Huh, yeah, I was reading that state of AI thread with the dev comments earlier, but going to the url now gives an error. Whole thread trashed
How can so many major game aspects be broken?
- Thread starter BlackholePD
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I really wish they wouldn’t delete threads like that. It actually felt like we were making progress with darkrenown. It took courage to actually apologize and acknowledge the issue, which is more than the rest of their shambolic and hamfisted PR has managed.
Sincerely hope he does not face blowback from at least trying to calm things down.
It’s not like we’re all not going to remember reading it. It’s already preserved for all time on the reddit subforum. They should have just locked it at the very least.
Not a good look.
Sincerely hope he does not face blowback from at least trying to calm things down.
It’s not like we’re all not going to remember reading it. It’s already preserved for all time on the reddit subforum. They should have just locked it at the very least.
Not a good look.
They have been deleting posts overtime since they got back, trying to keep all the issues plaguing the game off the front page to prevent them from being known to possible new players., many of them didnt even get bad.
Then we must 're-create' the posts so that no one is left out of the 'What really happened..." posts. But it is a slippery slope to delete negative posts regarding a rushed/incomplete bugfilled game. It's like not acknowledging the fact that there IS a problem and if they delete enough posts the problems will go away. Sadly that kind of 'time machine' doesn't work.
well from the post quoted on the previous page where the dev admitted they care more about profit than good reviews, they actually dont think there is a problem, they are a greedy company that just wants to pocket our money, they could care less if their games work.
im personally done with them, bought some of their stuff because of obsidian, but it looks like even they got out of working with paradox, probably because of their policies.
There was a time when Paradox got money from success, and success from being respectful with a customer niche, which was not numerous but faithful. I do know that actually that faithful thing is obsolete.... and the first moves were from Paradox. That, as a dumb customer only worth its bucks, I will never forget.
Deleting that thread was shady, that's probably the closest we'll get to an honest apology and a "look it's bad but we're making it better". Goes a long way to calm people down and I think most of his responses were found fairly helpful. But then who knows, maybe it got out of hand like these things do on these forums... On my end as a customer, there will be no further initial releases purchases. Drop in the bucket but hey when Syfy was cancelling The Expanse, I bought it on Amazon and it did get picked up by them, so sometimes enough drops in the bucket make a difference...
Because actually communicating - in the written word is now too difficult for PDX? What a strange world we live in, where telling the truth seems too difficult and deleting posts and trying to sweep problems under the rug seems like a better solution.
If PDX had come out - much earlier - probably before the went on a 1 month x-mas holiday and told EVERYONE that there were some issues with MEGACORP etc and that they would be adressing them as soon as humanly possible I would have accepted that. I wouldn't have been happy about it, but the fact that they would have communicated to me (and everyone else) in an orderly fashion would have been satisfactory.
This now ... deleting posts ... not good Paradox, not good at all. That's not the right way to go about things; that's cowardice!
The thing that quote from Jake fails to understand (and it's troubling coming directly from a PDX game head) is that reviews trend sales for the next release, not the current one.
It's like Star Wars TLJ reviewed horribly but made a boatload of money. The fans who went to see it and hated it couldn't get their money back, but they sure as hell were done with Star Wars moving forward. Hence Solo flopped and they are putting other movies on hold and there is no buzz for the next trilogy movie either.
So while a release sells great but reviews horrendously that doesn't mean "hey everything is fine look how great it sold". It means good luck selling the people that you burned this time around anything in the future. If you want to see how this backlash effects their bottom line, you gotta wait until the next DLCs roll out.
OK, from AI thread we finally get the answer to this one:
As someone working in IT, I'm absolutely positively sure 10 people isn't enough for a project like Stellaris and even more with a sweeping changes like in 2.2. Even if parts of works are on other team( like Engine-related stuff, or maybe parts of QA). Especially in Sweden, with it's strict laws about working practices, so no crunches or overworking.
As someone working in IT, I'm absolutely positively sure 10 people isn't enough for a project like Stellaris and even more with a sweeping changes like in 2.2. Even if parts of works are on other team( like Engine-related stuff, or maybe parts of QA). Especially in Sweden, with it's strict laws about working practices, so no crunches or overworking.
Yeah, that took me completely by surprise. Unlike there is a miscommunication (like, 10 people is the amount of programmers, or something like that), it sure seems the team is severely undermanned...
