I am frustrated with 2.2. Reasons why, and suggested remedies.

[Scorpio_Shirica]

The AI needs some serious help in deciding to not over-expand and crash their economy/ science/ tradition costs. At this point, I simply let them spend all the influence to expand like mad and get free systems when I am finally in a place I feel comfortable to expand my civilization. I tech way too fast by playing tall compared to them and can use a fleet 1/2 their size in number by just raw tech power to claim any of their systems I want.

 

[exogeologist]

Why remove a perfectly good taskbar, one of the only pieces of the UI you can actually customize because it's not perfect. Just make it better, such as by adding a priority bar. If you don't like things on the Outliner you can minimize them or remove them entirely as you see fit. We need to stop throwing out one imperfect system for another in this game.

I don't think we need to throw out the Outliner; if we could add section-specific filters and sorting to make it more of an active to-do list, that'd be wonderful. You could do that *and* give us the executive dashboards Rybear discusses. I agree that we don't need to throw out existing systems that work, but we definitely need to enhance the usability of what we have.

 

[exogeologist]

Just to clarify, I really only play the game with the largest galaxy settings, and I only play on Ironman. But like a previous poster, I've never finished a game because the micromanagement gets out of control after I own over half the galaxy. If I had to-do lists that were concise and actionable, galaxy and empire sizes wouldn't matter much, esp with the new economy updates (which I love).

 

[Dalwin]

Wow. I did not realize what I was starting with that post. Genuinely, just trying to get feedback to the dev team about a game I liked, and now don't like as much.

Why? Because they changed the thing I liked about it. I acknowledge it is different, I just don't like the difference.

My analogy is this:
The ice cream shop had my favorite flavor of ice cream, Cookie Dough. I enjoyed eating it. Sometimes with hot fudge, sometimes not.
The ice cream shop decided to change the recipe.
Thye used to muse chocolate chip cookie dough and now they have changed to chocolate-mint dough.
There's some texture similarity to what I was eating before, and I do like it. Just not as much.
When I want ice cream, I don't usually want this. I really liked what they served before and I'm sad they stopped making it the way I liked it.

I do not expect that we will have the same favorite flavor of ice cream. No amount of talking will change our tastes.

I'll respond to a few things said on the thread. Most of this is opinion - and everyone has one, and we know what that means.

1. CLICK FEST. Someone pointed this out, and I think it hits the mark very well. There are WAY TOO MANY CLICKS to accomplish a thing. In commercial software we do studies on this all the time. How usable is <X> feature? What do people have to do all the time, and how do we make that easier? There is so much clicking to manage planets, etc, that it gets in the way of playing the game. This feels like a major update that was rushed out for some reason.
2. "WHAT'S WRONG WITH MICRO? I LIKE MICRO!" Good. Enjoy the micro! I'm glad the game is more playable for you and more fun. I'm not being sarcastic, I'm glad you like the thing you like. In my case, I don't have a ton of hours to play games. This game offered me a fun strategic RTS experience with interesting challenges and "just the right amount" of micro. Now, too much, and it feels like work. I really think that some good UI work would solve this, but I'll have to wait for it, if I get it at all.
3. SECTOR GOVERNORS. If I didn't have to have 25+ governors, sure, that would work. That's what I'm asking for. Give me back the old sector style. Maybe add some depth to the kinds of instructions you can give them. I really would be happy with just the old style and offloading all the micro to them. I can still micro a few planets at a time for whatever reason I want, which I did previously. I will absolutely give that a shot and see if it solves my personal flavor-preference-problem.
4. DASHBOARD. Someone pointed this out and I really love the idea. It would align with the "executive" concept. I've done some dashboard designs for businessess and the concept is "management of the exception", in this case meaning "(1) Show me everything in a simple format. (2) Highlight cleanly what is going well and poorly. (3) Enable me to drill into the details of any area that I want, so that I may solve problems or exploit advantages". Applying this to a full planet list - not limited to within a sector (especially when I have 60 sectors!) would probably help a lot.

Last, an appreciation.
Several of you have chimed in agreeing with my summary of "I want to be an executive, not an accountant".
Thank you!
I was wondering if it was just me, and I'm glad to know it's not.

Enjoy your gaming,
Rybear.

Most of the threads in the general discussion area do not even get read by devs.

To make sure that at least one of them reads it, you need to post in the suggestion subforum. To be able to even see that subforum you first have to link your Paradox and Steam accounts. The steps for doing this are in a sticky post at the top of the forum.

 

[exogeologist]

Most of the threads in the general discussion area do not even get read by devs.

To make sure that at least one of them reads it, you need to post in the suggestion subforum. To be able to even see that subforum you first have to link your Paradox and Steam accounts. The steps for doing this are in a sticky post at the top of the forum.

Thank you! @Rybear, if you re-post there let me know and I'll be happy to +1 and add additional thoughts as needed.

 

[Ashantai]

It is true that threads in the suggestion forum are more likely to be seen by the devs.

Also, please keep comments on topic and productive, without insults or silly hyperbole.

