years waiting for end game crisis in incredibly boring to me.

HOWEVER. As it stands war is also boring and a mindless effort. If that can be fixed by changing starting tech thats fine by me!

 

[anamiac]

If you preferred to eat apples, how would you like being told that you had to eat oranges? I'm sure oranges are nice and all, but I prefer Apples. Don't take away my apples.