If the numbers on wikipedia are correct, the Paradox Development Studio has around 80 employers and Paradox Interactive as parent company has around 300.
Having 80 Employers, 4 games which are currently maintained (CK2, EU4, Stellaris, HOI4) and one which is currently in development (Imperator: Rome), 10 people in total, not 10 programmers, working on Stellaris seems realistic.
if they didn't stream their MP games i would say they don't even play this game because most of the problems in this game are painfully obvious when you just play 1 or 2 games. aside from the game breaking bugs there are allot of small inconveniences that i would love to see fixed but i dont see the point in reporting them because they aren't even fixing the big obvious things.
Generally speaking I love the game, but it really is kind of a mess right now.
Previously my only campaign had been multiplayer, in version 1.6.x. I started playing again a few weeks back. Hard to compare some things since they're not in recent memory, but while some things may be better, the AI is, if anything, much worse.
Of course the biggest thing is their completely inability to handle the economy. I've gone Captain -> Admiral -> Grand Admiral in the three campaigns I've played since picking up the game again. Honestly there's not been much difference. GA had them getting more score early on, but by the time I had built myself a reasonable fleet, the AI was already doing very little in their wars. I guess they probably had decimated each other's fleets. (I wish this had "power graphs" like MoO2 did so one could follow how things went, even if they're only accessible in a delayed manner or after a victory condition has been met.)
So when I had ramped up a proper big fleet well prior to 2400 despite my slow start, no one else had much of anything. The highest-scoring non-fallen AI had great economy score but the biggest fleet I met was 60-70k, and the rest were barely that combined! I think their war with a FE decimated both sides. In general it seems they'll manage a fleet early on, but are unable to rebuild once they lose it. As it was, when the endgame crisis - which is Unbidden EVERY TIME - struck, I had probably 5x more fleet than the rest of the galaxy combined (I wish I was exaggerating), especially as I had just crushed the other Awakened who still had had at least a resonable portion of their fleet intact prior to my attack. I was so bored that I charged 950k worth of unbidden fleets with my 500+k, almost destroyed the portal, would've done it had I not attacked from the wrong side. Had to retreat after losing 300 cap worth of ships (had too many plasma ships), but they lost at least as many and never got to spread outside that system anyway as I rebuilt a bit and cleared them out as they had spread around the system. Sigh. Kind of like when I geared up for a 600k vs 600k fleet fight against Awakened in the previous campaign only to have them instantly spread around via gateways on wardec and get killed <100k at a time against my full fleet. Sigh x 2.
The second of the biggest problems is the war exhaustion system. It doesn't really work. Occupation does nothing, unless perhaps if you reach 100%, but that takes forever and shouldn't be necessary. It really should increase the exhaustion of the side being occupied. It only gets worse when the enemy has no fleets so you can't even cause exhaustion by destroying fleets! And then it only gets multiplied if you're in a Federation or such with AIs and they instead of you start the war, because then the war won't end until both sides reach 100% exhaustion. Which can lead to a nearly 100-year war, literally. Seems to me it should be simple enough to fix this behavior, but I've seen comments about it from early 2016 already! In combination these issues make it really hard to wage war and gain territories in the late game. Would've liked that "200 starbases" achievement!
Maybe worth mentioning that the first two campaigns were with just the base game, while this last one included Utopia, Apocalypse and Leviathans. I think the additional megastructures probably only hurt the struggling AI even further given the vast amount of alloys needed.
Sorry for the VERY long-winded post, just needed to rant a bit. Naturally there are other issues even if I haven't had most of the bugs mentioned in the OP - while on the other hand I've had army fleets magically vanish when trying to make a planetary assault, several times - but they're very minor compared to the above. As it is there doesn't seem to be a way to get a truly enjoyable/challenging/satisfying single player campaign at least without mods (which I'd rather not use), because the AI and wars are so crippled. I'm thinking of firing up good ol' MoO2 to get a proper challenge.
TL;DR; AIs don't work with war exhaustion and economy, bummer.
Previously my only campaign had been multiplayer, in version 1.6.x. I started playing again a few weeks back. Hard to compare some things since they're not in recent memory, but while some things may be better, the AI is, if anything, much worse.