 

[fleaphli]

Glad to see others are agreeing that the current sector system needs to be examined. It doesnt seem to make sense as to where the borders are drawn, I've colonized a system directly next to another owned system, expecting it to be a part of the old sector, just to now have a new sector entirely and needing another governor. I would at least like to know whether or not it will join an old sector when colonizing.

 

[Rybear]

RE: Devs' suggestion thread. Thank you, I would love to. I did link my accounts.
I see several, this one (https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/stellaris-suggestions-feedback.1049904/) being most promising. It's locked.
Can anyone refer me to the right place? I'll copy/paste my comments to there.
Thank you,
Rybear

 

[Dalwin]

RE: Devs' suggestion thread. Thank you, I would love to. I did link my accounts.
I see several, this one (https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/stellaris-suggestions-feedback.1049904/) being most promising. It's locked.
Can anyone refer me to the right place? I'll copy/paste my comments to there.
Thank you,
Rybear

It does not look like you successfully linked your accounts. If you had then your games would show below your name. Perhaps restart Steam?

 

[Rybear]

Got it fixed. Thanks for the help!

IF YOU ARE INTERESTED:
My OP thoughts have been copied to this thread. ( https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...2-reasons-why-and-suggested-remedies.1142133/ )
If you've held a passionate opinion about something here, I certainly appreciate your +1 over there.

Best,
Rybear.

 

[nuyu]

Yes event log, especially after I start to replay an old save game. I need to re-read again all those event chain to understand what's going on.

 

[SemperSaevio]

How would people feel about a return to the old open choice sector system, with a governor planet limit based on skill thrown in for balance, so people don’t just dump the entire empire into one mega sector? (Assuming one mega sector is meant to be prevented by design in the current configuration.)

Or a auto-build system of sorts based around a policy choice. Perhaps varying degrees of automation from fully central planned economy (all up micro everything) to fully free market (automation of everything, auto choices biased by ethics and traits etc) and in between guided or managed economics which allow for some executive/regulatory direction or monetary policy type edicts to sway steer things in a broad sense.

 

[Incompetent]

My hope is that Paradox doesn't dumb down the new system because people doesn't have the capability to "micromanage" (i.e take actual and relevant decisions instead of the automated clicking of the old tile system borefest).The system is great. There's a lot of things that need polishing and bugfixing, but please, don't change the essence of the new system.

The key difficulty at the moment isn't that players can't handle it, but rather that the AI can't handle it, meaning AI empires are useless, and/or they have a largely fake façade of an economy, where they only stay solvent through cheating on the market. It also means the player also can't trust sector governors to do anything, so the sheer quantity of micromanagement decisions becomes excessive. This is a persistent problem with Paradox games in general: the complexity of new features added with each expansion tends to race ahead of whatever limited resources the company puts into updating the AI.

To be fair to Paradox though, most strategy games companies do a half-arsed job of developing an AI for their game, because it's not rewarded from a commercial standpoint: actually having a competent AI (as opposed to merely claiming that you do) is not something you can easily communicate to potential customers, and professional game reviewers almost never comment on AI quality, probably because they don't play the game long enough to find out.

 

[SemperSaevio]

The key difficulty at the moment isn't that players can't handle it, but rather that the AI can't handle it, meaning AI empires are useless, and/or they have a largely fake façade of an economy, where they only stay solvent through cheating on the market. It also means the player also can't trust sector governors to do anything, so the sheer quantity of micromanagement decisions becomes excessive. This is a persistent problem with Paradox games in general: the complexity of new features added with each expansion tends to race ahead of whatever limited resources the company puts into updating the AI.

To be fair to Paradox though, most strategy games companies do a half-arsed job of developing an AI for their game, because it's not rewarded from a commercial standpoint: actually having a competent AI (as opposed to merely claiming that you do) is not something you can easily communicate to potential customers, and professional game reviewers almost never comment on AI quality, probably because they don't play the game long enough to find out.

A very good point. And this is what I meant in my earlier post about how it is more realistic in a sense to have an automated economy that produces equal outcome to AI player economies. I LOATHE the industry standard of outright cheating AI to mask deficiencies vs human players. I would rather play on a difficulty level that givens no magical bonuses, even if that makes it trivial to win with my human brain adaptive super intelligence, and balance from my end by playing house rules of no min/max or specializing, in order to get a level playing field that isn’t unlimited horde defense mode, which may be hard but in my opinion is scarce little fun.

 

[Incompetent]

A very good point. And this is what I meant in my earlier post about how it is more realistic in a sense to have an automated economy that produces equal outcome to AI player economies. I LOATHE the industry standard of outright cheating AI to mask deficiencies vs human players. I would rather play on a difficulty level that givens no magical bonuses, even if that makes it trivial to win with my human brain adaptive super intelligence, and balance from my end by playing house rules of no min/max or specializing, in order to get a level playing field that isn’t unlimited horde defense mode, which may be hard but in my opinion is scarce little fun.

I think it would disappoint many players if you killed their ability to optimize the economy beyond what the AI can do; if you did that, this game would suffer the same problem as EU4, that there is very little happening during peacetime. Unlike EU4 or CK2, Stellaris is designed to allow for pacifist 'German board game mode', where building up your economy over the long term is the primary focus of the game once the initial exploration/expansion phase is over. To make it interesting though, you'd have to have an AI good enough that a beginner will tend to do *worse* than the AI at economic management. In particular, I think it's overall a good sign for the game that if you make poor economic choices, you can now get into a terrible mess even in the absence of external threats (e.g. you get too greedy on building labs without the economic base to support them). But given that is how things are now, we have to make sure that the AI only rarely falls into such a pit itself.

'Horde defence mode' isn't great as the main source of external danger in a game, I agree, but it is at least *a* challenge whose threat level can be easily tuned and doesn't require such a sophisticated AI to be engaging (because Marauder-style antagonists don't even pretend to have a normal economy). It's not as deep as dealing with actual AI empires, but it's not completely trivial at a grand strategic level either, because you have to decide between 'more ships now' versus building up your economy/science for a stronger fleet in the long run. You can also make the choice of vassalage versus resistance an interesting one, or have threats that the players bring down upon themselves through expanding too greedily. Think of games like Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri or Factorio for instance, where your economy generates 'pollution' that angers the local fauna, or the nasties you encounter by 'digging too deep' in Dwarf Fortress, so that you face an additional trade-off between trying to keep your threat generation low (so you don't get attacked by critters) versus building up your economy (so that you're strong enough to crush any hostile critters and/or absorb the losses). I'm not sure what the Stellaris equivalent of those mechanics would be though. Maybe it should be commonplace on habitable worlds to have some kind of indigenous menace that you need to appease or destroy, so that armies play a more important role in 'peacetime' expansion? (I know there are events like this, like the Titanic Life and Subterranean Civilization event series; I mean something more integrated into the basic functionality of planets.) Maybe there should be more space fauna, who will initially let your science ships explore unhindered, but are on a sliding scale of hostility depending on how profoundly you try to economically exploit 'their territory'?

 

[SemperSaevio]

Hmm something might be done with the imo under utilized fallen empires. A sphere of influence etc that applies a natural brake on excessive land grabbing.

 

[Sopbucket]

As someone who despised the old sector system, and always tried to work around it, I would say that the micromanagement of planets has improved significantly, the downside now is that it takes longer for each planet to be fully developed, and it's forced upon everyone whether they want it or not. It's a step forward in my opinion, but I can see how many would be put off by this.

What we need are better tools - a production interface that lets us see all of our planets in a list, and make changes without having to go to each one individually. I would love it if we could que up production without having to make a mineral investment, it would allow us to plan out a planet in one go instead of having to go back and remember what we were going to do. The thing is, since districts add to empire sprawl, we're encouraged to build just enough to keep all of our pops employed, which means going back into the planet screen again and again. If we could mitigate the need for that, or make it easier, it would cut down on micro a lot.

 

[TheHolyAsdf]

I agree with the original poster. I just came here after a game of basically confusion and frustration. 80 years in and I have negative resource income for everything but minerals. It's not that I am clueless but I feel i'm trying to balance the income of over a dozen different resources.

That being said, I just don't understand how anyone new would be able surmount the learning wall. I tried playing with my one of my friends who just started right before this patch, but after an hour or so, we just gave up cause frankly, it wasn't enjoyable and played other games instead

 

[TempUsername12345]

Yeah, having played well over 200 hours of Stellaris (so a fair amount, although far less than many on this forum I am sure) I have to say that I despise the v2.2 update and have rolled back to 2.1.

The new resources just feel like they have added more complexity for the sake of it and personally I see no benefit in the slightest. Had a quick game on 2.2 which I abandoned pretty early on. By following the governor's mandate and building consumer goods building instead of another alloy plant I was stuck wondering why the gameplay was so fucking slow - I am used to issues with influence slowing expansion but adding alloys as well?!? WTF? That is just wank. This game was already very focused on needing to build and research in the "right" order in order for you to be competitive - the effect of this latest update seems to further necessitate micro-management on a preprogrammed path which personally seems to remove the whole point of playing - why not just turn the game into a simulator where people just observe and not play?

I personally do not intend to play this again in its current form

 

[maxp779]

Very high level summary:

• You have made a game that was mostly executive in nature into a complete micromanagement slog-fest.
• Things are so micro-oriented now that I'm genuinely looking for something else to play.
• The complexity you added in 2.2 is not balanced with playability.
• Many of the ideas are good but they needed more polish. I suspect this update had minimal broad playtesting.

Couldn't have put it better myself. I am really really bored by midgame now. Removal of the micro intensive tile system and replaced with... well... it still looks a lot like the old tile system to me and the micro has actually gotten worse.

And yeah, where are my sectors??? They are absolutely useless now in their current state.

Honestly I can't play 2.2 any more. A lot of these issues can be offset with better automation, i.e sectors, the one thing they inexplicably castrated into uselessness.

Im at the year 2380, grand admiral difficulty playing as a standard ME and using the latest beta patch. Im doing well but its too fecking boring to continue.