Of course the biggest thing is their completely inability to handle the economy. I've gone Captain -> Admiral -> Grand Admiral in the three campaigns I've played since picking up the game again. Honestly there's not been much difference. GA had them getting more score early on, but by the time I had built myself a reasonable fleet, the AI was already doing very little in their wars. I guess they probably had decimated each other's fleets. (I wish this had "power graphs" like MoO2 did so one could follow how things went, even if they're only accessible in a delayed manner or after a victory condition has been met.)
So when I had ramped up a proper big fleet well prior to 2400 despite my slow start, no one else had much of anything. The highest-scoring non-fallen AI had great economy score but the biggest fleet I met was 60-70k, and the rest were barely that combined! I think their war with a FE decimated both sides. In general it seems they'll manage a fleet early on, but are unable to rebuild once they lose it. As it was, when the endgame crisis - which is Unbidden EVERY TIME - struck, I had probably 5x more fleet than the rest of the galaxy combined (I wish I was exaggerating), especially as I had just crushed the other Awakened who still had had at least a resonable portion of their fleet intact prior to my attack. I was so bored that I charged 950k worth of unbidden fleets with my 500+k, almost destroyed the portal, would've done it had I not attacked from the wrong side. Had to retreat after losing 300 cap worth of ships (had too many plasma ships), but they lost at least as many and never got to spread outside that system anyway as I rebuilt a bit and cleared them out as they had spread around the system. Sigh. Kind of like when I geared up for a 600k vs 600k fleet fight against Awakened in the previous campaign only to have them instantly spread around via gateways on wardec and get killed <100k at a time against my full fleet. Sigh x 2.
The second of the biggest problems is the war exhaustion system. It doesn't really work. Occupation does nothing, unless perhaps if you reach 100%, but that takes forever and shouldn't be necessary. It really should increase the exhaustion of the side being occupied. It only gets worse when the enemy has no fleets so you can't even cause exhaustion by destroying fleets! And then it only gets multiplied if you're in a Federation or such with AIs and they instead of you start the war, because then the war won't end until both sides reach 100% exhaustion. Which can lead to a nearly 100-year war, literally. Seems to me it should be simple enough to fix this behavior, but I've seen comments about it from early 2016 already! In combination these issues make it really hard to wage war and gain territories in the late game. Would've liked that "200 starbases" achievement!
Maybe worth mentioning that the first two campaigns were with just the base game, while this last one included Utopia, Apocalypse and Leviathans. I think the additional megastructures probably only hurt the struggling AI even further given the vast amount of alloys needed.
Sorry for the VERY long-winded post, just needed to rant a bit. Naturally there are other issues even if I haven't had most of the bugs mentioned in the OP - while on the other hand I've had army fleets magically vanish when trying to make a planetary assault, several times - but they're very minor compared to the above. As it is there doesn't seem to be a way to get a truly enjoyable/challenging/satisfying single player campaign at least without mods (which I'd rather not use), because the AI and wars are so crippled. I'm thinking of firing up good ol' MoO2 to get a proper challenge.
TL;DR; AIs don't work with war exhaustion and economy, bummer.
Im not in the gaming industry so correct me if im wrong but isnt pdx a multi million dollar company now? Cant they afford to hire more people for their games?
that is exactly why they are not, they recently (2016) became publicly traded, which means their profits are most important, so until their profit to cost ratio starts to take a hit from not having enough people they wont hire anyone else, as long as they make their quarterly they wont care, hence releasing a broken game at the very end of the quarter for positive earning reviews.
Yah, im in a team of 10 working on datacentre cloud type stuff. It's less complex than a game and 10 is barely enough at times.
Why didnt they have more people before they were publicly traded? Pdx has been pretty successful for years now. I have a hard time believeing they couldnt afford more people. Just goes to show the petty bourgioes is no better than the corporatists
Devs are really expensive, and the hiring pipeline is extremely long. Even when you have the money and the intent, it can take most of a year to hire and onboard someone new.
(Not an excuse on PD's behalf; I'm in the "good lord this is being mis-managed" camp.. Just saying, it's easy to get stuck with fewer devs than you'd like.)
(Not an excuse on PD's behalf; I'm in the "good lord this is being mis-managed" camp.. Just saying, it's easy to get stuck with fewer devs than you'd like.)
In which universe did that happen? TLJ got good reviews in this one. "Universal Acclaim" on Metacritic, last I checked.
Sure, it upset some fanboys , but that isn't the same thing.
Edit: that's not actually harmful to your argument since it doesn't rely on reviews per se, but on the opinion of a particular class of consumers.
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